Chapter 59: My King
Lilith stood over the corpse when Malrik found her.
She hadn’t moved. Hadn’t so much as glanced up at the sound of his footsteps crunching over broken bark.
"This is your punishment," she said, quiet and even, to something that could no longer hear her. "For wearing my face on that hideous body of yours. That’s a sin only death forgives."
Malrik stopped beside her.
A smile pulled at the corner of his mouth despite everything—despite the blood drying along his jaw, despite the way his ribs pulled tight with every breath. Lilith looked no better. Her illusion form flickered at the edges, thin as smoke over a dying flame.
"You look terrible," he said.
"You look worse."
"Fair."
She glanced at him sideways. "Don’t worry. Once we’re back in the soul space, this heals in minutes. It always does."
Malrik nodded, already crouching beside the wreckage of the Hybrid’s shell.
"This," he murmured, running a hand along one cracked, obsidian plate, "is going to be a hell of an addition to the army."
"We were lucky." Lilith’s voice had gone flat, serious in a way it rarely did. "If that thing had reached Fallen rank before you killed it, we wouldn’t be standing here talking about additions. We’d be dead."
Malrik didn’t answer that.
He just smiled, wider this time, and pressed his palm flat against the ruined chest.
Three attempts.
That was all a resurrection ever gave him. Three, and no more—fail all of them, and the soul was gone for good, scattered past anything he could reach again.
He’d never lost a soul yet.
He didn’t intend to start with this one.
Malrik closed his eyes and pushed his mana down through his palm, reaching for whatever was left clinging to the wreckage beneath him.
Something answered.
And then something refused.
It wasn’t resistance the way a lock resists a key. It was a door braced shut from the other side, deliberate, total, like whatever remained of this thing had decided dying once was enough.
One.
The first attempt slipped through his fingers and was gone before he could tighten his grip on it.
A cold spike of something close to panic cut through the exhaustion in his chest. Two attempts left. He’d burned through more than half his reserve already.
If this fails again—
He didn’t let himself finish the thought.
He gathered everything he had left, every last scrap of mana still willing to answer him, and pushed a second time—harder, faster, with nothing held in reserve.
The door didn’t just open.
It tore.
Black matter surged upward out of the ruined shell, but it didn’t stay ruined. Cracked plating smoothed itself over as it rose, wounds sealing closed, the borrowed, ill-fitting proportions of the thing that had died here folding back into something whole. Pre-battle. Untouched.
Except it wasn’t untouched.
Thin lines of emerald light traced themselves across the smooth black surface like veins under skin, pulsing faintly in time with something Malrik couldn’t hear. Where a face should have been, three pale masks hovered instead—and behind them, where eyes had no business existing at all, two points of emerald fire opened and fixed on him.
It rose to its full height.
And then it folded itself down, low and deliberate, an enormous body bending into a bow that belonged on a throne room floor, not a ruined forest clearing.
"My king."
The voice came from everywhere on its body at once, and nowhere in particular. Reverent. Certain. Like the words had been waiting a long time to be said to someone worth saying them to.
A pale line of text unrolled across Malrik’s vision.
[Faceless successfully resurrected.]
[This soul has met the requirements for naming.]
[Would you like to assign a name?]
[Yes / No]
Malrik stared at the kneeling shape a moment longer, chest still heaving from what the second attempt had cost him.
Malrik remained silent for a long moment, his gaze fixed on the black masks floating before him.
A name...
It deserved a name.
His thoughts drifted back to a world that no longer existed for him. Back to Earth. There had once been an old legend about a god of trickery who could become anyone he wished, wearing countless faces as though they were nothing more than masks. A being known for deception, illusions, and endless transformations.
Loki.
Malrik let the name linger in his mind for a moment before giving it a slight twist.
"...Lokris."
It sounded older. More fitting for the creature before him.
[Yes]
The status window opened without him asking.
[ Name: Lokris ]
[ Type: Faceless ]
[ Potential: Rare★★★★★ ]
[ Evolution Required Points: 0 / 900 ]
[ Total EP: 2,700 ]
Malrik went very still.
Zero out of nine hundred.
He already had two thousand seven hundred sitting untouched.
An idea landed in his chest before his mind had finished catching up to it, sharp and electric, the kind of idea that didn’t leave room for second-guessing.
He didn’t think.
He just opened the panel, fed nine hundred points into the empty bar without a second’s hesitation, and pressed forward.
The reaction was immediate.
The emerald veins along Lokris’s body flared white-hot for an instant, then collapsed inward, dragging a black-green aura up out of nothing to wrap itself around him layer by layer until the whole kneeling silhouette had folded into a single, massive sphere.
The sphere pulsed.
Not glowed. Pulsed.
Malrik watched it contract and expand, contract and expand, with the same unhurried rhythm as something alive. A heartbeat, if a heartbeat could be the size of a boulder.
The excitement that had carried him this far cracked, just slightly, under a colder thought pushing its way up from underneath.
We’re standing in the middle of a monster-infested forest.
And I just started something that’s going to take time.
Time is exactly what we don’t have out here.
Every instinct he owned went taut at once.
Around him, the wreckage of the clearing—the shattered trees, the cratered earth, the drying blood still cooling in the dirt—suddenly felt less like the aftermath of a fight he’d already won, and more like a dinner bell for whatever else the forest had left.
The black-green sphere kept pulsing, patient and slow, giving no sign that it cared how exposed the three of them had just become.
"Lilith."
She was already moving before he finished saying her name, falling into step beside the pulsing sphere without needing to be told twice.
"Cover us," he said. "All of it. I don’t want so much as a footprint visible from outside this clearing."
"Give me a moment to admire you being competent for once, and then, yes. No problem."
Her hands traced a slow half-circle through the air. The broken clearing folded in on itself—not vanishing, just bending, the way water bends light. From the outside, there would be nothing here now but undisturbed forest and the faint, uninteresting hum of undergrowth.
The Spider Queen took up position at the treeline without being asked, every eye fixed outward, watching the dark for anything the illusion couldn’t fool.
Malrik summoned the rest of his bound souls into a loose circle around the sphere. Wolves settled into the shadows without a sound, the Venom Spiders clung to the surrounding trees.
Satisfied that nothing would disturb it, Malrik lowered himself onto the cold ground beside the pulsing sphere.
At last... he allowed himself to breathe.
His gaze drifted toward the canopy overhead.
In another life, on another world, he had been nothing more than a laborer struggling to survive. Every day had been spent carrying burdens heavy enough to break his back, earning barely enough to put food on the table. No one had known his name. No one had looked at him twice.
Back then, being called "Young Master" would have sounded like the punchline to a cruel joke.
Yet now...
An ancient soul had knelt before him.
My King.
The words echoed through his mind once more.
Malrik couldn’t help but let out a quiet laugh.
"Life really does have a strange sense of humor."
Once, he had struggled simply to feed himself.
Now, even his own souls called him a king.
His smile lingered as he looked at the steadily pulsing sphere beside him.
And for the first time since entering the forest, Malrik simply closed his eyes and enjoyed the silence.