The sterile, blinding white light of the Sulin courtyard spilled through the open window, catching the edges of the young assassin's dark clothing. He remained perfectly balanced on the narrow marble ledge, waiting with the absolute, disciplined stillness of a drawn bow.
Devin stared at the young man. The legacy of the Trangdar shadows was staring back at him, alive and breathing, wearing the name of a ghost.
"There is only one Lotjed," Devin said softly, his amber eyes unyielding. "He was a master of the dark. He cleaned up the blood of my enemies, and he protected my bloodline. You are an echo. From this moment on, you are Lotjed Jr. I will not address you as anything else."
The young assassin did not flinch at the demotion. He simply offered another slow, fluid bow of his head.
"As you command, Blessed Prince," Lotjed Jr. murmured. "A name is merely a tool. The master gave it to me so the Sulin court would tremble when they read the ciphers. If you wish me to carry a lesser title, I accept it with honor."
Devin stepped back from the window, gesturing into the shadowless, perfectly square room.
Lotjed Jr. shifted his weight and dropped into the guest quarters. He didn't make a sound. Not a scuff of leather, not a rustle of fabric. The mechanical leverage he used to absorb the kinetic impact of the fall was flawlessly executed, a perfect mirror of the ancestral combat forms Devin himself used.
"Lieutenant Reze is standing guard right outside that marble door," Devin warned, his voice low. "She is a Cyprian super-human laced with venom. If she hears you, she will breach the room and attempt to sever your head. Speak quietly."
"I smelled the venom on her when she stepped out of your carriage," Lotjed Jr. noted, his dark eyes glancing briefly toward the heavy door. "A fascinating corruption of the flesh. But I did not cross the continent to fight your bodyguards, Prince Trangdar."
"I am King Kross Sapien to the world, Lotjed Jr.," Devin corrected sharply. "And you are currently sabotaging my geopolitical shield. I forged an alliance with Emperor 8 to hold the western flank against Enoch's holy war. By slaughtering his ministers, you are forcing the Emperor's hand. Why?"
Lotjed Jr. stood straight, his hands resting naturally at his sides.
"Because Emperor 8 is lying to you, Blessed Prince," the apprentice stated, his voice completely devoid of hesitation. "The shadow faction—my master, your grandfather, and the acolytes who drowned in the lye—did not come to the Sulin Federation to hide. And we did not come to protect you from Count Sapien's coup."
Devin frowned, the tactical map in his head violently rearranging itself.
For the past few pars, he had assumed King Arthur had deployed his father, the original Lotjed, to Sulin to establish a defensive contingency. A sleeper cell in a pristine kingdom.
"If you weren't sent here to hide," Devin asked, the cold logic of the king kicking in, "then why did King Arthur send the Royal Cleaner across the continent?"
"For eradication," Lotjed Jr. answered. "The shadow faction operates under only two absolute standards of living. The first is to obey the Trangdar throne with our lives. The second is to completely eradicate the Sulin Federation and their mystic practices. King Arthur sent us here to destroy the Empire from the inside out."
Devin's breath hitched. "Destroy it? Sulin is a hyper-rigid, geopolitical anomaly. They don't even permit the Holy Gene inside their borders. They are harmless to the anomaly bloodlines."
A dark, bitter smile touched Lotjed Jr.'s lips. It looked entirely out of place on his youthful face.
"They do not permit the Holy Gene to walk freely in their streets," Lotjed Jr. corrected, his voice dropping into a harsh, venomous whisper. "But they certainly permit it in their slaughterhouses."
The ambient temperature in the white marble room seemed to plummet.
"What are you talking about?" Devin demanded.
"Emperor 8 told you that Sulin has no sub-humans," Lotjed Jr. explained, stepping closer. "It is the greatest, most horrific lie in the Northern Kingdoms. The Sulin Empire actively hunts anomalies. They smuggle them across the borders, purchasing them from slavers in Halipan and capturing refugees fleeing from the Mortipian Quarantine. But they don't use them for labor, like Firebrim or Colstar."
Lotjed Jr. paused, his dark eyes burning with a deep, ancestral hatred.
"They use them as livestock for mystic rituals. The high nobles of the Sulin court practice soul draining."
Devin froze. The words hung in the sterile air, heavy and suffocating.
Soul draining.
"The Holy Gene is not just a biological mutation," the apprentice continued, the horrifying truth pouring from his lips. "It is a fragment of divine resonance. The Sulin mystics discovered centuries ago that if they systematically torture a pure sub-human, breaking their mind and shattering their will, the soul becomes volatile. At the moment of death, the Sulin nobles consume that volatility. They drain the soul to lace their own mortal flesh with elements of the divine."
A sickening, absolute dread pooled in Devin's stomach.
"It grants them unnatural lifespans," Lotjed Jr. said. "It grants them terrifying, hyper-accelerated intellect. Look at the boy sitting on the quartz throne, My Prince. Emperor 8 is eleven cycles old, but he speaks and calculates like a warlord who has lived for eighty. He is a vessel brimming with the stolen, digested souls of our people."
The pieces crashed together in Devin's mind with devastating clarity.
King Arthur hadn't been paranoid. He had discovered the horrific, cannibalistic rituals of the Sulin court. He had sent Grandfather Lotjed to systematically assassinate the soul-draining ministers and collapse the empire to protect the anomaly bloodlines. But the child emperor, fueled by stolen divine intellect, had outsmarted them and drowned the faction in the aqueducts.
Lotjed Jr. wasn't a rogue assassin ruining a political alliance. He was executing the final, desperate orders of the Trangdar crown.
Devin turned away from the apprentice, pressing his hands against the cold white marble of the wall. His breathing grew shallow.
They drain the soul to lace their own mortal flesh with elements of the divine.
The words echoed in Devin's skull, but they didn't just apply to the horrific practices of the Sulin nobles. They struck a terrifying, resonant chord deep within his own existence.
Devin closed his eyes, his mind spiraling backward through fourteen cycles of stolen time.
He remembered the blinding white void. He remembered the sadistic, mocking voice of God echoing from the infinite light, judging him, casting him back down to the board.
He remembered waking up in the freezing slums of Mortipia, his soul shoved violently into the body of Zain Ricky.
He remembered dying in the cafe, only to wake up in the lavish, silk-lined bed of the Obsidian Palace, his soul occupying the chronically ill body of a five-cycle-old Kross Sapien.
What happened to Zain? Devin thought, a sudden, horrifying cold sweeping through his veins. What happened to the real Kross Sapien?
He had always assumed that the Creator had simply erased the original souls of his vessels to make room for him. But the Creator was a deity of suffering and games. The Creator didn't just erase things; He demanded conflict.
Devin raised his hands, staring at the calloused palms of Kross Sapien. He thought about the King's Command.
When he projected his authority, it wasn't just charisma. It was an overwhelming, magnetic gravity that bent the will of Emperors and Queens. It felt dangerously, terrifyingly similar to the absolute, crushing voice God had used on him in the void. It was a lesser, mortal echo of divine mandate.
The realization hit Devin like a physical blow, driving him to his knees on the white marble floor.
He wasn't just possessing these bodies.
I am devouring them.
When his soul was forcefully injected into Zain Ricky, the violent friction of the transition hadn't just displaced the slum boy. Devin's pure, Trangdar soul had consumed Zain's. And when he was shoved into Kross Sapien, he had unconsciously devoured the soul of the dictator's son.
Every time he took a vessel, his soul absorbed the essence of the host. He had absorbed Kross Sapien's latent Cyprian venom, merging it with his own metaphysical structure. He was actively absorbing the Holy Gene, condensing it, layering it over the stolen lives of his vessels.
He was doing exactly what the Sulin nobles were doing, but on a macro, divinely mandated scale.
Devin's soul was absorbing mortal lives, and with every vessel he consumed, he was closing the gap to the divine. He was becoming a deity. That was why the Kross Selective worshipped him. They didn't just see a good King; their subconscious minds felt the horrifying, overwhelming divine gravity condensing inside his flesh.
"Blessed Prince?" Lotjed Jr. whispered, stepping forward, his dark eyes laced with concern as Devin remained on his knees, gasping for air.
Devin slowly looked up.
The horror of his own existence warred violently with the absolute, unyielding hatred he harbored for God. He was a monster. He was a parasite that ate the souls of innocent boys to survive.
But as the horror settled, a dark, terrifying clarity rose from the ashes.
God had made a mistake.
The Creator had turned Devin into a soul-devouring anomaly to torture him, to make him play a twisted game against Enoch's holy army. But if Devin was truly absorbing elements of the divine, if his King's Command was a fractured echo of God's own voice... then he wasn't just a pawn anymore.
He was a weapon being forged in the dark. A weapon that was slowly gathering enough metaphysical density to strike back at the heavens.
Devin slowly stood up, brushing the invisible dust from his charcoal mantle. The exhaustion was gone. The hesitation was gone. The amber eyes of Kross Sapien burned with a cold, terrifying, unholy light.
"I understand the board now, Lotjed Jr.," Devin said, his voice dropping into a resonant, commanding register that made the young assassin physically shudder. "You were right to execute the ministers. The Sulin Federation is a parasite that feeds on our people."
"Then you will help me finish the master's work?" Lotjed Jr. asked, dropping to one knee in absolute reverence. "We can slaughter Emperor 8 before the sun rises. We can break the empire."
"No," Devin corrected, his tactical mind overriding the bloodlust. "If Emperor 8 dies tonight, the Sulin military will fracture, Enoch's forces will sweep through the western passes, and Cypris will be surrounded. I cannot afford to lose my shield, even if it is a shield forged from the bones of my people."
Lotjed Jr. looked up, confusion warring with his conditioning. "But the mandate—"
"The mandate was issued by a King who is dead," Devin stated, projecting his authority with flawless, crushing weight. "I am the last true blood of Trangdar. And I am issuing a new mandate."
Lotjed Jr. bowed his head lower. "Command me."
"You will cease your assassinations within the Sulin court," Devin ordered. "Emperor 8 must believe the threat is neutralized so the alliance remains intact. But you will not leave the Federation. You will retreat back into the shadows. You will map every aqueduct, every hidden slaughterhouse, and every soul-draining ritual chamber in this pristine, miserable city."
Devin stepped closer, looking down at his grandfather's lethal legacy.
"When Enoch is dead, and the holy war is won," Devin promised, the divine gravity in his voice echoing in the sterile room. "I will march the Cyprian vanguard into the Sulin Federation. And you and I will burn this empire to the ground together."
"It will be done, My King," Lotjed Jr. whispered, his voice trembling with dark anticipation.
"Get out of here," Devin commanded, gesturing to the open window. "Emperor 8 will be expecting my report. Tell the shadows that the Prince of Trangdar has finally returned to the board."
Lotjed Jr. rose silently. He stepped backward onto the marble ledge, offering one final, deep bow of reverence. He fell backward into the dark, vanishing into the night air without a single sound.
Devin stood alone in the white room, listening to the sterile silence.
He walked over to the heavy marble doors and knocked twice.
The latch instantly clicked. Reze pushed the door open, her hook-blades drawn, her ice-blue eyes sweeping the empty room for threats before locking onto Devin. She was breathing heavily, a flush of eager anticipation painting her pale skin.
"Is there a threat, Holy One?" Reze hissed, her grip tightening on her blades. "Who needs to bleed?"
"No one bleeds tonight, Reze," Devin said, his voice calm, the terrifying revelation of his own divine metamorphosis locked securely behind the mask of the King. "Secure the window. The ghost has departed."
Reze quickly moved to obey, completely unaware that she was serving a God who was quietly learning how to kill his Creator.