Chapter 240: The Weaknesses
Mantis was sitting near the edge of the arena, the wounds across his face and arms still closing slowly, an empty potion vial resting on the ground beside him where he had set it down after draining it.
The healing draught had done most of the work, but a body that had absorbed the kind of punishment his had taken didn’t bounce back completely just from one vial, and the bruising along his ribs was still dark and tender beneath his torn clothing.
Neil walked over and stood in front of him, not saying anything for a moment, just looking at the man who had lost so thoroughly that the entire crowd was still talking about it somewhere behind them.
"Starting from today, you are a subject of my domain," he said.
Mantis let out a long breath, the kind that came from somewhere deep in the chest, and nodded slowly.
"I understand," he said. "I gave you my word back there, and I’m not the type of man who takes his word back just because the outcome wasn’t what I hoped for."
He looked up at Neil, his expression worn but steady, the exhaustion of the fight still sitting heavily on him.
"There’s one thing I want to ask before any of that happens, though," he said. "Let me fight one last time. Those creatures are still tearing through my settlement, and my people are still out there waiting for someone to do something. If I go and come back alive, I’ll step down from being warden on my own, and I’ll come to your domain without a single complaint."
Neil studied him for a long moment.
"And if you die out there," he said, "what happens then? You already lost to me. Isn’t it a little selfish to be asking for one more battle when the terms were already decided?"
Mantis was quiet, the weight of the question settling over him.
Then he lowered his head, despite being decades older than the man standing in front of him, the gesture carrying genuine respect rather than performance.
"You’re right," he said. "I understand. I’ll do exactly as you say."
Neil nodded once.
"Come to my domain," he said. "Today, before it gets too late."
Neil walked back to where Ileana and Jane were still seated, the two of them having watched the entire exchange from a distance without interrupting.
Ileana looked at him as he approached, her expression carrying the particular warmth she reserved for moments when he had handled something the way she would have wanted him to handle it.
"You didn’t go easy on him in the end," she said.
"He didn’t ask me to," Neil replied.
Jane was quiet for a moment, turning something over in her mind before she spoke.
"He’s strong," she said. "Diamond class at the 5th Origin isn’t something you find casually walking around a settlement. Having someone like that under you changes what your domain can actually do in a real fight."
"That’s exactly what I was thinking," Neil said.
The three of them returned to the domain together, Magnar falling into step beside them the moment they were through the gate, his amber eyes carrying the satisfied look of a familiar who had clearly enjoyed watching his master dismantle someone in front of an entire crowd.
Nearly two hours passed before Mantis arrived.
He stood outside the gate without trying to enter on his own, waiting with the patience of a man who understood exactly what his position was now, and Leon was the one who noticed him first during a routine perimeter check.
He found Neil near the main building.
"Mantis is outside," he said. "He hasn’t tried to come in. Just waiting."
"Bring him through," Neil said.
Mantis walked into the courtyard a few minutes later, his eyes moving across the domain with the particular attention of someone trying to take in everything at once and failing to settle on any single detail for long.
Neil reached out through Nemo without speaking, and a notification appeared directly in front of Mantis, hovering at eye level with the clean glow of an official system message.
[Do you agree to become a subject to Dead Man Walking?]
Mantis stared at it for a moment.
Internally, he still couldn’t quite process how the day had gone.
He had walked into this with the simple intention of asking for help against the creatures overwhelming his settlement, had been refused outright, had then proposed a duel out of desperation more than confidence, and now here he was, standing in a stranger’s domain about to formally surrender his independence as a warden of years.
"Yes," he said.
[Mantis, 5th Origin diamond class, has now become a subject in the Graveyard.]
The message faded.
Neil received the corresponding notification on his end almost instantly, the addition registering cleanly within his domain’s structure, and he looked at Mantis with the same even expression he had carried throughout most of their interactions so far.
"Welcome to the Graveyard," he said.
"Thank you, lord," Mantis said, and bowed without hesitation.
There was no embarrassment in the gesture at all, despite the fact that he was a man who had commanded respect across half a dozen settlements for years.
Neil was simply that much stronger, and pretending otherwise would have been a worse kind of foolishness than bowing ever could be.
He still couldn’t fully wrap his mind around how someone who had become a lord only a handful of months ago could already be standing at this level.
Throughout the entire fight, Neil hadn’t drawn on a single skill, hadn’t tapped into his essence reserves even once, had relied purely on raw physical strength and speed to turn a 5th Origin diamond class warden into something closer to a training dummy.
That kind of gap shouldn’t have existed this early, and yet here it was, undeniable and standing directly in front of him.
"This is Bob and Rob," Neil said, gesturing toward the two of them as they wandered over from the workshop, drawn by the sight of someone new standing in the courtyard. "They handle most of the building work around here, and they’ll introduce you to everyone else. Once that’s done, we’ll sit down and talk about what comes next."
Bob immediately stepped forward and clapped a heavy hand against Mantis’s shoulder, the impact almost staggering him.
"Come on then," Bob said, already grinning. "Plenty of faces to meet, and Fay’s probably got something cooking that’ll make you forget half the day you just had."
Rob followed a step behind, quieter, already sizing Mantis up with the particular look he gave anyone new, the look of someone calculating whether this person was going to be useful around the domain or just another mouth to feed.
As Bob started walking Mantis toward the kitchen, his voice carrying loudly enough to draw Fay and Ray out from inside, Neil turned and walked off in the opposite direction, leaving the introductions to handle themselves.
’Freya,’ he said internally, once he had some distance from the noise. ’Do you know anything about those creatures? The ones that keep doubling every time someone kills one.’
She had spent enough time on the phantom planet over the course of her life that if anyone inside him had useful information, it was almost certainly her.
’I’ve never personally fought them,’ she said after a moment, her tone thoughtful. ’From what I remember, they’re not individually strong. Annoying, more than dangerous, at least on their own. One becomes two the instant you cut into it, and if even a single drop of their blood touches the ground, that seems to be enough to trigger another split. I’m not certain there aren’t other methods as well. Wiping out a population of them completely sounds like it would be genuinely difficult.’
Neil considered this for a moment.
’What if they kill themselves,’ he asked. ’Does that still cause them to double? And what happens if they’re killed in a way that doesn’t spill any blood at all?’
Freya went quiet, clearly working through the question properly rather than guessing at an answer.
’I don’t think self-inflicted death would trigger the doubling,’ she said eventually. ’And killing one without any blood reaching the ground might genuinely be a weakness. I can’t say for certain since I’ve never tested it myself, but the logic tracks. If they could multiply just by harming each other freely, their numbers would already be completely unmanageable by now.’
Neil nodded slowly to himself, turning the idea over from a few different directions.
It made sense.
If the creatures could simply throw themselves at one another and multiply on command, there would be no controlling their numbers at all, which meant something was clearly preventing that from happening in practice.
Still, it felt foolish to build an entire strategy around an assumption he hadn’t confirmed himself, so for now he simply catalogued every method he could think of that might kill the creatures without spilling blood.
Mind control was one option, forcing them to turn on each other directly.
Mental or soul based attacks were another, since neither of those typically broke the skin in the process.
There were probably other approaches he hadn’t considered yet either, methods that depended on abilities he didn’t currently have access to.
He had no particular investment in saving humanity as a concept, that much hadn’t changed since the day he arrived on this planet, but if Cynthia needed his help dealing with this threat directly, he wasn’t going to refuse her.
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