Semua Bab Beast Billionaire Claim : Bab 121 - Bab 130

The night did not sleep.Ash drifted like snow, carried on a wind that hissed through broken towers and hollowed gates. The Vale’s ruins glowed faintly from the embers of battle, each flicker revealing shattered walls and blackened stone. Maxim stood at the edge of what had once been the high court, its marble columns now little more than jagged teeth rising from the ground. His men huddled in silence around the remains of a fire, their faces gaunt with exhaustion, eyes fixed on him as though his shadow alone might hold the walls upright.But Maxim felt no strength in his shadow. Only weight.He tightened his cloak against the cold and stepped further into the darkness. Each stone he passed seemed older than it had been an hour ago, as though the Hollow’s whispers had eroded them in silence. His oath burned in his chest, a tether keeping him upright—but beneath it lurked something heavier, hungrier. The Beast stirred, restless, sensing cracks in his resolve.That was when he heard her

The Vale was no longer a kingdom, nor even a battlefield. It was a graveyard that refused to stay buried. Ash fell like snow, but heavier, grittier, clinging to skin and tongue until every breath felt like swallowing soot. The air was thick with it, dimming torches and veiling even the strongest flames.Maxim stood at the head of the survivors, his cloak dragging through dust that had once been streets, palaces, memories. What remained of his oath-bound warriors moved with him, their armor dulled gray, their steps uneven. Behind them stumbled the remnants of Ruby’s cinder-guard, their crimson banners torn and blackened, faces hollowed by terror and exhaustion.Once, the two groups would have slit one another’s throats for honor, for vengeance, for pride. Now they walked in uneasy silence, bound not by loyalty but by necessity.The ruins swallowed sound, except for the constant hiss of falling ash and the distant, grotesque howls of Hollow spawn still prowling. Every collapse of stone

Ash fell like snow, silent and endless. The Vale had grown still in its ruin, the wind carrying whispers not its own. Every broken stone seemed to breathe with the Hollow’s pulse, as though the earth itself inhaled its hunger.Ruby stood at the heart of that silence, her crimson cloak tattered, her crown of cinders slipping from her tangled hair. Blood streaked her mouth, but her eyes burned with something other than pain. They gleamed as though another fire had taken root inside her, a darkness deeper than flame, ancient in its patience.Her followers circled in fearful half-ranks. Once they had been her cinder-guard, loyal beyond reason, ready to drown the Vale in blood at her command. Now their blades trembled, not with eagerness, but with dread. They had watched her rage, watched her burn men alive with laughter. They had cheered it. But what seeped through her skin now was not rage. It was hunger, vast and impersonal, as though she were only the mouthpiece for something endless.

The Vale groaned like a dying beast.Every stone trembled beneath the weight of what pressed through the sundered gate. Once, the Hollow had whispered, its influence creeping in shadows, subtle as rot. But now it bellowed. Its call split sky from earth, a soundless thunder that bent trees, toppled walls, and made marrow ache in the bone.The gate—if it could still be called that—was no longer a border. It was a wound. A wound that tore wider with each heartbeat, black veins crawling outward like cracks in glass. The obsidian arch that had once framed it now sagged inward, chunks falling into the yawning dark. From within, shapes surged forward—half-born things of limb and smoke, their bodies warping as though forgetting what flesh should be.Maxim stood at the forefront, ash swirling around him, sword in hand though steel already felt laughable. His warband, newly bound by blood oath, gathered at his back. They bled still from the ritual, but their eyes glowed faintly with the tether

The battlefield was unrecognizable.Where once stood towers of Vale stone and halls of silver banners, only a wasteland of broken spires remained. Ash fell as though the sky itself wept, the flakes clinging to wounds, hair, and armor until all who still stood looked carved from the same grave earth.At the center of that ruin, the Hollow pulsed. The shattered gate had become a bleeding wound in the world, spilling darkness that writhed and clawed, whispering in voices meant to unmake sanity. Around it, Ruby stood transformed.She was not merely Ruby anymore. Shadows threaded her flesh, carved runes of absence across her skin, her eyes gone pits of endless hunger. The Hollow wore her body like a coronation robe, a queen crowned in abyss. Her voice when she spoke was not her own but something older, something cold enough to still flame.“Maxim Vale,” she intoned, every syllable bending the air. “Kneel, and I will make you more than wolf, more than oath. I will make you hollow—and eterna