The Conquerors Path

Chapter 1082: Chapter 1080-The God Eater’s Warning

The bed creaked softly beneath us as the laughter died down. Luna was still lying flat on my chest, her heavy silver head resting right above my collarbone, her breathing slow and warm against my neck. For a moment, the room was completely silent.

Then, Luna shifted.

She didn’t do her usual lazy roll or demand another plate of spiced trench-meat. Instead, her body went completely rigid. The playful warmth in her silver eyes vanished, replaced by a cold, primordial sharpness that made the ambient temperature in the room feel like it had dropped ten degrees in a fraction of a second.

She raised her head, looking down at me with an intensity that had nothing to do with her gluttonous, spoiled persona.

“You think you understand what she then you are wrong.”

Luna said. I kept my hand resting on her back, my fingers loosely buried in her thick silver fur, but I didn’t interrupt. When Luna used that tone, you listened.

“I was there, Austin, before the oceans had names. Before the Mermaid royalty built their golden cages. Back when the sea was just raw, violent chaos and beasts the size of continents fought for every inch of the deep.”

She continued, her silver eyes locking onto mine. She shifted her weight, sitting back on her haunches right on my chest, looking down at me with a solemnity that made my smile slowly fade.

“There were three of them, the Abyssal Trench-Lords. Three leviathans born from the primary magma vents. Each one of them possessed a physical form so dense that their mere movement caused tsunamis on the surface. They were stronger than Krave. In terms of pure physical force and raw elemental mana, any one of them could have torn her tentacles off and fed her to the deep currents.”

Luna said softly.

‘System, give me the historical logs on the Abyssal Trench-Lords.’

I thought silently,

[Data retrieved. The Three Trench-Lords: Ignis-Leviathan, Vael-Kraken, and the Calamity Serpent. All three were Peak-Tier Divine Beasts during the First Era. Status: Extinct.]

“Krave knew she couldn’t beat them, If they ever united, or even if one of them decided to clear her out of her territory, she was dead. So do you know what she did?”

Luna went on, her tail brushing against my leg in a slow, tense rhythm.

“She made them turn on each other.”

I guessed quietly.

“Worse, she didn’t just push them into a fight. She spent three hundred years playing three entirely different roles. To Ignis, she was a weak, timid creature seeking protection from the other two. She fed him false intelligence, making him believe Vael was preparing an ambush to consume his primary magma vent. To Vael, she played the arrogant, ambitious diplomat, dropping subtle hints that Ignis was plotting with the surface gods to seal the deep trenches forever.”

Luna snarled, a low, guttural rumble vibrating in her chest. Luna leaned down, her snout inches from my face.

“And the Calamity Serpent?”

I asked, my voice barely above a whisper, keeping my breathing even under the crushing weight of the silver wolf.

“The Serpent was the dumbest of the three, but it possessed the most raw destructive power,”

Luna growled, her breath washing over my face.

“To the Serpent, Krave was a willing subordinate. An informant. She fed it a constant stream of highly accurate, easily verifiable intelligence about the other two. She made herself indispensable. She built three completely distinct identities, maintaining them simultaneously for three hundred years. One slip-up, one contradiction, and any of those three would have instantly realised the game and crushed her. But she never slipped.”

Luna’s silver eyes were practically glowing in the dim light of the room.

“When the time was right, she engineered a territorial dispute over a highly concentrated deep-earth mana vent. She told Ignis that Vael was moving to claim it. She told Vael that Ignis had already laid a trap there. And she told the Serpent that both of them were exhausted from a previous skirmish and the vent was ripe for the taking.”

I could see the entire board in my head. It was a flawless, self-sustaining loop of paranoia.

“The resulting clash boiled the ocean, I watched it from the surface. The shockwaves shattered the tectonic plates. They tore each other to pieces, burning through centuries of accumulated divine mana in a matter of hours. Ignis crushed Vael’s core. The Serpent managed to inject its venom into Ignis before Vael’s dying thrash severed the Serpent’s head. It was absolute, apocalyptic mutual destruction.”

Luna said, her voice completely devoid of its usual lazy drawl.

“And Krave?”

“Krave was exactly where she always is, in the shadows. Watching. Waiting until the water stopped boiling and the blood settled. Then she simply swam out into the open, consumed their ruined cores, and took the absolute throne of the deep. She didn’t lose a single drop of blood. She won a war against three superior gods using nothing but whispers.”

Luna sneered.

I let out a slow, deliberate breath.

‘Three hundred years of perfect, unyielding manipulation.’

I felt a chill crawl up my spine, completely independent of the freezing abyssal water outside our room. That was the creature currently playing the enamoured host. That was the ‘majestic, vulnerable’ queen who had leaned against my shoulder and confessed her eternal loneliness.

[A chilling realisation, isn’t it?]

The blue screen flickered into my peripheral vision.

[You pride yourself on your little schemes. You manipulate young heroines, you outsmart arrogant people, and you think you are the apex predator of deception. But she has been playing this game since before your species figured out how to build a fire.]

‘I know the difference in scale.’

I shot back internally.

[Do you? Because a few hours ago you were acting quite smug about conquering her. A Divine Kraken doesn’t get conquered. She allows you to think you are holding the leash while she slowly wraps her tentacles around your neck.]

I ignored the System’s jab, focusing back on the massive silver wolf resting on my chest.

“She’s running the same plans on me.”

I said quietly.

“Obviously, she is studying you. She knows you are arrogant. She knows you enjoy the thrill of breaking powerful women. So she is handing you a perfectly crafted, slightly damaged, incredibly powerful woman for you to ‘fix’ and ‘conquer’. She is playing the victim to your Ignis.”

Luna replied.

I reached up, running my hand slowly through the thick silver fur at the base of her neck. She let out a low, vibrating purr, closing her eyes.

“It’s a beautiful trap.”

I admitted.

“It is a meat grinder, and I am not going to let you walk into it just because your ego is currently overriding your survival instincts. If she decides you are no longer a useful novelty, she will not fight you. She will just arrange for the entire ocean to collapse on top of you while she watches from a balcony.”

Luna corrected blindly.

The silence stretched out between us.

I kept stroking her fur, letting the reality of the situation fully anchor itself in my mind. This was exactly why I kept Luna so close. In a world completely saturated with ancient sociopaths, duplicitous gods, and power-hungry maniacs, this gluttonous, lazy, incredibly arrogant God Eater was the only genuine thing I possessed.

She didn’t plot. She didn’t scheme. If she wanted to eat you, she just walked up and bit your head off. Her honesty was absolute.

“You’re my anchor, you know that?”

I murmured, a genuine smile finally touching my lips.

“I am your superior, I simply keep you alive because you possess a unique talent for acquiring high-quality calories.”

Luna corrected without opening her eyes.

“Sure. Let’s go with that.”

I stared up at the glowing moon-coral ceiling of the Sapphire Suite. The light was shifting again, maintaining that flawless, artificial cycle of dawn and dusk. Everything in this palace was an illusion. The warmth, the air, the safety. Even the affection Krave had shown me was just a highly advanced form of camouflage.

‘System. Open the historical logs again.’

[What are you looking for? A manual on how not to get eaten by a squid?]

‘I am looking for the exact mechanism she used to ascend to the Divine Grade.’

I remembered the specific line from her status window. Willingly entered divinity so she can forget the feeling of love and rule with even better proficiency.

‘If she willingly discarded her emotions to become a better ruler, that means those emotions were previously a liability. She viewed them as a weakness. A flaw in her survival doctrine.’

[Correct. During the Era of Gods, attachments got you killed. So she surgically removed her capacity for genuine emotional attachment. It made her the perfect, unreadable machine.]

‘But a machine operates on logic. It operates on predictable inputs and outputs. She expects me to act like a rational, ambitious mortal. She expects me to fall for the bait, try to secure my power, and slowly become dependent on her authority.’

[And your grand counter-strategy is?]

‘We break the machine.’

I smiled, the expression cold and entirely devoid of the warmth I had just shared with Luna.

You don’t beat an apex manipulator by trying to out-manipulate them on their own board. Krave had three hundred years to perfect her game against the Trench-Lords because they all played by the same rules of territorial dominance and survival.

I was not going to play by those rules.

“Luna.”

I said softly.

“I am resting.”

She grumbled.

“We need to change our approach.”

One silver eye cracked open, glaring at me with mild irritation.

“If your new approach involves less food, I will bite your face.”

“It involves vastly more food, and significantly more chaos. Right now, Krave thinks she has a perfect read on me. She thinks I am a slightly clever, highly ambitious mortal who is slowly falling under her spell.”

I promised, shifting my weight slightly so I could look her in the eye.

“Because you are.”

Luna pointed out unhelpfully.

“I am acting the part. I am playing the ‘lost puppy’ perfectly. But if we want to actually survive this, and maybe even get the upper hand, we can’t just be obedient. We have to introduce a variable she cannot calculate.”

“And what variable is that?”

“Genuine, unpredictable irrationality.”

I let out a slow breath, my mind rapidly constructing the blueprint of my counter-offensive.

“She excised her emotions because they were a liability. That means she no longer understands how to process them when they don’t follow a logical pattern. If I act completely contrary to my own self-interest, if I throw away perfectly good opportunities for power just to do something entirely senseless, her plans will stutter.”

Luna’s ears pitched forward. She wasn’t entirely sold, but her predatory instincts recognised a hunting strategy when she heard one.

“You are going to act like an idiot?”

“I am going to act like someone who cannot be controlled by pleasure, novelty, or power,”

I corrected.

“If she realizes her usual levers don’t work on me, she will be forced to improvise. And when a machine is forced to improvise, it makes mistakes.”

I could feel the hum of my own ego flaring up. The System was right; it was incredibly dangerous. Keeping a monster like Krave close was a massive gamble. But the potential payoff was too staggering to ignore. Learning her methods, observing her micro-expressions, understanding how a being at the absolute apex of the world maintained her throne—it was an education I couldn’t buy with any amount of System points.

“She is terrified of you, Luna.”

I added, a sly grin forming.

“Obviously, I could eat this entire palace if I was sufficiently motivated.”

The wolf snorted.

“Exactly. We use that. She respects your power, but she expects me to manage you. If I intentionally fail to manage you, or if I actively encourage you to disrupt her perfectly ordered kingdom, it breaks her illusion of control.”

Luna finally lifted her head, her silver eyes gleaming with a sudden, vicious amusement.

“You want me to be a nuisance?”

“I want you to be an absolute nightmare, if she sets up a romantic, highly calculated dinner, I want you to crash it and demand the main course. If she tries to isolate me, I want you to break through the spatial wards. We are going to make her perfectly quiet, infinitely lonely existence as loud and obnoxious as possible.”

I confirmed.

Luna let out a deep, resonant bark of laughter. It was a terrifying sound, full of teeth and ancient malice.

“I can accommodate this strategy.”

“I thought you might.”

I reached up, giving her thick neck one last firm scratch before gently pushing her off my chest. She hopped down onto the obsidian floor, shaking out her silver coat.

I sat up on the massive bed of crushed velvet-kelp, running a hand through my hair.

The game had fundamentally changed. Krave thought she was playing a slow, elegant game of chess, maneuvering her pieces into a flawless checkmate. But I was about to flip the board, set the pieces on fire, and ask her what we were playing next.

‘System. Buy me the restricted lore regarding Krave.’

[The information costs 500,000 points. It is classified as Primordial-Tier knowledge.]

‘Buy it. I need to know exactly what she cut out, and more importantly, if there is a way to force it back in.’

There was a brief pause, a digital hesitation from the entity that resided in my mind.

[Transaction complete. 500,000 points deducted. Initiating data transfer… Warning: The psychological strain of processing a Divine’s secrets is heavy.]

A sudden, violent spike of agony drove itself directly behind my eyes. I gritted my teeth, clutching the side of my head as a torrent of ancient, blood-soaked memories flooded my consciousness.

I saw the dark water. I saw the crushing pressure.

I saw Krave, not as the majestic, beautiful woman she was now, but as a writhing, desperate mass of tentacles and raw survival instinct. I felt her terror. I felt the absolute, suffocating dread of knowing she was the weakest predator in a trench full of monsters.

And then, I saw the plans.

I stood up from the bed, my boots clicking softly against the dark crystal floor. I smoothed out the heavy fabric of my coat, adjusting the lapels with slow, deliberate precision.

I looked over at Luna. The silver wolf was sitting by the heavy diamond doors, her tail swishing in slow, lazy arcs, waiting for me.

“Ready to go terrorize a god?”

I asked.

“I am.”

Luna snorted.

I smiled. The real game was finally starting. The Behemoth of the Ocean thought she had laid the perfect trap for a lost puppy. She was about to find out that she had invited a parasite directly into her bloodstream.

I reached out, grasping the heavy, deep-sea diamond handle of the door.

Let the Queen of Manipulation try to pull my strings. I was going to tear the whole damn puppet theater down.