From Slave to King: My Rebate System Built Me a Kingdom With Beauties!-Chapter 239: The Biggest Threat Yet?

The entry point Byung had forced through the rock wall was still there, the edges jagged and raw where stone had given way under pressure. He went in first, the tunnel folding around him, and the three sisters followed without a word. Thulga had to angle her shoulders slightly to fit through the gap, and Mazga nearly caught her hair on a protruding edge before Roktha grabbed her by the collar and hauled her through.

The moment Byung straightened on the other side, something was wrong.

He couldn’t place it immediately. The tunnel looked the same, same low ceiling, same rough walls, same darkness swallowing the path ahead. But it felt different. Shifted, like someone had rearranged a room you’d memorized in the dark and moved everything three inches to the left. He stood still, eyes scanning, running the layout against what he remembered.

He assumed it was because of the entry point the orc had made on the far end, a second breach in the structure, disturbing the air flow, changing the acoustics. That would account for some of it. But not all of it. The path he recognized. The feel of it he didn’t.

Then his nose caught something.

The dwarf’s scent was there, faint but unmistakable, that absence-that-was-presence, the void smell he had learned to identify. That was expected. But underneath it, threading through the cold stone air like smoke from a fire he couldn’t see, was something else entirely. Something with no name he could attach to it. Something that had no business being in these tunnels.

He stopped walking.

The three sisters pulled up behind him, Mazga nearly bumping into Roktha’s back.

"Why are we stopping?" Thulga asked, her voice low, hand already moving toward the weapon at her side.

Byung didn’t answer immediately. He was breathing slowly, pulling the air through his nose in long careful draws. Kraghul was here — that he was certain of. Alive. The orc’s scent came through clearly, close enough to give him direction.

But the other thing.

"What the fuck is that," he muttered under his breath, more to himself than any of them. The words came out quiet and completely flat, which made them worse.

"What?" Roktha’s casual tone had dropped entirely. "What do you smell?"

"Something that isn’t the dwarf." He kept his voice even. "And isn’t Kraghul."

Mazga moved up beside him, close enough that her arm brushed his shoulder. For once she wasn’t smiling.

"Is it dangerous?" She asked.

"I don’t know what it is." He started moving again, slower this time. "But Kraghul is still here and this is the only path to him."

"That’s not exactly a reassuring answer," Roktha said from behind.

"It wasn’t meant to be," Byung fired back but once again noticed the elf was nowhere to be seen or felt.

Thulga fell into step just behind his right shoulder, close enough to respond instantly if something came at them. "How far?"

"Far enough." He paused. "We’ll be fine. The three of you alone would be enough for most things in these tunnels."

"Most things," Thulga repeated.

"Most things," he confirmed.

The tunnel stretched ahead of them, dark and unchanged to every sense except his. But with each meter they covered, it pressed against him more — not threatening, not moving, just *there*. Heavy and patient, the way something waits when it knows it doesn’t need to rush.

He kept walking. Whatever it was, Kraghul was on the other side of it.

-

The horse slowed as the ground changed beneath its hooves — softer, disturbed, the earth churned up in the way that only happens when something violent has passed through. Naz felt it before she saw it, the animal’s reluctance telegraphing what waited ahead. She guided it forward anyway, and the elf sitting behind her had gone completely rigid the moment the tree line thinned.

Then she saw the blood.

It had dried dark against the ground, spreading wide — too wide for a wound, the kind of volume that meant a body had given up everything it had to give. The grass around it was flattened in patterns that read clearly: something had moved fast, something had struggled, something had ended here. Broken branches. A clear sign of battle.

The elf dismounted before the horse fully stopped. She landed without sound and walked to the center of it, moving the way someone moves when they already know what they are going to find and are only confirming it. She crouched down. Pressed two fingers to the stained earth.

Naz climbed down slowly, watching her.

It didn’t take long. The elf stayed crouched but her head dropped, and the silence that came off her was a different kind than before — heavier, private. When she finally spoke, her voice was controlled in the way that requires effort.

"She bled," the elf said. "Which means her regeneration failed her. That should not be possible."

"Who?" Naz asked carefully.

The elf didn’t answer that. She rose, turned, and looked at the surrounding ground then she sank to her knees in the blood and was still.

Naz said nothing. She stood with her hands at her sides and waited, because she understood grief well enough to know it didn’t need commentary.

After a long moment, the elf looked back at her. The expression on her face had changed. The grief was still there but something had moved in front of it.

"Help me find Byung," she said.

Naz blinked. "What does Byung have to do with this?"

"I believe he was here. I believe he had a hand in this." She stood. "Take me to where he lives."

Something about the way she said it made Naz’s chest tighten. "Why?"

A pause. "Because I wish to speak with him."

It was a lie and not a particularly convincing one, but the elf delivered it without looking away. Naz studied her — the stillness, the jaw set too hard, the hands that weren’t quite relaxed at her sides.

"You want to hurt him," Naz said flatly.

"I want answers."

"You want to hurt him," Naz said again. "And anyone near him."

The elf didn’t deny it this time. "Will you take me or not?"

Naz was quiet for a moment. She looked at the blood on the ground, at the grief this elf was trying to weaponize before it could break her open, and thought carefully.

"You have no magic right now," Naz said. "Whatever you are when your power works — you are not that right now. You know that, yes?"

Something flickered across the elf’s face. Not agreement, not yet. She was too far inside her rage to hear it clearly, centuries of life doing nothing to blunt the rawness of what she was standing in. She thought her hands were enough. She hadn’t done the math.

"Take me to him," she said quietly. 𝙛𝒓𝒆𝙚𝒘𝒆𝓫𝙣𝓸𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝒄𝒐𝓶

Naz exhaled. "Get on the horse."

Byung had done the impossible already but something told her even he was not capable of this cruelty but Naz had no idea what she had gotten her hands into as she was now being watched by the elves.