Knowledge Is Power: The Last Reader

The King rose out of the crater like the collapse had been an inconvenience rather than an attack — dust sliding off his shoulders in slow, unbothered sheets, robes barely disturbed, his expression carrying nothing that resembled pain at all. Only irritation.

A shame, he thought, surveying the wreckage of the corridor with something close to genuine regret, the specific, clinical regret of a man calculating a loss in strictly practical terms. Twenty years of patient, reliable use, and I never once suspected he had this in him. I could have saved him, if he hadn’t caught me thinking about something else entirely. Now I’ll have to find a new tool, and good ones are so tediously difficult to properly train.

He was still turning that particular inconvenience over, still faintly distracted by it, when the first blade found his throat.

It should have opened him from ear to ear. The assassin — fast, silent, her whole form shimmering briefly at the edges as she folded herself out of a shadow that shouldn’t have existed at this hour — put every ounce of her considerable, professional speed behind the strike, and the King’s own attention, still half-occupied with the tedious problem of a dead merchant, barely registered the danger before the blade had already connected.

It didn’t leave so much as a scratch.

She recoiled, disbelieving, already folding back into shadow to reposition, and her two companions took her place in the same breath — one from directly above, dropping soundless out of a shadow that had no business stretching that high against the midday sun, the other rising through the ground itself like the earth had simply agreed to let him pass through it unopposed. Blade after blade, strike after strike, each one delivered with the specific, patient discipline of guild-trained killers who had never once failed a contract they’d formally accepted.

None of it mattered. The King simply stood there, mildly, genuinely irritated by the interruption to his own thoughts, unmarked by every single strike.

"Rude," he said, to no one in particular, and that was the entire extent of his reaction.

The fourth attacker arrived without any fanfare at all — simply there, suddenly, at the King’s flank, a shadow-cloak settling around broad shoulders as though he’d stepped directly out of the wall behind him. He wasn’t, Milo understood even from his distant vantage point, using the same ability the assassins carried. He was copying it, the shape of their technique rendered slightly imperfect, slightly slower, the specific tell of a borrowed skill layered over someone else’s natural strength.

"You’re the Lazy Dragon," the King said, and for the first time all morning, something in his voice carried genuine, mild interest rather than idle contempt. "I’ve heard of you. Rarely bother fighting for rank, from what I understand. Family man."

"Yeah," the fifth-ranked fighter said, already circling, shadow-cloak rippling at his shoulders. "My wife’s scarier than you, for what it’s worth. You’re kind of overrated, honestly. Figured I’d just cut your head off quick and go home before dinner."

The King’s expression didn’t change at all.

"You’ll die first," he said, flat, unbothered, and the casual, total certainty in it landed harder than any threat could have.

He didn’t get the chance to prove it immediately. The second attacker announced himself before the sentence had even finished settling — dropping in fast and loud from directly overhead, a spear already descending in a strike that carried, Milo would learn only afterward, a genuinely terrifying mechanic behind it.

"I have come for your crown, my rival," the second-ranked fighter declared, spear connecting with a crack that split stone for twenty feet in either direction. "The die has come for me to claim my rightful place as first."

It should have staggered anyone. It barely registered against the King at all — but Milo, watching from a distance, understood the real danger wasn’t the first strike. It was the second, and the third, and every one after that, each successful hit doubling the fighter’s own offense and defense in turn, each successful dodge doubling his speed further still. A man who started merely dangerous and grew, with every passing second of survived combat, into something considerably worse.

"I don’t even know you," the King said, after the second strike landed and did precisely nothing but make the man’s own power climb higher.

The second-ranked fighter’s face went white with fury.

"You’re about to."

The sky shredded first—not with wind, but with a vacuum that stole the breath from every distance soldier’s lungs, followed by a thunderous crack as the Air General’s blades condensed into invisible scythes, carving canyons through the marble columns. The Earth General stomped, and the courtyard rebelled; bedrock splintered into a forest of obsidian spears, erupting in staggered, grinding waves meant to pin the King like an insect, each spike aimed with surgical precision at tendon and joint. Then the Fire General unleashed not a wall, but a miniature star—a collapsing orb of white-hot plasma that detonated sideways, melting stone to glass and turning shadows into screaming light. Three cataclysms, perfectly synchronized, converging on a single point of flesh and bone. The ground liquefied. The air burned. The world became a deafening, searing apocalypse.

And yet, at the very heart of that annihilation, the King stood with his hands clasped behind his back. He didn’t dodge. He didn’t flinch. He breathed in—and the fire dimmed, the wind stalled, the earth stilled. With a slow, deliberate step forward, he doubled the pressure. He didn’t just endure their elements; he learned them in that single, stolen moment, dissecting their frequencies like a musician reading a score. Now, as the exhausted generals gasped, their combined fury lay coiled in his palm, twice as dense, twice as volatile, and aimed squarely back at them—a mirror that reflect everything and the worst part, it was not even a skill.

Milo watched from far enough back that the details blurred at the edges, Appraisal straining to track everything happening at once. Nine of them. All at once. Assassins, fighters, generals, all coordinated exactly the way the plan demanded, hitting from every direction simultaneously instead of one at a time the way every previous challenger had made the mistake of doing.

And it still, somehow, wasn’t enough.

The King’s body simply refused to yield. Blows that should have shattered mountains connected and did nothing beyond mildly, visibly annoying him. Milo watched, disbelieving, as the earth-general’s spike bounced clean through the King’s own shoulder and the man barely flinched, more offended by the interruption than wounded by any wound itself.

What status does he even have, Milo thought, cold horror settling deeper with every passing second. This isn’t strength anymore. This is something else entirely. Nine of the most dangerous people currently alive, coordinated, focused, and he’s treating the whole thing like an inconvenience he hasn’t yet decided is worth properly addressing, He wanted to use Appraisal to check his stats, but he’d promised his friend he wouldn’t.

He held himself back, patient despite the horror climbing in his own chest, watching for the gap he needed. Not yet. I’m not at his level. I need them to drain something out of him first — stamina, patience, anything — before I risk what little edge I actually have.

The King didn’t seem to be draining at all.

He moved through the chaos with the same unhurried, contemptuous ease he’d shown from the very first punch a courtyard ago, catching the assassin’s fourth strike, her fastest yet, an entire flurry of blades delivered in the space of a single breath — and this time, instead of simply absorbing it, he caught her by the throat.

"Fine," he said, mild, almost bored, as the rest of the battle raged unbroken around them both. "You first. You’ve been rather excessive with the theatrics."

His speed, when it finally, fully arrived, made everything that had come before it look like children playing at combat. One instant she was struggling in his grip, shadow-form flickering desperately at the edges, trying to fold herself free through the same ability that had carried her this far. The next, his fist had already passed clean through her chest.

The sound of it — wet, total, final — silenced even the roaring chaos around them for one full, horrified second.

"Next," the King said, and let her body fall, and turned, already unbothered, already searching for whoever wanted to occupy his attention next.

One of the remaining assassins caught her before she hit the ground, cradling what was left of her with an urgency that had nothing professional left in it at all, and reached up with his free hand to tear his own mask away.

His eyes, when they finally settled on the King, carried a fury so total, so absolute, that it seemed to swallow every other sound on the battlefield around him — and yet no sound came from him at all. Not a scream. Not a single word. Just silence, complete and unnatural, the specific, unsettling quiet of a man whose rage had somehow reached past the point where voice could still contain it, as though the world itself had reached out and muted him at the exact moment his grief demanded to be heard the loudest.

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