All Chapters of Dungeon King: I Rule: Chapter 101
- Chapter 110
142 chapters
Chapter 56 (1)
The chamber, once a symbol of the Ghost Code’s hard-won unity and defiance, now felt like a pressure cooker seconds from exploding. The air, usually cool and circulating from hidden vents, was stale and thick with the heat of too many bodies and too much fervent, clashing ideology. The circular table, carved from a single massive slab of reclaimed blackwood, was no longer a place of discourse but a battle line. Councilor Aris sat rigidly in her seat, her hands flat on the table’s polished surface, but the usual calm calculation in her eyes had been replaced by the sharp, desperate focus of a commander whose battlefield has just transformed into something unrecognizable.Across from her, Commander Vex stood, refusing to sit. He leaned forward, his knuckles planted on the wood, his broad shoulders hunched like a bull about to charge. The scar on his face seemed darker, a livid line of fury against his pallid skin. “You saw what I saw!” His voice wasn’t a shout, but a low, vibrating grow
Chapter 56 (2)
The air in the Grand Veridian Hotel ballroom tasted of dust, decay, and the sharp, coppery tang of ozone. The colossal chandeliers, once dripping with pre-fall crystal, now hung like skeletons, their arms strung with crude wiring and flickering bioluminescent fungi that cast a sickly green glow. The polished marble floor was scarred by the blackened circles of cooking fires and littered with the detritus of a desperate, squatter population. This was the heart of Eclipse's kingdom. Not a citadel of ideology like the Aerie, nor a nest of faith like the emerging cults. This was a scavenger's nest, a den of predators adapting to a new, brutal ecology.Perched on a ragged velvet throne that had been dragged from the hotel's executive suite, Eclipse surveyed her domain. She was a woman carved from whipcord and grim necessity, her hair shorn close to her scalp, her eyes the color of cold slate. One side of her face was a web of old, shiny burn scars that pulled at the corner of her mouth, gi
Chapter 56 (3)
The profound, healing silence that followed the wave of peace was its own kind of sound. It was the echo of a memory the world had forgotten, a pristine quiet that made the previous hum of machinery and the psychic scream of corruption seem like a vulgar noise. In the center of the room, the node pulsed its serene, steady azure light, a tiny star of order in the darkness. The feral mouse, unconcerned by the giants surrounding it, continued its meticulous grooming, a perfect, peaceful testament to the power that had been unleashed.The silence was broken by a soft, crumpling sound.Selene folded.The immense psychic effort, the violent fluctuation of her corruption, the sheer willpower required to not fight but to harmonize with oblivion—it all crashed down upon her the moment the connection was severed. There was no dramatic cry, no final word. Her eyes rolled back in her head, and she collapsed sideways onto the cold permacrete floor, limbs splayed, utterly unconscious. The terrifyin
Chapter 56 (2)
The silence in Elian’s cell was no longer the empty quiet of surrender. It had become a different thing entirely—a thick, suffocating shroud, a held breath waiting to be screamed. The sterile, polished walls seemed to press inward, amplifying the silent noise raging within the man curled on the floor. The cooperative numbness that had allowed him to dispassionately detail the mechanisms of the apocalypse had evaporated, burned away by the full, unfiltered return of a grief so profound it was a physical presence in the room.It was not the hot, messy grief of tears and wailing. That would have been a release, a storm that passes. This was a cold, absolute, and silent thing. It was the gravity at the center of a black hole, pulling every memory, every thought, every shuddering heartbeat into a singularity of pure, self-annihilating pain. He had confessed his sins, and in the speaking of them, he had made them real again. He had not just described the moment he doomed the world; he had r
Chapter 56 (2)
The air in the ruined plaza tasted of ozone and old blood. Corporal Kaelen of the Ghost Code, his back pressed against the rusted husk of an ancient public transport vehicle, squeezed off another three-round burst. The sharp crack-crack-crack of his rifle was swallowed by the vast, empty space, answered a half-second later by the sizzling spang of return fire from a scavenger’s energy pistol striking the metal beside his head. He ducked, hot shrapnel peppering his helmet.“They’re pushing from the east flank!” a voice yelled over the squad’s comms, strained with static and adrenaline. “Where’s Vex’s backup?!”“Backup’s busy having a civil war, remember?” Kaelen snapped back, ejecting a spent power cell and slamming in a fresh one. The skirmish was a stupid, pointless thing. A Beauty remnant scavenging party, growing bolder by the day, had tried to muscle in on a ruined hardware depot the Code had been watching. Now they were all wasting ammo and lives over a pile of pre-fall junk. The
Chapter 56 (3)
The war room deep within the Aerie was a tomb of frantic, hushed activity. The usual low murmur of tactical updates and resource management had been replaced by a strained, electric silence, punctuated by bursts of static-slurred voices screaming over comms. Councilor Aris stood at the central holotable, its surface a chaotic mess of flickering light. The elegant strategic maps of Bombay were gone, replaced by a frantic, shuddering plot of emergency signals that flared and died like desperate fireflies across the city’s grid. Each one was a tiny, digital scream.“—something in the market district! It’s not a Harvester! It’s a shadow—a weeping shadow—!”Static. Signal lost.“—Alpha team is gone! They’re just… down. Not dead! Their minds are—AGH—!”A scream, then a sound like tearing metal and a low, harmonic weep. Signal lost.“—It doesn’t care! It’s hitting the remnants too! It’s hitting everyone—!”Static. Signal lost.Aris’s hands were clenched into white-knuckled fists on the cool
Chapter 57 (1)
The chosen neutral ground was a monument to dead commerce: the vast, open-air top level of a multi-story car park. The once-white lines marking the parking bays were faded to ghosts, the permacrete beneath them cracked and weeded. The skeletal remains of a few burned-out vehicles sat where they had been abandoned a decade ago, their husks picked clean of anything useful. The place was a bowl of cold wind and bleak exposure, chosen for one reason alone: no one could be ambushed here. The sightlines were clear in every direction, all the way to the jagged skyline of the ruined city. It was a place of absolute vulnerability, and that was the only thing that made it safe.Kaelen felt the wind bite through his fatigues as he stood with Aris’s small contingent. They were the first to arrive, taking up a position near the eastern stairwell exit—a tactical choice for a rapid retreat if this was, in fact, an elaborate trap. Selene sat on an overturned crate, wrapped in a thick thermal blanket,
Chapter 57 (2)
The word hung in the wind-whipped silence of the car park, a delicate, impossible thing. Lonely. It was so simple, so devastatingly human, that it seemed to short-circuit the complex machinery of fear and aggression that had been driving the gathering. Commander Vex stared at Linda as if she’d just spoken in a foreign tongue, his brow furrowed in pure, uncomprehending frustration. Eclipse’s cold, assessing eyes narrowed, not in dismissal, but in recalculations. Aris simply watched, the strategist in her momentarily stunned into silence.It was Vex who recovered first, his frustration boiling over. “Lonely?” he echoed, the word a bark of disdain. “It’s a weapon! A force of nature! You might as well call a tsunami ‘thirsty’! We need a plan of attack, not a therapy session!” He turned his fury back on Aris and Selene. “This is what you brought? This is our strategic advantage? A catatonic and a… a child?”Kai took a half-step forward, his own temper, banked so carefully for so long, flar
Chapter 57 (3)
The silence left in the wake of Linda’s words was a fragile, crystalline thing. The wind, which had moments before whipped angrily across the car park, seemed to hold its breath. The hardened faces of soldiers and scavengers, etched with years of ingrained hostility and suspicion, were now slack with a kind of bewildered awe. They had been prepared for a battle of strategies, a clash of force and counter-force. They had not been prepared for a lesson in empathy from a woman who had been, until very recently, lost to the world.Commander Vex was the first to break, but not with anger. A harsh, disbelieving breath escaped him. It wasn't acceptance; it was the sound of a man whose entire worldview had just been invalidated by a logic he couldn't argue with. "Change the sound," he repeated, the words tasting alien on his tongue. He looked at Selene, then at Linda, his expression one of profound, exhausted confusion. "You propose we... sing it to sleep?""It is not a lullaby, Commander," S
Chapter 58 (1)
The relay station was a tomb of forgotten signals. Tucked into a crumbling pre-fall office, it was a chaotic nest of humming servers, tangled fiber-optic cables, and jury-rigged Ghost Code technology that glowed with soft, amber runes. The air was warm and thick with the smell of ozone and overheated electronics. This was one of the nerve endings of Aris’s network, a critical node linking the Aerie’s command center to the scout teams now combing the ruins for the Griefborn Beast. And it was in the trembling hands of Rin.Sweat beaded on her forehead, a cold, clammy feeling that had nothing to do with the room’s temperature. Her hands, usually steady and precise, felt like someone else’s as they danced across the touch-sensitive interface, aligning frequencies and boosting degraded signals. Every flicker of a status rune, every hiccup of data flow, sent a jolt of anxiety through her. The Behemoth’s collapse had left its mark not just on her body, but on her code. She was a patched-toge