Chapter 184: Stuck As A Mere Worker
Plontis didn’t waste a single beat before spilling everything he knew about Aaron’s mission.
"I gave him the mission to find his way to the capital city of Drax, m’lady. I figured it would prove a decently difficult journey for him." He delivered the words with a neat bow.
"Drax... huh?" Bella hummed casually, her tone giving nothing away, betraying no particular interest in the subject.
Aaron’s eyes went wide. He abandoned any remaining pretense of subtlety and turned to the Empress, jabbing a finger toward the screen and Plontis’s image within it. "He’s lying! He gave me a second mission too! Ask him!"
"W-Wait — that voice..." Plontis stared into the screen with barely concealed shock. "Aaron? Is that man with you right now, Empress?"
Bella tilted her head in Aaron’s direction for just a moment before releasing a slow, quiet sigh and returning her gaze to Plontis. "Plontis. I asked what mission you gave him."
"M-M’lady, there was a small second part to the mission —" He hesitated visibly before pressing forward. "If he could — seduce you, I would grant him a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity as his reward."
When Bella offered no response to that, the silence itself became instruction enough. Plontis had no choice but to continue.
"L-Lady Karen had said that Lady Bellanoir is getting too old and she needs a spark in her life to make it more worthwhile, or she will keep getting older and keep wasting her life stuck in a small realm, lazing around." He delivered the words with the brisk, detached tone of someone reading from a prepared statement, then immediately tacked on, "I deeply apologize for the words, m’lady. These are genuinely Lady Karen’s words, and I am merely the messenger."
"I see." That was all Bella said. Her face remained fixed on the screen, her gaze settled on Plontis with the particular stillness of someone looking through a person rather than at them.
"T-That is everything, Empress. I deeply apologize if my foolish decision has caused you any trouble."
"Once-in-a-lifetime opportunity — tell me more." She bypassed his apology entirely.
"I — it was a minor bloodline connection to the Primordial race, Empress. I had received Lady Karen’s permission to offer it as the reward, in the event that this young man succeeded in completing the extra mission."
Bella hummed once, then raised her hand. The floating screen dissolved instantly, the connection severing without ceremony, and Plontis disappeared mid-breath. Aaron watched the empty space where the screen had been, then turned his gaze to the Empress.
He was no expert by any measure, but even he could feel the state her emotions were in beneath the surface. He could sense the irritation — sharp and contained — and he could intuit, without needing to be told, exactly who it was directed toward.
The elusive Lady Karen, whose name Plontis had invoked more than once in the span of a single conversation.
Aaron’s best guess was that she was a Primordial herself — someone standing at roughly the same level as Bella, perhaps even close to her equal.
"Uh, Empress," Aaron ventured, his voice careful and deliberate.
Bella turned to look at him. Her face was utterly blank — no anger, no irritation visible on the surface, no emotion offered up for reading. It was, somehow, significantly more unnerving than outright fury would have been.
But he had already committed, and the iron was still hot.
"Actually, Empress — did you know that back on Earth, the name Karen was used more as a slang term? A slur, even?"
That landed. Her attention sharpened and shifted onto him with unmistakable interest.
"What slur?" she asked, mildly curious.
"Due to a general lack of magic and an abundance of idle time, we humans were always searching for ways to entertain ourselves. And that was when the Karens surfaced on Earth. They are typically blonde, and quite psychotic — women who dedicate themselves almost exclusively to shouting at service workers and demanding to speak to managers. Their primary goal seems to be generating as much chaos as humanly possible. Though we don’t judge — anyone can be a Karen, really. I doubt there is a single person on Earth who actually likes one."
A low giggle slipped out from behind Bella’s composure before she caught it and reassembled herself into something more refined. "What an amusing little planet," she mused.
But just as Aaron was preparing to lean into it — to share more, to let the laughter come — Bella smiled faintly and said:
"Karen is called the Empress of Destruction. She is a woman of nearly the same strength as myself, and a full member of the Primordial race — so I would suggest swallowing those indirect jokes before they go any further. I won’t harm you for it, but I cannot guarantee your safety if the wrong person overhears and decides to pass it along."
Aaron swallowed every word he had been about to say with impressive efficiency, blinking back at her with an expression of complete, unbothered innocence, as though nothing of any kind had been said.
"I like you," Bella said, a light note of amusement threading through her voice — before it faded. "But I am afraid your once-in-a-lifetime opportunity is going to slip through your fingers." She shook her head.
"E-Empre—"
"Don’t be troubled, though. Since I like you, I will give you an alternative path to that Primordial bloodline you are after." She smiled, and it was the particular smile of someone who had already decided.
Aaron waited in attentive silence.
"I am going to remove Plontis from his position, which means his role as Primordial Consort will be genuinely vacant — not just as a class title, but as an actual post. You could step into that role and apply those impressive flirting and persuasion skills of yours on Karen directly to obtain the bloodline from her."
"..." Aaron stared at her.
"Empress, I am genuinely grateful for the offer," he said at last, "however, I would much rather return to Solaris and to my lovers. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity is something extraordinary, yes — but what is the point of obtaining it if my entire lifetime gets spent serving as a mere worker?" He shook his head slowly. "Besides — after meeting you, I stopped chasing that mission purely for the reward. In my eyes, if I could actually complete it, you were the real reward."
Bella’s lips parted — just barely, just for a moment — before she pressed them back together and held the cold, unshakeable exterior she had always worn, the one that nothing was supposed to reach.
Inwardly, however, his words settled somewhere deeper than flattery ever could.
The compliment itself meant nothing to her. Compliments were currency she had been paid in every single day for longer than she cared to count. They were trivial. Weightless.
But it wasn’t the compliment that caught her.
It was this: What’s the point of getting it when my lifetime will get spent stuck as a mere worker?
That line. The quiet, unadorned reasoning behind it. It found something in her she hadn’t expected it to reach.
She doubted Aaron would have had the nerve to call Plontis a mere worker in any other company, with any other audience. But standing where she stood, looking at it honestly — was he wrong?
Plontis was a lower-stage mortal whom Karen had taken a liking to, upon whom she had bestowed a fragment of her bloodline, elevating him onto a pedestal he could never have reached on his own. It had seemed, from the outside, like an extraordinary gift.
But the moment Plontis had stepped into the world of the Primordials — that world that ordinary mortals could not even conceive of — he had understood, with the particular clarity that only arrives too late, how foolish the dream had always been. His life, his family, his friends, his work — all of it had been surrendered in an instant. He had been moved into Karen’s palace, alongside all the other consorts and concubines she kept and collected.
What was he, in the end, if not a mere worker?
And then, following that thought almost unbidden, came the one that cut closer.
Bella realized she was not so different.
She too was confined — held in place within her own realm, presiding over this small, contained world with precious little freedom to call her own. She could not leave it unattended. The dark forces that circled its edges would not wait patiently for her return. And she had never been the sort to invite others in, to let the noise and company of the outside world breach these walls in the name of entertainment.
She had told herself, for a very long time, that this was enough. That the stillness was a choice, that the rest was restorative, that sleep and solitude were preferable to whatever lay beyond the boundaries of this realm she had built for herself.
She had mistaken the cage for a comfortable bed.
"I was the real reward, hmm?"
Bella’s lips curved into a slow, quiet smile — the kind that arrived without permission and carried something genuine beneath it.