Chương 204: Chapter : 204

The surviving magician pressed his good hand against his chest, feeling his own heartbeat. It was slow and faint, but it was there. He had done it. He had actually done it. The forbidden fake heart-stop magic, a technique so dangerous and so illegal that even other Black Magicians refused to learn it, had saved his life. The technique worked by temporarily shutting down the body's life functions to such an extreme degree that the practitioner appeared to be completely, absolutely dead. No heartbeat. No breathing.

No magical signature. Nothing. For those few critical seconds when Karna's light arrows had struck, the leader had been, by every measurable definition, a corpse.

"If I hadn't secretly mastered that technique," the mage wheezed, his voice barely a whisper, "I would be nothing but ash right now. Just like the others." He looked around the ruined chamber. The golden particles from his four companions were still fading, drifting upward like the souls of the dead leaving the world. The altar was broken. The purple flames were gone. Everything they had built, everything they had planned, was destroyed in less than half a minute.

The sheer, unstoppable power of Lancelot's forces was not just frightening. It was humbling. It was world-shaking. The mage's hands were shaking. His whole body was trembling, and it was not from the cold. It was from pure, unfiltered terror. He had faced powerful enemies before. He had killed people with his own hands. He had performed dark rituals that would make a normal person go mad. But Karna, the golden spirit who served the masked monster Lancelot, was on an entirely different level.

The spirit had not even broken a sweat. He had not needed a second attempt. He had walked into their most heavily guarded secret chamber, destroyed five high-ranking Black Magicians like they were candles being snuffed out, and had been ready to leave without even checking if anyone survived. That was how little Lancelot's forces feared them.

"We underestimated them," the mage whispered, his purple eyes wide and hollow.

"We all underestimated them. The King of ZulFarah, the generals, all of us. We thought Lancelot was just one man, one shadow. But he is not. He is a force of nature. And his servants... they are not human. They are something else entirely." He knew what he had to do. He could not stay here. The chamber was exposed. If Karna had found it once, he could find it again, and the next time, there would be no forbidden technique to save him. The entire operation in this sector was compromised.

The supply lines, the contacts, the safe houses, all of it was at risk. The central headquarters had to be warned immediately. The surviving magician raised his trembling, broken hand. With painful, clumsy movements, he traced a glowing dark symbol in the air. It was a complex pattern, a key that would tear open a temporary rift in the fabric of space. A dark portal. The spell required an enormous amount of energy, energy that the mage barely had left.

But fear was a powerful fuel, and right now, he was absolutely terrified. Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings. The air in front of him ripped open. A swirling vortex of dark purple and black energy appeared, humming with unstable power. The edges of the portal crackled and sparked, threatening to collapse at any moment. It was not a clean, stable doorway like the ones used by trained portal mages.

It was a desperate, messy rip, the magical equivalent of breaking a window instead of using the door. But it would do. The mage pulled himself to his feet, his broken arm dangling uselessly at his side. He took one last look at the destroyed chamber, at the fading golden particles that had once been his comrades, at the shattered altar and the cracked walls. This place, which had been the secret heart of their operations in the region, was now just a tomb in the ground.

"I will warn them," the mage promised, his voice shaking but determined.

"I will tell headquarters everything. About Lancelot. About Karna. About what they can do. This is not over." He stepped through the dark portal. The vortex closed behind him with a sharp crack, like a bone breaking, and then the chamber was truly, completely empty. The silence that followed was heavy and absolute. There was no one left to hear it.

The golden particles of the four destroyed magicians continued their slow, quiet ascent toward the ceiling, like tiny stars floating up into a night sky that had no stars of its own. The cracked altar sat in the darkness, cold and lifeless. The broken stone seats were nothing but rubble. And somewhere far above, in the cold streets of ZulFarah's capital, the people went about their business, completely unaware that deep beneath their feet, a war in the shadows had just taken a very dark turn.

The surviving magician would reach his headquarters. He would deliver his warning. And the leaders of ZulFarah's Black Magic faction would learn, with absolute clarity, that the masked monster known as Lancelot was not a myth, not a rumor, and definitely not someone they could afford to ignore. The question was not whether Lancelot would strike again. The question was when, and where, and whether anyone would be left standing after he did.

And far, far away, in a warm, sunlit living room in the Belmontia Empire, Ken Eliot continued to sleep on the couch, completely unaware that his spirit servant had just wiped out an entire cell of Black Magicians before breakfast. A tiny drop of drool rolled down his chin. The blanket that Naomi had draped over him shifted slightly as he rolled over. And in his dreams, there were no dark magicians, no ancient weapons, and no world-ending threats.

There were only potatoes, sunshine, and the beautiful, beautiful sound of silence.

There were places in the world that did not exist on any map. Not because they were hidden, but because they were impossible. The Round Table Chamber was one of those places. It sat inside a pocket dimension, a tiny bubble of reality folded in between the spaces of the normal world, like a secret room hidden behind the walls of a house. There were no doors that led to it from the outside. There were no windows that looked into it.

The only way to enter was through a specialized teleportation spell known only to twelve specific people, and none of those people were the type to share secrets.