The Tyrant Of The Red Throne

CHAPTER 9 When the Soul Splinters

Silence.

The world completely lost its voice. Faried's muffled screams. Ivan's choked groans. Even Gharok's satisfied growl completely vanished, swallowed whole by a deafening, absolute silence. Time froze, stretching out into an incredibly thin thread ready to snap at any given second.

The absolute only sound left in the entire universe was the heavy, ragged breathing echoing violently inside Roy's own head.

Hah, hah, hah.

His eyes were dead locked onto the object resting right at the tip of his boot. Elara's head. Her clear blue eyes, the same eyes that just hours ago had looked at him with such playful teasing at the dinner table, were now staring completely blankly up at the uncaring night sky. A small patch of mud clung to her freezing cold cheek.

Something deep inside Roy completely shattered. It wasn't a bone. It wasn't an organ. It was something much, much more fundamental.

The absolute anchor of his sanity, the very foundation of his humanity, splintered with a sickening crack that only he could hear.

Gharok smirked in absolute satisfaction watching the total ruin in the boy's eyes. He completely casually holstered his massive axe. "Now, see? That wasn't too incredibly hard, was it? Sometimes, a little bit of motivation is absolutely all it takes for pests like you to fully understand their place in the food chain."

The Beast Man Commander gave a sharp nod to his soldiers. "Finish off the rest. I'm completely bored of playing around."

Faried violently thrashed around, desperately trying to break free from the axe held directly at his throat by the guarding soldier. Ivan, using the absolute last ounce of his strength, frantically crawled forward, desperately trying to reach Faried's broken dagger lying in the dirt. Everything moved in a completely pointless, agonizing slow motion. Death was now absolutely unavoidable.

But, right in the dead center of all that absolute despair, a massive shift happened inside Roy.

His eyes slowly lifted up from his little sister's head, locking dead straight onto Gharok.

And then, he laughed.

"Hahaha."

A tiny, broken laugh. Incredibly quiet. Unbelievably dry. A laugh that held absolutely zero traces of any actual joy. The sound felt exactly like rough sand physically scraping right across a tombstone.

Gharok deeply furrowed his brow. "What's so damn funny, kid?"

"Heheheh," Roy's laughter slowly grew louder, his shoulders starting to violently shake. He tilted his head down, completely hiding his face right behind the dark shadows of his filthy hair. "Hehehe, hahahaha."

Ivan completely stopped crawling. Faried completely stopped thrashing. Even the Lycan soldiers preparing to execute them actively hesitated, physically feeling an incredibly wrong, deeply twisted aura starting to violently bleed out from the kneeling boy's body. That laugh didn't sound like the laugh of a human grieving or slowly going insane. That laugh sounded, absolutely hollow.

Deep inside Roy's retinas, the system interface that had previously been a glowing blood red, now instantly shifted into an absolute pitch black. The ancient runes were no longer calmly offering a transaction, they were actively screaming out emergency warnings in a tone that felt borderline panicked.

[WARNING! WARNING! Host's Emotions Exceed Soul Vessel Capacity!][Despair Resonance has reached a critical breakpoint. System is in imminent danger of complete destruction alongside the Host's consciousness.]

[Initiating Emergency Protocol, Forced Energy Release.]

"Hahahahaha, AHAHAHAHAHA!"

Roy slowly lifted his head. Thick tears were violently streaming down his cheeks, yet his lips were stretched into a massive, incredibly wide smile. A truly terrifying smile, the exact smile of a man who had stared directly into the absolute bottom of hell and simply decided to build his own throne right there.

"Ivan, Henry, Faried," Roy called out right between his echoing laughs, his voice now sounding incredibly raspy and impossibly heavy, sounding completely, entirely different from before. "Do you guys see it? I was absolutely wrong this entire time."

"Roy, stop it," Ivan whispered in pure, absolute horror. He had never seen an expression like that on his best friend's face in his entire life.

"I honestly thought, if I just held back, if I just rationally thought it through, I could somehow find an opening," Roy continued, his laughter slowly dying down, instantly replaced by a freezing whisper that pierced straight down to the bone. "But this completely ruined world doesn't actually work like that at all, does it? Out here, there is absolutely zero room for thinking."

Deep inside his head, the system actively continued its desperate emergency protocol.

[Absolute payment is critically required to stabilize the Vessel. The highest level of compensation will be forcefully extracted.]

[Extracting Payment, Every single memory regarding 'First Love'.][Extracting Payment, The entire abstract concept of 'Future Hope'.]

In a fraction of a second, the two absolute final pillars holding up Roy's remaining humanity were violently ripped entirely away.

The memory of a blonde village girl who had once given him a flower at the harvest festival, instantly vanished. Her face, her warm smile, the gentle touch of her hand, everything was completely erased, completely replaced by an absolute, freezing void. The flutter in his chest whenever he saw her was now absolutely nothing more than empty, dead data.

And then, the very concept of a future. The dream of owning his own farm, the hope of eventually rebuilding the village, the simple desire to live a completely peaceful life until he grew old, all of it was brutally burned to absolute ash by the system. Now, inside Roy's mind, there was absolutely no such thing as 'tomorrow'. There was only 'right now'. And 'right now' was completely overflowing with an absolute ocean of pure hatred.

[Payment Accepted. Vessel Stability Fully Restored.]

[Unlocking Output, ABSOLUTE EXECUTION.]

Gharok suddenly felt a deeply terrifying premonition. The hair on the back of his neck stood completely straight up. His absolute apex predator instincts were violently screaming at him that the creature currently kneeling in front of him was absolutely no longer prey.

"Kill him! Do it right now!" Gharok roared at his soldiers.

The Lycan soldier aggressively guarding Faried raised his axe high, completely ready to chop the rational boy's head entirely off.

"Today, there is absolutely nothing left," Roy whispered, his terrifying smile completely vanishing, instantly replaced by a dead, hollow expression that was infinitely more horrifying than any form of pure rage. "Except blood, and absolute vengeance."

Suddenly, the dirt right beneath their boots began to violently vibrate.

It wasn't an earthquake.

Drip. Drip.

The massive puddle of Elara's blood near Roy's feet started violently vibrating. The drops of blood completely soaking Faried's broken dagger began to aggressively pulse. The rapidly drying blood completely coating the unconscious Henry's body instantly liquefied all over again.

"What, what the hell is happening?" The Lycan soldier completely froze his axe swing mid-air, staring down in absolute, utter confusion.

The blood from the completely shredded mutant hounds. The blood from the Beast Man soldier Roy had brutally killed back in the village. The blood from dozens of violently slaughtered villagers that was currently flowing through the dirt trenches. Every single drop and puddle of blood within a fifty-yard radius, absolutely regardless of who it originally belonged to, began to vibrate with an incredible, terrifying intensity.

And then, completely defying absolutely every single law of nature and gravity, all that blood began to physically lift straight up into the air.

Heavy drops of thick crimson, massively dense clumps of pitch-black fluid, absolutely all of it slowly floated upward, violently pulling together to form thousands of tiny, blood-red spheres that aggressively orbited all around Roy, exactly as if he were the absolute dead center of a newly born galaxy of pure death.

Roy's eyes, which had previously been glowing a deep red, now violently flared with a crimson light so unbelievably bright it physically pierced straight through the pitch-black darkness of the pine forest.

He had completely stopped being human. He was now a boy who had been forcefully twisted into a monster by the absolute tragedy of his slaughtered family, and that monster was now actively demanding an ocean of blood to quench the raging inferno of his revenge.