Chapter 768

Chapter 768

“What in the world…” A navy-skinned magic spirit—one of the fallen fairies—parted her lips in disbelief. Her gaze was fixed on a sight emerging from the far distance.

She wasn’t necessarily shocked by the presence of divinity; she had encountered holy power many times before. However, the sheer scale of it—the way it was being deployed as a massive barrier to intercept an advance—was a tactic she found highly irregular.

The master of Thorn Fortress did not dwell in isolation. He was surrounded by a retinue. Aside from the mindless throngs he commanded, he was assisted by researchers, two experts in the field of alchemy, and several beasts that, while lacking sapience, possessed the martial prowess of elite knights.

Among these defenders, three magic spirits were stationed atop the high walls. Their mission was twofold: surveillance and harassment. Their specific orders were to pummel intruders into a state of total exhaustion before delivering the broken remains to their Lord for his experiments.

These fairies were remarkably expressive, a trait likely born from their corruption. Having steeped themselves in the essence of the Demon Realm, they had discarded the typical stoicism of their race. They stood together, watching the shimmering wall of white light from their high vantage point, trading observations.

“A desperate struggle,” one remarked. “The futile thrashing of a mortal. It should be entertaining to observe,” another added. “They actually believe the battle is won simply because they halted the plague ghouls.” “Purity and holiness… how quaint.”

The trio had long ago traded their natural fairy essence for the dark energy of the Demon Realm—the force known as demonic power. This transformation allowed one of them to manipulate the minds of lesser creatures, while the other two functioned as snipers with their bows. They could lace their projectiles with concentrated malice, though they were nowhere near as proficient as the legendary archer who had first ambushed Enkrid’s company. Because of this gap in skill, they were relegated to sentry duty.

Yet, despite their fall, they retained the preternatural agility of their kind.

“That girl wielding the holy light… we should flay her and study the source,” one mused. “I wonder if the skin of a half-giant is as thick as a true giant’s. If so, her hide would make for an excellent chimera base.”

Giant skin was as durable as stone; if hers shared that quality, she was a high-value resource. These spirits possessed a level of cruelty that defied fairy nature. Whether this was the result of the Demon Realm’s rot or the long years spent in this fortress, the result was the same. They viewed themselves as superior beings who had evolved past the ‘weakness’ of flowers and forests to become the favored children of the dark. To a human observer, they were indeed monsters wearing fairy skin.

They were slow.

Compared to a being like Shinar or the refined fairies dwelling in the Border Guard’s city, the disparity was immense. A true fairy would not even crush a blade of grass without purpose; they were cultivators who mastered their hyper-sensitivity by restraining their passions. But these creatures were unbridled. They flaunted their malice and delighted in grotesque surgery. They had lost the delicate precision of their ancestors.

Jaxon wasn’t aware of the philosophical differences. He simply perceived that they were far more sluggish than they should be. And for his purposes, that was plenty.

The moment Jaxon had dispatched the two plague ghouls, he had lunged forward, moving against the tide of the monster swarm. Even a warrior like Enkrid would have struggled to pass unseen through a horde of monsters that preferred self-destruction over life. But Jaxon was different.

The atmosphere of the Demon Realm has a specific weight. Once a person understands that rhythm, blending into it is a matter of technique. It was the art of Assimilation—a knightly skill the Dagger of Geor referred to as “Blur.” It allowed the user to become a faint, spectral presence. To Jaxon, the name was irrelevant. Labels didn’t change the reality of the blade.

He masked his presence perfectly, weaving through the ghoul tide in the opposite direction of their march. Staying low and moving with explosive speed, he skirted the edge of the throng. When the spectral energy of the thorn-covered wall began to glow, he launched himself upward.

A few spirits attempted to grasp at him with translucent hands, but they were too slow. Jaxon used their reaching limbs as mere stepping stones to scale the vertical surface. When wraiths shrieked and lunged out from the stone of the fortress, Jaxon didn’t flinch. He drew a dagger humming with sanctified power and carved through them.

Kiiaak!

Their agonizing wails were swallowed by the constant, haunting drone of the Thorn Fortress. Only the most sensitive entities nearby even noticed the disturbance. Jaxon had successfully blinded the fortress’s own eyes. This was the culmination of a lifetime of training. Had he been facing true, alert fairies, he might have been spotted, but a series of favorable conditions worked in his favor.

These guards were dull, and Thorn Fortress—a bastion of the Demon Realm—had never known a breach. Over the years, knights had scouted this place but concluded it was an impossible target. A solo attack was death; a coordinated siege required resources they didn’t have. Furthermore, since the inhabitants rarely ventured out to cause trouble, the world left them alone.

Jaxon, acting on pure predatory instinct, exploited this complacency.

He reached the summit. Spotting the three sentries, he manifested behind them like a ghost. With a stiletto in each hand, he drove the blades into the base of two necks simultaneously.

To the survivors, it was a waking nightmare.

“…!”

The third spirit couldn’t even find his voice. His eyes widened in terror as he spun around. It appeared as though a shadow had simply coalesced from the air to murder his comrades. He swung his heavy longbow like a club in a frantic arc. Jaxon flowed around the strike like water. As he retreated, the two bodies he had just stabbed didn’t fall to the ground. Instead, they jerked into a halt mid-collapse.

Jaxon narrowed his eyes. This wasn’t the behavior of a fresh corpse. But he didn’t let it shake him; this was the Demon Realm, where the laws of nature were mere suggestions.

The two impaled spirits stood with their spines bent at impossible angles, their heads ratcheting upward. The sound of grinding bone echoed as their vertebrae shifted. Their eyes rolled back until only the whites were visible, their consciousness extinguished. Then, from the puncture wounds Jaxon had made in their necks, something erupted. It wasn’t blood. With a wet, churning sound, their flesh bubbled and reorganized into new, terrifying shapes.

Long, ropey masses of muscle burst from their necks, dropping to the floor like massive serpents. It was impossible to categorize these appendages—part limb, part tail, part parasite. This mutated growth tensed, its surface hardening into a point, and then it whipped toward Jaxon with the velocity of a fired arrow.

Jaxon’s eyes tracked the movement. Beneath the bruised, navy skin of the growth, black veins pulsed rhythmically. It looked like a gargantuan, writhing parasite. Jaxon stepped aside and lashed out with his stiletto.

Swish.

He identified the segments of the organ that acted as joints and severed them. It was a masterpiece of reactive swordsmanship—using the enemy’s own speed to widen the wound. To an outsider, it looked like he was a step ahead of fate itself. If Enkrid had witnessed it, he would have praised Jaxon’s tactical brilliance and his ability to turn an opponent’s momentum against them.

Black ichor sprayed from the severed limb, but the mutation didn’t slow down. Like a viper recovering from a missed strike, it coiled and lunged for the back of Jaxon’s skull.

“You wretch.”

The third spirit, still mostly intact, finally managed to nock an arrow. But before he could draw the string, a blade buried itself in his forehead.

Thunk!

The sound of metal meeting bone was sharp and final. Jaxon had thrown his Silence Dagger while simultaneously evading the fleshy coils. As Jaxon ducked between the two thrashing meat-worms, the third spirit began to convulse. His eyes lost their luster, and his body shook violently.

Jaxon paused to observe again. Is it a curse? Or is death merely the trigger for a transformation? It was clear that these spirits were merely vessels for something else.

The surrounding darkness began to press in, but Jaxon was a creature of the night. He didn’t need light to see; his other senses filled in the gaps of the world around him. As he watched, the Silence Dagger was forced out of the spirit’s forehead by the pressure of growing tissue.

Rrrk—thunk.

The weapon clattered to the floor as a third fleshy appendage erupted from the skull. Yet, Jaxon continued to analyze the situation. He realized that the “veins” he had seen earlier were not veins at all. The black lines tore through the skin of the organs and began to bloom.

Dark, sickly flowers unfurled from the meat.

They’ve planted a cursed seed within them.

What was driving these corpses? Jaxon’s Will was different from that of his peers. While other knights used their Will to bolster their strength, Jaxon used his to dissect reality. He looked inward and reflected outward. For a dead body to move like this, it required a spirit or a state of undeath.

He had seen the plague ghouls below and understood the pattern: spirits of sickness were bound to the ghouls. Here, they had used a parasitic plant native to the Demon Realm. Jaxon’s heightened perception allowed him to see the “truth” of the magic—a pulsing, black oval heart beating deep within the three monstrosities.

From the black blossoms on their necks, a fine dark powder began to drift. It was a potent toxin that could incapacitate a knight and kill a commoner on contact. But Jaxon had spent a lifetime building a resistance to a thousand different venoms. Even so, he wasn’t reckless.

He pulled a small filtering mask from his gear and covered his face. It was a high-grade tool from a fairy city, designed to scrub the air of impurities. During his time with the Mad Platoon, he had established a vast network of black-market trade, even reaching into the hidden realms of the fairies. Not even Enkrid knew the extent of his resources.

With his breathing protected, the contact poison was a secondary concern. The whipping, lashing limbs and the clouds of spores were no more threatening to him than the clumsy swings of a berserker. His experience fighting the lunatics of the Mad Platoon had forged him into a master of close-quarters chaos. He hated to admit it, but those madmen had truly sharpened his skills.

Jaxon lunged into the heart of the storm, his blades finding the exact locations of the internal seeds.

Controlling the flow of information was the only way to win a war. He shared that philosophy with Lua Gharne. That was his purpose here: to ensure that the alarm didn’t reach the inner sanctum of the fortress until it was too late. He was satisfied with his work.

This wasn’t the first time he had used his talents for something other than a paycheck, and he couldn’t deny that he was enjoying the sensation. He was supporting a man who carried a heavy, noble dream.

In the quiet of his mind, the voice of his old master echoed like a lingering ghost: “Look at you, you brat. You actually look decent for once. Use that talent. Use it for what you think is right. Didn’t I tell you that a thousand times? Are your ears bleeding yet?”

The master’s tone had always been irritatingly casual, a mask for Jaxon’s own darkness.

I know, Jaxon thought.

The lessons he had been told until his ears bled had finally taken root in his soul. He had learned the meaning of “right” by watching Enkrid. Therefore, anyone who stood in Enkrid’s way was the enemy. And right now, that righteousness—and the man who carried it—was at the gates.

The aftermath of the ghoul explosions had turned the air into a toxic fog. Under normal circumstances, the party would have suffocated long ago, but Teresa’s holy song acted as a wind of purification, carving a path through the rot.

Enkrid looked up toward the ramparts. He saw shadows flickering and falling. It appeared as though the guards were having violent fits, but he didn’t need to be told that Jaxon was the cause of those “seizures.”

What is happening up there?

The fallen foes began to distort into horrific shapes, and a chaotic skirmish broke out. Only then did Jaxon’s silhouette become briefly visible against the dark stone. Enkrid considered offering assistance for a split second before dismissing the idea.

It wasn’t necessary.

A few moments later, the three mutated horrors collapsed, their bodies deflating like empty husks. Why human-shaped beings had suddenly turned into tentacled monsters remained a mystery, but the path was clear.