Chapter : 1755
She closed the door and locked it.
But a lock on a wooden door is nothing to a man with an axe.
From the tree line, Rubel watched Lloyd ride away. He smiled. It was a sad, twisted smile.
"He took the bait," Rubel said to the empty air.
Behind him, twelve n stepped out of the shadows. They were not ordinary bandits. They were Shadow Knights—rcenaries clad in black armor, paid a fortune to do a job that required no rcy.
"Go," Rubel commanded. "Make it ssy. Make sure he sees exactly what his failure cost him."
The knights drew their weapons and walked toward the cabin where the light was still warm and inviting.
________________________________________
The storm grew worse. The thunder cracked like a whip across the sky, shaking the ground.
Lloyd rode hard. The mud flew up from his horse's hooves, coating his cloak. He reached the location ntioned in the scroll—a narrow pass near the old river bridge. He waited.
And he waited.
The rain poured down. An hour passed. Then two. There was no caravan. There was no gold. There was only the wind howling through the trees.
Slowly, a cold feeling started to creep up Lloyd’s spine. It wasn't the cold of the rain. It was the cold of realization.
He looked at the scroll again. The seal looked real, but the ink... the ink was running slightly in the rain. Royal ink didn't run.
"A fake," Lloyd whispered.
His heart stopped. Why would soone send him out here? Why would they lure him away from the cabin?
"Mina."
The na tore out of his throat. He spun his horse around so fast the animal almost slipped in the mud. He kicked its sides, screaming at it to run.
The ride back was a nightmare. Every shadow looked like a monster. Every clap of thunder sounded like a scream. Lloyd prayed. He prayed to the gods he didn't believe in. Please let her be okay. Please let be wrong. Take my arm, take my title, take anything, just let her be safe.
He pushed the horse until its heart nearly burst. He tore through the forest, branches whipping his face, drawing blood.
When he broke through the tree line and saw the clearing, his world ended.
The cabin was gone.
It wasn't just burned; it was demolished. The roof had collapsed. The walls were smashed inward as if a giant had stomped on them. The door was lying in the mud, splintered into a hundred pieces.
"Mina!" Lloyd scread. He leaped off the moving horse, hitting the ground and rolling. He scrambled to his feet, slipping in the mud, running toward the ruins.
"Mina! Answer !"
There was no answer. Only the sound of the rain hissing on the smoldering remains of the fire.
Lloyd tore at the wreckage. He lifted heavy beams with a strength he didn't know he had. He threw aside broken furniture. He cut his hands on shattered glass and rusty nails, but he didn't feel it.
He found her near the hearth.
She was lying on the rug where they had sat just a few hours ago. But the rug was no longer white. It was soaked red.
Mina was gone.
The attack had been brutal. They hadn't just killed her; they had made sure she suffered. They had made sure that whoever found her would be scarred for life. Her eyes, once so warm and brown, stared up at the broken ceiling, empty and glassy. Her hand was outstretched, reaching toward the door, as if she had been waiting for him to co back.
Lloyd fell to his knees.
A sound ca out of him. It wasn't a word. It wasn't a cry. It was a raw, animal noise—a howl of pure, absolute agony. It was the sound of a soul ripping in half.
He gathered her into his arms. She was cold. So cold. The rain mixed with the blood on her face, making pink streaks that ran down to her neck.
"I'm sorry," Lloyd sobbed, rocking her back and forth. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I should have stayed. I shouldn't have left you. I'm sorry."
He buried his face in her hair. It slled of smoke and rain now, not the lavender soap she used.
Chapter : 1756
He sat there for a long ti. The grief was a physical weight, crushing his chest, making it impossible to breathe. He wanted to die. He wanted to lie down beside her and let the cold take him too. He felt small. He felt weak. He felt like the failure everyone said he was.
See? a voice whispered in his head. It wasn't Mammon this ti. It was his own self-hatred. Everything you touch dies. You cannot protect anyone. You are weak.
Yes, Lloyd thought. I am weak.
Why are you weak? the voice asked.
Because I care, Lloyd thought. Because I have a heart. Because I feel pain.
Then get rid of it.
The thought was sudden. It was sharp. It didn't feel like a thought; it felt like a command.
Lloyd stopped rocking. He stopped crying. He looked down at his hands. They were covered in Mina’s blood. The blood was cooling, becoming sticky.
He rembered the iron. He rembered the rust on his sword. He rembered the feeling he had sotis, the strange buzz in his blood when he was angry.
Rubel was watching.
Lloyd didn't see him, but he felt him. He felt eyes on his back. He looked up toward the hill overlooking the clearing.
He saw the movent in the trees. He saw the glint of armor.
The grief inside Lloyd didn't vanish. It didn't go away. Instead, it froze. It was compressed under the weight of his rage until it turned into sothing else entirely. It turned into a black hole. A void.
Lloyd stood up.
He didn't stumble this ti. He didn't slip in the mud. His movents were chanical. Precise. Unnatural.
He laid Mina down gently, arranging her hands so she looked peaceful. He took his muddy cloak off and covered her face, shielding her from the rain one last ti.
"Goodbye, Mina," Lloyd said. His voice was different. It wasn't the voice of a boy anymore. It was flat. It was devoid of emotion. It sounded like tal grinding against tal.
He turned toward the hill.
From the shadows of the forest, the twelve Shadow Knights erged. They walked into the clearing, their black armor gleaming wetly in the storm. They ford a loose circle around him, their weapons drawn, confident that they were facing a broken, unard boy.
Lloyd didn't look for an escape route. He didn't reach for the rusty sword at his hip.
He simply stood there, letting the rain wash over him. But deep inside, the switch had been flipped. The grief was gone, replaced by a cold, mathematical calculation of trajectory and mass. The weeping heir had died in the mud with Mina.
The thing that stood in the rain now was a monster. A machine of logic and death. And it was waiting for them to make the first move.
Inside Lloyd’s mind, a catastrophic system failure was occurring. The grief was too massive, a jagged spike of data that his consciousness could not process. He saw Mina’s face—the warmth of her smile, the way she looked in the firelight—and then he saw the blood on the rug. The contrast was a fatal error. The pain was so intense that his brain, in a desperate attempt to prevent total psychological collapse, triggered an ergency override.
It was like a massive circuit breaker tripping in a power plant to prevent a total ltdown.
This pain is inefficient, a voice whispered in the cold, dark corners of his subconscious. It wasn't a demon or a system voice; it was the raw, stripped-down core of his own intellect, the Earth-trained engineer taking control of the broken noble. Emotional variables are causing a 98% drop in combat readiness. To survive this interaction, all non-essential human data must be quarantined. Initiating the ‘Black Box’ protocol.
Lloyd’s perspective shifted. The world stopped looking like a tragedy and started looking like a blueprint. The rain wasn't a taphor for sadness anymore; it was a liquid dium with a specific viscosity and conductivity. The n surrounding him weren't murderers; they were biological targets with structural weaknesses in their armor.
"Hey! I'm talking to you, garbage!" The leader of the Shadow Knights shouted, his voice muffled by the heavy black steel of his helt. He stepped through the mud and shoved Lloyd hard in the chest.
Lloyd stumbled back, his boots sliding in the muck. But as he looked up, the knights stopped laughing.
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