Chapter : 1261

He finally looked up, his gaze sweeping over the twenty black-armored knights, the two terrified-but-defiant royals, and the supremely confident demon-worshipper. He looked at them not as a threat, but as a group of rowdy, and very inconsiderate, teenagers who had just tracked mud all over his clean floor.

He let out a long, weary sigh, the sigh of a man who has been pushed to the absolute limit of his professional patience.

"Look," he said, his voice the tired, and deeply put-upon, tone of a man who just wants to finish his shift and go home. "I don't know who you people are, and frankly, I don't care. But we have a pre-wedding ceremony here in less than twenty-four hours. A very important, and very expensive, wedding. And you are currently standing on the Duchess’s prize-winning roses and leaking some kind of… unpleasant black ichor all over the pristine white gravel paths. So, I am going to have to ask you to leave. Now."

He had just told an apocalypse to please use the coasters.

Franz, the high-ranking priest of the Seventh Circle, the man who had orchestrated this perfect, silent, and world-shaking act of terror, simply stared. His mind, a sharp, cruel, and highly intelligent instrument, was struggling to process the sheer, unadulterated, and almost sublime absurdity of the situation.

He had expected screams. He had expected a futile, heroic charge from the Prince. He had expected a desperate, and ultimately useless, plea for mercy.

He had not, in any of his most fevered, and very detailed, imaginings, expected to be told off by a glorified party planner for ruining the landscaping.

The sheer, breathtaking, and almost comically mundane nature of the interruption was a form of psychological warfare so advanced, so utterly alien, that it was, for a moment, completely and utterly effective. He was a god of despair, a harbinger of a new, dark age. And he had just been treated like a noisy neighbor.

He finally found his voice, a low, purring sound of pure, condescending amusement that did not quite mask the flicker of genuine, baffled confusion in his eyes.

"The… decorators," he said, the word tasting like a strange, and very unappetizing, new fruit in his mouth. He looked at Lloyd, at his simple servant’s attire, at his ridiculous clipboard, at his deeply, and profoundly, and almost insultingly, unimpressed expression.

He scoffed, a sound of pure, aristocratic disdain. The brief moment of confusion was gone, replaced by a renewed sense of his own, supreme, and absolute authority. This was not a threat. This was a joke. A final, pathetic, and deeply amusing piece of comic relief before the main tragedy began.

"You have a certain… courage, I'll grant you that," Franz purred. "The courage of a fool who does not understand the stage upon which he has just stumbled. Very well. Since you are so concerned with the tidiness of the gardens, you shall be the first to water them with your own, insignificant blood."

He made a small, almost lazy, gesture to two of the Curse Knights, a silent, contemptuous command. Deal with the help.

The two black-armored knights moved. They were not a clumsy, shambling force. They were a blur of silent, disciplined, and utterly lethal motion. They flowed across the lawn, their black swords raised, two specters of death sent to erase a minor, and very amusing, annoyance.

The Prince cried out a warning. Princess Arisa’s hand flew to her mouth.

Lloyd did not move. He simply stood there, his expression one of a profound, and very deep, professional disappointment. He let out another, long, and very tired sigh.

"So be it," he murmured to himself. "I did ask nicely."

And as the two Curse Knights were a mere five feet from him, their blades descending in a silent, final, and utterly merciless arc, Lloyd’s team moved.

It was not a dramatic, heroic charge. It was a quiet, professional, and utterly terrifying event.

From the deepest shadows of the garden, from the tops of the ancient cypress trees, from the very flowerbeds themselves, they emerged.

The thirty butlers and the twenty maids.

They did not shout. They did not scream. They moved with the silent, disciplined, and perfectly synchronized grace of a pack of hunting wolves. They were no longer servants, their faces no longer masks of polite, subservient deference. Their eyes were cold, hard, and utterly devoid of all emotion but a quiet, professional, and very deadly purpose.

The two Curse Knights who had been about to cleave Lloyd in two were the first to die.

Chapter : 1262

Two of the butlers, who had seemed to materialize from the very earth at their feet, moved with a speed that was a blur. They did not use grand, sweeping attacks. They used short, brutal, and brutally efficient ones. Hidden blades, forged from a dark, non-reflective steel, slid from their sleeves. One butler’s blade slid between the gaps in the Curse Knight’s armor at the neck, severing its spiritual connection to its unholy master in a single, silent, and perfect thrust. The other butler simply sidestepped the knight’s clumsy swing and drove his own, shorter blade up under the helm, into the base of the skull.

The two knights did not even have time to register their own, un-deaths. They simply collapsed, their red eyes flickering out, two empty suits of armor clattering to the pristine lawn.

The garden, which had been a stage for an execution, was now a silent, brutal, and utterly beautiful kill-zone.

Franz froze, his arrogant, condescending smile finally, irrevocably, gone, replaced by a mask of pure, stark, and abject disbelief. His perfect, flawless ambush had just been… counter-ambushed.

And the battle had just begun.

Head Maid Annalisa, a silver serving tray still held in her hand, met the charge of five more Curse Knights. She was not a terrified, cowering servant. She was a goddess of war. She spun, a whirlwind of black silk and righteous fury, and the silver tray became a deadly, spinning chakram in her hand. It hummed through the air, its polished, sharpened edge decapitating the first knight with a sound like a wet, final thwip. It ricocheted off the second knight’s helmet, stunning it for a fraction of a second, an opening that was all Annalisa needed. She flowed forward, a hidden blade appearing in her other hand, and dispatched the stunned knight with the same, brutal efficiency as her butlers.

The other maids and butlers were a symphony of silent, professional death. They fought not as a disorganized mob, but as a single, cohesive, and perfectly drilled military unit. They moved in small, three-person cells, their movements a textbook display of small-unit tactics. One would create a distraction, a feint, a thrown bottle of wine that would shatter against a knight’s helmet. The other two would use that single, fleeting moment of distraction to flow in from the flanks, their hidden blades finding the small, almost invisible gaps in the unholy armor.

There were no wasted movements. There were no grand, heroic duels. There was only a quiet, brutal, and terrifyingly efficient process of extermination.

Lloyd’s Ghost Brigade had just made its debut. And it was a masterpiece of silent, and very, very bloody, art.

The moonlit Royal Garden had transformed into a silent, brutal abattoir. The carefully manicured lawns were now a stage for a deadly, whispered ballet of assassination. Lloyd’s Ghost Brigade, his fifty butlers and maids, were not just fighting; they were performing a systematic, and terrifyingly efficient, dissection of Franz’s elite unholy honor guard.

The Curse Knights, who had been an intimidating, monolithic force of terror, were being dismantled. They were powerful. They were resilient. But they were soldiers, trained for a conventional, frontal assault. They were a hammer. And they were facing a team of fifty scalpels.

The butlers, with their hidden blades and their intimate knowledge of the palace’s terrain, were the primary assault force. They flowed through the shadows, their movements a blur, their attacks always aimed at the weak points, the joints, the visor slits. They were not trying to overpower their opponents; they were simply, and very professionally, taking them apart.

The maids, who had seemed like the weaker half of the unit, were the true, terrible heart of the operation. They did not engage in direct combat. They were the support, the controllers, the puppet masters of the battlefield. They used their seemingly innocuous tools as weapons of terrifying ingenuity. A length of fine, silver wire, used for hanging decorations, became a deadly garrote, silently and efficiently severing the head of a knight from behind. A bottle of high-proof cleaning alcohol, thrown with perfect, arcing precision, became an incendiary device, creating a momentary wall of fire that would blind and disorient a group of knights.

One particularly resourceful maid, a small, grandmotherly woman named Elspeth, used her feather duster. The handle was a weighted, iron cosh, and the feathers themselves were laced with a fine, almost invisible powder—a blessed, alchemical compound that, when inhaled, would momentarily disrupt the flow of unholy energy, causing a knight to seize up for a precious, and very fatal, second.

It was a beautiful, horrifying, and deeply, deeply professional slaughter.