Chapter : 883
Kael, who had been on the verge of grabbing his axe and storming the arena himself, hesitated. He looked at his partner, at the new, strange, and deeply unsettling stillness in Jager’s eyes. The shock was gone, replaced by something else. Something colder. Something far more dangerous.
“Sit down,” Jager repeated, his voice a soft, silken, and utterly unbreakable command.
Kael slowly, reluctantly, sat back down, his own warrior’s rage momentarily quelled by the sheer, absolute force of his partner’s will.
“You are a soldier, Kael,” Jager began, his voice a low, analytical hum. “You see an unexpected fortification, and your instinct is to attack it head-on with overwhelming force. It is a sound, if predictable, tactical response. But a direct assault now, even with his power presumably drained, would be a fool’s errand. His bodyguard, the King-level shadow, is still out there. And now the entire city, the entire royal court, is watching this man. A public attack would be suicide.”
“So we do nothing?” Kael growled, his voice incredulous. “We let him walk away?”
“We do not do nothing,” Jager chided gently. “We simply do it smarter. You are correct. The old plan is useless. The time for simple traps is over. The target’s power level requires us to escalate our methods. Dramatically.”
A new, strange, and terrible light was dawning in Jager’s grey eyes. The shock had been replaced by a pure, unadulterated, and almost joyful professional excitement. The hunt, which had become so tedious and so boring, had just become the single greatest challenge of his entire, long, and illustrious career.
“Our mission has not been aborted,” he said, his voice a low, triumphant purr. “It has simply… been upgraded. This is no longer a simple elimination. This will require a level of preparation, of resources, and of artistry that we have not employed in years. Our benefactor wanted a dead lordling. We will deliver him a legend’s fall. And the price for such a service will be… magnificent.”
He looked at Kael, and a slow, cold, and deeply predatory smile spread across his face. “Our hunt is not over, my friend. It has simply become more interesting. And far, far more profitable.”
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Kael stared at his partner, his mind struggling to keep up with the dizzying, terrifying leaps of Jager’s logic. The man was insane. He had just witnessed a being of seemingly infinite power, a creature that could create and unmake mountains of fire, and his reaction was not to reassess the risk, but to see it as an opportunity to inflate their invoice. But Kael was a warrior, and a warrior’s code was simple: if the enemy is stronger than you thought, you find a bigger, sharper sword. Jager was proposing they build a new one.
“Escalate our methods?” Kael repeated, the words feeling thick and stupid in his mouth, but his tone was now one of grudging, professional curiosity rather than indignant rage. “Jager, what methods do we possess that can possibly counter that? He has his own monstrous fire spirit, and he is protected by a King-Level bodyguard. We are two men.”
“We are not just two men,” Jager sighed, his tone one of a patient teacher explaining a complex concept to a particularly strong, but very literal, student. “We are artists. And our art is not just in the killing, but in the preparation. You are still thinking in terms of a direct confrontation, of our strength against his. And in that arena, you are correct. We would likely lose.”
He leaned forward, his grey eyes gleaming with a new, feverish, and almost religious intensity. “The target has shown us his true, overwhelming power. That was his mistake. He believes he is unassailable. He believes his raw force makes him invincible. And that is the very arrogance we will use to destroy him. We will not challenge him to a duel. We will construct a kill-box so perfect, so absolute, that his power will be rendered completely and utterly irrelevant.”
“And how do we do that?” Kael asked, his voice a low, skeptical growl.
“With resources, my dear Kael,” Jager replied, his voice a soft, silken, and utterly venomous whisper. “And with knowledge. We will contact our benefactor. We will present him with the new, terrifying truth of the target. And we will make a request. A request for a tool that is reserved for only the most high-value, most powerful of targets. A tool that our order has not deployed in over a decade.”
He paused, letting the weight of his chilling implication sink in. “We will request a dispensation to acquire a ‘Soul-Catcher’ shard.”
Chapter : 884
Kael’s blood ran cold. He was a killer, a brute, but even he knew the legends, the dark, forbidden whispers of the Soul-Catchers. They were not simple weapons. They were artifacts of black magic, crystalline shards imbued with an Abyssal curse that did not just kill the body, but was said to devour the very spirit, to erase a soul from the cycle of rebirth. They were a weapon of absolute, final damnation.
“That is… forbidden magic,” Kael said, his voice a low, warning rumble.
“It is effective,” Jager replied, his voice a soft, cold, and utterly final statement. “The target’s power is immense, yes. But it is the power of a spirit user. And a Soul-Catcher does not care about the strength of a spirit. It cares only about the soul to which it is bound. It is the perfect, conceptual counter to a man like him.”
He leaned back in his seat, the picture of calm, composed, and utterly ruthless strategic planning. “The new plan is simple. We will acquire the artifact. We will then construct the perfect ambush. Not in the open, not in an arena. In a confined space. A place with no room to maneuver, no room to summon a mountain of fire. And we will strike not with our own power, but with a power that unmakes reality itself. He will be dead before his own formidable bodyguard can even react.”
The plan was monstrous. It was a violation of not just martial codes, but of the very laws of the gods themselves.
And it was absolutely, undeniably, and brilliantly perfect.
Kael was silent for a long moment. He looked at the man opposite him, at the cold, beautiful, and utterly inhuman intelligence in his partner’s eyes. A true warrior faced his enemy head-on. But he was not a true warrior. He was an assassin. And an assassin’s only honor was the successful completion of the contract.
He gave a single, slow, and reluctant nod. “The pay will need to be doubled. This is a new level of risk.”
Jager’s smile widened. “My dear Kael,” he purred. “I believe our benefactor will be more than happy to oblige. After all, we are about to deliver him a legend.”
The two assassins sat in their shadowed alcove, their own, private, and terrible alliance reforged in the fires of their shared ambition and their newfound, monstrous purpose. The old plan was dead. The new hunt, a hunt for a weapon that could kill a soul, was about to begin.
The Royal Arena was a tinderbox of raw, volatile, and deeply confused emotion, ready to explode. The crowd, which had just moments before been baying for the blood of a fraud, was now a silent, gaping, and utterly terrified mass. The Royal Knights, who had been on the verge of arresting a common cheat, were now frozen in a state of profound, procedural, and deeply existential paralysis. And Gias, the broken champion, could only stare, his own, personal humiliation now a small, insignificant footnote in a story that had just become a cosmic, epic poem.
They were all staring at the veiled Princess Amina, the slender, enigmatic figure in the Royal Box who had, with a few, quiet, and absolutely world-shattering words, completely and utterly upended their entire reality.
“He is not a fraud,” she had said. “The power he wields is his own. And his age does not violate the rules of the Challenge. He is a legitimate victor.”
The statement was a triple-pronged assault on the very foundations of their understanding. She had not just declared him innocent; she had declared the impossible to be true. She had stated, as a matter of absolute, unequivocal fact, that a young man could wield the power of a god, and that his age, the very crux of the accusation, was a non-issue.
The silence that followed her decree was not just a lack of noise; it was a vacuum, a void created by the sudden, violent implosion of seventy thousand individual certainties.
The one-eyed Royal Knight, the commander of the unit, was the man trapped at the very epicenter of this conceptual earthquake. His entire world was built on a simple, iron-clad foundation of rules, of laws, of the known and predictable order of things. And the Princess had just taken that foundation and had turned it to sand.
He was a soldier, and his first, and most ingrained, instinct was to obey. The word of the Princess was law. But he was also a veteran warrior, a man whose own, hard-won experience screamed at him that what she was saying was a lie. A beautiful, royal, and politically convenient lie, perhaps, but a lie nonetheless.