Chapter 630: The Lullaby Of The Singing Hollows
Chapter 630: The Lullaby Of The Singing Hollows
But there was still the matter of the New Year. Marcus clapped his hands, drawing everyone’s attention.
“If you’re all so worried about whether the boy is dead or alive.” He announced cheerfully. “I’ll cut him into pieces after the countdown, and you can examine the remains yourselves!”
A round of appreciative chuckles rippled through the crowd.
“But before that.” Marcus continued. “We have something more important. It’s not long until midnight. So I’d like to ask…”
“…does anyone have any New Year’s resolutions? Dreams? Aspirations they’d like to share?”
The crowd buzzed with excitement.
“I want to buy a mansion in the capital!”
“A fleet of luxury carriages for me!”
“I’m going to acquire three more companies before spring!”
“I want to propose to my beloved—she’s been waiting long enough!”
Others offered darker wishes, their voices dripping with malice.
“I want to blow up a school full of children!”
“I’m going to enslave an entire village and keep them in my basement!”
“I want to sleep with a Battle Angel.” The speaker’s voice turned reverent. “That’s something I definitely want to do!”
Another voice, bolder than the rest.
“I want to sleep with Lady Charlotte herself!” He guild leader leered at Charlotte’s hunched form. “After everything’s done, maybe I’ll get my chance!”
More wishes followed, some mundane, some monstrous, all spoken with the casual cruelty of people who had abandoned their humanity long ago.
Marcus beamed, holding Amanda’s hand.
“Wonderful! Simply wonderful! I love seeing so much ambition!”
He turned toward Charlotte, his smile sharpening.
“But what about our guest of honor? Lady Charlotte?”
He approached her slowly, savoring the moment.
“What exactly is your New Year’s resolution? We don’t have much time left, so you’d better say it now. And don’t worry—”
His voice dropped to a creepy whisper.
“—after the sacrifice we just performed, the spirits are stronger than ever. Your wish will definitely come true!”
Marcus expected her to ignore him, scream at him, or to break down in tears again.
What he didn’t expect was for her to slowly stand up and turn toward him.
And the moment her face came into view, Marcus felt a chill run down his spine.
Her bright pink eyes—once so full of warmth and defiance had gone impossibly dark.
There was no light in them anymore. No hope. No fear.
Just an emptiness so profound it seemed to swallow the light around her.
And beneath that emptiness…
Rage.
Rage so pure, so absolute, that it had transcended emotion entirely.
Charlotte spoke in a voice that was utterly cold and lifeless.
“You want to know my New Year’s resolution?”
She let out a soft, eerie chuckle, her dead eyes never leaving his.
“It’s to kill you, Marcus. To kill you in the most horrifying, gruesome way imaginable.”
Marcus’s throat went dry.
But Charlotte wasn’t finished. Her gaze shifted to Amanda, who flinched under the weight of that empty stare.
“And you too, you fucking whore.”
Amanda’s face contorted with offense, but Charlotte continued before she could respond.
“I want to kill you as well. But not quickly. I always thought you had such nice, fluffy hair.” Her smile widened slightly. “I want to tear your scalp off and force it down your throat while you scream.”
The room’s temperature seemed to drop.
Charlotte turned to the doctor who had been watching the proceedings with clinical interest.
“And you. I want to harvest every single one of your organs. I’ll donate them to medical students so they can learn from your screams.”
Next was the actor who had been laughing at Mika’s suffering moments ago.
“You play psychopaths in your movies. But I want to see you become the victim. I want them to use real knives, not props. I want to watch them peel the flesh from your bones while the cameras roll.”
The actor’s face went pale.
One by one, Charlotte addressed the crowd, her voice never wavering, her words growing more graphic and brutal with each passing moment.
“I want to pull out your intestines and strangle you with them.”
“I want to remove your eyeballs and make you eat them.”
“I want to flay your skin inch by inch while you beg for death.”
“I want to drown you in the blood of your own children.”
Every sentence was a horror. Every word was poison.
The crowd, which had been so boisterous had fallen completely silent.
The only sound was Charlotte’s voice, flat and lifeless, painting pictures of death and torment that made even these monsters blanch.
“I want all of you to die.” She said finally, her voice carrying across the now-silent crowd. “But that’s not enough. I want your friends to die. Your families. Everyone you love.”
“Everyone you’ve ever touched. I want them all to suffer—to die in the most horrible ways imaginable.”
She fixed Marcus with her hollow gaze.
“That…is my New Year’s wish. What do you think about it?”
Marcus’s heart seized in his chest. For one terrifying moment, he thought Charlotte had somehow regained her power.
That her SSS-Class blessing had finally broken through his domain and was about to consume them all.
But then he checked. He analyzed the area. He examined the mana fluctuations, the power signatures, the binding spells that held her captive.
Nothing.
She was still trapped. Still powerless. Still nothing more than a broken girl saying terrible things.
Marcus forced himself to relax.
‘Ridiculous.’ He thought. ‘Getting scared of a child’s empty threats. How pathetic.’
He was about to reassure the crowd—to tell them everything was fine, that there was nothing to worry about—when a sound cut through the air.
A voice.
But it wasn’t speaking. It was singing.
The melody was eerie and beautiful, floating through the courtyard like smoke from a dying fire.
“Come, little travelers, follow the tune…”
“The night is awake and the moon’s coming soon…”
The moment the first words reached their ears, every single person in the courtyard froze.
“Lay down your weapons, lay down your fear.”
“We’ve waited so patiently for you to appear.”
Horror dawned on their faces. Not ordinary horror—something primal. The kind of terror that lived in the bones and could never be reasoned away.
“We’ll open your armor, we’ll open your skin…”
“We’ll pull out your hearts and invite death within…”
Some of them recognized the song instantly.
Others needed a moment.
But as the verses continued, even the slowest among them understood what they were hearing.
“We’ll paint all the roads with the blood that you shed…”
“And dance through the fields where the fallen have bled…”
People began to shake. Some clutched at nearby chairs for support. A few collapsed entirely, their legs giving out beneath them.
One woman let out a strangled sob, clamping her hands over her ears as if she could block out the sound.
“So run if you wish, little soldiers, run fast…”
“We’ll sing while we’re hunting, and you’ll never last…”
The voice was coming from the direction of the stake.
From the direction of the boy who was supposed to be dead.
“Your screams will become our beautiful choir…”
“Your bones will be candles, your corpses our pyre…”
Marcus’s blood ran cold. Beside him, Amanda had gone white as a sheet, her fingers digging into his arm with desperate strength.
“So, come closer, don’t hide in the night…”
“Because we’ve already found you…Say goodnight.”
By the time the final, eerie line faded, a suffocating, crushing weight of absolute dread had settled over the entire garden.
Every single guest who had spent the night laughing at torture and debating mutilation was now trembling in genuine terror.
Even Marcus and Amanda stood paralyzed, their faces pale, not daring to make a single move.
This fear wasn’t caused by a spell. It wasn’t a psychic illusion or a mind-altering curse.
It was the song itself.
The Lullaby of the Hollows.
It was the ancient war chant of the Singing Hollows…
…the most terrifying legion to ever grace a battlefield under the Eternal Queen.
In the historical archives of the great wars, every veteran soldier knew one universal truth:
If you ever encountered a night where a strange, unnatural fog rolled into your camp, followed by the sweet, mesmerizing melody of that exact lullaby…your life was already over.
This was because the Singing Hollows rarely left survivors.
Entire human armies, tens of thousands of heavily armored soldiers had been found slaughtered in their tents overnight, their bodies brutalized and carved beyond recognition, after that cursed song was heard echoing in the dark.
No one even knew what the Hollows looked like; whether they were human, demon, or eldritch monstrosities, because no one had ever faced them and lived.
The only reason the world even knew the words to the lullaby was because, on rare occasions, the Hollows would intentionally leave a single, traumatized soldier alive just to spread the tale.
Because of their terrifying abilities the Singing Hollows had been a living nightmare.
A force of nature that made even the bravest soldiers weep with terror.
And then the Battle Angels had destroyed them.
Every last member of that cursed race had been slaughtered, their threat eliminated forever.
The Battle Angels never spoke of what they had seen, never revealed the secrets of their fallen enemies. They simply…didn’t talk about it.
From that day forward, the Lullaby of the Hollows had been banned. Outlawed. Turned into a taboo so powerful that even humming the melody could result in imprisonment.
It was considered the anthem of the Eternal Queen’s forces, a relic of an age of terror that no one wanted to remember.
And now, here, in this place of sin and suffering…
Someone was singing it.
‘Who in the world would sing such a cursed thing?!’
The guest frantically looked around, their eyes darting across the lawn in absolute panic.
Even as sadistic monsters, they knew their cruelty was nothing compared to the apocalyptic horrors associated with the Eternal Queen’s legacy.
Then, a horrifying realization swept through the crowd.
They all knew which direction the eerie, melodious voice had come from.
But…it was impossible!
It had to be impossible! He was dead! They had watched him burn!
And yet…
All of them including Charlotte slowly turned their head toward the burnt stake only to realise—
Mika was not dead.
Despite the fire. Despite the burns. Despite everything they had done to him—he was still alive.
And he was smiling.
His charred, ruined face had twisted into an expression of pure, sinister joy.
His teeth that were still startlingly white against the blackened flesh gleamed in the firelight.
Yet, as he rested his head against the wood, he looked down at the crowd with a gaze that felt impossibly arrogant like a god looking down upon insects whose horrific deaths were already written.
“D-Demon…IT’S A DEMON!”
A noblewoman shrieked, tripping backward over her own dress and spilling red wine all over her lap.
“WHAT THE FUCK?!” The doctor screamed, backing away in pure horror. “WHY IS HE STILL ALIVE?! WHY IS HE FUCKING SMILING?!”
“GET HIM AWAY FROM ME! GET IT AWAY!” The fat man gasped, scrambling backward on his hands and knees.
“DISGUSTING! FILTHY! DEVIL!”
“THAT’S NOT A SMILE—THAT’S A CURSE!”
“I DON’T WANT TO LOOK AT HIM ANYMORE! MAKE IT STOP!
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