Chapter : 1143

Taron’s body began to shake uncontrollably, his mind finally succumbing to the memory. "He… he didn’t fight him. He just… talked. And his chains… they weren’t steel, my lord. They were made of shadow… so many of them… Lord Kyle… he couldn’t move…"

The final words were a ragged, dying breath, a confession delivered to the silent, horrified hall.

"He put a spike through his heart. His own cousin. He just… watched him die. And then he ordered the slaughter. No witnesses…"

Taron's eyes rolled back in his head, and his body went limp, his final duty done. He had delivered his message. He had borne witness to the fall of the Lion of Ironwood and the damnation of Viscount Rubel Ferrum.

The silence that followed was absolute. It was a heavy, suffocating thing, the silence of a world that had just been fundamentally and irrevocably broken. The lords and retainers stood frozen, their faces a mixture of horror, grief, and a rising, impotent rage.

They all looked to their Arch Duke, waiting for the roar of fury, for the call to arms, for the order to ride to Ashworth and burn it to the ground.

But it never came.

Arch Duke Roy Ferrum remained kneeling beside the unconscious soldier for a long, still moment. He did not look at the body of his fallen kinsman's last loyal man. He did not look at the horrified faces of his council. His gaze was distant, fixed on the intricate patterns of the marble floor, but his eyes were not seeing it. His mind, a cold and magnificent engine of logic and strategy, was processing an equation that refused to compute.

He heard the words. He understood their meaning. But he could not accept the data.

Rubel killed Kyle.

The statement was a logical impossibility, a violation of a fundamental axiom that had governed his entire world. A Ferrum did not kill a Ferrum. Not like this. Not with a cold, contemptuous spike through the heart. They fought, they schemed, they maneuvered for power. It was the brutal, intricate dance of their bloodline. But there were lines. Sacred, unspoken laws of kinship that were the very bedrock of their house. To murder a cousin in cold blood, to slaughter his men to the last… it was not just treason. It was a form of self-mutilation, an act of such profound, self-destructive insanity that it defied all strategic sense.

Roy’s mind replayed the soldier’s report, stripping away the terror and the grief, reducing it to a series of cold, hard data points. An unholy pact. An army of the dead. Three King-Level Curse Knights. The details were fantastical, bordering on the insane, but they were consistent with the rising tide of darkness he had seen in the south, with the intelligence reports he had been receiving for months. He could accept the demonic alliance. He could accept the unholy army. It was a new, terrible variable, but it was a variable he could plan for.

But Rubel’s act of fratricide was the one piece that broke the entire puzzle. When Roy had sent Kyle, the orders had been explicit: contain, capture, and bring Rubel back for judgment. He had sent a warden, not an executioner. He had acted to preserve the house, even in the face of his brother's treason. Rubel's response, however, was not a counter-move in their political game. It was a flipping of the entire board. It was a declaration that he was no longer playing by any of the established rules, human or familial. He was playing a new game, a game whose victory condition was not dominance, but annihilation.

A cold, chilling clarity began to settle in Roy’s soul, displacing the initial shock. This was not the act of a desperate politician or an ambitious rival. This was the act of a monster wearing his brother’s face. The Rubel he knew—the grasping, resentful, but ultimately predictable schemer—was gone. In his place was something else, something that had sacrificed its very humanity for a crown of ashes.

He finally looked up, his gaze sweeping over the faces of his council. He saw their grief, their rage, their thirst for immediate, bloody vengeance. He saw the fire in their eyes, the desire to ride to Ashworth and meet this atrocity with righteous fury. And he knew it was a trap.

Rubel had not just killed Kyle; he had sent a message. A challenge. Come and get me. He was baiting them into a direct, emotional, and utterly foolish military confrontation. He wanted them to charge his fortress, to throw their living soldiers against his army of the dead in a glorious, honorable, and unwinnable battle.

The Arch Duke of Ferrum would not give him the satisfaction.

Chapter : 1144

Slowly, Roy rose to his feet. The warmth of a grieving man was gone, if it had ever been there. In its place was the absolute, chilling cold of a predator that had just identified its prey. His face was a mask of carved stone, his eyes holding the flat, merciless finality of a headsman’s axe.

"The council is dismissed," he said, his voice quiet but carrying an authority that was absolute. The words were a bucket of ice water on the council’s simmering rage.

The lords looked at each other in stunned disbelief. Dismissed? Now? In the face of such an atrocity?

"My lord Arch Duke," one of the senior lords began, his voice trembling with a mixture of grief and fury. "Lord Kyle… our men… we must retaliate! We must march on Ashworth and…"

"You will do nothing," Roy cut him off, his voice a blade. "You will return to your estates. You will double the watch on your walls. You will prepare your levies for war. But you will not march. Not one of you. Not until I give the order."

He turned his back on them, a final, unarguable dismissal. "This is no longer a matter for open debate or a glorious charge. This is a pestilence. And a pestilence is not fought with swords. It is cut out, root and stem, and burned until not even the memory of it remains."

He walked towards the doors of the Grand Hall, his footsteps echoing in the stunned silence. The lords and retainers could only watch, their own rage and grief feeling small and childish in the face of the cold, absolute, and terrifyingly calm fury of their Arch Duke. The game of politics, the long, intricate dance of power between the great houses, was over.

A war of annihilation had just begun. And its first command was not a call to arms, but a descent into a cold, patient, and merciless silence.

________________________________________

The hours following the council’s dismissal were a study in controlled chaos. The Ferrum estate, which had been a place of tense, horrified silence, transformed into a buzzing hive of grim, purposeful activity. Couriers on lathered horses galloped from the gates, carrying the Arch Duke’s orders to every corner of the duchy. The garrison was placed on high alert, the armories were opened, and the quiet, rhythmic life of the estate was replaced by the hard, sharp sounds of a house preparing for war.

But at the heart of the storm, there was a profound, chilling stillness.

Lloyd’s study at the manufactory had become his private war room. The scent of rosemary and soap had been replaced by the sharp, dry smell of old parchment and ink. A massive, detailed map of the Ashworth territories was spread across his large oak desk, pinned at the corners with heavy, polished steel paperweights of his own design. He stood before it, his hands clasped behind his back, his gaze fixed on the fortress that was now a black, cancerous heart in the center of his family’s lands.

He had received the news not from his father, but from Ken, a silent, grim report delivered with a professional detachment that could not quite mask the undercurrent of shared loss. Lord Kyle Ferrum, the man who had seen his potential when all others saw failure, the quiet, steadfast rock of his father’s regime, was dead. Murdered.

Lloyd felt no searing rage. He felt no soul-crushing grief. The news had landed in his soul not as a fiery explosion, but as a block of ice. The emotional, chaotic part of him had been cauterized long ago, in another life, on other battlefields. What remained was the cold, clean, and brutally efficient engine of a commander processing a catastrophic intelligence failure.

His analysis was swift and unforgiving. They had underestimated Rubel. They had seen him as a political threat, a schemer, a traitor. They had failed to see the transformation, the unholy ascension. They had sent a warden to arrest a politician, and he had walked into the den of a demon king. It was a failure of imagination, a failure of intelligence, and it had cost them the life of one of their most valuable assets.

The ice in his soul was not grief; it was a cold, hard, and absolute certainty. There would be a reckoning. Not a battle. Not a war. An extermination. Rubel and his entire unholy order were no longer a political problem to be managed; they were a biological threat to be cleansed from the earth.