Chương 345: Joyce - The Shepherd’s Scythe

I was a history student before the sky broke. Most people on Ferra do not know that about me. They see the scarred General of the Iron Covenant, the woman who leads heavy-infantry charges with a morning star, and they assume I was born from the dirt and mana. But I remember the books. I remember studying the rise and fall of empires, the way kings traded away the future for a slightly more comfortable present. That was why my naivety left such a foul taste in my mouth.

At the very beginning of the Integration, back when the Covenant was just a huddle of terrified humans hiding in the aftermath of the tutorials, Korg seemed like exactly the kind of man we needed. He was strong, he was vocal, and he promised us safety. He wanted the best for us — I genuinely believed that, once. But power is a parasitic organism. When the Kyorian ships appeared in our atmosphere, Korg didn't see an existential threat; he saw a negotiation partner. I watched him change over a year.

I watched him trade our planetary resource rights for golden breastplates. I watched him accept "Administrative Support" from House Vorr in exchange for forcing his own people into slavery. In my history books, they called that appeasement. And appeasement is just the act of feeding your friends to a tiger, hoping the tiger eats you last. I stayed with the Covenant not out of loyalty to Korg, but because I was hoping I could help him change.

Or maybe I was just waiting for someone who didn't view the Integration as a transaction. Someone who understood that when you are in a cage with a monster, you don't offer it your hand — you look for the weak point in its throat. Then I met Eren Kai. He didn't speak of destiny. He didn't promise us paradise or safety. He simply dismantled the warlords and built a market.

He didn't care about the historical significance of being human; he cared that we were efficient, loyal to one another, and capable of holding a line. He didn't have aspirations to become an emperor on a lavish throne; he just wanted to be the only person in the room who couldn't be ordered around. I liked that logic. It resonated with me. It was something I could actually follow without the bile of betrayal in my throat.

But standing on the obsidian ramparts of Obsidian Zero during our second week on Bir-Z, I feared I had miscalculated yet again. I watched Eren for six long, agonizing days. He sat at the base of the black flagpole like a statue of weathered stone. I watched his aura — the legendary Void-star pressure I'd grown to respect — flicker and dim like a lantern running out of oil.

He was spending every subjective minute funneling mana into the leaching-shields Leoric had designed and the ground-wardings the Dweorg had carved into the mesa. Every time Silas reported a scouting probe, Eren would "Heal" our warriors from afar, each flare of his powerful skill was accompanied by a visible stagger, a wheezing cough, or a puff of dark soot venting from his skin.

"General, look at his hands," Remus whispered beside me on the fifth night. We were staring down at the Lord from the battlement.

"He's shaking. If Malacor hits us tomorrow…"

"He won't fall," I said, though my morning star felt heavy as lead in my grip. I was a woman of prayer once, but God seemed to have a very different meaning nowadays.

"He can't fall." The dawn of the seventh day arrived like an executioner's hooded arrival. The Northern glass forest vanished behind a roiling tide of ashen smog. From that cloud stepped a nightmare made manifest: Malacor, the Sovereign of Ash. He was flanked by the Machinist Primus and the Titan Lord. And behind them — an elite strike force of fifty legends. Fifty Tier 7 and Tier 6 champions, their combined mana alone warping the auroras in the sky.

I saw them approaching fifty miles from our gates, and for the first time in years, the historical footnotes of my memory felt like my own epitaph. This was it. The total failure of the Ferran gamble. We were outmanned, outgunned, and our strongest cultivator was a spent husk in the dust. I squeezed my eyes shut for a second, a silent, desperate prayer for strength to die well. Then, the oppressive atmospheric weight just… vanished. The sound of my own heartbeat became the only noise in the valley.

I opened my eyes and looked down. Eren Kai wasn't slumped anymore. He somehow just 'transferred' into a standing position, as if the concept of 'getting up' was a physics equation he had just edited out. The exhausted grey fog of his aura collapsed into his ribs and exploded outward in a wave of black starlight that blotted out the demonic furnace on the horizon. Oily, black-red liquid fire began to bead on the stones around his boots, melting the supposedly indestructible obsidian floor of the fort.

It was a liquid ending. I felt a chill so violent it rattled my armor. This wasn't the man I had known for months. A strange energy began to emanate from him that seemed to have its own consciousness, radiating demanding urges. I saw Anna and Rexxar further along the wall. Anna wasn't reaching for her bow to save or stop him; she was leaning against the stone with a look of bored satisfaction. Rexxar was grinning, showing those terrifying lion-teeth.

The looks on their faces somewhat eased my terror, but I still didn't understand what was happening. Then a strange tall being with a smile that was far too wide emerged from the very shadow Eren was casting. Its long, spindly limbs were wreathed in screaming energy and he began to laugh. It was a high-pitched, melodic cackle that made the back of my brain itch. He shook his obsidian bell, the sound like glass being crushed in a mortar.

"Welcome to the Feast!" the horrific figure shrieked, his voice splitting the valley in half.

"I have been so excited to welcome our new Guests!" A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation. The ground of the valley — the dirt we had carefully trodden for days — suddenly broke. The air turned airless as a network of deep-blue Dweorg runes, previously invisible beneath our boots, flared to life across a twenty-mile radius. I recognized Jeeves' hand in the architecture — a global siphon grid meant to pin mana to the earth.

Out of that shimmering circle, horrors began to climb. First came ten Tier 7 Void Beasts — obsidian chimeras with heads like split fruit and thousand-lensed eyes that reflected the upcoming carnage. They moved like lightning, skipping the Lattice to appear directly in the center of the alliance's ranks.

"I hope you enjoy what we have served!" the being screamed, clapping his pale hands. A group of Argent Drake warriors tried to raise their electric shields, but their Tier 5 gear simply vaporized as the first Void beast walked through them. These creatures simply deleted the space their enemies occupied. A Silver-Drake lieutenant was engulfed by a black mass and, a microsecond later, he wasn't there anymore. Not even mist remained.

From the shadows above the fortress walls, three more signatures appeared — massive, monolithic presences that made the Titan Lord on the floor look like a child. Three Tier 8 Void Lords. They looked like fallen angels made of lightless smoke, carrying scythes that trailed black-red lightning. They descended from the clouds of ashen smog like harbingers of a terminal universe.

"Merciful Mother," I whispered, gripping the wall until my fingers bruised.

"Are these… Did he really summon these…?" Watching those abominations ravage the top elite factions of our sector felt unholy. I saw a Void Lord reach down and pluck a Sovereign of the Titans off its feet as if it were a pebble. The Giant tried to manifest his mace, triggering a skill that felt impossibly powerful, but the Void Lord didn't even flinch. It inhaled the Essence, siphoning the Titan's own Core until the mountain-giant shriveled into a grey, stony husk that shattered on impact with the floor.

I looked at the Ferran veterans around me. For three integrated years, we had fought to keep our humanity. We had struggled against alien lords who treated us as inventory. And here was Eren, unleashing creatures that didn't even obey the System's rules of war, butchering the very best of our Sector like common cattle for their lunch. A sharp, stabbing doubt pierced my chest. We must be like monsters to these people… Eren stood at the center of the courtyard, not lifting a finger.

He watched as his Void beasts ravaged the fifty elites. He didn't look heroic. He didn't look like a savior. He looked entirely apathetic, like an Auditor checking the numbers on a spreadsheet. Occasionally, he would manifest a black blade and step through a spatial rift to arrive behind a struggling Tier 7 demon-commander. He didn't give them a painful death. He would just slide the blade into their hearts and drink their essence, the black-red liquid on his skin glowing brighter with every kill.

The air was thick with the scent of ozone and the heavy, sweet rot of Void-waste. Malacor of the Cinder Throne, the Lord of the Titans, and the Machinist Primus were the only ones who could really fight back. I watched the Demon Lord transform into a living sun — a pillar of white-gold fire that actually managed to incinerate one of the Tier 8 Void Lords. The demon fought with masterful perfection, his horns blazing, striking with such velocity the air itself cracked in frustration.

The Machinist Primus deployed thousands of humming gear-swarms that stalled a second Void Lord, dismantling its shadow-armor piece by piece. They won their little micro-wars. They stood atop the mounds of grey soot that remained of our monsters, panting, leaking golden essence from their mouths. Malacor's charcoal armor was melted in places, his hands charred to the bone. The courtyard was silent now. The fifty elites were gone.

The siphons in the floor had turned from blue to a violent, hungry red, continuing to drink the lingering mana of the dead. Only then did Eren walk forward. He just took three leisurely steps toward Malacor. With every step, the air around him surrendered, the gravity multiplying until Malacor's surviving demons in the distance were crushed flat to the earth without him even glancing at them. Rexxar and Nyx materialized on Eren's flanks, appearing from the smoke like phantoms joining a master.

"Hah! My claws have been itching for blood!" Rexxar bellowed, his laughter booming across the valley like rolling thunder. He shouldered a claymore that looked like a jagged tooth from a Void-Titan, wreathed in the dark, heavy energy Eren was funneling into his frame.

"Tell me, tin-skin! Does a machine scream when its gears stop turning?" Nyx was a silhouette of silent death on Eren's other side, her shadow-silk robes rippling in a wind that didn't exist. She spun two light-eating daggers with an effortless, predatory grace. Malacor looked at the three of them, and I saw his poise shatter for a glimpse. His hands were trembling. The Godlike being who had demanded our eviction an hour ago now looked like a terrified student faced with an exam he hadn't studied for.

Eren didn't seem to notice the fear. Or if he did, he didn't show it. He tilted his head back, his black-and-red eyes looking over the fortress wall. He looked at us — the mix of human veterans from the Covenant, the S'skarr shamans from the swamplands, the Elven scouts from Aethelgard. Eren had never cared about the blood in our veins or the labels the System tried to paste on us. He hadn't asked if we were human before he offered us his strength.

He had simply accepted the existence of every refugee in this broken universe and woven them into a single, lightless Star. I looked at the black fire licking at Eren's knuckles and I finally understood why I followed him. Korg had offered us safety by kneeling. Eren was offering us sovereignty by standing in the furnace. It wasn't 'good' or 'heroic.' It was just the only logic left in a galaxy that didn't want us to have any.

"Enough stalling," Eren's voice boomed, a deep, melodic rumble that caused my morning star to resonate in agreement.

"You have wasted enough of our time. And since you didn't leave while the gate was open…" Eren raised his hand, and for the first time, I felt a skill that seemed completely different to all mana methods the System has taught us — a note of pure, resonant silence that signaled the end of the conversation.

"I think it's only fair that you help me stabilize the neighborhood by becoming my foundation." Malacor roared, his white-gold fire flaring in one final, glorious surge of suicidal pride. The Machinist Primus fired every gear-battery he possessed, turning the air into a storm of metal. The Titan Lord, holding a shattered fragment of the mountain, charged. But their light felt tiny beneath the shadow Eren was casting. I leaned over the rampart, a fierce smile finding my lips. My prayers weren't needed.

The Butcher had finally started his shift. And Bir-Z belonged to the Void Star.

"Hit them hard," I whispered, adjusting my grip. The black red inferno engulfed the courtyard, and as the kings met their hunger, I realized the System hadn't built this Frontier to find a new world for its Pioneers. It had built it as a dinner table for the monster who finally stopped asking for permission. Rexxar launched into a howl of laughter that blotted out the demon's screams. This wasn't a battle. It was the moment Ferra finally grew its teeth.

And as a student of history, I knew what happens next when the shepherd stops using a crook and starts using a scythe. Bir-Z was being claimed, one soul at a time.