Beast Slayer Online: Initialization
Copyright© 2026 by CaffeinatedTales
Chapter 101: Wolves Circled The Fortress
It happened too suddenly.
So suddenly that Lannor found it absurd.
Ubank was dead.
When he fell, his neck landed exactly across the spine of that great thick book on commerce. The force of more than sixty kilograms of body weight snapped his cervical vertebrae clean through.
Lannor noticed as he fell. Arya saw it too. Neither of them cared.
Not only did they not care, Ubank himself had not cared.
Aside from the instinctive flicker of panic when he first lost his balance, Ubank had not believed a simple fall could change anything.
Then his neck struck the book’s spine with a crisp crack.
Lannor’s hand, which had been lightly patting Arya, stopped at once. He whipped his head around.
What the witcher saw was only Ubank’s widening eyes, already clouding with bafflement.
“ ... Fuck.”
Even with Lannor’s mind still held in the cold precision of battle, he froze for a moment at the sight.
Arya, who had nearly steadied herself again, jerked like a startled rabbit.
Lannor hurried to Ubank’s side. He did not care in the least that the piece of filth was dead, but the information in his skull was the only lead they had.
Who knew whether a sorcerer could make a corpse talk?
Lannor wanted to save Ubank, but the first look told him there was no life left to save.
On the side of Ubank’s neck, the outline of the spinal joint pushed visibly beneath the skin. The Skelliger’s topknot lay in the blood on the floor. Spittle leaked from his mouth where the muscles had gone slack. His pupils had spread wide.
Gone. No saving him.
Lannor only needed a glance to understand the shape of it. When Ubank stood, his one usable foot had stepped into the grease spilled from Arya’s dinner plate. The plate had been on the large table, same as Gaunter O’Dimm’s gift.
This was not chance.
Lannor already had the answer in his gut.
At least, it was not “chance” or “accident” in any ordinary sense.
He had cut down twenty-seven trained fighters in terrible terrain without a tremor in his hands. But when he reached to pull out the book that had killed Ubank, his brow tightened, and for once his face showed a rare hesitation.
The book came free with a soft slap. The limp corpse dropped into the blood and filth.
Lannor crouched beside the body, lips pressed thin, and opened the book at random.
By “chance,” a drop of blood fell from the ceiling at that very moment and struck one sentence on the page.
A merchant must strive to preserve his necessity to the client, at any cost. Otherwise, bankruptcy is not far behind.
The red drop made the line stand out from the whole page like a wound.
Lannor slowly closed the book. His face had gone very ugly.
“Gaunter O’Dimm.”
This was no chance. No accident.
It was a joke, shaped by the hand of a being that could bend reality and look beyond time.
“My lord...”
Arya came closer, timid now. Where Lannor crouched, the dead lay thicker than elsewhere.
“Is he dead?”
“Aye ... dead.”
Lannor closed the book again and laid it flat on the floor.
“Then ... does that mean we can’t find the children who are going to be made slaves?”
Arya’s voice had shrunk. It sounded nothing like her usual brash chatter.
“Actually ... as your squire, I should have looked after that book, shouldn’t I?”
Lannor shook his head lightly.
“This has nothing to do with you, Arya. The man who sent this book is no friend of mine. Even if you hadn’t been eating with your head down, I planned to leave it on the table and quit the room.”
The other party was Gaunter O’Dimm. Whatever Lannor chose, the book’s purpose had already been set.
It had been sent to kill the lead Lannor had caught, then drive him, helpless and cornered, like a gambler who had lost everything, toward a contract.
A contract written by O’Dimm.
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