Chapter 110: The Execution of Arthur Pendelton

The optical reconnaissance feeds routed to the underground bunker in Geneva did not flicker.

On the three-hundred-foot holographic display dominating the central war room of the World Hunter Council, the high-resolution imagery captured by the European surveillance satellite Hermes Nine was painfully clear. Every bead of cold sea spray clinging to the rusted conning tower, every smear of dark engine oil on the deck, and every drop of crimson blood pooling around Sir Arthur Pendelton’s knees was projected with absolute, brutal fidelity.

Three dozen supreme delegates, field marshals, and royal envoys stood around the circular tiered amphitheater in petrified silence.

Nobody reached for their cigars. Nobody adjusted their neckties. The British Minister of Defense gripped the bronze railing before his seat so tightly that his gold signet ring deformed against the metal.

"Authorize the secondary orbital railgun," someone muttered from the French delegation, his voice shaking with hysteria. "Vaporize the entire coordinates. We cannot allow an anointed knight of the Crown to be put on display like a slaughtered ox."

"Silence," High Commander Vance’s voice cut through the room over an encrypted audio link from the withdrawing American task force. "Arthur is forty yards from the central ballast line. If an orbital kinetic spike touches that trench right now, the displacement will capsize every escort cruiser we have retreating in the sector. Watch the screen. There is nothing left to authorize."

Down on the tilted iron plates of the Eastern Strait, the wind was dying down, leaving behind a thick, suffocating smell of scorched star-metal and dead sea brine.

Arthur Pendelton remained on both knees.

The knight did not weep. He did not bow his head to press his forehead against the blood-stained deck. With the last remnants of his biological strength, he forced his neck upright, his pale eyes tracking the dark void dagger resting in Renan’s right hand.

"The satellite lenses are locked onto us, Renan," Arthur spoke, each word dragging through his crushed windpipe like gravel through a rusty pipe. "Three billion people will watch this footage before the sun sets in London. You will not be remembered as a sovereign. You will be branded an extinction-level abomination. Every registered guild across thirty-six nations will mobilize their reserves to purge your name."

Renan took half a step forward, the toes of his leather boots coming to a stop against Arthur’s bent knee armor.

"They already branded me an abomination when I was an unlicensed porter starving in Sector Four," Renan replied, his tone quiet, conversational, and completely detached from the weight of global judgment. "The only difference between then and now is that your kings are finally close enough to smell the mud."

Arthur let out a ragged, dry cough that speckled his white tunic with dark foam. A faint, bitter grimace crossed his battered features.

"Perhaps," Arthur whispered. "Perhaps we did build our towers too high above the scavengers."

The knight drew in one final, deep breath of the damp ocean air. He straightened his back as best as his fractured ribs allowed, lifting his chin so that his bare throat was fully exposed to the cold sky.

"Strike true, Sovereign," Arthur said, his aristocratic cadence returning for a single, clear sentence. "A knight of the Round Table does not die with his eyes closed."

Renan did not deliver a grand political speech for the orbiting satellites. He did not shout curses at the distant cities of Europe.

He simply raised the void dagger.

The newly absorbed argent mana from the shattered relic blade coursed through the black metal, wrapping the edge in a thin, microscopic film of spatial severance. Renan stepped past Arthur’s shoulder, his movement smooth, unhurried, and as natural as the falling of night over the sea.

The black blade swept across the hollow of Arthur’s throat in a single horizontal blur.

There was no spray of dramatic gore. The spatial sharpness of the newly forged edge severed the knight’s carotid artery, jugular vein, and cervical vertebrae with such terrifying precision that the blood along the cut line turned instantly into dark, vaporized mist.

Sir Arthur Pendelton’s eyes widened for a fraction of a second, reflecting the gray clouds above, before the light within his pupils slipped away into total, hollow gray.

The body of the British Empire’s greatest champion collapsed forward onto the rusted iron deck, his forehead coming to rest against the cold steel, motionless.

In the Geneva war room, two thousand miles away, a woman from the British diplomatic delegation let out a sharp, choked gasp and collapsed into her chair, her hands covering her face. Across the entire chamber, not a single military commander spoke. The First Knight of the Silver Round, the man who had personally closed forty-two Class-S gates and slain three abyssal dragons with his bare hands, had been executed on an offshore scrap heap like an ordinary deserter.

On the central bastion of the Iron Wall, Renan flicked his wrist.

A thin bead of dark blood rolled off the tip of the void dagger and splashed into the puddle at his boots. He returned the blade to the leather sheath at the small of his back, turning his body toward the fallen knight.

The wind from the open sea kicked up again, tossing the hem of Renan’s dark woolen coat as he extended his bare right hand over Arthur’s motionless corpse.

The deep violet mana residing within his core did not simply surge; it roared with an ancient, predatory hunger that shook the very atmosphere above the deck.

[Host Entity Neutralized: World-Class Hunter Sir Arthur Pendelton] [Target Rank: Tier-5 Earth Champion / Relic Bearer] [Commencing High-Tier Monarch Soul Inscription...]

Dark, viscous tendrils of pure black shadow erupted from the rusted deckplates beneath Arthur’s corpse.

Unlike the ordinary shadow sailors or the scavenger infantry raised in the early days, the mana rising from Arthur’s body was not black alone; it was woven through with thick, blinding threads of liquid silver light, crackling like cold lightning against the damp air. The shadow miasma wrapped around the dead knight’s limbs, seeping into his crushed breastplate, his broken wrist, and his severed throat, knitting the shattered flesh back together beneath an impenetrable shell of living abyssal plate armor.

The air on the deck turned impossibly heavy.

Shadow General Ignis stepped forward from the conning tower, driving the tip of its broadsword into the deck and dropping to one knee in silent reverence.

From the dark water forty fathoms below, Shadow Commander Thorne let out a low, seismic rumble that vibrated through the hulls of all forty-two sunken warships, acknowledging the birth of a terrifying new presence within the Sovereign Legion.

The pool of black shadow beneath Arthur’s corpse began to boil.

Two armored hands, forged from dark star-metal and etched with glowing argent runes of absolute loyalty, reached up through the shadow pool, gripping the rim of the rusted deck to pull an eight-foot titan of silver and midnight steel into the freezing afternoon light.