Episode-238

Words : 1602 Updated : Oct 1st, 2025

Chapter : 475 Lloyd looked down at the two broken men. One, a powerhouse rendered as weak as a child. The other, a schemer reduced to a drooling imbecile. It was a brutal, absolute, and deeply, profoundly, unsettling demonstration of the true, insidious power of the Black Ring Eyes. He let them stew in their private hells for a long, silent minute. He watched Joseph struggle uselessly against his bonds, his powerful muscles refusing to obey him. He watched Jacob babble to himself, lost in a world of purple-singing fish. Then, he released the seals. Strength flooded back into Joseph’s limbs with a sudden, jarring rush. Coherent thought crashed back into Jacob’s mind with the force of a physical blow. They both gasped, panting, their faces pale with the aftershocks of their respective torments. They looked at each other, then at the silent, white-masked figure before them. The last vestiges of their defiance, of their hope, of their foolish loyalty to their mysterious benefactor, had been utterly, comprehensively, scoured away. They had just been given a taste of a power so far beyond their comprehension that it might as well have been the wrath of a vengeful god. Lloyd crouched down again, his voice still a quiet, gentle whisper. “Now,” he said, the sound making both men flinch as if from a physical blow. “Let us have our conversation again. And this time, I expect you will be far more... forthcoming.” He paused. “Who is Jager?” — The cellar was a chamber of broken wills. The Croft brothers, who had moments before been clinging to a desperate, defiant silence, were now just two shattered men, staring up at the white-masked figure with the wide, vacant eyes of those who have gazed into the abyss and found it staring back. The psychological torment Lloyd had inflicted with his Black Ring Eyes had been more effective than any physical torture. He had not just broken their bodies; he had invaded their minds, temporarily stripping them of the very essence of their identities—Joseph’s strength, Jacob’s cunning. He had shown them, with chilling, absolute clarity, that he could unmake them with a single, silent thought. Their wall of defiance had not just been breached; it had been atomized. The fear of their mysterious benefactor, Jager, a fear that had seemed so powerful moments ago, was now a pale, insignificant shadow compared to the raw, existential terror of the man who stood before them. “Now,” Lloyd’s voice was a low, calm murmur, but it echoed in the silent, stinking cellar with the force of a judge’s gavel. “Let us try this again. Who. Is. Jager?” Jacob Croft, the schemer, the man whose mind had so recently been a chaotic soup of purple-singing fish, broke first. A high-pitched, keening whimper escaped his lips. Tears, thick and greasy, streamed down his pale, terrified face, carving clean paths through the grime. “I’ll talk!” he shrieked, his voice a ragged, desperate plea. “Gods, I’ll tell you everything! Anything! Just... just don’t do that again! Don’t put me back in the... the noise!” Joseph, the brawler, shot his brother a look of furious, betrayed contempt. “Shut up, you sniveling coward!” he snarled, though his own voice trembled, the memory of his sudden, absolute weakness a cold, crawling thing in his gut. “Don’t you dare! You know what he’ll do to us! To our families!” “What he will do?” Jacob screamed back, his voice cracking with hysteria. He gestured wildly with his head towards Lloyd. “What about what this one will do?! Did you not feel it, brother?! He turned my mind to mush! He can unmake us! Jager will kill us, yes! But this... this thing... it will erase us!” The raw, primal terror in Jacob’s voice, the absolute conviction of his words, seemed to finally shatter the last, stubborn vestiges of Joseph’s brutish pride. He looked at Lloyd, at the blank, white, emotionless mask, at the quiet, terrifying stillness of the figure before him. And he finally, truly, understood. They were not dealing with a man. They were dealing with a force. And it was a force that had already won. Joseph’s broad shoulders slumped in utter, comprehensive defeat. The fire in his eyes died, leaving only the grey, cold ashes of despair. “He’s... he’s right,” he mumbled, his voice a hoarse, broken whisper. “It’s over.” Lloyd watched their final collapse with a cold, dispassionate satisfaction. The threat recalibration had been successful. The demonstration had achieved its objective. He crouched down again, his voice still a quiet, almost gentle, murmur. “Then talk. And do not lie to me. I will know if you are lying. And the consequences for lying,” he paused, letting the implication hang, heavy and cold, in the air, “will be... permanent. Start from the beginning. Who is Jager?” Chapter : 476 Jacob, his face a mask of tear-streaked terror, began to talk, the words spilling out of him in a frantic, desperate torrent. It was a pathetic story of greed, of ambition, of two small-time criminals who had been given a chance to play in a game far, far beyond their league. “He came to us a month ago,” Jacob began, his voice trembling. “Just... appeared. In this very office. Out of the shadows. Just like you.” He shuddered at the memory. “He called himself Jager. Said he was a... a broker. An agent for a powerful, anonymous client who wished to see the new Ferrum soap venture... fail. Spectacularly.” He described Jager. A tall, thin man, always cloaked, his face always hidden in shadow. His voice was quiet, cultured, but his eyes... Jacob shivered again. “His eyes... they were not right. They glowed. A faint, sickly, green light. Like... like swamp gas.” A Black Spirit user, Lloyd’s mind supplied instantly. The pieces were beginning to fall into place. “He offered us a deal,” Jacob continued, the words tumbling over each other in his haste. “He gave us everything. The formula... not the whole thing, but the basics. The idea of using a softer lye for a liquid. The concept of the pump. He even provided the initial funding. Twenty Gold Coins. A fortune! All we had to do was set up the production, create the counterfeit, and flood the market with it. He said... he said his client wanted to ruin the AURA brand’s reputation before it could ever truly be established. He wanted to poison the well.” “And you agreed,” Lloyd stated, his voice flat, devoid of judgment. “We... we were fools!” Jacob wailed. “The money... it was too much to resist! We saw a chance to be rich, to be powerful! We never thought... we never imagined...” Lloyd’s patience, which had been stretched thin, finally snapped. He was tired of their pathetic excuses, their sniveling confessions. He had the core of what he needed—the name, Jager; the description, a Black Spirit user. But he needed more. He needed leverage. He needed something to take back to his father, to the King. He needed a thread to pull that would unravel Jager’s entire network. And he knew, with a sudden, chilling certainty, that their fear, while potent, might not be enough to make them give up their true master. He needed to show them a power so absolute, so overwhelming, that the fear of Jager would seem like a child’s nightmare compared to the reality of the god of thunder standing before them. He stood up slowly, the quiet, gentle interrogator vanishing, replaced once more by the cold, implacable arbiter of consequence. “Your confession is... noted,” he said, his voice a low, chilling whisper. “But it is not enough. You are holding something back. The name of the noble house that funded you. You lied about that earlier. You will not lie about it again.” “No! I swear!” Jacob shrieked. “It was just Jager! We don’t know who he works for! He never told us!” “A likely story,” Lloyd replied, his voice a silken, disbelieving murmur. He turned his blank, white gaze towards the far end of the cellar. “It seems,” he sighed, a sound of profound, theatrical disappointment, “that a more... pointed... question is required.” He raised his hand. The air in the cellar, which had been thick and foul, suddenly became crisp, charged, electric. The low hum of contained power, the scent of ozone, returned, a hundred times more potent than before. He focused his will. He built the blueprint in his mind, drawing upon the vast, raging river of power he shared with Fang Fairy. He envisioned the spear. Not a javelin this time. Not a small, surgical instrument. But a full-scale, devastating, and utterly, comprehensively, terrifying, Lance of Judgment. The air before him tore apart. Not with a shimmer, but with a silent, violent, reality-bending rip. A point of light, so brilliant, so impossibly white-hot it was painful to look at, appeared, then elongated, solidified, into a weapon of pure, divine wrath. It was a spear of solidified lightning, ten feet long, thick as a man’s arm, its surface a churning, incandescent vortex of blue and white energy, its tip a point of such absolute, terrifying power that it seemed to be consuming the very light around it. It did not hum; it sang. A high, keening, cosmic note that vibrated in the bones, in the soul, the sound of a star being born, and dying, in the same instant.

Episode-238

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