Chapter 38: Hidden Blight
"Where on earth did you hear that from?"
Gru’s brow furrowed, his jaw locking tight.
The moment any conversational variable intersected with his daughter, the veteran Fighter’s baseline composure thoroughly evaporated. He was notoriously known across the regional guild networks as a cold, methodical vanguard commander, but every human template contained a fatal structural weakness.
Without question, the lively, spirited young girl who had been the center of his life bar just a few months ago was this man’s ultimate vulnerability modifier.
"I didn’t fish for it in the dark corridors," Xander replied, his tone remaining raspy and completely flat. "A simple log reached my ears confirming her physical parameters were degrading. I am merely investigating her active symptoms."
Gru hesitated, his grip on his heavy greatsword micro-adjusting before his broad shoulders slumped in absolute defeat. "The degradation is advanced. The city apothecaries ran their diagnostics and concluded her life bar will completely wipe within a few seasonal cycles. We scrambled to procure a filtration blessing from a Silver Covenant priest, but those low-tier ritualists lack the casting tier to interact with the condition."
"The localized database indicates only a high-tier High Priest can purge the matrix. But their transactional fees are astronomically high. The Syndicate has liquidated every spare asset and borrowed heavily from the merchant guilds, yet our liquid silver falls catastrophically short of the required tariff," the captain admitted frankly.
Even though the Masked Twin Blades projected an absolute, lethal threat vector inside his private quarters, the desperate father laid his ledgers completely bare.
"Did the physical degradation initiate instantaneously without a clear environmental trigger?" Xander interrogated.
"Precisely," Gru stated, his eyes widening slightly with a sudden spike of desperation. "Could it be that your advanced class configuration includes a specialization in medicine or toxicological diagnostics, Master Masked Twin Blades?"
"Far from it. I merely logged identical clinical markers during my seasonal transit across the outer continents."
Xander effortlessly projected the stoic, hyper-experienced aura of a legendary planar traveler. His performance matrix was so mathematically flawless that even a decades-long field veteran like Gru failed to detect a single frame of deception.
"What? You’ve actively witnessed this exact biological decay before?"
Gru’s vocal cords strained with intense emotion. His daughter was his singular anchor to this world; his life partner had crossed the final boundary during the girl’s infancy, leaving him to treasure the child above all earthly parameters. He had consistently over-compensated for his parental absence, thoroughly spoiling her and satisfying her every material whim while she associated with questionable crowds in the city’s lower wards. As a mercenary commander, his operational schedule kept his boots on the frontier for months at a time, leaving him helpless to monitor her daily habits. He could only continually farm silver to fulfill her continuous requests.
But now that her vital metrics were cratering... Gru felt as though his own core chest plate had been violently ripped away. That specific flavor of parental agony could only be fully downloaded by someone who had survived it.
"Naturally. Which is precisely why I initiated this dialogue," Xander stated, keeping his delivery completely unhurried. "Is her dermis turning a sickly, jaundiced yellow while her ocular nodes reflect an unnaturally high, glossy luminance? And does the skin surrounding her carotid artery feature miniature, black pustules structurally identical to common smallpox?"
Gru reeled back as if struck by a physical shield slam, his massive frame beginning to visibly tremble.
"You... how could you possibly possess those exact diagnostic specs?!" he rasped, his voice cracking.
"Master Gru, your ledger has encountered a statistical anomaly. Fewer than a handful of scholars across the Feinan continent retain the data blocks to recognize this specific affliction," Xander murmured, his voice drop-shipping absolute gravity into the small room. "Do not let your cognitive functions collapse when you download this reality."
"Your daughter hasn’t contracted a standard regional illness. Her physical frame is actively hosting a primordial plague."
"The historic archives log its manifestation exactly three times in continental history. During each cycle, the pathogen systematically liquidated multiple contiguous city-states."
"The specific designation of the matrix is the [Blight of the Velvet Dark]. Tell me if that title exists in your vocabulary."
Gru stood frozen, his jaw slack as his mind failed to process the sheer weight of the declaration.
The Blight of the Velvet Dark was an engineered biological weapon originating directly from the divine portfolio of the Plague Sovereign.
That specific malicious deity had harbored designs to compromise the continental magic pool of Feinan for eras. His optimal cosmological blueprint was a world entirely dominated by unmitigated terror, systemic decay, and absolute, cascading mortality rates.
He cast the Blight of the Velvet Dark across the mortal realms like a farmer sowing seed. Every individual infected by this specific divine pathogen would initially project standard symptoms of malnutrition, yet their ocular nodes would retain a brilliant, hyper-feverish glow.
During this primary phase, the matrix would systematically flood the host’s nervous system with intense, euphoric hallucinations, tricking their cognitive functions into believing they had ascended to a higher plane of paradise.
Concurrently, their metabolic demands would spike exponentially. Every single calorie they consumed, however, wouldn’t nourish their failing muscles; it would be entirely redirected to feed the expanding black pustules anchoring themselves around their neck line.
Those necrotic nodes functioned as localized biological siphons, continuously draining the host’s fundamental vitality parameters.
The Blight of the Velvet Dark was an absolute cataclysm. Every historical outbreak had systematically wiped out massive population metrics before the containment protocols could engage.
The inaugural manifestation of the blight occurred deep within the ancient elven epoch. During that era, human civilization retained a remarkably low technological modifier, and their aggregate quality of life was severely unoptimized. When the pathogen initially breached the settlements, nearly ten percent of the human population was infected within a single seasonal cycle.
The Plague Sovereign’s divine power parameters expanded tremendously from the sheer volume of cascading death metrics.
During the height of the crisis, a mortal Ascendant manifested from the wilderness. He carried a proprietary herbal formula that could systematically dismantle the molecular structure of the blight, successfully dragging humanity back from the precipice of absolute extinction.
The historic records labeled that ancient sage by the surname of Brando, though his primary designation had been entirely lost to time.
Certain regional myths claimed he was a localized avatar of the Elven Pantheon, while other archived scrolls insisted he was a mortal mask worn by the First Wizard God.
Regardless of his true origin, the moment the sage treated the final infected host, he vanished from the continental database of Feinan entirely. The terrifying title of the Blight of the Velvet Dark gradually faded into obscure myth.
Civilization had systematically forgotten the absolute horror of the pathogen.
But Xander’s internal database retained the exact patch notes of that era.
The sudden return of the Velvet Dark was one of the definitive early-game world events signaling the onset of the Great Calamity. Though, in the upcoming timeline, its localized spread would be rapidly suppressed by the collective deployment of the continental Legendary Wizards.
At this current node in history, this single case was merely a minor diagnostic probe launched by the Plague Sovereign to test the continental boundaries—nothing more.
The archived planelogics of Feinan were explicitly clear on one critical point: the ancient Ascendant who broke the first outbreak wasn’t a divine manifestation at all. He was a pure, unclassified mortal who had simply maximized his profession levels in Master Herbalism and Master Apothecary sciences.
Furthermore, the true resolution of that historical outbreak hadn’t been triggered by mortal medicine alone. When the Plague Sovereign had originally cast his pathogen across the map, his targeting vectors erred, accidentally infecting a sacred grove deep within the Western Wilds. That structural violation had directly triggered a furious counter-intervention from the Sovereign of Nature.
The Nature Deity had erupted with unmitigated divine wrath, utilizing his massive cosmic power parameters to brutally thrash the lesser Plague God within his own divine domain.
The pathetic Plague Sovereign barely escaped absolute annihilation; his core divinity was nearly fractured into shards during the encounter. Had the Deities of Dread and Destruction not executed an immediate emergency intervention to extract him, the Nature God would have permanently sealed his essence inside an arcane prison cell to play with for eternity.
Since that catastrophic defeat, the Plague Sovereign had operated with extreme, paranoid caution... completely avoiding any territory intersecting with the higher pantheons.
He had spent centuries quietly cultivating minor cult cells in the remote dark zones of the world, slowly regenerating his fractured power metrics.
And now, as the higher deities prepared their collective assault to shatter the Balance of the Magic Pool, every divine entity—regardless of their cosmic ranking—recognized that a supreme window of opportunity had manifested.
It was an exceptional chance to expand their localized influence and harvest massive quantities of mortal devotion points.
The Universe Magic Pool, for the mortal mages and general populations of Feinan, represented an absolute shield of protection.
However, for the divine entities ascending from the outer planes, that exact magic pool functioned as a cosmic set of shackles and binding restraints. Following the historic departure of the Creator Wizard Lance, the gods had desired nothing more than to shatter that protective layer.
They merely required a definitive wedge to break the seal.
"If the historical data is that absolute... does that mean my child’s condition is mathematically incurable?" Gru whispered, his lips turning completely white as his knees buckled.
Hearing Xander’s clinical review of the Blight of the Velvet Dark, the veteran fighter felt an absolute wave of cold terror paralyze his nervous system.
His flesh and blood was actively acting as an incubator for a divine plague!
It was a horrific reality. Quite apart from the near-zero survival metrics of the disease itself, if the regional watch or the superstitious city guilds logged a single trace of a primordial pathogen, they would immediately dispatch a purification squad to burn the girl to ashes to prevent a municipal outbreak.
Indeed.
Even with the presence of high-tier Wizards ruling this current era of the world, their administrative understanding of localized epidemiological crises remained as completely ignorant and medieval as Earth’s dark ages.
A host contracts a plague? Clear their data block and incinerate the remains!
The velocity of human panic consistently outpaced the spread of any biological virus. In a way, mass hysteria and biological plagues formed a perfect synergetic loop. Unfortunately, since the God of Dread and the God of Plague were both locked into masculine divine templates, they couldn’t enter a formal cosmic marriage; they could only occasionally align their portfolios to optimize their collective harvesting phases.
"If her life bar was fundamentally beyond repair, I wouldn’t be occupying a stool in your quarters," Xander stated, his baritone entirely flat and professional. "My database contains the exact mechanical sequence required to neutralize the pathogen and save her life."
"What? Are your attributes truly capable of executing that filtration?" Gru gasped, his eyes suddenly catching a brilliant flare of hope.
The Masked Twin Blades had zero logical reasons to fabricate an elaborate theological lie of this scale. Since the executioner had dropped such a massive volume of locked historical data, he clearly possessed the tools to back up the claim. Gru’s combat readiness completely deactivated.
"Maintain your composure. The Blight of the Velvet Dark maintains an exceptionally long latency sub-routine. The infection only triggers a mass atmospheric transmission event at the exact millisecond the primary host’s health bar hits zero. When the host expires, the necrotic spots detonate, spreading the spores through the air currents. We still possess a sufficient operational window."
"The absolute priority right now is the immediate recovery of Redoak Vale. Because the rare, pre-Calamity botanical compound required to manufacture her antidote happens to be secured deep within Baron Marvin’s private ancestral vault."
As Xander rose from the stool to depart, his gloved hand lightly patted the heavy iron pauldron of the Fighter. "Stabilize your parameters. Entering tomorrow’s engagement with compromised focus metrics will only lower your survival rates."
Gru let out a ragged, trembling breath, a faint, deeply grateful smile breaking through his weathered face. "Understood... you have my absolute gratitude... regardless of what hidden contract binds your blades to young Baron Marvin."
"Hear this clearly: the Bramble Syndicate will completely exhaust their stamina bars to ensure this deployment succeeds."
The following evening, as darkness fully consumed the regional horizon.
The contract force finalized their equipment preparations and quietly distributed their numbers into the dense brush flanking both sides of the southern mountain pass.
In absolute alignment with the tactical blueprint they had mapped out, the estate’s standing garrison and the Bramble Syndicate anchored the western ridge, while Cat’s rebel squad and the three solo operators occupied the eastern perimeter.
"Deploy the active lure," Elyra commanded, her voice dropping into a low, authoritative whisper.
Beside her, Gru executed a silent hand signal.
One of the solo operators positioned behind him—a female Druid wearing simple linen wraps—stepped forward into a clear patch of moonlight. Her lips moved in a rhythmic, ancient cadence as she initiated a primal class specialization.
```
[Class Skill Activated: Primal Metamorphosis]
```
Within a single frame, her human geometry collapsed and reshaped, her flesh flowing into the graceful, slender form of a wild sika deer.
The transformed Druid executed two light bounds to calibrate her weight distribution, then suddenly bolted out onto the main commercial highway, letting out a sharp cry before intentionally darting back into the thick timberline.
"Roaar!"
The six idle mutated aardwolves guarding the choke point immediately caught the scent of fresh, warm prey. Strands of thick, predatory saliva dripped from their jaws as their primeval hunting algorithms triggered. Moving as a single, coordinated pack, they abandoned their posts and launched into a high-velocity pursuit straight into the jaws of the western ambush line.
