Chapter 1136. Cities Bury People, It’s One of the Few Things They’re Designed For

Chapter 1136: 1136. Cities Bury People, It’s One of the Few Things They’re Designed For

The silence in the northern corridor stretched beyond the point of discomfort, warping into something grotesque and unnatural. Thousands of soldiers stood frozen, trapped in a tableau of impending slaughter.

The pale blue light bleeding from the crystal seams washed over the assembled armies, casting sickly shadows across their faces and transforming every tense jawline and widened eye into something inhuman and monstrous.

In that unbearable quiet, sensory details became hyperfocused: the rhythmic, maddening drip... drip... drip of water echoing from some unseen cavern far behind them; the metallic tang of oiled steel; the sour stench of unwashed bodies and adrenaline-soaked leather; the smell of wet stone that seemed to cling to the back of the throat.

Each heartbeat felt like a hammer blow against the eardrums.

Apollo Brightsoul finally broke the spell.

He didn’t shout. He didn’t charge.

Instead, he stepped forward from the vanguard of Aethelgard’s formation. His boots rang against the stone with three deliberate, measured paces that carried him away from the safety of his phalanx and into the exposed killing ground between the two armies.

His hands were held slightly away from his sides, not in surrender, but in the practiced, controlled gesture of a commander seeking parole before unleashing hell.

Valentina followed a heartbeat later. Her movements were serpentine and controlled, the faint shimmer of active defensive wards still clinging to her shoulders like a ghostly second skin.

Neither of them spared a glance at the thousands of lives hanging in the balance behind them. Their focus was singular, locked entirely on the masked figure at the heart of the Underlayer’s obsidian wall.

Flanking that figure were Cassandra and Gorvasha, standing like twin pillars of inevitable death, while Mordecai Vrael hovered half a step behind them, looking conspicuously out of place, a disgraced power seeking purchase in a new world order.

Apollo studied the masked commander with the clinical intensity of a predator cataloguing a rival.

For months, the name Lord Xerollion had been a ghost in the Apostle intelligence reports, a whispered myth of a man who had seized control of the Underlayer with impossible speed, restructuring its entire power dynamic before anyone could even realize the throne had changed hands.

The reports had called him a demon, a tyrant, and a god. But the reality standing before Apollo was far more unsettling.

The figure wasn’t a hulking brute like Gorvasha; he was built lean, corded with wiry muscle that suggested explosive speed rather than raw crushing power.

The mask covering the upper half of his face was deceptively simple, plain, unadorned, and utterly devoid of emotion. It didn’t scream menace; it refused to acknowledge it.

’What kind of man stands like that?’ Apollo wondered, his grip tightening imperceptibly on the hilt of his sword. ’No fidgeting... No shifting of weight... No nervous breath...’

’He isn’t bracing for a fight; he’s waiting for an inevitability.’

The stillness was absolute. Xerollion hadn’t moved an inch since the two armies had locked eyes. He stood as though he were carved from the very stone of the corridor itself.

Behind that mask, Apollo felt a gaze unreadable, ancient, and terrifyingly patient sweeping over him and Valentina. It was the look of a man who had already seen every possible outcome of this confrontation and found them all wanting.

The air between them grew colder, charged with a static that made the skin crawl. The two most powerful figures Aethelgard could muster and stood in the mouth of the lion’s den, facing a man who didn’t seem to fear death because he seemed to own it.

"So you’re the one who’s been hiding beneath our city all this time," Apollo said finally.

His voice broke the tension not with a shout, but with the controlled power of a man who commanded the very essence of life.

His life affinity lent his words a resonant, harmonic quality that carried effortlessly through the narrow passage, vibrating against the stone walls until even the soldiers at the very rear of both formations could hear his challenge.

"Lord Xerollion... We finally meet face to face."

"Apollo Brightsoul."

The response came from behind the mask, but it wasn’t the voice of the man they knew as Rex. This voice was lower, a gravelly register that seemed to vibrate from the floorboards of the world itself.

It was deliberately weighted, pitched to carry menace rather than any semblance of human warmth. "Your reputation reached me long before you did..."

"The songs of your bravery precede you."

"They tell me you lead this force with great courage, which I suppose is one way of describing how far you’ve marched into territory that was never yours."

Apollo’s eyes flashed with holy fire. "This territory sits beneath a city that has buried more of its own over the past several months than it did in the previous twenty years combined."

"We’ve seen the bodies, Xerollion... We’ve seen the aftermath."

"Cities bury people, Brightsoul," Xerollion replied, his tone conversational, almost bored. "It’s one of the few things they are actually designed for."

A sharp intake of breath hissed through the Aethelgard ranks. Valentina stepped forward half a pace, her boots clicking like a death knell against the stone.

Unlike Apollo’s measured diplomacy, her voice was a blade cold, accusatory, and honed by months of grief.

"Let’s not pretend this is some philosophical debate about urban planning," Valentina snapped, her eyes blazing with the fury of a woman who had watched her students die in terror. "There is a figure who calls himself The Undead Bringer, who has butchered apostles in their own beds, in places where our wards should have made them untouchable."

"There is an entity called Tremor who leveled our northern district, turning stone to powder and civilians to meat in a single afternoon."

"There is a half-dragon operative who nearly burned Aethelgard to its foundations."

"Every thread of every investigation, every drop of blood we’ve scraped off our streets, leads down here."

"Into your territory... Into structures you control."

She took another step, her hand hovering near the hilt of her weapon. "So I am going to ask you directly, in front of both our armies..."

"How much of that was the Underlayer’s doing?"

The question hung in the air like a guillotine blade suspended by a thread. For several agonizing seconds, the only sound was the distant dripping of water and the ragged breathing of thousands of terrified men.

During that pause, Xerollion’s head turned. It was a miniscule movement, barely an inch, toward Mordecai Vrael standing behind him.

It was too subtle for the soldiers to read, but to Apollo, it felt like a silent accusation. ’Is he looking at his accomplice? Or is he reminding him of his debt?’

"The Underlayer is not a single hand, Valentina," Xerollion said at last, his voice cutting through the tension like a scalpel. "It is two hundred thousand souls living in a dimensional layer that your city has treated as a garbage pit for eight centuries."

"You dump your sins here and expect them not to fester."

He took a single step forward, and the Underlayer soldiers behind him shifted in unison, their armor clanking with the sound of approaching doom. "Things move in the dark."

"Some of them move with my knowledge."

"Some of them move simply because the filth and corruption your people created made their movement inevitable."

"If you want me to stand here and confess to the specific authorship of every catastrophe that has ’inconvenienced’ Aethelgard, you’ll be disappointed."

His masked head tilted slightly, the dim crystal light catching the edge of his visor. "But if you want me to deny that the Underlayer has been involved in your recent suffering, you’ll be lying to yourself."

"And I have absolutely no interest in helping you maintain your delusions."