From Slave to King: My Rebate System Built Me a Kingdom With Beauties!-Chapter 229: Apocalypse?
The dwarf chuckled darkly about how his carefully constructed plans had fallen apart so spectacularly. The goblin lost to a prison he couldn’t track, the armor removed and discarded, the elves more prepared than anticipated—everything had gone wrong in ways he hadn’t accounted for despite decades of meticulous preparation. But failure was simply data, another variable to incorporate into future calculations. He’d survived this long by adapting rather than despairing.
He used the cover of night to return back to his tunnels, slipping into hidden entrances that dotted the landscape like wounds in the earth’s surface. The transition from above-ground to subterranean was seamless. Within moments he had disappeared completely from the surface world, swallowed by darkness and stone.
The elves could no longer track him once he went deep enough, their scrying magic unable to penetrate. This much was to be expected—his people had designed these tunnels specifically to be invisible to their senses, had invested tremendous resources in materials that disrupted magical detection. It was one of the few advantages dark dwarves maintained over their surface-dwelling adversaries.
He had no compelling reason to stay above ground anyway since it was painfully obvious the elves hadn’t taken his bait. The dead scout’s body had been a calculated provocation, an attempt to draw out their champions for a confrontation on his terms. But they’d responded with retrieval teams and defensive positioning rather than aggressive retaliation. Disciplined. Frustrating. It meant the direct approach wouldn’t work, that he’d need to be more subtle going forward.
The dwarf made his way through winding passages. His footsteps echoed off stone walls carved with precision that spoke to inhuman patience and skill. Eventually he reached the deeper chambers where his more sensitive projects were housed.
Kraghul was still clinging to life in his cell, a fact that genuinely surprised the dwarf when he checked. It was honestly a miracle the orc wasn’t dead yet given the extent of his injuries and the minimal care provided. Multiple broken bones, deep lacerations, significant blood loss, probable internal damage—any one of those conditions should have been fatal without treatment. Together they should have killed him days ago.
This display showed Kraghul’s absolutely monstrous willpower, the sheer stubborn refusal to die that marked certain individuals as exceptional. The orc’s body was failing, shutting down piece by piece, but his mind remained locked in determination to survive. It was almost admirable in a pathetic sort of way.
But there was something disgustingly evil about this dwarf that went beyond mere cruelty or pragmatic torture. He’d kept Kraghul alive deliberately, monitoring his condition carefully, providing just enough intervention to prevent death without offering anything approaching mercy or healing. This wasn’t about information anymore—he’d extracted everything useful long ago. This was about watching something suffer because the suffering itself held value, because pain and desperation were currencies he understood better than gold.
Kraghul knew the moment the dwarf was close by—could sense his presence even through stone walls and magical wards. It was a proximity awareness that came from extended exposure to a captor’s habits and patterns. But the time it took the dwarf to actually cover the relatively short distance from the tunnel entrance to the cell showed clearly that he had intentionally taken a longer, more circuitous route. Making his prisoner wait, building anticipation and dread, extracting psychological torment from simple navigation choices.
More than that, Kraghul could tell with absolute certainty that something had happened to Byung. He didn’t know how he knew—perhaps some residual connection from their brief encounter, perhaps simple deductive reasoning based on the dwarf’s frustrated energy. But the goblin’s situation had changed, and not in ways that favored the dwarf’s schemes.
The cell door opened with a groan of protesting metal. The dwarf walked into the cramped space where Kraghul was being held shortly after, his expression unreadable in the dim fungal light, his red eyes reflecting illumination like a predator’s.
"Did you miss me?" Kraghul managed to rasp through his damaged throat, the sarcasm coming automatically despite his weakened state. "Is that why you came back? Couldn’t stand being away from your favorite project?"
The dwarf simply looked at him with those evil, calculating eyes. Then he made a small gesture with one scarred hand.
Kraghul’s mouth clamped shut instantly, his jaw forced closed by invisible force that felt like iron bands wrapped around his skull. He tried to speak, to breathe properly, but could only manage muffled sounds through his nose. The dwarf hadn’t done anything but fear was magic on its own.
"You talk too much," the dwarf said conversationally, his voice carrying the particular coldness of someone discussing weather rather than suffering. "It’s a trait common among your kind—this need to fill silence with noise, to assert dominance through words when physical strength fails. Quite tiresome."
He moved closer to the bound orc, studying him like a specimen pinned to a board. "Let me educate you about something, Kraghul. You think you matter. You think your little vendetta against that evolved goblin, your father’s political ambitions, —you think any of it has significance in the grand scheme of events currently unfolding."
The dwarf’s smile was utterly devoid of warmth. "It doesn’t. You’re an ant who stumbled into the path of forces you can’t begin to comprehend. Your only value was as a tool to pressure Byung, and even that has become questionable given recent complications."
He began pacing the small cell, hands clasped behind his back, launching into what was clearly a prepared monologue. "Do you know what the world was like before the barrier? Before the elves in their infinite arrogance decided to seal away an entire continent because they deemed it too dangerous, too corrupted to be allowed to exist alongside their precious ’civilized’ lands?"
Kraghul could only listen, his eyes tracking the dwarf’s movements with hatred he couldn’t express.
"It was unified," the dwarf continued, his voice taking on an almost reverent quality. "One world, complete and whole. The dark continent wasn’t separated—it was simply the frontier, the place where the strong thrived and the weak perished as nature intended. There was honest brutality instead of this sanitized, regulated society the surface races have built. There was potential for those willing to seize it."
He stopped pacing and turned to face Kraghul directly. "And the world will return to that state soon. The barrier is weakening, has been for years despite the elves’ desperate efforts to maintain it. All I need is the right catalyst, the proper tool to punch through at the optimal location, and everything they’ve built will come crashing down." 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚
The dwarf’s expression hardened. "Your goblin friend was supposed to be that tool. His resurrection ability, his capacity for evolution—perfect for breaching magical barriers that kill normal beings. But he’s proven... difficult to control. So I’m developing contingencies, exploring alternatives, ensuring that even if he fails, the plan proceeds."
He leaned in close to Kraghul’s face, close enough that the orc could smell something acrid and wrong on his breath. "When the barrier falls, when the dark continent reconnects with the surface world, do you know what will happen? Chaos. Glorious, purifying chaos. All the accumulated corruption, all the twisted evolution, all the beings that have been sealed away for centuries—they’ll flood across the border like water from a broken dam."
"The elves will fall first," the dwarf said with absolute certainty. "Their magic is powerful but they’re too few, too spread out, too dependent on the status quo. The humans will fragment into warring factions. The orcs..." he glanced at Kraghul with something approaching pity, "your kind might actually thrive in the new order, if you survive the initial onslaught. Strength is the only currency that will matter."
He straightened, his monologue apparently concluded. "So you see, Kraghul, whether you live or die in this cell is ultimately irrelevant. Whether Byung succeeds or fails in whatever mission I eventually force him to complete is merely a question of timing. The outcome is inevitable. The world will become one again, and this time there will be no elves powerful enough to seal it away a second time."
The dwarf made another gesture and Kraghul’s mouth was suddenly released, the magical compulsion vanishing as quickly as it had appeared. He gasped for air, working his jaw painfully.
"Any questions?" the dwarf asked mockingly. "Or do you need more time to process the futility of your entire existence?"
Kraghul stared at him with pure hatred, but underneath that fury was something more troubling—the creeping certainty that the dwarf actually believed every word he’d just said, and might actually have the capability to make it happen.
But the fact he got to Kraghul so fast was proof that it didn’t need to take him and Byung that long to reach their location unless it was intentionally delayed.
-
Beyond the barrier, the desolate land with no life in sight, a bloodmoon hovering over the sky in an ever-lasting post-apocalyptic setting. A pair of golden eyes awakenened.
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