From Slave to King: My Rebate System Built Me a Kingdom With Beauties!-Chapter 241: Dark Passenger?

Three passages. No way to tell which one led out.

Byung stood at the junction and worked through it methodically, pulling every detail he had logged on the way in and running it against what was in front of him. The downward slope. The air current. The texture of the walls where the runes had been carved deepest. None of it matched. The tunnels had rearranged themselves with the kind of precision that ruled out coincidence and ruled out his memory being wrong. He knew what he had seen coming in. This was not it.

Behind him, the sisters were doing their own audit. He could hear it in the way they moved — boots scuffing the floor as they checked each passage, the low sounds of Thulga working through her options out loud before cutting herself off. Kraghul hung across Mazga’s shoulders, unconscious, his breathing shallow but present.

"There’s no way out," Roktha said. Not a question.

Byung didn’t answer.

"Hey." Her voice sharpened. "I’m talking to you. What is this? Did you lead us in here on purpose?"

He still didn’t answer, because the thing that had lifted earlier was back.

It came in through the soles of his feet first, a vibration that wasn’t sound, wasn’t physical, had no business being felt by anything with a nervous system but hit him like a low current running straight up his spine. Then it was in his chest, pressing outward from the inside, and then it was everywhere at once, heavy and suffocating and wrong in a way that bypassed thought and went straight to something older. His legs stopped working. Not because he chose to stand still. Because they stopped.

He had felt something like this at the entrance. A presence with no scent, no shape, no frame of reference. He had filed it under paranoia and kept walking. He could not do that now. It was too thick, too close, too deliberate in the way it sat against him. His body had locked up around it the way a hand closes around something burning without the brain’s permission.

Then he felt it coming from Kraghul.

Same signature. Same frequency. Sitting inside the orc like something that had always been there, woken up now by proximity to whatever was filling the tunnel. Byung’s eyes moved to him — unconscious, pale under his green skin, draped across Mazga’s shoulders, and the reading he got off him made his stomach turn.

"Drop him," Byung said.

The sisters looked at him.

"Drop him. Now. Put him on the ground."

"Absolutely not," Thulga said. "He’s barely—"

Byung was already moving.

He crossed the distance faster than was reasonable for his size, and Mazga reacted on instinct, she was the youngest but her instincts were clean, already shifting her weight to bring her free arm around toward his ribcage. He read the movement before it landed, ducked the angle of it, and used her forearm as a platform, one foot on the inside of her elbow, pushing off, and cleared her entirely, landing behind her without making contact beyond that single point. She spun to face him, more surprised than hurt.

Roktha had already adjusted. She was fast, and she had positioned herself to catch him while he was still in the air. Her kick came up from a low angle, calculated to hit him mid-drop where he couldn’t brace for it. He didn’t try to dodge it. He brought both arms down and caught it with everything he had.

The impact detonated through his arms and drove him sideways into the tunnel wall. Stone cracked behind him. The force was enormous, Roktha had held nothing back, and the collision was loud enough to ring in the enclosed space. Dust and debris sheeted off the wall around him.

The sisters held their positions and watched the cloud settle.

When it cleared, Byung was standing in the crater his body had made in the stone. The wall behind him had spiderwebbed outward from the point of impact. His feet were planted. His arms were at his sides.

Not a scratch on him.

Roktha stared. Mazga’s mouth had opened slightly. Even Thulga, who kept her face controlled as a rule, had gone still in the way that meant she was recalculating something fundamental.

Byung looked at the three of them and felt the rage hit.

It came up fast and clean and vast, nothing like his usual cold anger, which he could hold at arm’s length and use. This was not usable. It filled him from the floor up, pressing out through his skin, and underneath it was the bloodlust, genuine and enormous, the desire to close the distance between himself and the three orcs in front of him and not stop until something gave way. He recognized it the way you recognize a smell from years ago. He had touched something like this before, at the edges, when the system pushed him past a threshold in combat. But this was not the edge. This was the center of it, and it was not his. This was the side effects of the dark magic coursing through his veins as his impulses couldn’t be controlled like before.

He looked at the sisters.

"Did you think you could harm me?" His voice came out wrong, same words he would use, different weight behind them. "Do you know who I am?" Byung wasn’t acting like himself.

Thulga’s jaw tightened. Roktha took one step back, which for her meant something. Mazga did not move at all, but her eyes had changed, that childlike openness gone, replaced by something wary and focused. 𝓯𝙧𝓮𝓮𝒘𝓮𝙗𝙣𝒐𝒗𝒆𝓵.𝓬𝓸𝒎

He dropped from the wall and landed on the floor with a single heavy thud. The killing intent that came off him in that moment was not subtle. It was not something you reasoned about or talked yourself out of feeling. It filled the tunnel the way smoke fills a sealed room, and the orcs, who had grown up around violence, who had sparred with Kraghul, who had ridden out from their father’s stronghold with the confidence of women who had never lost a fight they chose to take — felt it land on them and did not move.

Mazga spoke first, her voice dropped to something quiet and careful.

"Take him," she said to her sisters, angling her shoulder to hand Kraghul’s weight to Thulga. "Take him and find another way. I’ll hold—"

Byung covered the ground between them in the time it took her to finish the sentence. The kick landed on the point of her jaw — not the side, the point, where the bone is weakest and the force travels cleanest — and Mazga left the ground. She hit the wall of the chamber they had just come from with enough force to cave the stone around her shoulders, then dropped. She did not get up immediately. She sat in the rubble with her hand at her jaw, eyes blinking, working through what had just happened to her.

The tunnel went silent except for Kraghul’s breathing.

Byung stood in the passage and looked at Thulga, who had taken Kraghul’s weight and was holding him with one arm, her other hand free.

"Drop him," Byung said. Quieter this time. More controlled, which was somehow worse. "I will ask one more time."

Thulga did not drop him. She looked at Byung with the expression of someone who is scared and is refusing to show it past a certain point out of principle. "Tell me why," she said. "You want him on the ground, tell me why."

The rage was still there, but the question snagged something in him. He stood with it for a moment, the darkness pressing against the inside of his skull, and tried to reach past it for the original thought.

"Something is inside him," he said. The words came out with effort, like lifting something heavy. "The same thing that is in these tunnels right now. I can sense it. It is not him, it is sitting in him like a passenger and I need him away from you before—"

He stopped.

Something new entered the tunnel. Fast. Coming from the direction of all three passages simultaneously, or from none of them, the directionality wrong in a way his senses couldn’t resolve. But the signature was unmistakable. He had catalogued it weeks ago in his chambers, standing in the dark with a dagger in his hand.

The dwarf.

The rage did not leave, but it pulled back an inch — enough for him to think clearly around the edges of it. He straightened. He turned slowly, looking at each passage in turn, nose working through the air. The dwarf’s scent was stronger than it had been anywhere in these tunnels. Close. Moving.

The same presence that had been suffocating the tunnel moments ago began to shift — not diminishing, but reorienting, pulling away from Byung and Kraghul and gathering itself somewhere further in, as if it recognized the dwarf’s approach and had its own response to it.

Byung stood in the middle of the junction with the rage still burning low in his chest and the orcs behind him and the dwarf coming in fast from a direction that should not exist.

He exhaled slowly through his nose.

"Stay behind me," he said. The voice was closer to his own now. Not all the way back, but closer. "All of you. And Thulga—"

"What?"

"Put him down."

A pause. Then the sound of stone under boots as she lowered Kraghul carefully to the tunnel floor.

Byung faced the passages and waited.