Chapter : 959
Roy listened, his face a mask of granite, his eyes as cold and hard as the winter sky. The report did not shock him. It did not surprise him. It merely connected the dots, confirming the grim, terrible picture that his own intelligence had already begun to paint. When Ken finally finished, the silence in the room was a heavy, suffocating thing.
"Your report, as always, is impeccable, Ken," Roy said finally, his voice a low, dangerous rumble. He gestured to the papers spread across his desk. "And it aligns perfectly with my own. Too perfectly." He picked up a single sheet of vellum, its contents a series of coded troop movement reports from his spies on the southern border.
"Your assassins were not the first wave, Ken," Roy said, his voice dropping to a near-whisper, a sound more terrifying than any roar. "They were the distraction. The glorious, noisy firework display to draw our eyes to the south while the real army assembled in the west."
He let the paper fall from his fingers. "The Altamiran kingdom is mobilizing its legions. Three of them. Their elite Griffin Riders, their Ironclad Infantry, and their Siege Golem corps. They are massing on the border of the Western Marches, under the pretense of ‘suppressing bandit activity.’"
Ken’s impassive facade finally, fractionally, cracked. A flicker of something—cold, professional alarm—showed in his eyes. This was not a border skirmish. This was a full-scale invasion force.
Roy then delivered the final, soul-chilling blow. "And they are not alone." He tapped another report, this one marked with a symbol of the highest, most terrifying classification—a black, jagged rune that seemed to absorb the very light around it.
"Our deep-cover assets within the Altamiran court have confirmed the unbelievable," he said, his voice a low, gravelly sound of pure, unadulterated hatred. "The Crown Prince has forged an unholy alliance. He has opened a gate. The Devil Race has returned to this continent. That is where their new, high-level Black Spirit users are coming from. That is the source of their forbidden magic."
The pieces of the puzzle slammed together with the force of a physical blow. The Black Spirit users. The Soul Catcher. The sudden, aggressive mobilization. It was all connected.
The attack on his son had not been a simple assassination. It had not even been just a prelude to war. It had been the opening salvo in a holy war. A war for the very soul of their kingdom. A war against the encroaching darkness of an ancient, forgotten enemy.
The stakes, which had been catastrophically high, had just been elevated to an apocalyptic level.
The revelation of the Devil Race alliance descended upon the study like a physical weight, a suffocating shroud of ancient, primordial dread. Ken Park, a man who had faced down gods and monsters without a flicker of fear, felt a cold, unfamiliar sensation snake its way up his spine. This was not a war of politics or territory. This was a war of extinction. The Altamirans had not just made a deal with an enemy; they had unleashed a plague upon the world.
Roy Ferrum’s face was a grim, stoic mask, but his eyes burned with the cold, righteous fury of a king whose lands were threatened by an encroaching, absolute darkness. He had spent his entire life fighting the predictable, honorable wars of men. He was now faced with an enemy that had no honor, no rules, only an insatiable hunger for chaos and destruction.
"The King has been informed," Roy continued, his voice a low, hard rumble. "The Royal Legions are mobilizing. But they are slow. The court is a nest of vipers, and the Altamiran sympathizers will do everything in their power to delay, to sow confusion. The first line of defense, as it has always been, will be the North. It will be us." He looked at Ken, his gaze as sharp and heavy as a guillotine’s blade. "This war will be won or lost not on the open battlefield, but in the shadows. It will be a war of intelligence, of assassination, of pre-emptive strikes. We must be the dagger that cuts the throat of this conspiracy before it can fully awaken."
His gaze dropped to the report on Ken’s interrogation of Kael. The grand, apocalyptic scale of the war suddenly contracted, focusing down to a single, tangible, and immediate asset.
"The prisoner," Roy said, his voice turning to ice. "The assassin, Kael. He is our first, and perhaps our only, key to unraveling this. He spoke of a handler, ‘The Curator.’ This is the name we need. This is the head of the snake."
Chapter : 960
Ken’s focus snapped back to the immediate, the tactical. "The prisoner is broken, my lord. But he is a fanatic. His loyalty to his order is absolute. He gave us the operational details because he believed his master, Jager, was already dead or captured. He will not betray the deeper secrets of his organization. Not willingly."
Roy leaned back in his chair, the ancient ironwood groaning under his weight. He steepled his fingers, his gaze becoming distant, his mind already moving, calculating, weighing the terrible necessities of their new reality. "Willingly," he mused, the word tasting like ash in his mouth. "Willingness is a luxury we can no longer afford. The fate of this kingdom may very well rest on the information locked inside that man’s skull."
He looked up, and the warmth of the father, the wisdom of the duke, was gone. In its place was the cold, unyielding, and absolute will of the Arch Duke of the North, the Warden of the kingdom, the man who stood as the final bulwark against the encroaching darkness. His gaze was a thing of terrible, chilling finality.
He gave a single, cold command.
"Break him."
The words were not an order for a simple interrogation. They were an authorization for something far darker, far more absolute. "Use whatever means are necessary, Ken. The Duchess has… esoteric arts. The old Austin methods. They are not pleasant, but they are effective. I want names. I want the identity of his benefactor. I want the location of their nest. I want the name of every Altamiran agent, every sympathizer, every devil-worshipping traitor on this side of the border."
He stood up, his massive frame seeming to fill the entire room. He walked to the window, his back to Ken, and looked out at the rain-swept grounds of his estate. "We will cut the head off this snake before it can strike again," he said, his voice a low, dangerous promise whispered to the coming storm. "We will purge this cancer from our lands with fire and steel. Let the Altamiran prince play his games with devils. He will find that there are far, far worse things to fear in the cold, hard north."
Ken Park gave a single, almost imperceptible nod. He did not need to speak. The order had been given. The rules of engagement had been irrevocably changed. He turned and melted back into the shadows from whence he came, a silent, lethal instrument on his way to the estate’s deepest, most forgotten cells. The war in the shadows had begun, and its first, brutal battle was about to be waged in the mind of a single, broken, and utterly doomed man.
The air in the Ferrum estate was a thick, unbreathable soup of tension. Lloyd felt as if he were walking through a minefield of unspoken accusations and simmering emotional crises. Every corridor seemed to echo with the silent, furious pacing of Faria Kruts. Every shadow seemed to hold the cool, analytical gaze of Duchess Milody and her new, formidable ally, Princess Amina. And at the heart of it all, in the cold, silent suite that was his supposed home, was the silver-haired enigma that was his wife. The estate was no longer a fortress; it was a cage, a beautifully gilded pressure cooker where three of the most powerful and passionate women on the continent were all focused, with a laser-like intensity, on him.
He knew, with the cold, hard certainty of a general who recognizes an unwinnable battle, that he could not solve this problem by staying. To engage with Faria would be to pour fuel on a wildfire. To negotiate with Amina and his mother would be to walk into a political chess match where he was already in checkmate. And to face Rosa… to face the quiet, profound accusation in her single question… that was a battle for which he had no strategy, no defense.
The emotional and political complexities were a quagmire, a tactical nightmare that threatened to bog him down, to drain his focus, to leave him vulnerable to the real enemy that was still out there, gathering its strength in the shadows. His priority could not be this domestic chaos. His priority had to be the mission.
He needed an escape. A strategic retreat. A move so unexpected and so perfectly logical that none of them could argue against it.
The answer, as always, lay in the truth. Or, at least, a carefully edited and beautifully weaponized version of it.