Timeless Assassin

Chapter 916: Dumpy Unchained

(Meanwhile, Dumpy’s POV)

While the other Cult Monarchs began their onslaught against the Righteous Faction, each carving open their own section of the battlefield and dragging their respective divisions forward through blood and fire, Dumpy did not join the charge straight away, not because the battle did not call to him, but because the moment he watched his Lord Father collapse behind the ring of landed ships, something older than hunger took hold of him and pinned his feet to the stone.

It was not fear.

Dumpy did not understand fear the way mortals did, and even less so on a battlefield where death was simply a currency to be spent, yet what he felt as he stood guard outside the makeshift medical ship was closer to a cold, protective fixation, as though the entire universe had narrowed until only one thing mattered, the faint rhythm of Leo’s breathing somewhere behind reinforced bulkheads, and the knowledge that if that rhythm stopped, nothing else in existence would remain worth living for.

He could hear the war outside.

Not in clear detail, not as individual screams or blades, but as a constant, distant pressure that vibrated through the stone like an endless drumbeat, artillery impacts rolling in waves, mana cannons releasing their shrieks across the sky, the Chakravyuh’s lattice humming with that unnatural resonance that made even seasoned warriors feel like their bones were being listened to, and yet Dumpy stayed still, watching the sealed door to the treatment chamber as his claws flexed and released in slow cycles.

It wasn’t that he did not itch to participate in this war.

If anything, the longer he waited, the more the hunger built inside him like a storm trapped behind glass, because there was no warrior in the Cult who thirsted for enemy blood as much as him, not with the way his body was built for violence, not with the way his instincts begged him to leap, cleave, and melt everything in front of him, and yet every time that hunger tried to pull him toward the frontline, his mind dragged it back with a single thought.

Lord Father had fallen.

And until Lord Father rose again, Dumpy would not move.

Inside the ship, he could sense the healers failing one after another, even without seeing it, because each time a doctor tried to push their mana into Leo’s body, the air outside seemed to tighten for half a second, as though something inside the chamber pulled at the world and then rejected it, leaving behind a faint, sickening drain that made the nearby soldiers breathe a little heavier.

Minutes stretched.

Not ordinary minutes.

Battlefield minutes that could swallow thousands of lives, that could turn a flank into a graveyard before a messenger even finished running, and Dumpy stood through them all with his jaw clenched and his gaze unmoving, as if his stubborn refusal to blink could somehow force the universe to behave.

Then the door finally opened.

A senior battlefield doctor stumbled out, sweat clinging to his brow, his robe damp around the collar as though he had been dragged through a storm, and even through exhaustion, the man still flinched slightly when his eyes met Dumpy’s, because standing that close to the Cult’s greatest beast was like standing near a weapon that was already half-swinging.

Dumpy did not speak at first.

He simply stared.

His presence pressing down on the doctor without intention, as although he did not release any killing intent, the weight of his stare was enough to make the doctor feel nervous, as the doctor swallowed hard to force his voice to remain coherent.

"Don’t worry," the doctor said, words rushed but clear, as he tried to keep his tone professional despite the tremor he couldn’t hide, "the Lord will be alright... he just needs rest, and a lot of mana to recover."

For a second, Dumpy did not understand the sentence.

Not because the words were difficult, but because relief was something his body had forgotten how to process, and when it finally hit him, it didn’t come out as celebration, it came out as a long, shaky breath that seemed to empty a pressure he had been holding since Leo first collapsed.

"...He will wake," Dumpy murmured, as if he needed to hear it spoken in his own voice to believe it.

"Yes," the doctor answered quickly, nodding, eager to reassure him, "his consciousness is intact, his circuits are scorched, his reserves are beyond empty, but he is alive, and the worst of it has passed, so give us a few minutes and we will stabilize him properly."

The doctor took a half-step back as he finished speaking, as though expecting Dumpy to erupt anyway, but Dumpy’s expression only tightened, his eyes turning distant for a moment as the storm inside him shifted direction, because now that his Lord Father was not dying, there was no longer any reason for him to hold his anger back.

There was only reason to punish.

Dumpy lowered his head slightly, not in thanks, not in gratitude, but in a quiet vow, as he spoke without raising his voice, and yet every nearby Cult soldier heard it as clearly as if it had been shouted.

"Good," he said, the word heavy, as his gaze slid past the doctor and toward the battlefield beyond the ring of ships, where flashes of distant combat lit the horizon, "then I can finally work."

The doctor blinked, as if he wanted to say something else, but Dumpy was already turning away, stepping out into open stone where the air tasted of ash and mana discharge, as the ground trembled faintly beneath him from artillery impacts and the Chakravyuh’s resonance.

He rolled his shoulders once.

And the air changed.

Not dramatically at first, not like the sudden detonation of a Monarch’s aura, but like a slow tightening of reality around a living mass, as though space itself braced for what was about to happen.

*CRUNCH*

*GRIND*

Dumpy’s muscles began to swell, his bones lengthening with a grinding, internal thunder that sounded like mountains shifting beneath the sea.

His body widened from four feet to fourteen in a breath.

Then to forty.

Then to eighty.

Then to one hundred and eighty, his limbs stretching into monstrous proportions as his torso thickened like a fortress being built from flesh, and with every pulse of growth, the wind around him bucked outward, flinging dust and broken stone in expanding rings.

Cult soldiers nearby staggered back instinctively, boots scraping as the pressure of sheer mass displaced the air, while engineers assembling war machines paused mid-motion, heads turning as if pulled by gravity, because there were some presences that overrode even discipline.

Dumpy continued growing.

Two hundred.

Two hundred and twenty.

Two hundred and fifty.

Until he rose high enough that the landed ships looked small beneath him, until his shadow spilled across the stone and swallowed entire battalions, until the horizon itself seemed to shrink as his enormous form towered over the battlefield like a judgment that had decided to become physical.

Across his back, three swords lay strapped like relics, two of them gifted to him by Charles before he died, and as he reached behind himself with the casual ease of someone drawing a knife, he gripped two of them and pulled them free, the metal singing as it cleared its sheaths, the sound deep enough that it felt less like steel and more like a bell struck inside the bones of the world.

*SHINNGGG—*

The Righteous soldiers on the outermost ring saw him then.

At first, they did not understand what they were looking at, because their minds tried to interpret him as a tower, as a ship, as a mirage, anything except what he truly was, and then the sun vanished behind his bulk, and realization struck them so hard that even shouting failed for a moment.

Some dropped their shields without meaning to.

Some forgot their formations.

Some simply stared upward as their instincts screamed at them to run, and yet their feet remained rooted because their minds had forgotten how to move.

Dumpy’s eyes narrowed.

He locked onto the section of the ring he wanted first, not randomly, not based on where the fighting was loudest, but where the density of the Righteous stabilizers was thickest, where the lattice beneath their feet pulsed most strongly, because if they had forced his Lord Father to bear that strain, then Dumpy would return it in a language they understood.

"How dare you....." he muttered, voice low enough that it should have been private, yet so large that it rolled across the battlefield like an approaching storm, "how dare you Mongrels force my Lord Father to bear such unbelievable strain."

His grip tightened around the twin blades.

His muscles flexed.

"Because of you infidels," he continued, voice sharpening as something poisonous entered the calm, "he had to come here personally and fight."

Dumpy lifted his chin slightly, eyes burning with something that was not rage in the human sense, but a cold, unshakable certainty of punishment.

"Because of you, he had to push himself beyond his limits and walk till he almost died....."

"Because of you, I saw him faint for the first time in my life...."

"And for that, I will never forgive you."

Dumpy said at last, as he bent his knees and leapt, shattering the stone beneath him as the sky itself recoiled, his colossal form blotting out the sun mid-arc while the battlefield fell silent for a single, dreadful heartbeat, waiting for judgment to land.