From Slave to King: My Rebate System Built Me a Kingdom With Beauties!-Chapter 244: Situation Worsens! [FIXED!]

Byung looked at the thing wearing Kragg’s face and ran the numbers honestly.

He was faster than most things he’d met in this world. Stronger than he had any right to be given what he’d started as. He had magic now, dark and volatile, and a system that had dragged him back from death more than once. None of that changed what was standing in front of him. The arm on the ground said everything — Mazga had hit it with everything she had and it had responded the way a mountain responds to weather. Whatever was inside Kragg wasn’t just stronger than him. It was operating somewhere above the ceiling of what he’d encountered in this world entirely.

He couldn’t win. Not today. Probably not ever, at his current state.

That wasn’t fear. It was just arithmetic.

But he couldn’t leave empty-handed either. He needed to understand what this thing was — its limits, what it would do, what it wouldn’t, and why. And the system had pulled him back before. Dying here was costly, but it wasn’t the same as dying dead. That changed what he was willing to risk.

Byung charged towards him with the intent to feel him out.

Straight line, full commitment, enough conviction that anything with a survival instinct would read it but it was too direct. Then at the last possible moment he cut hard left — the kind of redirect that his goblin frame could manage where an orc’s couldn’t — and put everything into charging towards the dwarf instead.

He almost made it.

The orc’s hand found his ankle before he registered that Kragg had moved at all. The grip was like iron that had decided to become a hand. Then the floor was gone and he was spinning through open air, tunnel ceiling rushing up and then away, the world rotating past him until gravity remembered it had an opinion and he ran out of upward.

He read the room on the way down. His mind was already working ahead of his body, preparing to dodge the attack as he fell to the ground, in the life he barely remembered anymore.

Kragg’s weight was planted firmly on the ground with his right side loaded. He was lining up a strike to the torso and Byung was going to drop right into it with nothing to push off of, no surface, no angle, no way to adjust midair.

He exhaled and prepared to absorb the worst of it to see what the system did with the damage.

If this could kill him, all Byung could do was decide how he died, even though he hadn’t yet grasped the full potential of this attack.

The fist came up.

Then it went sideways. Not at him — past him. A clean deliberate motion through empty air, like swatting something that wasn’t there. Byung hit the ground, tucked, rolled, came up into a crouch with his hands ready and his mind working very fast because that was not what was supposed to happen.

He looked at Kragg and Kragg looked back at him.

No follow-through. No second move. The thing that had taken Mazga’s arm off without glancing down was just standing there, watching him with those dark eyes. It had no killing intent, and come to think of it, it hadn’t attacked Byung despote having the upper hand to do so with Byung having no way to defeat it.

Byung stared at it and felt genuinely unsettled, which was not a feeling he enjoyed. It was the enemy. It had slipped through a weakened barrier, borrowed a dead man’s body, and casually dismembered an orc. He should understand why it was choosing not to press but he didn’t. He filed the confusion and moved before he could overthink it.

The dwarf hadn’t moved either. Byung crossed the distance and put everything he had into the man’s ribs — full weight, proper rotation, nothing held back.

The impact was real. Solid. He felt the connection all the way up his arm.

The dwarf didn’t move an inch.

Not back. Not sideways. Not even a shift in his footing. The blow just landed and stayed there, like hitting a wall wearing a robe. Byung stepped back and looked at his own hand, then looked at the dwarf, and understood. Not magic. Something worn, something passive. A tool. He filed that alongside everything else he was collecting.

"Those fucking tools!" Byung thought to himself before leaping backwards to create some distance and eliminate all chances of a counter-attack.

"There are no enemies here," the dwarf said pleasantly.

Byung said nothing.

"We want the same thing."

"We don’t," Byung said. "I never wanted the barrier down."

"You may find your wants shifting once you understand the full picture."

"Then explain it. Why do you think we want the same thing?"

The dwarf drew breath to answer but before the words could leave his dehydrated lips.

"So you are the host."

The voice came from behind him. Low and unhurried, with the texture of something that hadn’t spoken in a long time and was choosing its first words carefully. Byung turned slowly, this time it was speaking the language of the goblins.

Kragg — whatever was inside Kragg — was looking directly at him. Not at the dwarf. Not at the tunnel. At him specifically, with the certainty of someone who had confirmed something they already suspected.

Byung felt his stomach do something strange as he realized he needed to leave, and now.

"What?" he said.

It came out genuinely flat, because he genuinely didn’t know what else to say. He knew what the system was. He understood it was unusual, understood it was the reason he was still alive and functional in a world that should have ground him to nothing the first week.

He had never said the word host out loud. He had barely assembled the concept clearly in his own head. There was no reasonable explanation for how this thing, from the other side of a collapsing barrier, wearing the body of an orc Byung had met exactly once, knew to use that word.

He stared at it and felt something shift in his chest.

"Don’t tell me...!" Byung muttered under his breath as he came to the realization.

If the dwarf could place a soul into a dead body — if that was real, if that was a working mechanism that produced results — then what had placed Byung’s soul into this body? He had no memory of being in a womb. No gradual accumulation of a self considering the goblins attained self-awareness almost immediately after birth.

His first memory was simply arriving, already formed, into a body he had no prior relationship with, in a world already fully in motion, with a voice in his head that had been there from the first breath sorting his existence into numbers and categories and rewards.

He had taken that for granted. He had assumed it was simply how things worked here — a different world, different rules, a place where the gods had shown him mercy so he could live again.

He had never once asked what had put him here, he just assumed it was one of those things that couldn’t be explained.

He stood in the tunnel with the shifting walls and the smell of stone and Mazga’s blood still on the floor and felt, for the first time, the full weight of a question he should have asked a long time ago.

What if he hadn’t been born at all and what if something had placed him in this body just like the creature possessing Kragg’s body.

-

The dark elf, Velara, remained rooted at the broken edge of the tunnel mouth, one hand still half-raised as though she might yet force her way past the ruined runes. The air tasted of scorched stone and blood; the hole above her exhaled slow, thick waves of wrongness that made her skin crawl even through layers of discipline and dark mana tolerance.

She had felt the orcs’ escape—the sudden absence of their heat signatures climbing upward, the faint tremor of Thulga’s final punch still vibrating through the rock. The original entrance, twenty paces back, still shimmered with fractured power. When she tested it again, extending only the tips of her fingers, the barrier snapped like a living thing: a cold lash across her knuckles, a warning sting that promised worse if she pushed.

The fight below had shredded the runes’ precision. Not broken them entirely—the weave still held, stubborn and ancient, but no longer clean. It rejected anything carrying even a trace of the elf DNA, herself included.

Velara kissed her teeth once, sharply. The sound cut the silence. She could feel the evil swelling beneath her feet: patient, vast, no longer content to seep. It was waking properly, feeding on whatever tether the dwarf had engineered. If it finished with the boy, if it finished wearing Kragg’s shell, the surface would pay in ways no one here was ready for.

She coiled shadow around her fist, ready to tear the entrance open anyway, consequences be damned, when the sky changed.

It wasn’t gradual. One heartbeat the clouds were ordinary gray; the next they parted as though sliced. A column of pale, merciless light descended. No wind, no thunder, just presence. The goblins fifty paces back dropped to their knees without knowing why. Even the ones too dull to sense mana felt their chests compress, ears ringing with sudden pressure.

Seraphel touched down without sound ten strides from the tunnel mouth.

Silver hair flowed like spilled moonlight. Armor caught the dying sun and threw it back in cruel, faceted shards. Wings of translucent light flexed once, slow, deliberate, then folded away into nothing. She stood motionless for a long breath, winter-pale eyes fixed on the black maw of the hole.

She did not look at Velara.

Not at first.

The silence stretched until it hurt. Then Seraphel’s head turned—just a fraction, barely enough for the motion to register. Her gaze slid across the dark elf without stopping, without softening. It was acknowledgment, nothing more.

"I see you," The weight of it landed like a blade laid flat against skin—cold, precise, promising judgment at a later hour.

No words. No gesture. Just that single, glacial acknowledgment.

Seraphel turned fully back to the tunnel. Light gathered at her fingertips—not gentle, not warm. It was the color of frost under moonlight, sharp enough to cut thought itself. The air around her tightened, mana coiling in disciplined fury.

Velara stayed exactly where she was. The barrier still hummed rejection against her skin; she made no second attempt to cross it. Whatever came next belonged to the Seraphel.