Chapter 72: Sudden Strike
The sound of bone grinding against bone amplified in the suffocating silence of the living room.
The Skeleton Knight wielding the broadsword paid no heed to Karl's frantic screams. Its hollow sockets remained locked onto Pierre. It raised its blade, beginning a downward arc aimed straight for the man's skull. Simultaneously, the skeleton with the rapier shifted its focus to the boy blocking its path. It slid forward, body low to the ground, the slender tip of its blade aimed directly at Karl's throat.
The scent of death was overwhelming.
Pierre's eyes threatened to burst from their sockets. He strained with every fiber of his being to heave his broken body upward, desperate to shield his son, but his shattered frame refused to obey. His final scrap of strength manifested as a single, despairing roar:
"RUN!"
Karl squeezed his eyes shut by instinct. His right index finger, pointed forward at the encroaching monsters, snapped outward with a sudden, violent force.
"I will... SHATTER IT!"
The next heartbeat.
BOOM!
A deafening explosion rocked the house. The wooden front door and a massive section of the side wall detonated inward, showering the room in a storm of splinters and stone. A silhouette wrapped in a physical shockwave burst through the wreckage, moving at a velocity that left nothing but a blurred afterimage.
The blur slammed into the two motionless skeletons.
CRACK! CRACK!
The Tier 2 undead frames were pulverized instantly, reduced to a rain of bone meal and jagged shards that scattered across the floor.
Neither Karl nor Pierre could comprehend what had just happened. Karl slowly opened one eye. In his field of vision stood a figure with her back turned to him.
It was a girl, roughly his own age. Her brilliant golden hair was tied back in a high ponytail, and she was clad in form-fitting combat gear designed for high-intensity movement. The girl turned her head slightly, her lips curling into a grin that revealed a row of white teeth.
"Not bad at all!" she chirped.
It was Princess Alice.
She didn't spare another glance for Karl. Her eyes swept over the bone fragments on the carpet before she began walking toward the jagged hole in the wall.
"You're safe now. Find a room, lock the door, and don't come out until the sun sets."
Pierre struggled to a sitting position, his voice shaking as he tried to offer his thanks. "My deepest gratitude, Your Highness—"
Alice merely gave a dismissive wave of her hand and leaped through the gap in the wall without looking back, vanishing into the chaos of the streets in a heartbeat.
Pierre stared at the pile of bone dust in front of his son, then at the massive hole where his wall used to be. He let out a long, shuddering breath and collapsed back onto the floor.
He was alive. Karl was alive.
The Royal Palace, The Grand Terrace.
Emperor Odri V stood at the precipice of the terrace, overlooking his capital as it was swallowed by a sea of fire and slaughter. The crimson barrier still choked the sky, and screams echoed from every district.
A figure began to manifest behind him, condensing out of the very shadows. Beneath the swirling shroud of darkness was a frame of bleached-white bone.
A Sovereign of Death.
"To send Altlais and the Lionheart Guard away from your side... you truly are a bold man, Odri."
Odri did not turn around. "I did it because of the grief."
"Grief?" The Sovereign of Death let out a hollow, rattling chuckle. "It is precisely because life is finite that your kind fears the end. You suffer, and in that agony, you produce nothing but sorrow and sin."
He spread his skeletal arms wide toward the burning city below.
"To become undead is to possess eternal existence. Without the end of life, the root of all suffering is severed. No more errors. No more pain. What I provide is release. It is the only true salvation."
Odri remained still, his voice a flat, dangerous calm. "Since you have seen fit to lecture me, allow me to ask you a single question."
The Sovereign of Death tilted his skull with amusement. "Speak."
"Do you know who I am?"
"Odri V. The current King of this heap of meat."
The moment the words left the Sovereign's mouth—Odri vanished.
A split second later, the Emperor was in the Sovereign's face, their gazes locking in the void. Odri's hand shot out like a strike of lightning, five fingers splayed wide as they clamped onto the Sovereign's entire skull.
Odri's arm muscles bunched, and he slammed the creature downward with the force of a falling star.
BANG!
The Sovereign's skull was driven into the reinforced white stone of the terrace. Spiderweb cracks exploded outward from the impact site. Odri loomed over the pinned skeleton, his voice devoid of a single degree of warmth.
"Then why haven't you knelt?"
HUM—!
The floor of the terrace ignited with a complex, glowing blue geometry. The Royal Protection Array had been triggered. It was a barrier woven by the most powerful mages in the Empire's history—a defense that even a Tier 6 entity would struggle to breach.
"Heh... hehehe..." A sound like dry wood snapping echoed from the Sovereign's throat as he lay pinned to the stone. "You are... far more mischievous than your father was."
BOOM!
A gargantuan wave of necrotic Mana erupted from the skeleton's frame, blasting Odri's hand away. The Sovereign of Death stood up, snapping his neck back into place with a series of wet clicks. The Soul Fire in his sockets shifted from ghostly blue to a bottomless, abyssal ink-black.
Tier 5 Peak. Only a hair's breadth from Tier 6.
A golden Battle Aura surged around Odri, the majesty of a King and the lethality of a warrior merging into a singular, radiant presence.
He, too, was Tier 5.
The duel began.
The Sovereign of Death manifested a longsword of jagged, pale bone. The blade was covered in wicked barbs and radiated a thick, suffocating scent of rot as it lunged for Odri's heart. Odri didn't retreat; he sidestepped the point and delivered a heavy palm-strike toward the creature's neck.
CLANG!
The Sovereign blocked with his blade, the impact sounding like two slabs of steel colliding. Odri used the momentum to backstep, reaching out toward a life-sized statue of a knight standing nearby. With one hand, he ripped the decorative Greatsword from the statue's stone grip.
"A fine toy," Odri remarked. He infused the blade with his Battle Aura, and the heavy slab of iron became weightless in his hand.
The two collided on the narrow terrace. The Sovereign's swordsmanship was erratic and alien, every strike targeting a lethal pressure point or a gap in plate. Simultaneously, wisps of black death-mana snaked along the floor like tentacles, reaching for Odri's ankles.
Odri's style was the opposite—wide, sweeping strikes that carried the absolute authority of a monarch. Every swing of the Greatsword brought the weight of the Empire down upon his foe. His golden aura purified the darkness before it could touch his skin.
Steel and bone clashed repeatedly, the roof of the palace trembling under the weight of two opposing philosophies of power.
The Sovereign of Death parried a heavy blow and drifted backward. "Enough games!"
He raised his bone sword high, the ink-black Mana beginning to swirl into a vortex at the tip. Odri drove his Greatsword into the stone before him, his golden aura condensing into a massive, shimmering shield of light.
But just as the final clash was about to detonate, the Sovereign of Death froze. He tilted his head toward the sky.
The crimson barrier shrouding the city was flickering. Its energy was beginning to hemorrhage. The Court Mages had found the sequence. They were breaking the lock.
The Soul Fire in the Sovereign's eyes pulsed once. He abandoned his charge. His objective had been met.
"It seems our playtime is at an end," he murmured. He sheathed his bone blade as his body began to turn translucent.
Odri didn't pursue. A cold trickle of unease ran down his spine. During the fight, the opponent had passed up several opportunities to land a crippling blow. This wasn't a raid—it was a distraction. A cover-up.
The Sovereign of Death offered one final whisper before vanishing completely.
"We shall see each other again soon, Odri."
"I hope, for your sake, you are still standing this straight when that day comes."
The figure dissolved into the wind.
Odri stood alone on the terrace, his brow furrowed. He felt a sudden, fleeting chill across his forehead, as if something cold and invisible had ghosted over his skin. But the sensation vanished as quickly as it had come. He couldn't even remember the exact feeling of it.
At that moment, the blood-red barrier in the sky shattered with the sound of a thousand breaking mirrors. It dissolved into a rain of scarlet sparks, vanishing into the air.
The Calamity that had gripped the Capital for hours was finally over.
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