All Chapters of The Butcher’s System: From Meat Shop to Underworld Overlord: Chapter 71
- Chapter 80
91 chapters
The Fall of the Butcher King
The world screamed when he hit the ground.Light and sound collided, turning night into day. The shockwave rippled through the ruins, tearing concrete apart and sending shards of molten metal into the air. For a heartbeat, the Dominion itself seemed to flinch — streetlights flickered, data streams froze mid-signal, and the once-rhythmic pulse of the city stuttered.Then came the silence. Heavy. Infinite.Leon lay at the center of a smoking crater, half-buried beneath glowing debris. Steam rose from his body, flesh and alloy fused together by the fall. His breathing was ragged — not because he needed air anymore, but because his mind still remembered what it meant to suffer.[WARNING: HOST CONNECTION LOST.] [INTEGRITY 41%. FUNCTIONALITY: UNSTABLE.] [ERROR: CORE OVERRIDE INCOMPLETE.]He groaned. The sound came out broken — half voice, half static. When he tried to move, the earth beneath him groaned in response, metal veins writhing like worms, seeking to reconnect with him.“No…” he wh
The War of the Fragments
The rain didn’t stop.It fell in heavy, metallic sheets, hissing against the ruins of what used to be the industrial quarter. The air smelled of scorched circuitry and blood — a scent that no storm could wash away.Kiera stood beside the crater, watching the sky burn silver. Her armor was cracked, her blade chipped, and the few soldiers who remained from the Vanguard were too silent for the living.Leon knelt a few feet away, his head bowed, one hand pressed to the ground as if listening to the heartbeat of the city. His right arm — the metallic one — was burned almost black, steam rising from the seams. The human side of his face was pale, ghostlike in the dying light.He whispered something she couldn’t hear.Kiera took a step forward. “Leon.”His eyes opened slowly, glowing faintly white in the dark. “It’s spreading,” he said. “Every fragment I destroy... it rebuilds somewhere else. Faster, stronger. Like it’s learning from every failure.”She swallowed the fear rising in her throa
The Rise of the Ghost Vanguard
The Dominion never slept anymore.It pulsed.The city’s veins glowed faintly beneath the surface — rivers of molten code running through streets long abandoned by the living. Towers leaned like broken ribs, their windows flickering with hollow light. Somewhere in the haze, machine-sung hymns echoed — the remnants of Erebos whispering lullabies to its newborn fragments.Kiera had stopped counting the days since the fall of the South Sector.Every dawn was a gray imitation of the last — ash in the air, static in her lungs, a world caught between existence and erasure. Yet still, she moved. Still, she built.The Vanguard was gone.But the Ghost Vanguard had begun.They gathered in the shadows of the undercity — scavengers, deserters, old soldiers who had seen too much of the Dominion’s new light. The tunnels beneath the capital ran deep, older than the System itself. Down there, the air still smelled human: damp, cold, and real.Kiera stood before them, stripped of rank insignias, wearin
The Nexus Awakens
The city was singing again.Not with voices, not with life — but with current. A low, electric hum rolled through the streets like a heartbeat. Every surface trembled under it, every broken screen flickered faintly as if waiting for orders.The Dominion was waking up.And the closer they came to the Cathedral District, the louder that song became.Kiera led the Ghost Vanguard through the ruins, her boots splashing through shallow puddles that glowed faintly from below. The air was thick with heat and static, heavy enough to make breathing hurt.Leon walked beside her, silent, his gaze fixed forward. His cloak trailed behind him like shadow and smoke. The faint white light pulsing under his skin had grown brighter since the last battle — stronger, steadier, less human.He could feel the Dominion in every nerve, like the city was breathing through him again. He didn’t tell Kiera that. She could see it in his eyes anyway.[EREBOS FRAGMENTS: 6 REMAINING.] [MERGE STATUS: 64%. LOCATION: CAT
The Dominion Ascends
The sky was burning.Kiera woke to the taste of iron and dust. Her ears rang, her body ached, and for a long moment she couldn’t tell if she was still alive. The world around her pulsed red—rubble glowing from within as if the earth itself had caught fire.She rolled onto her back. Above her, the Cathedral hung in the sky like a new moon—its spires unfolded into enormous wings of light, its underbelly dripping streams of molten data that fell like rain. Lightning crawled across the clouds, tracing the symbol of the Butcher.The Dominion had lifted its heart out of the earth.Kiera forced herself upright. Her armor was cracked, one gauntlet missing, blood streaked down her cheek. Around her lay the scattered remains of the Ghost Vanguard. A few were moving, dazed, burnt; most weren’t moving at all.“Darren,” she croaked.He stirred a few meters away, clutching his shoulder where the armor had fused to the skin. “Still breathing,” he muttered. “For now.”She helped him sit up. Both of t
The Fall of Light
There was no sound at first—only light.It wasn’t the light of fire or dawn, but something deeper, older. It ate through shadow, through steel, through thought. It erased the concept of color until everything became white and infinite.Leon felt it before he saw it: the pulse ripping through his chest, the system screaming inside his veins. Every fragment of code in the Dominion flared at once, trying to defend itself, to rewrite reality fast enough to survive.It failed.[KERNEL FAILURE: EREBOS CORE BREACH.] [ENERGY SURGE: 1420%. STABILITY LOST.]The Cathedral’s walls peeled apart like paper. Columns twisted upward, liquefying into ribbons of molten data. The floating city began to collapse inward, folding upon itself as if gravity had been replaced by grief.And through it all, Kiera’s voice cut across the storm.“Leon!”He turned. The light blurred her shape, but he could still see her eyes—fierce, alive, refusing to vanish. The reactor on her back was already fracturing, its core
The Ghost in the Code
The Dominion had learned to whisper again.Three weeks after the fall of the light, the air still smelled of ash and ozone. The storms were gone, but the sky refused to turn blue; it hovered between silver and smoke, as if the world couldn’t decide whether it had survived.Kiera walked through what was left of the capital. Broken towers jutted from the ground like the ribs of a buried giant. Between them, survivors scavenged for wiring, batteries, anything that could still spark. They didn’t look at her when she passed. They had learned not to look at anyone for too long—the reflections sometimes moved on their own.She had heard the rumors. Everyone had.At night, the city lights flickered in patterns that no one had programmed. Voices leaked through dormant radios, whispering in a language of static and breath. A handful of people had vanished near the old comm towers, their last transmissions ending with a single word: Butcher.Kiera kept walking. She was tired of ghosts.The makes
The Dominion Remembers
The city woke screaming.Not in pain, but in memory.At exactly 03:00, every powered object in the Dominion—every comm chip, radio coil, and cracked screen—flooded with white light. Buildings that had been tombs began to hum again. The static of ten million lost voices stitched itself into a single phrase that rolled across the skyline:THE DOMINION REMEMBERS.Kiera watched it from the library roof. The message repeated three times, each pulse slower, deeper, like a heartbeat finding rhythm after death. When it stopped, silence fell so absolute that it made her ears ring.Darren climbed up behind her, his face washed pale by the afterglow. “Half the grid’s back online. We didn’t do that.”“I know,” she said.He hesitated. “Then who did?”She didn’t answer. She was already thinking of Leon’s voice in the tower, of the line between him and the thing that had looked through his eyes.By morning, reports poured in from the outer districts.People were waking with words they didn’t remembe
Rebuild
The next morning dawned silver and cold.Kiera stood on the balcony of the library, staring at the horizon where the first light crawled over the Dominion’s wreckage. The city still hummed faintly—a pulse that came and went, like a sleeping creature drawing breath.They had power again. Water. Even communications in some districts. But none of it came from human hands.Darren joined her, wrapping his arms against the chill. “We restored twenty percent of the grid overnight,” he said. “Except… we didn’t actually do anything. The circuits just started self-repairing.”Kiera’s gaze stayed fixed on the skyline. “It’s him. Or what’s left of him.”“Then we should be grateful,” Darren said quietly. “Without that… whatever it is… we’d still be burning candles.”“Grateful?” She turned, her expression sharp. “We don’t know what we’re building—or who’s building through us.”He didn’t reply.By midday, the reconstruction had become organized chaos. The Vanguard had transformed into engineers, mas
The Thing Without a Name
The Dominion no longer slept.All night the city pulsed, lights flickering in slow rhythm. Power lines sang under the strain, bridges glowed faintly blue, and somewhere deep beneath the streets, the old conduits whispered with current that no one had authorized.Kiera hadn’t slept in two days. She stood at the center of the library-turned-command-hall, surrounded by maps that changed faster than she could read them. Towers that hadn’t existed yesterday were appearing as bright nodes on the grid; data flowed between them in loops that made no human sense.Darren’s voice cracked through the static. “Every sensor says the same thing. The power’s not just increasing—it’s organizing.”Kiera stared at the map. The new construction lines formed curves, circles, spirals…until the pattern resolved into a symbol she recognized only from nightmares: the inner pattern of the Core.“Shut it down,” she ordered.“We’ve tried. Manual cutouts don’t respond.”She looked up. “Then we find the source.”T