Chapter : 1267

This was an unforeseen, and deeply inconvenient, complication. His perfect, secret identity had just been catastrophically, and very publicly, compromised. Another layer of his carefully constructed life had just been stripped away, and he knew, with a sinking, and very tired, certainty, that this particular revelation was going to be the source of a great many, very loud, and very, very complicated, future conversations.

But that was a problem for future Lloyd. Present Lloyd had a more immediate, and much more pressing, problem to deal with. A downed, but still dangerous, Crown-Ranked enemy, and a garden full of witnesses.

He decided to end the fight. Cleanly. And quietly.

He gave a silent, mental command to Iffrit. The order was not to kill, but to disable. A public execution in the royal gardens was, he decided, a breach of etiquette that even he would have a hard time explaining away.

The nine-foot-tall demon of fire moved with a speed that was a blur, even to Isabella’s trained eyes. Its colossal, flaming zanbatō, a weapon that could level a fortress, descended. But it was not a clumsy, overwhelming blow. It was a move of pure, surgical, and almost contemptuous precision.

The flat of the massive, molten blade did not strike the cowering Hellfire Crow’s body. It simply… tapped… its wings. A gentle, almost delicate, gesture.

The effect was instantaneous. The crow’s magnificent, twenty-foot wings of living shadow and abyssal flame did not just burn. They were unmade. They dissolved into a cloud of black, hissing ash, their conceptual reality utterly and completely erased by the touch of the annihilation-fire.

The Hellfire Crow, its ability to fly and its very reason for being gone, let out a final, gurgling, and utterly defeated squawk and collapsed to the ground, a broken, lopsided, and now utterly pathetic thing.

Franz, who had been kneeling on the ground, clutching his head in psychic agony, screamed as the final, crippling blow to his spirit slammed into his own soul. The psychic backlash was a cataclysm, shattering the last, fragile vestiges of his own, corrupted spiritual core.

But he was not given the luxury of a quiet, agonizing collapse.

The moment the spirit was down, Annalisa and four of her elite "butlers" were on him. They moved with the silent, brutal efficiency of a pack of wolves on a wounded deer. Before Franz could even attempt to resist, before he could reach for a hidden blade or a suicide artifact, he was disarmed, bound in a set of heavy, silver-etched chains that sizzled as they made contact with his demonic aura, suppressing his power, and forced to his knees.

His head was pushed down, his face pressed into the cold, hard, and now deeply, personally, and professionally humiliating gravel of the garden path.

The entire engagement, from the first, silent appearance of the assassins to the final, professional, and utterly anticlimactic capture of their leader, had been a masterpiece of brutal, silent, and deeply, profoundly, and almost comically, efficient warfare.

Isabella could only stare, her mind struggling to reconcile the "glorified party planner" she had so gleefully and so publicly mocked, with the terrifying, silent, and utterly masterful commander who had just, without even breaking a sweat, dismantled a Crown-Ranked demonic threat and its entire elite honor guard.

The man was not a puzzle. He was an impossibility. A walking, talking, and deeply, profoundly, and infuriatingly, humble violation of the fundamental laws of her world. And she, the warrior princess, the hero of the kingdom, had just been reduced to the role of a stunned, silent, and utterly irrelevant, spectator in his magnificent, terrible, and secret war.

The silence in the garden, in the aftermath of the swift, brutal, and almost insultingly efficient battle, was a thick, and very charged, thing. The remaining Curse Knights, their commander captured and their demonic spirits broken, had been systematically, and very quietly, exterminated by the rest of the ghost brigade. The garden was now a silent, moonlit tableau of death, a beautiful, artistic, and deeply unsettling arrangement of black-armored bodies and dissipating, shadowy energy.

Lloyd stood at the center of it all, a quiet, unassuming figure who was now, in the eyes of everyone present, the most terrifying thing in the entire garden. He gave a silent, mental command, and the magnificent, terrible, nine-foot-tall god of annihilation that was Iffrit, dissolved into a swirl of crimson embers and vanished, his immense, overwhelming presence gone as quickly as it had appeared.

The world seemed to breathe a collective, and very relieved, sigh.

Chapter : 1268

Lloyd then turned his attention to the captured enemy. He walked over to the kneeling, bound form of Franz, his footsteps the only sound in the silent garden. He crouched down, bringing himself to eye level with his defeated foe.

"Now," Lloyd began, his voice a quiet, conversational, and utterly terrifying thing. "You and I are going to have a little chat. You are going to tell me who sent you. You are going to tell me everything you know about the Seventh Circle's operations in this kingdom. And you are going to tell me what your master, Beelzebub, is planning. And you are going to do it now."

Franz, his face a mask of bitter, impotent hatred, simply spat a glob of bloody saliva at Lloyd’s feet. "I will tell you nothing, you Northern dog," he hissed. "My master will unmake you. He will unmake this entire, pathetic, and self-righteous kingdom."

Lloyd simply sighed, a sound of profound, and very deep, professional disappointment. "I was afraid you'd say that," he murmured.

He did not raise his voice. He did not threaten. He simply reached out and placed a single, gentle finger on Franz’s forehead.

And he activated his Black Ring Eyes.

He did not use a seal of negation. He did not use a seal of pain. He used something far more subtle, and far more monstrous. He used the "Seal of Severed Identity."

He did not attack Franz's body or his soul. He attacked the very concept of who he was.

For Franz, the world did not go black. It simply… ceased to be. His name, his memories, his loyalties, his hatred, his very sense of self—it was all just… gone. He was a consciousness adrift in a perfect, featureless, and utterly silent void. He was not a man. He was not a demon worshiper. He was nothing. A blank page. A silent, empty room.

The experience lasted for only a single, terrible, and eternal second.

And then, Lloyd lifted his finger.

Reality, and with it, his own, shattered identity, crashed back in on Franz in a single, roaring, and agonizing wave. The sheer, psychic whiplash of ceasing to exist and then being forced to exist again was a form of torture so profound, so absolute, that it made a mockery of any simple, physical pain.

Franz screamed. A raw, animal, and utterly broken sound. The sound of a soul that has just been systematically, and very personally, unmade and then clumsily stapled back together.

"Let's try this again," Lloyd said, his voice still that same, quiet, and now infinitely more terrifying, conversational tone.

And in the background, a silent, and very pale, Princess Isabella watched. She had just witnessed a form of power, a form of cruelty, that she had not even known existed. The man she had thought a hero, the man she had thought a commander, had just revealed himself to be something else entirely.

A monster. A beautiful, brilliant, and utterly, absolutely, and terrifyingly, merciless monster. And he was, without a doubt, the most magnificent, and most terrifying, thing she had ever seen. The unmasking was complete. And the reality of him was so much more, and so much worse, than any of her most fevered, and most foolish, imaginings.

The silent, psychic scream that was ripped from Franz’s soul was a sound that would haunt the dreams of everyone who heard it. It was a sound of a mind being broken, not with a clumsy, brutal hammer, but with the cold, precise, and utterly terrifying art of a master surgeon.

Princess Isabella stood frozen, her own, formidable Royal Guard a silent, and now utterly irrelevant, wall of steel behind her. She was a warrior. She had seen death. She had seen battle. She had seen the raw, chaotic, and brutal face of war. She had never, in her entire, privileged, and very violent life, seen anything like this.

The man she had been so foolishly, and so arrogantly, taunting and testing was not a man. He was a force of nature. A quiet, smiling, and deeply, profoundly, and almost casually, cruel entity who could, with a single, gentle touch, unmake a person’s very soul.

The revelation was a silent, personal apocalypse. It was a complete, and utterly irreversible, recalibration of her entire understanding of the world, and of her own, now seemingly pathetic, place within it.

She watched, her mind a silent, horrified, and deeply, profoundly fascinated void, as the battle—if such a one-sided, psychological demolition could be called a battle—concluded.