I am 15 chapters ahead on my patreón, check it out if you are interested.
Patréon.com/emperordragon
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Chapter 127: Puppet
The morning fog clung to the forest like a shroud, thick and slow-moving, hanging in the air with the heaviness of breath held too long. Around Lucas, the yellow mist curled and drifted in idle spirals, lazy and haunting, like smoke from a fire long since dead but not forgotten. It coated his skin with moisture, cooled his lungs with every careful breath.
Then the figure emerged.
It moved with unhurried steps, each one pressing deliberately into the damp, uneven earth. The sound of boots crunching wet leaves and soft soil broke the stillness like glass cracking under pressure. The figure stopped just a few feet away, not close enough to touch, but near enough that the weight of its presence settled on Lucas's chest like a second gravity.
Then, with a motion so measured it was almost ceremonial, the figure reached up and lowered its hood.
What it revealed was… startling in its lack of drama.
Just a man.
Not a monster, not a demon cloaked in illusion — but someone completely ordinary. Average height. Unremarkable build. His hair was thinning, his features plain. The kind of man you could pass on the street a dozen times and never remember. A face like background noise. A ghost of someone who never mattered.
And somehow, that made it worse.
Lucas's gaze narrowed slightly, though he kept his posture slumped, his breathing shallow. Still pretending. Still wearing the mask of exhaustion, still playing the role of the hunted — a young man worn down, caught, vulnerable. But his eyes never left the man's.
The stranger smiled — just a slight upturn of the lips. Casual. Effortless. It was the kind of smile you gave an old acquaintance on a park bench, not someone trapped in the woods.
His voice matched the smile: light, conversational, disturbingly calm.
"Did you enjoy my little gift?" he asked, gesturing vaguely to the fading yellow mist that still drifted through the undergrowth like poison fog. "Took some effort to acquire that particular strain, you know."
Lucas exhaled through his nose, slow and steady, and let his head rest back against the rough bark of the tree behind him. His limbs stayed loose, his expression heavy with feigned fatigue.
"All this trouble," he said dryly, "just for me?"
The man chuckled. It was low and uneven — a broken sound, like a record turning too slow on an old player. Something about it scraped the edges of reality.
"You're quite the anomaly, Lucas. So young, yet so… powerful. When I learned of you, I had to change everything."
The smile widened, just slightly — and something about it was wrong. Not in the way of monsters with sharp teeth and twisted features, but wrong in its perfection. Too even. Too practiced. Like a copy of a smile drawn from memory.
"You've made things interesting," he said. "I can't tell you how long it's been since someone surprised me. I look forward to learning what you're hiding inside that mind of yours."
As he stepped forward, the mist curled away from the soles of his boots — the last tendrils of wolfsbane dissipating into the earth. The temperature around them seemed to dip.
His voice lowered now, almost intimate. "But I suppose I'm getting ahead of myself."
Lucas didn't respond. Didn't flinch. Didn't blink.
He simply watched — and waited.
Then… he felt it.
Not through his eyes, but through the deeper senses, the ones that saw what sight missed. Beneath the man's surface there was nothing.
There was no heartbeat beyond the mechanical rhythm of blood being pushed through veins. No sparks of neural activity dancing behind the man's eyes. No emotional static in the air. Nothing that suggested presence. Nothing that suggested life.
The body in front of him was empty. Still. Silent in the way a tomb is silent — not just quiet, but hollow.
Lucas's gaze sharpened, the muscles in his face barely tightening. The void he sensed was absolute — not dormant, not hidden, but absent. What stood before him wasn't thinking. Wasn't feeling.
And then, he saw it.
Just beneath the collar of the stranger's shirt, barely visible against pale skin, something shifted. A flicker of motion where there should have been stillness. It pulsed faintly, dark and slick — a vine-like organism, wrapped around the spine like a parasite with purpose. It twitched once, almost eagerly, then went still again.
Alive. And absolutely not human.
The truth hit Lucas with the icy clarity of a blade:
He's dead.
No brain activity. No consciousness. No soul. The body was just a vehicle, piloted by something else entirely.
A puppet.
Lucas let his head tilt to one side, letting his lips curl into a tired smirk. He masked the realization behind a lazy smile, soft enough that it could pass as resignation.
"So… that's your secret," he murmured, voice barely above the wind, meant only for the listening trees.
The figure in front of him tilted its head in return — a mirror of curiosity, except… not. It mimicked interest, but there was no true emotion behind it. Like a puppet programmed to respond to cues it didn't understand.
The air between them went still.
The forest knew something unnatural stood there — something pretending to be alive.
Lucas stayed perfectly still, waiting, his mind already calculating what to do next.