From Slave to King: My Rebate System Built Me a Kingdom With Beauties!-Chapter 242: Kragg Vs Byung!?

The dwarf’s scent hit him before the footsteps did. Byung had catalogued it the first time they met — that particular absence wrapped around something ancient, like a room that had been sealed for centuries and finally opened. He knew exactly how this creature moved, how it thought, how it set the board before anyone else realized there was a game. He had watched it disappear into shadow and leave him standing in his own chambers holding questions he couldn’t answer. There was nothing simple about what was coming down that tunnel.

"We need to go," Byung said. "All of you."

Thulga didn’t move. "We’re not leaving without—"

"I know." He looked at the ceiling. Something had changed about it — the height was wrong, greater than it had been when they entered, the stone above them further away than the tunnels in this section should allow. He stared at it for a moment. "Thulga. You punched through the floor to get in here."

She paused for a second before saying. "Yes."

"Do it again. Take Kraghul and go up," Byung suddenly changed his mind because he knew they could figure out what was wrong with him when they left the area.

He heard her shift, heard the calculation moving through her as if she was contemplating it. She looked at the ceiling, looked at him, looked at her sisters. Roktha was already moving toward Kraghul. Mazga had gotten to her feet, one hand still at her jaw, the earlier playfulness entirely absent from her face.

Then the dwarf walked into the light with no care in the world, like he didn’t care about how many people were here because their numbers were irrelevant.

He came in from the left passage, the one Byung had written off, moving without urgency, hands loose at his sides, that broad unhurried stride that suggested he had never been chased by anything in his life and didn’t intend to start. The red eyes swept the group and settled on Byung, and the smile that followed was genuine in a way that made it worse.

Byung looked at him and felt the threat-reading his body had been doing since the tunnel entrance come up short.

Something was wrong. Not wrong like danger, wrong like diminished. The pressure that had been sitting in this place since they entered, the suffocating dark weight that had locked his legs and sharpened his bloodlust into something unrecognizable, was coming off the dwarf at a fraction of what it should. The dwarf in front of him was a shell of the presence Byung had felt bearing down on him twenty minutes ago. The entire physique looked the same, he had no injuries either and his eyes were the same. But the force behind them had been spent somewhere, on something, and what remained was a creature running on the memory of its own power.

"You look terrible," Byung said.

The dwarf laughed — a short, real sound. "Honest as always."

The orcs had fanned out. Byung could feel it without looking, the three of them spreading into positions they had clearly practiced, triangulating without needing to discuss it. In this state the dwarf was in a weakened state. The odds had shifted and all three of them had done that math instantly.

Byung did his own math.

A creature that powerful didn’t walk into a room weakened and outnumbered unless it had already changed the conditions of the fight before anyone stepped inside to give him the upper hand.

The dwarf was smiling. Had been smiling since he appeared. Not the smile of someone cornered. The smile of someone watching something go exactly as planned.

"Why show yourself like this." Byung thought to himself.

Byung’s eyes dropped to Kraghul on the floor.

What the dwarf had done was not visible to the eye and Byung had no name for it yet — but the mechanism was simple in the way that only truly cruel things are. He had taken a dead body, pushed a consciousness into it, and given it just enough to keep moving.

The problem with the dead is that they have no life of their own to burn. So the dwarf had borrowed some. The link ran blood-deep, direct and invisible, siphoning from driectly from Kraghul, three days was all it would take for his body had been fighting to stay alive, less if the exertion continued.

The darkness Byung had felt pressing through these tunnels, the thing that had locked his legs and filled him with something that wasn’t his own rage — that was what was walking around above ground wearing a dead man’s face. And it was hungry in the way only something that had no business being alive could be.

Byung didn’t have all of that. He had the dark current sitting inside Kraghul like a second heartbeat, same signature as the tunnels, same signature as whatever had felt wrong to him since they entered. But Byung knew for certain they needed to get out of there.

"Get him up," he said. "We need to—"

He felt it before he heard it despite his heightenend sense.

No footsteps. No passage behind them, there was only wall behinf them, he had confirmed that himself on the way in. Nothing should have been able to come from that direction at any speed.

But he felt the air current shift five seconds after the creature had arrived at its destination.

He turned his head. A figure was standing three feet behind the sisters.

It stood at full height with full mass — enormous, scarred, the particular stillness of something that had been a warrior so long it forgot how to exist outside of it. The eyes were wrong, pitch black, no warmth in them anywhere, the pupils swallowed by something that wasn’t grief or anger or any emotion a living thing produced. Just a passenger. Something wearing a shape it had been given rather than born into.

Mazga stepped back into Roktha without meaning to. The darkness that had been pressing against Byung all through the tunnels was coming off it in walls now — not ambient, not atmospheric, it was directed.

It rolled forward and hit the small group like weather, and Byung felt his legs go again, that same locked-up paralysis from earlier, his body making decisions without consulting him.

He bit down on it. Pushed back against it from somewhere in his chest, where the system sat like an ember that never went fully cold. The paralysis cracked. Didn’t break, but cracked enough.

"Take Kraghul," he said. His voice came out level, which cost him something. "Both of you. Take him and go through the ceiling. Now."

"We can’t just—" Roktha started.

"He will kill you." Byung said it flat and plain, no drama in it. "Not because he wants to. Because that thing needs Kraghul alive and it will remove anything that tries to take him. You cannot fight that with muscle." He kept his eyes on the figure, which had not moved, watching the group with that empty occupying gaze.

Byung was able to read the dwarf’s mind even in the dwarf’s weakened state, he couldn’t draw out all the information he needed.

"Thulga." A beat of silence followed.

"Thulga, I need the ceiling open."

He heard her exhale. Her boots hit the floor hard as she moved to Roktha, and then both of them had Kraghul up between them, and then the sound of a fist hitting stone overhead — once, twice, the second time with a crack that sent debris raining down on all of them.

Light came through from above. Faint, but there, the figure moved.

Not fast but cutting off the angle between the sisters and the opening in the ceiling. Byung moved the same instant, putting himself in the gap, and the collision was immediate. He got both hands on its forearm and redirected the first swing rather than absorbing it, the force passing past his shoulder and into the wall beside him, stone exploding outward from the point of contact.

It looked at him but then its own fist like it was surprised by how weak this body he was in was.

Byung held the arm, feet grinding against the floor, and looked up into the dark eyes of Kragg.

Behind him, the sounds of the sisters getting Kraghul through the gap in the ceiling could be heard.

Mazga dropped down beside him rather than climbing out, and he could feel her intent without reading her mind — she wasn’t leaving him down here alone.

Even though Byung knew it was a death sentence as he had no idea if he would be able to take them both on. But it was a shock seeing Kragg here, but more so, how the dwarf had access to him.

Byung knew he had to do something, he had to put an end to this.

No, he had to kill ths dwarf ehre and now.

The dwarf watched all of it from across the chamber with his hands still loose at his sides and that same unmoved smile, like a man watching a play he had written himself and already knew the ending to.

Byung held Kragg’s arm and felt the thing inside it push against his grip.

"Με βλέπεις;?" The said but thanks to Byung’s system, it translated itself.

"You see me?" Byung thought to himself, confused by what this meant because what Byung assumed was this was a form of necromacy that revived Kragg in a corrupted state.

He never knew it was something directly from the dark continent he was fighting so hard to stop.