Read Novel Full Chapter 1306 True Undead
Chapter 1306 True Undead
"These aren't normal restraints…" Iris muttered with a grimace, tugging again until her bound wrists burned. The rope didn't give even a fraction.
Her eye slid sideways toward Felicity. "Wake Ria first."
Felicity stiffened. "R-Ria?" Her voice shook behind the mask. She turned to Lyra, still unconscious near the wall, then to Ria. Ria was bloodied and limp but breathing steadier. Lyra's chest barely moved.
Iris gave a small, firm nod. "Ria will wake faster."
Felicity swallowed hard, the sound audible even through her mask. She had no idea what she was doing. None of this was her world. She wasn't ready for cells, shattered bones, or murder at arm's length. But Iris was. She practically grew up in these exact conditions. The woman's sheer will felt like a force pressing against the princess's back, shoving her forward.
"I-okay…" she whispered.
She rushed toward Ria, stumbling once but catching herself with both knees. Instead of kicking or nudging with her feet - both things that would have been far easier - she awkwardly twisted around and sat with her back facing Ria, careful not to step on or jostle her.
It was clumsy, but it was painfully gentle.
She reached her bound hands backward, awkwardly tapping Ria's cheeks with the tips of her fingers. "Ria… please wake up… we need you!" Her voice was tiny, but she kept going, leaning back as far as she could without hurting the assassin.
One more tap.
Ria's eyes snapped open, sharp and instinctive.
Felicity yelped.
But before Ria could fully react, before anyone could speak…
*Clap!* *Clap!* *Clap!*
Clapping echoed across the cell block. Slow. Heavy. Pleased.
Everyone's heads whipped toward the doorway.
Three figures stood there.
Two living men, hard-faced, armored, and suddenly very still as their eyes landed on the corpse of their ally on the floor. Their jaws tightened.
"Damn it, Gregor!" one muttered.
"They killed him!" the other growled under his breath, glaring at Iris with undisguised hatred.
The clapping wasn't theirs.
It came from the woman between them.
She wasn't breathing.
Her skin was too pale, too sickly grey, stretched in that unnatural stillness only the dead carried. She wore layered, ornate robes edged in gold and embroidered with symbols. A black crown rested against her bald skull, carved from some heavy metal that swallowed the torchlight around it.
In her hand, she held a staff almost as tall as she was, topped with a polished red orb that pulsed with ominous light.
She was nothing like the undead they had fought before.
Not like the half-rotted foot soldiers.
Not like the pale mages who captured them, the failed liches.
Those things still carried pieces of their old lives in the way they moved. They clung to habits, flinched at noise, hesitated at blades. Even the stronger ones had that faint wobble common to failed undead, the broken creatures stuck between life and death.
This woman carried none of that.
Her presence alone felt final.
A proper lich.
One who had completed the ritual instead of being shattered by it.
Her whole posture was incredibly rigid; she did not move any of her joints in a way a mortal, or even a failed undead, would. She was incredibly still, like a proper prop of a pale corpse.
Only then did Feng notice the hollow sockets staring in their direction. They were empty and clean. Two smooth caverns where eyes should have been. Yet the lack of them created no sense of weakness, no room to imagine blindness.
There was nothing unfocused about the way she faced them.
Every girl in the cell felt it.
A sharp, constant pressure.
As if the lich tracked them with perfect awareness. Better than sight, even.
Feng suppressed the urge to shift in place.
Iris straightened despite the pain clawing at her body.
Felicity's breathing slowed into small, trapped clicks.
It felt as if the lich held the entire cell inside her hand, weighing each person with a calculation none of them could follow.
She was a true undead. A real immortal.
And every instinct they had screamed the same thing:
They were standing in the presence of something that had long stopped seeing humans as equals.
"Curses!" Iris hissed, hurrying up her motion to free Feng. The oriental teen did the same. Ria's hand flexed behind her back, testing her own restraints.
The two human men, full of anger and a clear desire for revenge, stepped forward with their fists pulled back to strike Iris and Feng.
"Stop."
The undead woman's voice cut through the cell. It was dry, hollow, and absolutely commanding. Her jaw didn't move at all when the sound came out, which only made the moment more unsettling. Both men halted mid-step, as if an invisible hand clamped around their spines.
"But, my lady! These cunts killed-"
A sound leaked from her throat.
It was not a word, not even a growl.
Instead, it was something that sounded horribly wrong to all living beings in the cell, the two men included.
A warped, low ripple of noise with no earthly origin, stretched and layered, as if several voices were trapped inside her chest and forced to vibrate at once.
The two men froze.
Their rage vanished under the weight of something far worse: pure instinct screaming that this was the last warning they would ever receive in their miserable existence.
They bowed at once, stepping back so fast their boots scraped across stone, 'somehow' no longer caring for the existence of their comrade's desecrated body.
Silence settled before she entered the cell in full.
Her robes brushed the floor as she passed over Gregor's corpse without even acknowledging it. The orb on her staff flickered once as she surveyed the prisoners, her motion smooth and eerily precise.
She looked over the cell like one might inspect a set of tools.
Her empty sockets stopped on Iris.
Then moved on to Feng, Felicity, Lyra, and finally Ria, who met the hollow gaze with an exhausted but sharpened glare.
The undead woman's expression did not shift. She reached into her pocket ring and brought out a book.