Ch. 33
Chapter 33: Rage
The morning at Valerius Fortress always carried a nearly congealed tranquility.
Sunlight filtered through the Council Hall's tall stained glass windows, casting mottled bands of light across the obsidian floor polished to a mirror sheen.
Lady Elanor sat upright in her exclusive velvet chair, holding a bone china teacup from the distant Western Territories containing dragonspittle flower tea, said to soothe the nerves.
She didn't drink, merely admiring the wisps of steam rising from it while listening to her eldest son Lucius describe in a tone mixed with excitement and cruelty how his newly acquired purebred warhorse had dragged a errant stable hand to death.
“The sound of that fool's bones shattering was truly delightful, Mother.”
A trace of morbid flush colored Lucius's handsome face.
“Just like crushing a beetle. This Tempest is worthy of the Valerius family heir.”
“Your taste has always been impeccable, my dear son.”
Lady Elanor's red lips parted slightly, revealing a satisfied smile.
She loved this feeling—everything under control, all discordant notes erased.
That eyesore of a bastard should have long since become some magical beast's excrement somewhere in the Wailing Wastes.
She had even begun planning how to “sorrowfully” report to the Imperial Upper Council the unfortunate sacrifice of a “valiant pioneer,” earning the family another insignificant bit of reputation.
Just then, the Council Hall's heavy oak doors creaked open.
A steward, face deathly pale and steps stumbling, rushed in. Behind him followed two guards carrying a square wooden box wrapped in black cloth. Ice water continuously dripped from the box's edges, leaving a trail of wet marks across the floor.
“My… My lady… Young master…”
The steward's voice trembled uncontrollably, as if he'd seen demons from hell.
“There's… there's someone claiming to be a messenger from the City of Miracles who delivered… delivered this, saying it's… saying it's from Lord Caesar, sent to you… as a letter.”
“Caesar?”
Lucius's smile instantly froze, his brow furrowing into a knot.
“How is that bastard not dead yet?”
Lady Elanor's movements also stopped.
She slowly set down her teacup, her beautiful eyes narrowing dangerously like a lioness whose slumber had been disturbed.
“A letter?”
She laughed lightly, her voice carrying condescending languor.
“Open it.”
“I'm quite curious to see what new tricks that little mouse rolling in the mud has learned.”
Lucius impatiently waved his hand. The guards immediately stepped forward, roughly cutting away the black cloth with daggers and prying open the box's lid.
A white mist mixed with the stench of blood and cold air instantly gushed from the box.
The temperature inside the Council Hall seemed to plummet by more than ten degrees.
Lucius curiously leaned over to look. The next second, his face turned deathly pale, his stomach churning violently as he staggered back a step, nearly knocking over the armor stand behind him.
“What… what the hell is this?”
He cried out in alarm.
Lady Elanor frowned and slowly rose from her seat, walking over with perfect grace.
When she saw clearly what was in the box, even though she was accustomed to blood and death, her pupils involuntarily constricted violently, her breathing stopping in an instant.
There was no letter in the box.
Only a human head surrounded by ice blocks.
The head belonged to a middle-aged man, still wearing half of a shattered bronze mask on his face, eyes wide open with frozen extreme horror and disbelief.
The cut at the neck was smooth as a mirror, demonstrating the cutter's superior skill.
Lady Elanor recognized the mask's style at a glance.
Shadow Hand.
She had spent a full five hundred gold coins hiring them—top-tier assassins who supposedly never failed.
And now, his head, like a trophy, had been packaged and “returned” to her in such a humiliating manner by her target, that , that bastard in her eyes.
This wasn't a letter.
This was a declaration of war.
A declaration written with the head of the assassin she herself had paid for—full of silent mockery and bloody provocation!
“AAHHH—!!!”
A hysterical scream, like a wild cat whose tail had been stepped on, erupted from Lady Elanor's throat.
Her well-maintained beautiful face twisted completely from extreme rage and humiliation, becoming grotesquely terrifying.
She suddenly swept her hand, sending all the silver utensils and crystal vessels on the nearby table crashing to the floor!
CLANG! CRASH!
The crisp sounds of shattering echoed throughout the Council Hall, like her pride now shattered to pieces.
“Caesar! Caesar Valerius!”
She shrieked, chewing on that name over and over as if tearing it to shreds.
“You bastard! You damned maggot! How dare you?! How dare you do this to me?!!”
Her carefully planned elegant execution had become a farcical comedy.
The hounds she sent out were counter-killed by their prey, their heads sent back as trophies on display.
This wasn't just a slap in the face—this was grinding her dignity into the ground, trampling it repeatedly with the filthiest boots!
“Mother! Calm down! Please calm down!”
Lucius had never seen his mother so out of control. While trying to soothe her, he was also stirred to towering rage by that head.
“This bastard is declaring war on the entire Valerius family!”
“We must make him pay! A price in blood!”
“A price?”
Lady Elanor whirled around, her bloodshot eyes boring into him with a gaze that made even Lucius's heart skip.
“You're right! A price! I want him dead!”
“I want to grind his ridiculous 'City of Miracles' to powder! I want to shatter his bones one by one and feed them to wild dogs in the wastes!”
She gasped heavily, chest heaving violently, her mind burned to chaos by flames of vengeance.
“Not enough! This still isn't enough!”
She roared.
“I'm going to my father! I'll have him dispatch the family's knight order! I want to personally watch that land razed to the ground, watch that bastard kneel before me begging for mercy!”
The Viscount—her father, a truly powerful noble within the Eastern Territory with real authority and a formidable private army.
As long as he was willing to act, never mind one Caesar—even a hundred would be nothing but ants to be crushed at will.
Lucius's eyes erupted with mad joy.
“Exactly! Mother! Grandfather's knight order! That's true thunder and fury!”
“I'll personally lead them and twist off that bastard's head!”
Mother and son, intoxicated by vengeful fervor, seemed to already see victory.
Just then, a voice devoid of any emotion, cold as ice water poured over their heads, came from the Council Hall entrance.
“Have you made enough of a scene?”
Baron Anjou—Caesar's father—stood there, no one knowing when he'd arrived.
He wore simple black fitted clothing without any superfluous ornaments, yet the pressure emanating from him like something tangible made the Council Hall's temperature plummet again.
His gaze swept across the wreckage scattered on the floor, across the still-dripping wooden box, and finally settled on his wife's face twisted with rage.
His eyes held no anger, no surprise—only barely perceptible annoyance at this loss of control.
“Father!”
Seeing him, the fervor on Lucius's face instantly subsided considerably as he instinctively bowed.
“My dear husband.”
Lady Elanor turned around. She tried to recover her usual elegance, but her trembling voice and venomous eyes betrayed her.
“You've come at just the right time! Look at what your fine son has done!”
“Not only did he kill the people we sent to 'discipline' him, he sent the head back to humiliate us! This is a provocation against you, against the entire family!”
The Baron walked slowly into the Council Hall. He didn't look at the head, as if it were merely an insignificant piece of trash.
He walked to the table, picked up the bottle of Flame Rose wine that Lucius loved most, poured himself a glass, then walked directly to the fireplace to watch the dancing flames.
“So, what do you plan to do?”
He took a sip of wine and asked without turning around.
“I'm going to my father!”
Lady Elanor said without hesitation.
“I'll ask him to deploy his knight order and completely erase that rebellious bastard and his nest!”
The Baron was silent for a moment. Wood in the fireplace crackled and popped.
Then he let out a nearly mocking sneer.
“Foolish.”
Two words, like two resounding slaps, struck Lady Elanor and Lucius hard across their faces.
“What did you say?”
Lady Elanor couldn't believe her ears, her voice rising sharply.
“You call me foolish? Your son is humiliating your wife, defiling your family name, and you call me foolish?”
“Isn't that what you are?”
The Baron finally turned around. Those deep purple eyes identical to Caesar's were now like two blocks of ten-thousand-year ice, coldly observing her.
“For a banished son, you first spent five hundred gold coins hiring a bunch of rats who only know how to hide in gutters. The mission failed and the money was wasted.”
“Now you want to beg your father to mobilize an entire organized knight order to attack a… development territory that's legal under Imperial law?”
His voice wasn't loud, yet every word cut to the heart.
“Have you thought about what this means, Elanor?”
The Baron's voice carried a thread of cruel interrogation.
“It means you'll drag your father—an Imperial Viscount—into a military action with no legitimate cause.”
“It means you want him to bear the risk of angering the Eastern Territory Grand Duke, perhaps even alarming the Royal Capital, all for your pathetic pride.”
“Do you think your father, equally skilled at calculation, would make such a guaranteed losing deal for your personal grievance?”
Lady Elanor's face instantly turned deathly pale.
Her rage-clouded mind was finally pierced back to partial clarity by her husband's ice-cold words.
She knew her father—a man even more coldly ruthless and profit-oriented than her husband.
He doted on her because she was his chess piece for marriage alliances with other nobles, a tool that could bring him benefits.
To take enormous political risks for an insignificant?
He would never agree.
“But… but our honor…”
Lucius protested unwillingly.
“Are we just going to let that bastard be so arrogant?”
“Honor?”
The Baron's gaze turned to his eldest son, that look containing undisguised disappointment.
“Lucius, I taught you—honor is the spoils of the strong, not a fig leaf for the weak.”
“A true strong person doesn't roar because of an ant's provocation. He only considers what method of crushing it would be most effortless and effective.”
He paused, draining his wine in one gulp, his tone growing even colder.
“The first assassination's failure proved two things.”
“First, Shadow Hand are a bunch of .”
“Second, our target is more troublesome than we imagined.”
“He could survive in a place like the Wailing Wastes and even counter-kill professional assassins—this proves he's no longer that cowering in the castle.”
The Baron's words weren't praising Caesar but conducting a cold cost assessment.
The target's difficulty level had increased, meaning the hunting costs requiring investment must also increase exponentially.
And in his view, these increased costs had already exceeded the target's inherent “value.”
“You mean… we're just going to let this go?”
Lady Elanor couldn't accept this conclusion. Her nails dug deeply into her palms.
The Baron walked before his wife, looking down at her from above. In his deep purple eyes was absolute control and unquestionable authority.
“This matter ends here.”
“Without my permission, none of you will take any further action against the Wailing Wastes.”
“Whether you, Lucius, or you, my dear lady—you especially are not to write your father and let him see our Valerius family's joke.”
“You…!”
Lady Elanor trembled with rage. She wanted to argue back but found every one of her husband's words like cold shackles, firmly locking down all her potential actions.
The family background she took such pride in appeared so pale and powerless before her husband's absolutely rational analysis.
“A wild dog that just learned to bite isn't worth using a dragon-slaying blade on right now.”
The Baron's voice carried no warmth, as if delivering the final verdict on this matter.
“Since he enjoys playing house games in the wastes, let him play.”
“When winter comes, when all the magical beasts in the wastes go mad from hunger, we won't need to lift a finger. Harsh nature will collect this bad debt for us.”
Having spoken, he ignored his iron-faced wife and unwilling son, turned around, and left the Council Hall with steady strides.
From beginning to end, he never looked at that head on the ground again.
Inside the Council Hall, deathly silence.
Only Lady Elanor's heavy breathing remained, along with the crackling of burning wood in the fireplace.
After a long while, she slowly bent down and picked up a sharp crystal shard from the floor, gripping it tightly, letting its sharp edges cut into her delicate palm. Blood dripped through the gaps between her fingers.
Physical pain was nothing compared to the humiliation and fury of being suppressed and dismissed in her heart.
Her husband—that coldly ruthless man—had stripped her of the right to immediate revenge.
But the flames in her eyes not only didn't extinguish, they were compressed by this pressure into something more condensed, more dangerous.
She raised her head, looking toward the wreckage on the floor, that head already beginning to emit the stench of decay. The expression twisted with rage on her face slowly, slowly transformed into a smile so cold, so chilling it made one's blood run cold.
“Winter… is it?”
She murmured, her voice soft as Viper's hiss.
“Very well.”
“I'll let you and my dear 'son' live a few more months.”