Chapter 219 --219
"Y-Yes, Your Majesty!" a few desperate voices squeaked from the floor. "Overjoyed!"
"Exactly!" Heena beamed. "So, to celebrate my miraculous recovery, everyone who signed the petition should naturally want to give me a welcome-back gift. It’s only polite."
Hearing that, the nobles felt their stomachs collectively drop into their expensive shoes. They hurriedly exchanged panicked, sideways glances. They really, really wanted to ask Her Majesty a very specific question: Are you so poor that you need so many gifts?! Ever since she had taken total control of the court, it felt like she was constantly bleeding them dry. She was asking for gift after gift after gift, restructuring taxes, auditing their estates, and demanding "donations" for her various imperial projects. They were literally becoming broke because of it! Some of the lesser barons had already had to sell their summer estates just to keep up with the Empress’s "friendly suggestions" for charitable contributions.
Heena looked at their pale, horrified faces and tilted her head, her smile turning innocent.
"What?" she asked, blinking slowly. "Did I say anything wrong? Is my survival not worth celebrating?"
Hearing that loaded question, the nobles practically broke their necks shaking their heads in frantic denial, forcing the most sincere, pain-filled smiles onto their faces.
"No, no, Your Majesty!" Duke Valorian choked out, his smile looking like a grimace of physical agony. "Your order is very good! Excellent, even! We are... honored to present you with gifts!"
"Wonderful," Heena clapped her hands together once. The sound echoed like a gavel striking wood. "So, how about this? All of you regular lords and marquesses who signed that petition will give me 500 taels of gold."
A synchronized, muffled groan rippled through the hall. Five hundred taels of gold was enough to equip a small army.
"And as for the Dukes," Heena continued, her eyes locking onto Valorian, "because your joy is obviously so much greater, you will each give me 2,000 taels of gold."
Duke Valorian looked as though he might actually vomit, but he forced his head down in a stiff nod.
Then, Heena’s gaze snapped back down to the man still groveling at the base of the stairs.
"And Lord Helmut," she said softly.
Helmut flinched so hard he nearly bruised his own ribs.
Heena smiled at him—a terrible, bad, deeply predatory smile. "You. You are such a loyal person. You speak so frankly, so passionately, and so fastly about the rules of my empire. So, as a special honor, you will also pay 2,000 taels of gold."
Hearing that, Lord Helmut and the rest of the nobles hit a new shade of pale. They watched their beloved Majesty casually bankrupting their ancient houses in broad daylight. The sheer audacity of it left them speechless. They wanted to argue. They wanted to scream about ancient rights and financial ruin.
But suddenly, the Empress leaned forward, the cheerful facade dropping completely. Her dark eyes bored into them, empty and cold.
"What?" she asked, her voice dropping to a terrifying whisper. "Is there a problem? Because if you are short on gold... you can always give your head to me instead. I have plenty of room on the palace spikes."
The silence in the room was absolute. You could have heard a pin drop on the marble floor.
"No problem, Your Majesty!" Helmut sobbed, his forehead glued to the stone. "Two thousand taels! It is a bargain!"
Inside her mind, the situation was slightly less composed.
System 427, who had been hovering near her ear, could no longer contain himself. The little golden lion was practically vibrating with digital rage.
[Host!] the System shrieked directly into her neural pathway, his tiny holographic claws unsheathed. [Help us now! It is not the time for extortion! You should act swiftly and cut their necks! They tried to kill you! They tried to depose Larus! Slice them! Slice them all!]
Heena maintained her cold, imperious stare at the kneeling nobles, but internally, she let out a massive, exhausted sigh.
Are you crazy? Heena shot back, her mental voice dripping with the kind of exasperation usually reserved for dealing with toddlers holding sharp objects. Mother does not mind a little bloodshed, but how can I always just kill someone? Do you think these nobles are weak?
[They look pretty weak crying on the floor!] System 427 argued indignantly.
They are currently terrified of my crazy act, Heena corrected smoothly. But they control the trade routes. They control the grain silos. They control the private armies in the outer provinces. If I dare to touch any of them—if I actually start executing high-ranking Dukes and Lords without a proper, airtight legal trial—they won’t just cry. They will panic. And a panicked nobility is a dangerous nobility.
She rubbed her throbbing temples again, her head still aching fiercely from the lingering poison.
If I cut their necks today, she continued explaining to the bloodthirsty little lion, their heirs will instantly declare war tomorrow. They will literally unseat the throne and tear this empire apart in a civil war. And then who has to clean up that mess? Me. So no, we are not doing a massacre today. We are doing a mugging.
System 427 grumbled in her mind, clearly disappointed by the lack of immediate, gratuitous violence, but he couldn’t deny the terrifying logic of her politics.
Heena took a deep breath, the pain in her head slowly receding as she reasserted control over her body. She looked out over the sea of trembling, newly-bankrupted aristocrats, feeling a deep, profound sense of satisfaction.
"Now," Heena announced, her voice ringing clear and authoritative through the grand hall. "Since we have established how happy you all are to see me, and how generous you are all going to be... I believe this emergency court session is concluded."
She turned gracefully, her blood-red robes swirling around her ankles, and began to walk up the remaining stairs toward the throne. Larus, who had been standing silently by the royal seat, met her eyes. The exhaustion in his features was entirely eclipsed by the absolute, unbridled awe shining in his gaze.
Heena reached the top of the dais, but she didn’t sit on the massive, gilded chair. Instead, she stood beside it, looking down at the hundreds of men who had thought they could steal her world while she slept.
"You have twenty-four hours to deliver the gold to the imperial treasury," Heena said, her voice dropping into a deadly, nonchalant purr. "If a single coin is missing, I won’t ask for it twice. I will just send Duke Robbiston to collect the difference in blood."
She smiled one last, devastating time.
"Dismissed."
But just as the nobles began to frantically scramble to their feet, desperate to flee the room and count their remaining wealth, the heavy oak doors at the far end of the throne room slammed open once more.
A lone, breathless messenger stumbled into the hall, his uniform torn and stained with dust from a hard ride. He ignored the terrified nobles, ignored the drawn swords of the royal guard, and threw himself onto his knees at the base of the long carpet.
"Your Majesty!" the messenger gasped, his chest heaving as he held up a sealed scroll bearing a terrifyingly familiar emblem. "Urgent news from the Northern Border! The Marus Kingdom... they have mobilized!"
Heena’s smile vanished instantly. She traded a sharp, calculating glance with Larus, her mind instantly shifting gears from domestic extortion to international warfare.