Three days. 72 hours. It was a vicious, unyielding clock.
Elias lifted the exhausted Elara into his arms. The journey back to his compound was a stark contrast to his frantic rush to the Falls. He moved with a deliberate, steady pace, his body a cradle of bone and iron. Elara, her small life force no longer actively being drained by the plague, fell into a deep, feverish sleep, her head resting against his metal-plated shoulder.
The contact did not bother him now. It was simply a fact. His objective was in his arms. Its well-being was his sole focus. He was no longer just the Grave Warden, a creature of fear and shadow. He was a guardian, a transport, a mobile life-support system. The absurdity of it was immense, but the urgency was greater.
He returned to his fortress not as a reclusive monster, but as a concerned father returning with a sick child. The four skeletal prowlers, whom he'd summoned with a mental command on his journey back, stood waiting at the entrance. They did not react to the child, their programming absolute, but their presence transformed the scene into something profoundly strange: a family of the damned.
He carried Elara inside his cabin and laid her on his own cot, a rough bed of wood and furs that now seemed impossibly grand for her small frame. Her breathing was shallow, and the faint, sickly yellow aura of the Gutter-Rot, though suppressed, still clung to her. He had stalled the plague, but it was a tireless enemy, constantly pressing against the dam of his necrotic energy.
The System's three-day deadline was a death sentence. He couldn't leave her. The filtration effect of his power seemed to require his proximity. If he left to hunt the shaman, the rot would return in his absence and consume her. But if he stayed, the source totem would remain, and the plague would inevitably overwhelm his defenses. It was a perfect trap. A classic no-win scenario.
He sat on a stool beside the cot, the dim light of his forge casting long shadows across the room. He watched her sleep. For a long time, he simply processed the tactical problem. He needed to be in two places at once. His physical body needed to stay here to maintain the filtration. His will, his power, needed to go to the Green Caves.
And with a sudden, startling clarity, he saw the answer. It had been there all along, a tool he had acquired but never fully exploited. Corpse Marionette. He had used it for reconnaissance, piloting a single undead servant. But the System was a toolbox. The user defined the application.
His plan was insane. It was a feat of multitasking that would strain his mental faculties to their absolute limit. But it was the only way.
First, he prepared his vessel. He chose his strongest skeletal prowler, Unit 1. He took it to his forge and, with the insight of his Basic Metallurgy, spent precious hours reinforcing its structure. He hammered out plates of iron and lashed them to its bone-limbs. He affixed sharpened blades of steel, taken from the Hegemony soldiers' swords, to its claws. He was not just repairing an undead minion; he was building a remote-controlled war machine. A proxy avatar.
Next, he prepared the home front. He arranged his three other skeletal prowlers in a defensive cordon around the cabin, issuing a simple, absolute command: Nothing enters. Nothing harms the child.
Finally, he sat on the floor beside Elara's cot, his back against the wall. He placed one hand on her forehead, maintaining the flow of his filtering energy. This was his anchor. With his other hand, he reached out, metaphorically, to his upgraded Unit 1, now miles away, using the latent connection all his minions shared with him.
He activated Corpse Marionette.
His world split. It was a dizzying, nauseating schism of consciousness. One part of his mind, the Host, remained in the cabin. It was a point of pure will, focused on a single task: maintain the flow of necrotic energy into the child, filtering the Gutter-Rot. It was a passive but intensely demanding act of concentration, like holding a heavy weight overhead.
The other part of his mind, the Operator, shot across the miles of forest and slammed into the consciousness of Unit 1. He was there. In the deep woods. A monster of bone and black iron and sharpened steel. He saw through its sockets, felt the strength of its augmented limbs. He was Elias, the king in his castle, and he was simultaneously Elias, the champion sent forth to do battle.
The strain was immense. It was like trying to listen to two different conversations at once, solve two different logic puzzles at the same time. His Cognitive Fortitude proficiency, long ignored, flashed with stress alerts.
He ignored them. He had a clock.
Guided by his ravens and the location ripped from the goblin's mind, he began the hunt. His proxy avatar loped through the woods, a relentless engine of destruction. It moved faster and farther than his own body ever could.
He found the Green Caves carved into the base of a swampy, fungus-covered hillside. The entrance was draped with fetishes of bone and hair, and guarded by two hulking, ogre-like creatures with clubs.
Elias, from his seat miles away, did not hesitate. The Operator sent his war-machine into the fray. The battle was brutal and swift. The ogres were strong, but the iron-clad prowler was a whirlwind of steel claws and necrotic power. He fought with the detached precision of a drone pilot, his mind a cold calculator of angles and forces. He disemboweled one ogre and crushed the skull of the other, his proxy suffering only a few dents in its iron plating.
[Soul Essence Absorbed: 6.0] The influx of power helped stabilize his fractured consciousness.
He stormed the caves. It was a network of tunnels, filled with the stench of goblin filth and rot. He was a singular, unstoppable force. He slaughtered his way through the warren, a one-man, remote-controlled army. Goblins fell before his steel claws, their panicked shrieks echoing in the dark. He felt no remorse, no emotion at all from his distant seat. This was pest control. A necessary step in a critical path.
Finally, he reached the central chamber. It was a large cavern, lit by phosphorescent fungus. On a crude throne of stone sat the shaman, Grolnok, a wizened, ancient goblin wearing a headdress of bones. And before him, pulsing with a nauseating yellow-green light that Elias could sense even through his proxy, was the Rot-Totem. It was a twisted piece of petrified wood, carved into a screaming face and covered in sores that weeped a viscous, glowing pus.
Grolnok was not a simple warrior. He shrieked a command, and the very shadows in the chamber coalesced, forming into slithering, semi-corporeal shades. A higher form of shamanistic magic.
Elias, the Operator, felt a thrill. Not of fear, but of challenge. This was a battle of casters, fought by proxies and summoned minions. A true strategy game.
From the cabin, miles away, Elias the Host felt a shudder run through Elara's body. The plague was pushing back. The filtration was weakening under the strain of his divided attention. He had to end this. Now.
The Operator made a bold, seemingly foolish move. He ignored the shades and charged directly at the shaman. Grolnok, expecting his shades to intercept, was caught by surprise. The prowler-avatar crashed into the throne, claws first.
In that single, decisive moment, Elias performed the most complex act of will he had ever attempted. The Operator used the avatar's claws not to kill the shaman, but to snatch the Rot-Totem. Simultaneously, the Host, in the cabin, funneled a massive surge of pure, destructive necrotic energy through the Corpse Marionette link and into the avatar's grasp.
The Rot-Totem, suffused with vile, life-aspected plague magic, came into contact with an overwhelming torrent of pure death-energy. The two antithetical forces annihilated each other.
The totem did not just break. It exploded. A shockwave of sickly green and black energy erupted through the chamber, vaporizing the shadow-shades, throwing the shaman Grolnok against the far wall, and shattering Elias's proxy avatar into a thousand pieces of bone and shrapnel.
The connection was severed.
Elias gasped, his full consciousness slamming back into his body in the cabin. The mental whiplash was staggering. He slumped against the wall, his mind screaming from the strain. But he focused. He felt the energy flowing into Elara. The Gutter-Rot, its source destroyed, was no longer pushing back. It was a fading echo, a poison without a wellspring. The filtration was working, cleansing the last remnants from her system.
[Primary Objective Secured. Gutter-Rot Eradicated.]
[Legendary Feat Achieved: Astral Campaign. Commanded a remote vessel in sustained combat while performing a separate, continuous magical task.]
[Reward: 15 Skill Points. Title 'The Ashen King' Unlocked.]
He had done it. He had fought a war on two fronts, one physical and one metaphysical. He had saved a child and a mother.
He looked down at his own hands. They were trembling. He was the Grave Warden. The Reaper of Souls. A being of immense and growing power. A king who commanded undead armies and could wage war from miles away.
And at that moment, sitting on the dirty floor of his lonely cabin, covered in the grime of his forge, trembling with mental exhaustion while watching a child sleep, he felt the true, crushing burden of his self-imposed crown. To be a king was not to rule. It was to be singularly, absolutely responsible.