It began slowly.

Effie was still chained in the mud, with more dead soldiers scattered around her now. Azarax did not seem inclined to remove the corpses, perhaps as a way of making her already morbid existence even more oppressive, perhaps to instill a sense of competition into other warriors of the Steel Horde.

As if seeing their dead comrades would motivate them to try harder and succeed where others had failed. That was a questionable tactic, at best, but considering that a handful of fools inevitably attempted to attack Effie every day, it seemed to be working.

In the meantime, her wounds had healed, somewhat. When they did, Azarax personally arrived to disable her all over again. That was one of the only two times he had bothered to tend to her personally after expelling her from his tent — the second time was immediately after the first major assault on the Stone Castle had failed.

That time, Effie really thought that she would die.

But, in the end, she didn't.

The severity of the beating she received, however, helped mask her worsening condition. She had kept the plague under control for as long as he could, but by now, her body was finally beginning to surrender.

Effie was being consumed by persistent, harrowing pain. It was as if all her organs were devouring themselves. Her blood was turning thick and dark, almost black — luckily, when it dried, it was almost indistinguishable from the mud, and her condition had only worsened after the last visit from the King of Kings. So, no one had noticed the strange detail yet.

The soldiers simply attributed Effie's groans and weakened state to the consequences of the beating she had received from Azarax. It gave more of them the courage to try attacking her in a group... hence the increased number of corpses.

‘How the hell did Seishan endure it for so long...'

Effie had known that the daughter of Ki Song was not to be trifled with from their days on the Forgotten Shore. Still, experiencing the gruesome torment of the plague put things into perspective. Now, she could understand better how Seishan had survived a decade in that harrowing place... longer than any other Sleeper who escaped the Forgotten Shore in the end.

Effie's body... was slowly rotting from the inside. At the moment, her Transcendent physique was struggling to heal it faster than the plague was destroying it, locking her in a vicious cycle. For now, she was able to overcome the terrifying rate of virulent decay — but soon enough, the situation could change.

By the time gruesome sores opened on her body and blood began to seep from her pores, even a blind man would know that something was wrong with the captured War Maiden.

Effie knew that Azarax would know the truth far sooner, though.

That was because while she was still able to hide the symptoms, the soldiers of the Steel Horde could not.

Seishan had engineered her plague to have a long incubation period, so that it could spread wider before being detected. Now, that period was coming to an end.

Azarax himself would have been the first of the infected, but he probably had not felt the changes happening deep within his body yet. He was a Supreme, after all, and an especially powerful one at that. His body possessed an almost inexhaustible amount of vitality. So, even if he had been infected by the plague earlier, it would take longer for it to conquer him.

His soldiers, however, were much weaker. In fact, they were weaker now than ever, because many of them were subsisting on pitiful rations. Hunger, exhaustion, and the burdens of a long siege had made them look gaunt and diminished, which allowed the plague to remain hidden longer.

Its first symptoms were easy to miss, after all. The overall fatigue, the hand tremors... all of it was easy to attribute to exhaustion and starvation. Only Effie knew that there was a different, far more alarming reason why many of the soldiers around the camp seemed like they were on the verge of collapsing as of late.

Observing how widely the plague had already spread, she could not help but feel both horrified and full of dark, merciless joy.

She wondered if the people of the First Generation had felt the same eerie confusion when the Nightmare Spell descended into the world. It had been all but ignored for a long while, and by the time humanity began to pay attention, there was already no time to react.

The same happened with the plague Effie had brought to the encampment of the Steel Horde.

Some of the soldiers looked tired at first. But who wouldn't be, when they had to lay siege to an impregnable castle on an empty stomach?

Their hands were shaking. But whose wouldn't, when countless soldiers had already perished in this grueling campaign, and many more would die before it was over?

It was only when one of them bent over and vomited a torrent of viscous, black blood that the officers of the Steel Horde finally realized that something was wrong.

Sadly, Effie had not witnessed that incident, but she quickly learned of it from the frightened whispers of the soldiers.

Even then, though...

The Steel Horde was slow to react.

The plague had originated from its sorcerers, after all. So, when one soldier was discovered to be a carrier, Azarax wasn't too alarmed.

He might have expected it, even, considering that his soldiers were fighting inside the infected city now. Perhaps the inferno Effie and her cohort had unleashed did not destroy all pockets of the plague — so, he simply ordered his sorcerers to begin administering the cure.

It was only in the process of searching for all the infected soldiers that the healers of the Steel Horde began to feel alarmed. There were simply too many people showing the symptoms of the plague — and while it had not progressed to truly harrowing stages yet, it wasn't in its early days either.

That went against the notion that these first cases were the result of random soldiers being infected while traversing the burned city. So, the healers and the sorcerers began to treat them with uneasy hearts.

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