Free Web NovelChapter 625: 625. I’m Busy Killing and Torturing While Mordecai Starts Question Things
The air in the secondary observation terrace didn’t just feel cold; it felt hollow, as if the very oxygen had been sucked out of the room by the sheer vacuum of death occurring below. The sound of the genocide, the wet, rhythmic thwack of meat being pulverized, the shrieks that were cut short by the crunch of bone, and that god-awful, manic laughter drifted up the stone walls like a toxic mist.
Mordecai, who was watching everything, felt his knees trembling. It was a sensation he hadn’t felt since he was a fledgling imp, a primal, shivering dread that bypassed his intellect and spoke directly to his soul.
His hands were buried deep in his hair, his fingers twitching, pulling at the strands as if he were trying to physically tear the thoughts from his skull.
’How had this happened?’
The question wasn’t a thought; it was a heartbeat. A rhythmic, agonizing pulse in his mind. He had watched the first wave of Orcs vanish in a red mist.
He had watched the Minotaurs drown in the earth. He had watched the very sky seem to weep blood as the fire constructs tore through his legions. frёewebηovel.cѳm
And all the while, he had done... nothing. He had played the game of politics, the game of caution, and the game of survival.
Now, a mountain of corpses presented the cost of his caution.
"My lord."
Pavellia’s voice was a fragile thing. It lacked its usual steel, its usual command, and it was the voice of a mourner at a funeral that hadn’t quite ended yet.
Mordecai didn’t turn. He couldn’t.
To turn would be to acknowledge the reality of the carnage. And also, if he did that, then he would be able to look into the eyes of the monster that was currently laughing at the concept of mercy.
"The coalition is losing," he said, and his voice sounded ancient, stripped of its power, a dry husk of a sound.
"Yes," Pavellia replied, stepping into the light of the flickering torches.
She looked at the courtyard, where the spray of a freshly detonated Drake head was still settling like a gruesome rain. "The elemental constructs were the last significant organized resistance the city had to offer."
"I know," Mordecai whispered. He finally let his hands drop, but they didn’t rest. They hung limp at his sides, useless. "I know more than you think, Pavellia..."
"I know the weight of every life currently being extinguished down there..."
"I can feel the vibration of the earth every time he strikes... It’s not just a battle... or a reconstruction he kept saying before, but it’s... it’s a rhythmic erasure."
He turned then, and for the first time, Pavellia saw him. The Demon Lord was pale, his obsidian skin looking dull, almost grey.
His eyes, once pits of commanding fire, were wide and glassy, reflecting the flickering, chaotic lights of the massacre below.
"He isn’t fighting us," Mordecai said, his voice dropping to a terrified, intimate hush. "A warrior fights an enemy. A conqueror fights a nation."
"But that man... the lustful villain is just harvesting." Mordecai said with a low tone. "He’s playing with the wheat before the scythe."
"He’s laughing because he knows that every scream we utter is just a note in his symphony."
A particularly loud, booming KRA THOOM! shook the terrace, followed by a burst of that terrifying, unhinged laughter that seemed to pierce through the very stones of the castle. Mordecai flinched, a violent, involuntary shudder that betrayed his absolute terror.
"He’s looking for us, Pavellia," Mordecai said, his eyes darting toward the dark corners of the terrace, as if the shadows themselves might suddenly erupt into a whirlwind of blood. "He’s done with the armies."
"He’s done with the other lords that were far below you..."
"He’s hunting the survivors who didn’t agree with him... he’s hunting the fear."
He looked back down at the courtyard, where the light of the fires illuminated the silhouettes of his own soldiers, now turned into rabid hounds, tearing into the very people they once swore to protect.
"How did we mistake a god for a man?" Mordecai asked, a single, bitter tear tracing a path through the soot on his cheek. "How did we think we could survive a god who finds our suffering... amusing?"
Mordecai didn’t look away from the window. His gaze was fixed on the carnage, on the spot where the last of the coalition had just been systematically dismantled.
He looked like a man watching the slow, inevitable collapse of a star, a grand, luminous thing being swallowed by an infinite, unfeeling void.
"He hasn’t been trying," Mordecai said, his voice barely a whisper, yet it carried the weight of a death sentence. "The entire night..."
"He has been working through this city at whatever percentage of his capability produces the outcome he wants, and he has not once needed to go above it."
"No," Pavellia said. Her voice was a flat line of acceptance.
"That’s the thing that I keep coming back to," Mordecai said, his fingers digging so deep into his scalp that his knuckles turned a ghostly white. "Not what he did, but... more like... how he did it..."
"How he has been doing it the entire time he has been here, from the first night in the throne room... and I watched it and told myself it was an alliance and not a takeover."
Pavellia remained silent, her shadow long and dark against the stone floor. The flickering torchlight made her features seem carved from obsidian, unmoving and stoic, a stark contrast to the trembling lord beside her.
"You weren’t wrong that it started as an alliance," she said softly, offering a sliver of the comfort he didn’t want.
"It started as a takeover dressed as an alliance," Mordecai snapped, a sudden, sharp spark of the old Demon Lord flickering in his eyes before dying into embers. "I know the difference now."
"I’m not sure if I knew the difference then, which is either stupidity or willful blindness... and at this moment, Pavellia, I am utterly unable to determine which."
He pulled his hands out of his hair, staring at them as if they belonged to a stranger. They were shaking.
The hands that had commanded armies of the undead, the hands that had signed the decrees of a new era, were trembling like a child’s in a storm. He stared at them for a long, agonizing moment, then, as if compelled by a ritual of despair, he shoved them back into his hair.
"What am I doing?" he asked. It wasn’t a question for her; it was a lashing out at his own impotence. "I’m standing at a window pulling my own hair out while the city I built gets reorganized below me."
"I am a spectator to my own extinction."
"You are doing what people do when they are trying to think through something that doesn’t resolve neatly," Pavellia replied, her voice steady, providing the only anchor in his spiraling mind. "There is nothing wrong with it."
"There is everything wrong with it!" Mordecai roared, though the roar lacked the thunder of a king; it was the cry of a man drowning in shallow water. "The thing that is wrong with it is that it is completely passive!"
"I am watching a completely passive response in myself to something that is tearing the heart out of my world, and I am not doing anything with the fury of it except standing here and feeling it!"
He turned his gaze back to the courtyard. Below, the final remnants of the coalition—the elite, the brave, and the desperate—were being methodically erased.
It wasn’t a battle; it was a harvest. Rex’s sheer, effortless presence unraveled the coordination they had fought so hard to build.
The individual units were breaking, turning into frantic, isolated animals, trying to survive a predator that had already decided their fate.
The coalition lasted eleven minutes.
Mordecai watched the last of them fold. He watched a commander attempt a final, heroic stand, only to be silenced by a casual wave of Rex’s hand that turned the very air into a crushing weight. freeweɓnovēl.coɱ
CRUNCH.
A hollow, terrifying sensation washed over Mordecai. It wasn’t the hot sting of rage, nor was it the wet ache of grief.
It was something colder, something more permanent. It was the profound, soul-crushing realization of insufficiency.
He had built a masterpiece of a kingdom, a complex machine of power and shadow, only to realize it was made of cardboard, and Rex was a god made of fire.
"Pavellia," he said, his voice suddenly, eerily calm, and the mania of his panic had passed, leaving behind a terrifying clarity.
"My lord."
"Tell me something honest," he said, finally turning to face her. His eyes were bloodshot, his face a mask of exhaustion and dawning horror. "Not the operational version, nor the version that preserves the dignity of the throne or the morale of the survivors..."
"I want it... the honest version."
Pavellia met his gaze, her expression unreadable but her eyes softening with a tragic empathy. "What would you like me to be honest about?"
Mordecai leaned against the stone railing, his body sagging as if the weight of the entire city were pressing down on his shoulders.
"Whether any version of tonight could have gone differently," he said, his voice trembling with the finality of a man facing his own ghost. "Given who I am and what I have been doing for the past six months."
"Whether there was a decision point somewhere in it where things could have resolved in a way that left me still in possession of what I had built."
