Chapter : 1141

Rubel laughed, a high, unhinged sound that held no humor, only a chilling, fanatical glee. “Damned? No, my dear cousin. I have been liberated. I have cast off the shackles of a false loyalty to a line of usurpers. You speak of damnation? I have known damnation my entire life, watching your branch and the main house flourish on the stolen birthright of my father, Gideon. This… this is salvation. This is justice.”

His eyes, which had once been the familiar, calculating eyes of a politician, now glowed with the same malevolent, inhuman fire as the Curse Knights. “I offered you a place in the new order, Kyle. Raghav told me. I offered you my right hand. But your dog-like loyalty, your pathetic devotion to the son of the man who stole my father’s throne… it was too deeply ingrained. You are a relic. A beautiful, powerful, and utterly obsolete relic. And relics belong in the dust.”

He raised a hand. The air around him shimmered, and his own Ferrum power manifested. But it was a perversion, a cancerous mockery of the noble art.

The chains that erupted from the shadows around him were not the clean, hard steel of a true Ferrum. They were forged from black, shadow-wreathed iron, things that seemed to be woven from solidified night and screaming despair. They did not move with the clean, mechanical precision of Kyle’s own power; they slithered like living, malevolent serpents, each link a hungry, whispering mouth.

Kyle’s own power, a pathetic flicker, tried to respond. He managed to raise a single, pathetic wall of crumbling iron, a shield no thicker than a man’s hand.

It was useless.

Rubel’s shadow chains did not smash through it. They flowed around it, through it, as if it were not there. They were a tide of liquid darkness, and Kyle’s defenses were a castle of sand. In an instant, his arms were pinned to his sides, his legs were bound, and a thick, cold coil wrapped around his throat, choking off his final, defiant roar. He was lifted from the ground, a helpless, suspended puppet in his cousin’s unholy grasp.

Rubel glided forward until he was face to face with the captured lion. He leaned in, his breath a foul, charnel stench.

“This is for the birthright they stole from my father,” he whispered, his voice a sibilant hiss of pure, triumphant hatred.

From the shadow at Rubel’s feet, a single, sharp, three-foot-long spike of the same black, corrupted iron began to rise, its tip honed to a needle point. It was aimed directly at Kyle’s heart.

Kyle stared into his cousin’s burning, demonic eyes, and in that final moment, he felt no fear. He felt only a profound, soul-deep pity for the man who had traded his soul for a crown of ashes.

The spike lunged forward. It did not make a sound as it pierced his breastplate as if it were paper. It did not make a sound as it sank deep into his chest, shattering bone and tearing through the heart that had beaten with such unwavering, stubborn loyalty for his entire life.

The light in Lord Kyle Ferrum’s eyes, the defiant fire of the Lion of Ironwood, flickered for a moment, and then went out.

Rubel let the body drop to the ground with a dull, final thud. He looked down at his fallen cousin, his expression not of triumph, but of cold, clinical satisfaction. A necessary piece had been removed from the board.

Sir Raghav approached, his face a serene mask. “My lord, his men?”

Rubel’s gaze swept over the twenty broken, terrified soldiers who were being held at bay by the reformed legion. “No survivors,” he said, his voice flat and devoid of emotion. “Leave no witnesses. This was not a battle. It was a cleansing.”

He turned and began to walk back towards his Unholy Palace, not even bothering to watch the systematic, merciless slaughter of the last loyal sons of House Ferrum. He stood for a moment over his cousin’s body, his victory absolute, his path to the throne now paved with the blood of his own kin. The age of the Lion was over. The age of the Demon had begun.

Chapter : 1142

The news arrived not as a formal dispatch carried by a grim-faced courier, but as a ragged, bleeding wound that stumbled into the heart of the Ferrum estate and collapsed.

He was the last. The sole survivor of the twenty elite soldiers who had ridden out with Lord Kyle Ferrum. His name was Taron, a young, promising guardsman whose face, now a mask of dried blood, mud, and soul-deep horror, was barely recognizable. He had ridden for a day and a night, his horse dying beneath him miles from the estate, the rest of the journey a desperate, stumbling pilgrimage fueled by nothing more than the final, sputtering embers of his duty.

The guards at the main gate found him, and the word of his arrival spread through the estate like a poisoned wind. By the time they carried his broken body into the Grand Hall, a crowd of anxious retainers and servants had gathered, their faces pale with a shared, unspoken dread.

Arch Duke Roy Ferrum was holding a minor council, discussing grain shipments and border patrol rotations with a handful of his senior administrators. The meeting was a mundane affair, the quiet, rhythmic heartbeat of a duchy at peace. The sound of the great doors being thrown open was a jarring, violent disruption.

When the guards carried Taron in, a collective gasp sucked the air from the room. The young man was a ruin. His left arm was a mangled, useless thing, his uniform was in tatters, and a crude, hastily applied bandage around his torso was soaked through with dark, viscous blood. But it was his eyes that silenced the hall completely. They were the eyes of a man who had stared into the abyss and found it staring back, wide with a terror so profound it had burned away everything else.

"My lord…" Taron rasped, his voice a dry, cracking whisper as he tried to push himself up from the stretcher, his body convulsing with the effort.

Roy was on his feet in an instant, his face a mask of cold, hard stone. He strode down from the dais, his presence a wave of absolute authority that parted the murmuring crowd. He knelt beside the stretcher, his gaze clinical and unforgiving. "Report, soldier." The words were not a request; they were a command, a demand for data in the face of chaos.

Taron’s eyes, wild with fever and memory, finally found his Arch Duke. The sight seemed to anchor him, to give him a final, fleeting purpose. He began to speak, his words a broken, ragged torrent, a confession torn from a shattered soul.

He spoke of the silence of Ashworth, of a city of hollowed-out people with empty eyes. He described the corrupted fortress, the air thick with a wrongness that clung to the back of the throat. He recounted the arrival of Sir Raghav, no longer a knight but a smiling, fanatical priest of a new, unholy god.

"He… he called him a king…" Taron coughed, a spray of blood flecking his lips. "He said Lord Rubel was the true king… and that our house… was built on a lie…"

A low, dangerous murmur rippled through the assembled lords and retainers. This was not just rebellion; it was heresy of the highest order.

Roy’s expression did not change, but the temperature in the hall dropped by several degrees. "Continue," he commanded, his voice a sliver of ice.

Taron’s words became more frantic, his mind replaying the final, horrific moments. He described the raising of the dead, the square filling with a silent, disciplined army of skeletons with red fire in their eyes. He spoke of the ten Dread Commanders, of the suffocating aura of despair that had broken the will of his comrades before a single sword was swung.

Then he spoke of Lord Kyle.

"He was a lion," Taron whispered, a single, hot tear finally tracing a clean path through the grime on his cheek. "He roared… and his spirit… a lion of pure iron… He built a fortress from the ground… He fought them… He fought the gods of death themselves…"

He described the three Kings of Ruin, the impossible, mythic horrors that had emerged from the darkness. The Weeping Executioner, the Silent Judge, the Crimson General. He recounted Kyle’s impossible, defiant stand, how he had unmade one of the kings with a single, magnificent blow.

"He saved us… held them back…" Taron’s voice was fading, his strength leaving him. "But there were too many… The fortress fell… His spirit was gone…"

He looked up at Roy, his eyes pleading, desperate for his lord to understand the absolute finality of their defeat.

"And then… then Lord Rubel came."