Down in the subterranean bunker, Kairo jumped into the air, punching the stone ceiling with an ecstatic, chaotic grin. "THAT'S MY BOY, LEONHART!!! THAT'S WHAT I'm TALKING ABOUT!"
But as his cheer echoed off the geometric walls, Kairo's smile vanished, his face instantly dropping into a serious, highly calculated expression. He rubbed his temples, checking the life-force readings on the monitor. "But damn it... now I am getting way too nervous about the upcoming parameters. Leonhart... if things keep scaling up like this, would you even be able to solo the King?"
Before Leonhart could answer through the comm-link, a massive, crushing spike of raw, suffocating energy violently rattled the subterranean bunker's sensors.
Kairo gasped, his eyes widening into pinpricks as his spatial mapping channels violently short-circuited. "No way... Leonhart! Back out of that coordinate right now! There is someone very powerful entering the field!"
On the surface, the dust of the ruined Drama Hall parted.
Walking slowly out of the shadows was a man whose sheer presence distorted the air currents around him. He was toweringly tall, his muscular frame carved with an absolute, flawless symmetry that radiated high-tier combat power. He was strikingly handsome, his long silver hair flowing over a dark iron pauldrons that bore the direct insignia of the Supreme High General of the Land of Desire.
Leonhart didn't back down a single inch. His golden eyes flared with absolute defiance. "I will tear you completely apart!"
With a roaring explosion of speed, Leonhart lunged forward, swinging his heavy broadsword in a lethal, horizontal arc aimed directly at the man's throat.
SWIF.
The General didn't even draw his weapon. With an effortless, microscopic tilt of his head, he let the blade skim the empty air millimeters from his skin. Leonhart instantly anticipated the evasion; he aborted the momentum mid-swing, fluidly executing a hyper-precise feint and rerouting his blade to slash directly at the weak structural joint beneath the General's windpipe.
The General merely took a single, casual step backward. The tip of Leonhart's sword barely grazed the fabric of his collar, missing the vital line entirely.
The General stopped, looking down at the twelve-year-old boy with a cold, vacant curiosity. "So... this is the baseline? How did my entire elite vanguard manage to lose to a mere child like you?"
Suddenly, the General turned his head, his sharp eyes locking directly onto a hidden mud clone standing behind a marble pillar three meters away. He was looking straight through the optic link, staring directly into Kairo's eyes inside the bunker.
"Hmm..." the General muttered, his jaw clenching. "Maybe that rogue princess Seraphina was right about you. You've been navigating our subterranean tunnels with absolute ease. But because of your little tactical game..."
A sudden, terrifying wave of pure, unbridled rage and grief erupted from the General's core. His handsome face violently contorted, tears of raw agony spilling from his eyes as his aura violently flared, cracking the surrounding marble pillars.
"Because of you, I lost my beautiful wife!" he screamed, his voice cracking with a devastating sorrow. "We just got married! Who knows... she might have been pregnant! But all because of your interference, you didn't just kill my wife—you killed my unborn child! I waited patiently for one hundred straight years to marry the King's daughter! And the exact moment I finally fell in love with her and secured the lineage to the throne... you killed her! I loved her so much!"
The High General's knees violently gave out, and he collapsed heavily onto the blood-soaked cobblestones, his fists pounding into the dirt as he sobbed uncontrollably. "How could you do this to me?! What did I ever do to deserve this?! It wasn't my fault... I miss her so much..."
He looked up at Leonhart, his eyes completely hollow and desperate. "Hey... tell me she's okay. You didn't actually kill her, right? It was just her fake body... right?"
On cue, a low-tier soldier ran out from the inner corridor, carefully carrying Seraphina's headless, stiffened corpse, placing it gently on the stone before them. The General crawled toward it, clutching the ruined fabric of her dress. "Please... tell me you didn't kill her. Tell me this is just a fake clone construct!"
Leonhart stood over him, his face completely expressionless as he lowered the tip of his heavy sword to the dirt.
"I am not going to give you a single lie," Leonhart said, his voice dropping into a deep, chillingly disciplined register. "I am sorry, but I was the one who personally cut her head off. Because now... now you finally get to feel exactly how horrific it feels when you lose your loved ones. You possess such incredible, god-like power... but you and your wife systematically butchered thousands of innocent children across these six orphanages. Did you think those kids didn't have parents who adored them? Parents who waited years after years of desperate praying just to receive a child from God, only for you to treat them like fuel for your machine?"
Leonhart stepped closer, his golden eyes burning with an absolute, holy fury. "Their older brothers died fighting on the border to protect this land, and the moment God gave those families a new hope, you just killed them. What about their hopes? What about the treasures and life-force you have stolen from them? Don't cry your crocodile tears to me. If you were a real warrior... if you were a true man of honor, you would have used your supreme power to kill the parasitic King and stop this cycle centuries ago! It is entirely your fault for being an absolute coward. If you had killed the King, you would have taken the throne legally, and none of this tragedy would have ever happened. Seraphina died today... and it is all because of your cowardice."
The General froze, his entire psychological matrix completely shattering under the weight of Leonhart's words. He stared at his wife's corpse, completely defenseless.
Down in the moving bunker, Kairo's analytical brain fired at maximum speed. An optimal cognitive opening, he calculated, his eyes flashing with brilliant malice. Seize the moment.
Using the absolute last drops of his residual mana through the local network, Kairo activated his advanced illusion matrix directly over Seraphina's corpse.
To the General's tear-blurred vision, the air suddenly shimmered with a soft, ethereal gold light. The headless corpse vanished. In its place, a beautiful, flawless spirit projection of Seraphina materialized. She stepped forward with a gentle, peaceful smile, wrapping her translucent arms around the General's trembling shoulders, pulling his head into her chest.
"Don't worry, sweetheart..." the illusion of Seraphina whispered into his ear, her voice perfectly mimicking her living vocal parameters. "I will always love you. Don't blame yourself for this... it's not your fault."
The General let out a broken, choked sob, completely surrendering his defenses to the phantom embrace, entirely unaware that the trap was closing around his neck.
The General trembled within the phantom embrace of the illusion, his fierce aura completely evaporating into raw, human vulnerability. He looked up at Leonhart, his voice breaking.
"Hey... will God forgive me?" the General choked out, his eyes wide with a desperate plea. "I was up against a wall, believe me! I secretly saved thousands of kids' lives! I covertly routed food, shelter, and resources to the orphanages behind the administration's back! Don't put the entire weight of this damn collapse on me... I am broken inside. You're entirely right—I might look monstrously powerful from the outside, but inside, I was too terrified to strike the King down because I was completely paralyzed by the mechanics of it. This parasitic harvest... it only systematically started ten to twelve years ago!"
With a desperate, violent motion, the General ripped open the left shoulder of his iron chest plate, exposing his skin to the pale morning light.
"Look at this!" he hissed, showing a deeply burned, writhing black seal pulsing directly over his muscle fibers. "I swore a loyalty contract to the King years ago. The moment I actually tried to assassinate him, this damn magic locked my nervous system. I couldn't break the loop! I didn't know what the hell to do... You look like a true warrior's son, a kid who understands the heavens. Tell me... will God forgive me?"
Leonhart stared at the pulsing black brand, the icy edge of his combat stance slowly softening into a disciplined, solemn nod. "Yeah. He will forgive you. But forgiveness requires penance. Fight alongside us. Let's finish the King together."
THUD.
A fresh Kairo mud clone dropped down from the upper archway, stepping instantly into the General's immediate radius. Driven by Kairo's tactical foresight, the clone didn't hesitate. It supercharged its clay fist with a sudden, highly concentrated burst of anti-magic seismic frequency, driving a straight, hyper-precise punch directly into the center of the black curse mark.
"ARGHHHHHHH!!!"
The General let out an absolute, blood-curdling scream that echoed across the entire plaza. Behind the pillars, his remaining personal subordinates gasped in sheer horror. They had seen this man lose an entire limb on the border without flinching, yet this purge was causing him to convulse violently.
As the black contract dissolved under Kairo's magic, a horrific truth was exposed: the King's curse had been keeping the General's right arm intact by binding it to his lifeforce. The moment the seal snapped, the flesh of his right arm instantly began to turn gray, rotting and decaying right before their eyes.
But Kairo didn't stop the treatment. The mud clone slammed its secondary palm over the decaying flesh, channeling a heavy stream of foundational earth-healing magic. Slowly, the gray rot reversed. Fresh, healthy tissue knitted back together, and the agonizing physical pain completely faded away.
The General stood up, flexing his newly freed right arm, his silver hair whipping around his face as a brilliant, unburdened combat aura erupted from his core. He looked at Leonhart with absolute respect. "Let's kill this monster of a King."
Leonhart let out a brief, dry chuckle. "Woah. You were really peeping on my movements earlier, huh? What's your name, soldier?"
The warrior slammed his fist against his chest armor. "Gideon. Supreme High General of the Capital Defense."
Down in the hidden bunker, Kairo leaned back against his console, a brilliant smirk cutting across his pale face as he spoke through the clone's vocal vents. "Excellent. In exchange for my mana deficit, Gideon will handle the physical frontline parameters on his own."
Gideon adjusted his gauntlet, looking at the mud clone. "So... did you successfully evacuate the lower cells?"
Leonhart's eyes widened in genuine shock. "You actually knew about the rescue operation?"
"Yeah, I did," Gideon replied grimly, drawing a massive, master-crafted silver broadsword from his hip. "Now let's advance toward the palace gates before this entire civil chaos burns the city to the ground."
Behind them, Gideon's remaining personal subordinates—numbering exactly a few hundred elite, uncorrupted knights—stepped into a tight vanguard formation. "We will join you, General! We don't bear the King's loyalty curse. Even though including us we are just hundreds against an entire regime, we can't just sit around and watch this massacre continue. Let's end this broken government!"