The landing of the eighty void corsair skiffs was the quietest aerial disaster in the history of Aethelgard.
Thanks to the warm, buoyant thermal cushion generated by Solitude Spire's ambient sun-bloom, the eighty dead vessels did not crash into splintered kindling.
Instead, they slid out of the sky like greased sleds, skimming gently over the outer rim of the southern gorge.
*Shhhhhh-thump.*
The lead vessel, the *Bone-Render*, settled onto the broad clover lawn twenty paces from the stone well.
Its ironwood keel carved a shallow, two-inch groove through the turf, stopping so smoothly that an open mug of grog on the quarterdeck capstan didn't even spill.
Behind it, the remaining seventy-nine skiffs glided into the lower terraces and surrounding meadows. They came to rest in neat, parallel rows across the green clover, their black sails fluttering uselessly in the gentle mountain breeze.
For five breathless seconds, dead silence smothered the yard.
Then, the deck hatches slowly creaked open.
Dread-Commodore Kaelen the Flayer crawled out onto the grass on his hands and knees.
The terrifying pirate lord who had burned thirty-two trade-ports and drowned four imperial squadrons was trembling so violently that his pelagic drake scales rattled like dried peas in a gourd.
His ruby sight-lens was glazed with sheer, paralyzed terror. His hands, which had decapitated high-tier spellblades without blinking, were clawing hysterically at the grass.
Behind him, First Mate Skarr tumbled over the gunwale, landing face-first in a patch of crushed buttercups. Captain Vane and Captain Grak followed, accompanied by seventy-seven other hardened void captains.
Eighty ruthless corsair commanders, whose names caused merchant admirals to wake in cold sweats, lay groveling in the dirt.
They were weeping.
Real, hot, terrified tears streamed down their scarred, weather-beaten cheeks, dripping into the clover.
They knew what had just happened.
Every captain in the fleet understood void-crystal engineering. To shatter a Nether-Quartz crystal required a concentrated imperial siege battery firing for ten uninterrupted minutes.
Yet someone on this peak had targeted eighty separate crystals across fifty miles of turbulent sky.
They had pierced eighty engine compartments through microscopic hull tolerances, delivering eighty pinpoint thermal pulses that melted the indestructible cores without scorching a single deck board or singeing a single pirate's hair!
That was not warfare.
That was absolute, godlike omniscience.
It meant the master of this mountain could have vaporized all three thousand pirates into subatomic dust with a flick of his wrist, but had chosen instead to drop them gently into his yard like harmless stray kittens.
Kaelen slammed his forehead into the turf, his voice breaking into a frantic, shuddering sob.
"Spare us!" Kaelen wept, gouging his fingers into the black topsoil. "Merciful Emperor of the Heavens, spare our wretched lives! We were blind dogs! We were ignorant worms crawling through the void! We did not know this sacred summit was the throne of the Primordial Sun God!"
First Mate Skarr slammed his forehead down right beside him.
"Spare our souls!" Skarr wailed, his voice rising toward nine decibels. "We will burn our ships! We will take the vows of holy hermits! Only grant us your divine—"
A shadow fell over them.
Instead of warm morning sunlight, a suffocating chill of pure necrotic slaughter dropped the local temperature by thirty degrees in a heartbeat.
Kaelen froze mid-sob.
He slowly lifted his tear-stained face from the grass.
Towering over him was a spectral entity draped in tattered shadow robes.
The entity wore a stained burlap work apron tied around its waist with frayed twine. In its right skeletal claw, it held a pair of rusted iron pruning shears. In its left arm, it carried a bundle of wooden rakes and iron weeding forks.
Its crimson eyes burned with cold, apocalyptic murder.
Lord Nether-Bane leaned down until his rotting, spectral nose was two inches from Kaelen's face.
"SHUT UP," Nether-Bane hissed.
The words were not spoken aloud. They were forced directly into the sea of consciousness of all eighty captains as a blood-curdling psychic needle.
"Silence your filthy, howling mouths," the Ghost King whispered through gritted fangs. "If you raise your voice above five decibels again, I will personally pull your souls through your nostrils and feed them to the mountain pigs."
Kaelen choked on his breath, his heart seizing in his chest.
He stared at the rotting face, the glowing red eyes, and the crown of wailing shadow mist hovering above the entity's brow.
The mechanical ruby eye in Kaelen's skull whirred wildly, matching the facial structure against the empire's oldest historical bounties:
【Target: Lord Nether-Bane】 【Title: The Ghost King of the Abyssal Void】 【Historical Record: Calamity-Tier Entity. Slaugthered Three Imperial Dynasties. Eradicated from Mortal Annals 10,000 Years Ago.】 【Current Status: Solitude Spire Head Groundskeeper】
Kaelen’s jaw unhinged. His tongue turned to dry leather.
"L-Lord... Nether-Bane...?" Kaelen stammered in a terrified, soundless gasp. "The... the Sovereign of the Nether World...?"
First Mate Skarr clutched his own throat, suffocating in sheer disbelief.
This was the legendary Ghost King! The ancient monster who had swallowed entire continents in necrotic mist!
And here he was... wearing a grease-stained burlap apron... holding a bundle of garden tools!
Nether-Bane kicked a heavy wooden crate of spare tools off his shoulder.
*Thud.*
The crate landed in front of the eighty groveling captains. Inside were dozens of rusty hand trowels, iron hoes, wooden wheelbarrows, and alchemical pruning snips.
"Grab a tool," Nether-Bane growled, his voice trembling with manic, desperate fury.
Kaelen blinked through his tears. "A... a tool, my lord?"
"A tool!" Nether-Bane jabbed the tip of his pruning shears toward the far end of the lawn. "Senior Brother is taking his post-breakfast nap on the covered porch! He has been asleep for twelve minutes!"
The Ghost King grabbed Kaelen by the collar of his pelagic scale coat, hauling the massive pirate to his knees.
"Listen to me, you ignorant sky vermin," Nether-Bane hissed, his crimson eyes bulging with absolute sincerity. "Three weeks ago, I flew a fleet of one million specters over this mountain. Senior Brother sat in his floating chair, reached down, and swatted us with an old straw slipper at Mach 55."
Kaelen gasped, his blood running cold as ice.
"Mach 55..." Kaelen whimpered. "With... with a shoe?"
"With a three-copper river-reed slipper!" Nether-Bane shook the pirate captain violently. "My fleet was reduced to ash in one point two seconds! My Ten-Thousand-Year Soul-Pearl is currently being used as a paperweight for bakery invoices on his kitchen table!"
Nether-Bane shoved Kaelen toward the tool crate.
"Senior Brother's Dao is the Dao of Absolute Inaction," the Ghost King warned, pointing a shaking claw at the dandelion patches. "He desires two things in this universe: complete silence, and a lawn free of crabgrass."
He leaned in, his voice dropping into a horrifying rasp:
"If one of you drops a pebble... if one of you snaps a twig too loud... or if Senior Brother wakes up at two o'clock and steps on a thistle with his bare feet... NONE OF US SURVIVE UNTIL SUNSET."
Nether-Bane shoved a rusty iron hoe into Kaelen's trembling hands.
"Now grab your tools, get on your knees, and start pulling weeds! If I see a single dandelion head left on this lawn by noon, I will feed your marrow to the Thunder Gryphon!"
Eighty hardened void captains did not hesitate for a microsecond.
There was no pride. There was no hesitation. There was only the primal, frantic instinct of prey trying to survive in the den of a sleeping dragon.
Dread-Commodore Kaelen gripped the rusty hoe with both hands, dropped onto his knees, and began furiously, soundlessly hacking at a patch of crabgrass.
First Mate Skarr grabbed an iron trowel and began digging out wild thistles with tears streaming down his face.
Captain Vane took a pair of hand snips, trimming the clover edges around the stone well with surgical precision.
Captain Grak grabbed a wooden rake and began smoothing the gravel path, holding his breath to prevent the stones from making a scraping sound.
Up on the porch steps, Lyra Ashford stood with her silver rapier sheathed at her hip.
Her white training robes fluttered in the breeze, her golden eyes watching the eighty pirate captains crawling through the dirt with cold, regal approval.
*Senior Brother's wisdom is beyond mortal calculation,* Lyra thought, her heart swelling with boundless reverence. *Why spill blood and create unsightly corpses in the front yard? By sparing their lives, he transformed eighty savage void corsairs into disciplined, unpaid agricultural laborers! His mercy is not weakness... it is supreme logistical efficiency!*
Beside the stone well, the Thunder Gryphon opened one golden eye, watched Commodore Kaelen delicately pluck a weed three inches from its tail, gave a quiet, dismissive snort, and went back to sleep.
Up on the porch windowsill, Barnaby’s internal balance wheel ticked steadily: *tick... tick... tick...*
And in the center of the covered porch, resting inside his Zero-Gravity Recliner, Felix Vance shifted his weight under the faded cotton quilt.
He let out a long, drowsy sigh.
He reached up, adjusted the ergonomic neck pillow with his left hand, and gave his lips a sleepy smack.
"Those scarecrow animations are pretty smooth," Felix muttered, his voice muffled by the blanket. "Devs really nailed the base defense balance. Farm game is surprisingly relaxing..."
On his lap, the screen of the AetherDeck woke up for a brief moment, displaying a cheerful golden report:
Felix didn't see the screen.
He was already drifting back down into the warm, heavy depths of an uninterrupted morning nap.
Down in the yard, eighty terrifying void pirates continued weeding on their hands and knees, terrified of breathing too loud, while the master of the heavens slept soundly above them.