My Bugged System Made Me Too OP!

Chapter 162: Worse than I thought

Kael turned back to the demon, his massive, reptilian head tilting downward until his snout was just inches away from his trembling figure.

His chilling voice resonated within the supervisor’s mind, issuing an absolute, unbending mandate: "Start, explain everything."

Yaroth’s eyes turned bloodshot due to how hard he was trying to resist, but couldn’t do anything as his mouth opened up again.

"I’m a demon... from the demon kingdom, my name is Yaroth... I’m 138 years old..." Yaroth rasped out, his voice a flat, hollow drone that sounded completely devoid of independent consciousness.

Kael barely held back the urge to smack his head into a paste out of anger.

His long, iridescent tail whipped sharply behind him, smashing against the deep blue ice sheet with a concussive crack that sent fine shards of crystalline frost raining down across the bone-strewn floor blocks.

The ancient dragon was completely losing patience with the supervisor’s primitive parsing of his command; he hadn’t deployed the supreme authority of the Dragon’s order just to listen to a trivial chronological breakdown of a low-ranking name.

His voice sounded in Yaroth’s head again, expanding with a crushing, bass-heavy volume that made the demon’s ears bleed from the sheer pressure: "Not that you idiot!"

"Tell me... everything about this mission bastard!" Kael barked, adding a direct, aggressive spike of his sovereign mana into the mental link to ensure there was no room for misinterpretation.

Yaroth nodded absentmindedly, his head bobbing up and down in a limp, mechanical motion as the absolute weight of the corrected decree completely synchronized with his brain waves.

The fanatical light that had once defined his expressions was entirely absent now, replaced by the blank, vacant stare of a thoroughly broken puppet whose free will had been entirely deleted from the universe.

"The goal is to create numerous shadows... who would be sent into different parts of the human world... to infiltrate and gather information..." Yaroth said,

Noah frowned, the subtle movement hidden completely behind the absolute concealment of his matte-black cat mask.

’I was right... they really were trying to infiltrate human society!’ he thought.

The dark suspicions that had been forming in his mind ever since he first analyzed Tara’s unique elemental composition were finally validated with undeniable, physical proof.

This underground laboratory wasn’t just a minor, isolated operation run by a localized cult or a greedy ring of black-market merchants; it was a highly organized, international staging ground engineered explicitly by the demon kingdom to compromise the internal security of the human realms from the inside out.

They were breeding a silent, invisible army of modified sleeper agents capable of blending into common society while monitoring the strategic layouts of the provinces.

The question in his mind now was... how long had this been going on? And just how many ’shadows’ like Tara are there now?

If the network had been operating within the borders of the kingdom for decades without triggering the tracking arrays of the grand academy or the central capital scouts, the depth of the infiltration could be catastrophic.

There could be hundreds, if not thousands, of these empty, shadow-controlled humans already occupying key positions within the merchant guilds, the local guards, or even the lower ranks of the mage association itself, waiting silently for the supreme lord to activate their cores.

Kael, having already got the question Noah wanted to ask from the mental link, asking Yaroth the same.

Yaroth’s mouth moved rigidly under the absolute weight of the dragon’s command.

His eyes remained blank and bloodshot, staring straight ahead as the words forced their way past his lips in a flat, monotonous drone.

"It started about a hundred years ago..." Yaroth said, his voice echoing hollowly through the cold, ruined laboratory.

He paused for a brief moment, his chest heaving as his body tried to resist the mental compulsion, but the power of the Dragon’s order was too absolute to fight.

He could only continue speaking, laying bare the history of the organization. "...but we only got our first good results... twenty years ago."

Noah’s eyes widened, a cold wave of shock washing over him.

’ T-twenty years ago?! That’s when they got their first good results!’ he thought.

The timeline was far worse than anything Noah had initially calculated.

A hundred years of experimentation meant that the demons had been hiding within the borders of the human world for generations, quietly building their hidden facilities and refining their dark methods without anyone noticing.

But the mention of twenty years ago changed everything. It meant that the project was no longer in its testing phase.

This meant the first batch of shadow monsters were officially dispatched twenty years ago.

For two full decades, these modified sleeper agents had been existing among humans.

They had twenty years to gather intelligence, map out strategic weaknesses, and blend perfectly into human society. The sheer scale of the security breach was staggering.

Noah looked back at the ground, his eyes scanning the deep blue ice sheet that now covered the floor.

Beneath the transparent layer of frost, the grim remains of the facility were still visible.

He could see the piled heaps of rotten bodies, the tiny cracked skulls, and the splintered human bones that had been scattered across the masonry before his domain spell took over.

’I guess... that’s how most of the ’subjects’ ended up.’ he thought, his chest tightening with a mix of disgust and anger

The vast majority of the children stolen from the frontier villages hadn’t survived the process.

The process of hollowing out a human soul to force a high-density shadow core inside a fragile body had a catastrophic failure rate.

For every successful agent like Tara who managed to stabilize her power, hundreds of innocent children had been broken, discarded, and thrown into the dark corners of this room like common trash.

He couldn’t imagine how much pain those kids would have gone through before dying, which only made him realize just how evil the demons were.

The physical and mental torture of having one’s internal mana channels forcefully rewritten by a corrupted element was something no adult could easily withstand, let alone a child.

Yet, the three-horned supervisor and his researchers had carried out these atrocities for a century without a single shred of remorse, treating the screams of their victims as mere statistical data.

The sheer cruelty of their existence was beyond human comprehension.

As the realization settled deep into his mind, Noah’s cold fury broke through his usual detached composure.

His mana pressure leaked out, expanding outward from his silhouette in a heavy, physical wave that instantly crushed the atmospheric pressure of the entire vault.

The ambient air grew suffocatingly dense, and the ice sheet beneath his boots cracked under the sudden weight of his presence.

Yaroth’s knees dug into the ground, the immense weight of the arch magus’s aura slamming his seven-foot frame downward with a concussive force.

The pressure was so intense that the stone floor blocks beneath the ice began to fracture, and the supervisor’s knees started to bleed despite the thick black scales covering them. The protective properties of his demonic lineage offered absolutely no resistance against Noah’s raw, unbridled wrath.

The physical destruction of his body accelerated within seconds.

Blood also started leaking from his ears, nose, and mouth, painting his porcelain-white skin with dark, crimson lines that dripped onto the frost.

The bloodless flesh of his face contorted into a mask of pure agony as the sheer weight of Noah’s mana threatened to flatten his bones into dust. He couldn’t even whimper, his lungs entirely compressed by the gravity of the room.

Noah stepped forward, his traveling cloak trailing silently behind him as he stopped just a foot away from the kneeling demon. He tilted his mask downward, his golden eyes flaring with a terrifying, merciless light behind the eye slits.

"I’ll make sure you die... in the worst way possible," Noah said, his voice dropping into a razor-sharp whisper that carried an absolute promise of pain.

*

Skip to a few minutes later, and Yaroth was still on his knees, with Noah and Kael in front of him.

The heavy, suffocating aura had subsided just enough to keep the supervisor from dying prematurely, but he was completely broken.

His three jagged horns hung low, and his body was covered in deep burns from the previous lightning strikes, and he remained paralyzed under the dual constraint of Noah’s domain and Kael’s Dragon’s order. He could only draw shallow, ragged breaths, waiting for the end.

Noah stood in the center of the frozen garden, his arms folded loosely beneath his traveling cloak.

Kael remained at his side, his wings folded tightly against his flanks, his violet eyes still locked onto the captive.

Noah was still reeling in shock from all he just heard, his mind running through the massive web of information the demon had been forced to reveal over the last few minutes.

He thought to himself, his expression turning grim beneath his mask: It’s even worse than I thought!