Chapter 113: The Unpermitted Fracture: The King’s Wrath Awakens

The low, rhythmic thudding of the steam carriage’s pistons became a secondary vibration, swallowed entirely by the deep, structural groaning of the tectonic plates beneath the mountain path.

Rrrrrumble.

The midnight darkness was no longer absolute.

From miles away, the horizon had dissolved into a colossal, bleeding laceration that tore the sky completely open.

The volcanic eruption at the Obsidian Ridge was fully visible now, a towering wall of white-hot magma and incandescent ash that spewed upward against the suffocating canopy of black glass.

The sheer scale of the fire turned the night into a distorted, hellish theater. Rivers of liquid stone cascaded down the jagged mountain shelves, casting an intense, pulsing crimson glow that lit the entire basin with a violent, shadowless clarity.

The heat was already riding the wind, a dry, sulfuric backdraft that carried the taste of cooked iron and scorched air.

The earth beneath the caravan was violently convulsing, the narrow stone road buckling and cracking as small fissures hissed open along the cliffs, venting pale green vapors into the night.

Crack-snap.

Yet, the massive, war-like steam carriage did not slow down.

Its heavily riveted iron hull groaned against the pressure, its giant, spiked wheels grinding relentlessly over the shifting rock, biting deep into the fracturing stone to force its way forward.

The beast of brass and iron moved with the single-minded stubbornness of its master inside, tearing through the tremors like a battering ram.

Then, the momentum died.

SCREEECH-GRIND.

The brakes of the lead transport locked with a deafening, metallic scream that threw a massive cloud of silver sparks into the dark.

The colossal vehicle groaned to a violent, shuddering halt, its heavy iron framework tilting slightly as the forward wheels jammed against an insurmountable barrier.

Behind it, the ocean of midnight-blue naval uniforms reacted in perfect, terrifying unison.

Halt.

With a single, sharp pull of the reins, the hundreds of secret Lord Militants brought their ink-black warhorses to a dead stop at the exact same point.

The horses snorted, their iron shoes clicking against the hot stone as they shifted, their nostrils flaring against the sulfuric stench, but the riders remained absolutely frozen in their stirrups like a wall of silent statues.

The reason for the stop was absolute. The mountain path had simply ceased to exist.

Directly ahead, the road terminated in a massive, jagged drop-off... a dead end where the entire western shelf had fractured away, plunging down into a boiling, churning basin of pure, liquid magma.

The glowing sea of sulfur-blood rolled and popped twenty feet below, spitting large bubbles of white-hot stone that burst with a wet, heavy plop against the remaining rock face.

Inside the carriage, the sudden lack of motion triggered an explosion of raw, toxic fury.BANG.The heavy iron door didn’t just swing open; it was thrown back with such violence that the brass hinges warped against the frame.

Lord Vilucious stepped out into the pulsing red light.

He didn’t use the stairs.

He lunged out of the carriage with an absolute, terrifying lack of fear, his royal boots striking the trembling ground with a heavy, deliberate thud that seemed to challenge the very vibration of the earth.

His light grey eyes were no longer fluid; they had hardened into two pieces of polished flint, catching the raw reflection of the volcanic fire until they looked like twin craters of burning ash.

His chest rose and fell in jagged, heavy heaves as he stared across the boiling abyss at the mountain that had dared to fracture without his decree.

"If you possess the hunger to swallow your own creator, then try!" Vilucious roared, his voice cutting through the mechanical hiss of the boilers and the deep thunder of the eruption like a splitting wedge.

The shout bounced off the black glass sky, layered with the terrifying weight of his unhinged vanity. "Bleed for me! Shatter for me! But you will never belong to yourself!"

He didn’t hesitate.

He took three large, aggressive steps forward, his long leather boots clearing the loose gravel until he stood directly at the jagged edge of the dead-end floor, right where the stone sheared off into the liquid fire.

Behind him, the silent command passed through the air like an infection.

The first line of secret militants didn’t wait for a spoken word. Operating on the absolute, robotic loyalty of the court, the lead soldier urged his black warhorse forward.

Clack-clack.

The horse didn’t whinny. It didn’t balk at the heat. It leaped straight off the precipice into the white-hot basin below.

SPLASH-CRACKLE.

The moment the beast and the rider hit the churning sulfur-sea, the intense thermal shock caused the horse’s iron shoes and the militant’s pristine navy armor to warp instantly.

The dark blue uniform vanished into a brief, violent flash of black grease and white smoke as the magma consumed them whole in less than a second, leaving nothing but a momentary ripple on the thick, glowing surface.

Vilucious watched the soldier dissolve, and then he began to laugh.

"Ahahaha... Hahahahaha!"

It was a sharp, unhinged sound--- a manic, metallic cackle that echoed off the high rock faces like a rhythmic clapping.

He didn’t shrink back from the edge. He didn’t order the others to stop.

Instead, he took another step forward, his boots stepping directly into the small, red-hot cracks where the magma was beginning to seep up through the remaining rock.

The heat should have incinerated the leather. The volcanic backdraft should have blistered his pale skin. But as his soles pressed into the burning stone, the red light beneath his heels suddenly curdled.

It didn’t burn him.

The fire retreated from his touch, the liquid magma cooling into a dull, blackened crust the exact moment his weight shifted onto it.

Nothing happened to him.

The heat didn’t mark his clothes; the ash didn’t settle on his hair. He walked through the literal throat of the disaster like a man strolling through a dead garden, proving with every step why this entire geography belonged exclusively to his name.

He stopped at the very tip of the broken ledge, his shadow stretching long and dark across the glowing lake below.

"My stone," he whispered, his voice dropping into a terrifyingly quiet purr that somehow carried over the roar of the eruption. "My sky."

With a sudden, violent movement, Vilucious lifted his right leg and stomped his boot down into the center of the fracturing ground.

BOOM.

The impact didn’t just rattle the rock; it triggered a localized, magical shockwave that drove straight into the heart of the stone.

A deep, crystalline grinding sound tore through the earth as the magical feedback caught the royal blue energy he had impacted on the whole Kingdom, also earlier on Florianthum’s too.

Creeeeeech-snap.

From the very point where his boot met the marble-veined rock, the ground didn’t shatter--- it crystallized.