Chapter 98: The Ghoul King
"Leave her alone.." Kenji shouted instinctively, trying to break free from the heavy grips on his shoulders.
But an iron lock suddenly covered his neck, clamping down with a cold, metallic click.
The moment the metal touched his skin, he felt the connection between him and the mana completely disappear.
His internal pathways went entirely dead, freezing his energy before he could even form a single counterattack.
"No..." he cried out as they swooped Ayla over their shoulders like a sack of meat.
Ayla was completely unconscious. Her beautiful face was twisted, showing a clear sign of agony from the sudden, violent suppression of her traits.
Kenji’s mind filled with an absolute, suffocating dread. Realizing he had no strength left to fight his way out of this trap, he tried to shove his neck toward the sharp edge of the soldiers drawn sword.
He wanted to die. If he could just force his own death right here, the Death Looper trait would activate, and they could start the loop over from a safe anchor point.
But he could not move at all under the heavy holding of these high-tier people. They pinned his limbs with mechanical precision, predicting his every desperate twist.
What is going on...
Why is the Marshal doing this?
Kenji ground his teeth together in pure, unadulterated fury as he was pulled away roughly by those crimson-armored men, his boots dragging uselessly across the steel floor of the central command post.
The soldiers dragged him down a long, winding stone staircase that led deep into the subterranean foundations of the barracks, far below the standard military levels.
The air grew damp, thick with the heavy stench of rust, old blood, and mold.
They pushed him through a massive iron gate and threw him brutally onto the cold, filthy ground of a large underground cell.
The heavy bars slammed shut behind him with a definitive clank.
Kenji pushed himself up from the stone floor, his body feeling incredibly heavy without his internal mana flow.
He wiped a smear of dirt from his face and looked around the dark, massive dungeon.
As his eyes adjusted to the dim light of the flickering torches along the walls, his heart sank.
The cell was not empty.
Dozens of pale, hollow faces looked back at him from the shadows.
They were all decorated soldiers and elite vanguard officers wearing the official markings of his grandfather’s private division.
And sitting near the corner, her uniform torn and her expression filled with a dark, heavy exhaustion, was Lieutenant Maren.
Kenji scrambled toward the iron bars that separated his section from theirs, his chest tightening with a terrible premonition.
"Lieutenant Maren..." Kenji whispered urgently, his voice cracking. "What happened? Why are you all locked down here? What did the Marshal do to the division?"
Maren looked up at the sound of his voice. Her sharp, disciplined eyes were completely bloodshot, filled with a mixture of intense anger and profound sadness.
She crawled closer to the bars, her hands trembling as she gripped the cold iron.
"It was an internal purge, young master," Maren said, her voice dropping into a raspy, broken whisper.
"The Marshal has been compromised for weeks. He waited until the General’s core unit returned from the Pale Reaches campaign.
The moment we stepped into the fortress to log our report, his hidden enforcers ambushed us with these trait-suppressing locks."
"Where is Grandpa?" Kenji demanded, his hazel eyes wide with panic. "Is he in the high tower?"
Maren’s jaw clenched so hard the bone turned white under her skin. A single, heavy tear cut a clean line through the dust on her scarred cheek.
"The General fought them off," she whispered, her voice shaking the very air of the cell.
"He broke through the first three ranks of traitors. But they brought reinforcements from outside the grid. The Ghouls... they ambushed the perimeter. They took the General..."
*
* *
Meanwhile, on the upper levels of the barracks, a completely different scene was unfolding.
Ayla was lying on a large, luxurious silk bed inside a heavily secured private bedroom.
The sheets were made of fine crimson satin, and the furniture around the room was carved from expensive, dark wood.
Slowly, her eyelashes fluttered. Her gold pupils opened as she regained consciousness, the fuzzy disorientation of the suppression manacles clearing from her mind within a few seconds.
The moment her consciousness stabilized, her analytical mind registered the foreign variables affecting her vessel.
She instantly felt a dense, heavy energy blocking every single one of her acquired traits.
Her Pyromancy, her Shadow Stride, her Bloodnet, and even her internal mana reserves were completely frozen behind an unbreakable spiritual wall.
Every single trait was inaccessible. Except one.
Perfect Assimilation remained perfectly active, humming quietly at the absolute center of her core.
The foundational trait that defined her very existence as a mimic slime could not be suppressed by human machinery, because it did not rely on standard mana pathways to function.
Ayla raised her hands and touched the heavy iron lock clamped tightly around her neck.
This restriction device was what locked her traits and blocked her internal mana flow. For an ordinary human Crusader, this would be an absolute dead end.
They would be rendered completely helpless.
Too bad she didn’t need mana to use shapeshifting.
With a quiet, internal thought, Ayla deactivated her human slate form.
Her solid flesh, silver hair, and pale skin instantly dissolved, melting down into a loose, translucent blue puddle of viscous slime.
Because a slime possessed no bone structure, no rigid neck, and no solid mass, her liquid body simply slid out from beneath the heavy metal hoop effortlessly.
The iron lock clattered uselessly onto the silk mattress.
A millisecond later, the blue fluid surged upward, expanding and reforming back into her perfect human form.
She stood on top of the bed, her breathing perfectly even as she picked up the deactivated iron lock, balancing the heavy metal in her small hands.
Ayla looked down at herself and realized her current form was completely naked as her clothes dissolves every time she shapeshifted.
Remembering his strict instructions from their time in the manor, she quickly pulled the crimson silk bedsheets off the mattress, wrapping the fabric tightly around her naked body to cover her skin.
Kenji didn’t like it when anyone else saw her naked. He had been very clear about that rule.
He had told her it was indecent and violated the baseline parameters of being "wife material" in human society.
Thinking about Kenji, Ayla suddenly became incredibly restless. A strange, sharp heat flared inside her core.
How dare those humans try to force him away from her! How dare they place their dirty hands on her partner and drag him into the dark below!
Ayla’s golden eyes flared with an absolute, predatory anger. Her teeth clicked together as her primitive monster instincts began to override her calm exterior.
Kenji belonged to her.
He was her anchor, her partner, and her favorite source of fresh brains.
The idea of these humans playing with her property made her want to turn the entire humanity into a buffet.
She was just about to use her newly restored traits to blast the reinforced window open and search for him when the heavy wooden door to the room was suddenly pushed open.
The Marshal stepped into the luxurious space.
He froze the moment his eyes landed on her. He had expected to find a completely suppressed, weeping little girl chained helplessly to the headboard.
Instead, he found Ayla standing tall on the bed, wrapped elegantly in crimson silk, with the unbroken trait-suppressing lock resting casually in her right hand.
The Marshal’s old, creepy gaze lowered down her body, his eyes tracing the line of her bare shoulders and the curve of her collarbone where the silk sheet dipped low.
From the Marshal’s true perspective, he did not see an ordinary human teenager.
Beneath his high-ranking human illusion, his true identity was a high-tier Ghoul King, a creature that fed exclusively on the spiritual essences and raw flesh of extraordinary human talents.
To his advanced predatory senses, Ayla’s physical vessel radiated a scent that was more intoxicating than anything he had smelled in a century.
Her skin looked like polished marble against the dark crimson fabric, and the faint, sweet scent of fresh berries drifted from her silver layers, mixing with the underlying, hidden resonance of her Apocalypse Core.
She looked like a piece of perfectly crafted heaven, a rare delicacy designed to be slowly devoured.
The sight stimulated his ancient biological drives so intensely that his physical member became instantly hardened beneath his military trousers, his pulse racing with a sudden surge of raw lust.
A highly twisted, manic grin appeared across the Marshal’s face. He didn’t care how she had broken the iron lock; in his mind, a Bronze-ranked girl was still nothing more than a toy before his Diamond-tier statistics.
He could crush her whenever he pleased.
The Marshal licked his dry lips slowly, his creepy gaze locking with her vertical golden pupils as he took a heavy step forward into the room.
"I wonder how this future Conqueror tastes..." he whispered darkly, his voice dripping with a lethal, ravenous anticipation.
But to his horror the girl’s hands suddenly turned claws as she sliced her neck clean.
"Nooooo" he shouted rushing to hold her falling body. The girl had a smile on her face when she glanced at him. Her mouth moved slowly allowing him to read what she wanted to say.
’I will kill you..’
