Lord: Starting with Biological Modification

Chapter 68: Chapter 64: The Cross

Inside the castle of Shiyan Town, the air was heavy enough to drip, thick with the smell of sweat, ale, and an unspeakable tension.

Glenn was curled up on the ground, the breastplate of his armor deeply caved in.

Every breath tugged at his wounds, and the spit he coughed up was flecked with blood—he had just finished giving an utterly humiliating report.

The great hall was deathly silent, the only sound the CRACKLE of firewood bursting in the brazier, mercilessly mocking the assembled warriors.

Ola Stonebeard rose from his stone seat, his heavy iron boots pacing across the floor. Each step felt like it was treading on the hearts of all who were present.

He clutched the shard of glass he had confiscated from Glenn, his knuckles white from the force of his grip.

He rubbed it over and over, as if trying to parse the source of his utter humiliation from its faint, peculiar odor.

He stopped in front of Glenn, his voice terrifyingly calm. "Tell me again. What did it smell like?"

This calm terrified Glenn more than any roar. He shuddered, burying his head even lower. "M-my lord... it smelled... like horse piss..."

"Horse piss?" Ola laughed, a hoarse, twisted sound. "My Rock Breaker Knights. Ten fully equipped Heavy Armor Knights, scared shitless by a splash of horse piss?"

He suddenly raised his foot, the tip of his boot expertly flicking a stray stone from the floor. The pebble whizzed through the air and slammed into a nearby Knight’s helmet.

A loud CLANG!

The Knight staggered from the impact but remained rooted to the spot, not daring to even let out a stifled grunt.

Everyone else in the hall lowered their heads even further.

"The wall... It was the wall!"

Glenn latched onto the thought as if it were a lifeline. "My lord, that wall... it’s unnatural! Our charging formation was broken the moment we approached. The brothers couldn’t put any force into it, and its flanks were full of goddamn firing slits! It’s not a wall, it’s... it’s a death trap!"

"A trap?" Ola murmured, as if a realization had just dawned on him.

He turned, walked to the center of the hall, picked up a poker from the fire, and began to draw on the ground.

"Like this... one corner, facing another corner... if you attack from here, you can hit the men at the base of that wall..."

What he had drawn was a crude diagram of a bastion.

Everyone in the hall stared, dumbfounded.

’Their Lord Baron, a man who only knew how to reason with an axe, was actually analyzing tactics?’

After he finished, Ola stared at the scrawls on the floor, silent for a long time.

He hated this feeling. It wasn’t the defeat itself, but the humiliation of being played for a fool, of being intellectually bested.

That pretty boy had contaminated the sacred battlefield with "tricks," turning a warrior’s strength and glory into a joke.

It was like the taunts from his childhood, when those pure-blood Dwarves would point at the eyes he inherited from his human mother—eyes that weren’t "dwarven" enough—and sneer, ’You’re a half-breed, not one of us.’

"I don’t need tricks, and I don’t need formations!" he roared, snapping the fire poker in two. His voice was hoarse and decisive.

"Sell everything of value! The iron ingots, the bolts of cloth—go to the merchant’s guild and trade it all for fire oil! Put the oil in clay pots! Drag out the catapults!"

"In three days!" His surprisingly delicate eyes burned with a world-destroying madness. "I want every blade of grass and every last vine on that land to howl in the flames!"

"I’m not walking into his trap. I’m going to burn him and his wall down to cinders, roast them until they’re nothing but charred meat!"

"RAAAGH!" The long-repressed Knights finally erupted in a beast-like roar.

’This was the Baron they knew!’

’Crushing everything with pure, unadulterated violence!’

Ola walked over to the hide map in the corner of the hall, plucked a red-hot rod from the brazier, and stared at the circle representing Newly Town. His expression condensed into pure malice.

The rod moved slowly, the hide curling and blackening under its touch, emitting a plume of acrid smoke.

He pressed down hard, burning a large X over the circle.

...

A red X landed just north of the circle representing Newly Town.

The nib of the pen paused, the ink glistening like blood in the lamplight.

Velin stood before a map, a red quill in his hand.

His fingertip slowly traced a path across the map from Shiyan Town to Newly Town, finally coming to rest on a rugged area named the Wailing Hills.

"A humiliated bull doesn’t think," Velin murmured, his voice making no ripples in the empty room. "He’ll choose the fastest, most direct route, risk everything to seek a cathartic and utter destruction."

Finished with the map, Velin turned and walked deeper into his laboratory.

Although the laboratory air was thick with the complex aroma of various vaporized Alchemy Potions,

the unique stench of dragon dung—a mixture of sulfur and ammonia—still persisted, a background noise for the room.

Velin hadn’t slept properly in days.

Several Magic Lamps lit the area as brightly as day, illuminating his somewhat pale face.

Right now, his wine-red eyes were brighter than any of the lamps.

Before him, inside a massive iron enclosure, dozens of monsters lay quietly dormant.

They were no longer the Level 1 magical insects they had been a few days ago, the Rotten-Carapace Dung Beetles.

Now, each specimen stood one and a half meters tall and was nearly two and a half meters long, resembling a fleet of heavily armored chariots.

Their solid black chitinous carapaces were thick and hard, with menacing barbs sprouting from their joints and backs. A sharp horn on each head glinted coldly in the light.

These were the Bader Dung Beetles, Level 2 Magical Beasts that had been selectively bred with a core diet of dragon dung supplemented with other humus.

Velin’s gaze was fixed on the most unique one among them.

It was a specimen housed by itself in a special crystal case, only half the size of its kin—about half a meter long.

Its carapace, however, possessed a deep, Obsidian-like quality.

This was the specialized queen.

Velin extended his hand, offering it a mushroom soaked in an Enlightenment Potion.

The queen, unlike its kin, did not lunge forward to tear at the offering. Instead, it used two nimble antennae to carefully curl the food from Velin’s palm. A glimmer of wisdom shone in its massive compound eyes.

With the help of Valerius’s high-grade Alchemy Potions, its intelligence had been elevated to a whole new level, high enough to understand and carry out relatively complex commands.

It was like a shepherd dog, and the massive male beetles were its loyal, if dim-witted, flock.

Velin withdrew his hand, his index finger unconsciously making the motion of pushing up a pair of glasses on the bridge of his nose.

’Newly Town is the foundation for all my research projects, the cornerstone of my existence in this cruelly exploitative world, and the first proving ground for my grand blueprint for the future.’

’This place is sacred and inviolable.’

’Any attempt to meddle with it is an attempt to obstruct my experimental protocols, to delay my research.’

’It must be met with the most thorough and decisive counterattack.’

’If anyone dares to point a finger, I’ll chop off their arm. If anyone dares to extend an arm, I’ll amputate everything below the neck.’

’The threat must be utterly crushed, in a way that will make any would-be observers’ blood run cold.’

’To make an example of them.’