Chapter 111: Fake Notice
The shadow folded back into itself, slow, and the shape standing beside Arthur lost its edges, its weight, its legs, until it was just a flat dark patch on the marble again, ordinary, obedient.
Vexis reappeared beside him a second later, hovering the way he always did, visible to no one but Arthur.
'That felt real,' Vexis said, turning one hand over like he could still feel it. 'Weight. Ground under my feet. I haven't felt ground since the culmination.' A beat. 'Do that again sometime.'
Later. Maybe.
The King sat back down, slow, some of the color returned to his face that had drained out of it during the demonstration.
"I've seen what I needed to see," he said. "This audience is finished. All of you — leave my court."
Nobody argued with that.
Arthur let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding.
It worked.
Against every reasonable expectation, it had actually worked.
The King hadn't believed him because of his words. He'd believed what he'd seen with his own eyes. The suspicion hadn't disappeared, but it had shifted. From certainty to doubt. From judgment to curiosity.
For now…
That was enough.
Arthur's shoulders loosened for the first time since entering the throne room. One impossible gamble had bought them time. Time to uncover whoever was wearing his face. Time to stop this before the entire kingdom decided he was their enemy.
I'm a genius.
'You're too full of yourself' Vexis said beside him.
Oh shut up.
He almost smiled.
Outside the throne room, in the corridor, Arthur pulled Solenne aside before she'd gone three steps.
"That mage in the alley," he said. "The one with the transport relic. I don't think she was sending your letters."
Solenne's face went from tired to sharp in half a second. "I never gave that order. Every letter I've sent went through the normal courier channel. I'd know if someone was routing correspondence a different way."
"Then someone's been sending something without your name on it."
"I'm going to find her." Solenne was already turning, jaw set, hand drifting toward her sword. "Right now."
The floor came apart before she took a second step.
The explosion hit from somewhere above and to the side, a wall of sound and pressure that swallowed everything else whole. Marble sheared off the ceiling in slabs. The corridor buckled. Arthur felt himself thrown sideways, weightless for a half-second, then the impact when the ground stopped being optional.
He came back to himself on his back, ears ringing, white dust settling over everything.
The pain reached him a second after his vision cleared.
He looked at his left arm.
It ended at the wrist. Just — ended. Bone and torn muscle and blood pumping out in a rhythm he could feel in his own skull, the hand itself somewhere in the rubble, gone, not attached to anything anymore.
He didn't scream. He didn't have the air for it.
His mind refused to accept what his eyes were showing him.
His hand wasn't there.
It should have been.
He could still feel his fingers curling into a fist. He could still feel his nails digging into his palm.
Phantom sensation.
His body was trying to convince him nothing had changed while blood poured across the marble proving the opposite.
The metallic smell filled his lungs until breathing itself felt like swallowing iron.
Theodore lay a few feet away, unmoving, blood running from a gash along his hairline into the dust beneath him.
Screaming came from everywhere at once. Elven voices, sharp and panicked, the relic still humming somewhere nearby, catching fragments and throwing them back translated. Protect the King. Where are the humans. An attack, an attack, an attack.
The ceiling above them groaned and gave way in a slow collapse, chunks of marble raining down through a gap that hadn't existed a minute ago.
Arthur looked up through the dust, through the pain screaming up his ruined arm, and saw it.
A shape, black, materializing at the top of a leaning pillar, gathering itself out of shadow the way smoke gathers before it becomes fire. It resolved slowly. Gold hair. Gold eyes, wrong, the pupils blown wide, a thin red ring burning at the very center of each one.
The smile came last.
Arthur couldn't move.
It wasn't merely a resemblance.
Every feature was identical.
The same jaw.
The same eyes.
The same hair that caught the pale light of the Emerald Kingdom.
It was like staring into a mirror that had learned cruelty.
The expression ruined everything.
Arthur had smiled before.
Vexis had smiled before.
Neither of them had ever looked at another living person with that much delight at their suffering.
Whoever stood on that pillar wasn't pretending to be Vexis.
It was wearing him.
Vexis Lestilaut, standing on a marble pillar in the middle of a collapsing throne room, smiling down at the wreckage he'd apparently caused.
'That's—' Vexis's voice cracked with something close to horror. 'That's US. That's my face. What the hell is that.'
Arthur didn't have an answer.
A master mage staggered into view through the dust, one arm hanging wrong at the shoulder, screaming something in a voice that came apart at the edges. "The gates — the gates are breached! Cloaked men, they're inside the walls—"
She stopped. Swallowed. Forced the rest of it out like it physically hurt to say.
"They're wearing the Elercross crest."
Solenne's face went white.
Arthur's blood kept coming, faster than his heartbeat should have allowed. He pressed his good hand against the stump, tried to remember anything at all about how bodies worked, about pressure points, about anything that might slow it down, and came up with almost nothing useful.
Roz landed on his shoulder hard, ears flat, and shoved both small hooves against the exposed bone and torn flesh. Purple light bled out from between his paws, and the bleeding slowed, then stopped, cauterized and sealed in a few brutal seconds that hurt worse than the wound itself had.
"Hold still, brat."
Arthur held still. His shadow network erupted outward without him consciously pushing it — every anchor he'd ever laid crashed Information into him all at once.
Corridors.
Courtyards.
Rooftops.
Hundreds of moving signatures overlapped until his vision blurred.
Guards converged from every direction.
Shadows raced across collapsing walls.
Somewhere deeper inside the palace, dozens of signatures vanished almost simultaneously.
Dead.
Arthur nearly lost his footing under the weight of it.
His network had never stretched this far before.
It felt less like sensing people…
and more like listening to an entire kingdom scream at once.
Hundreds of signatures. Everywhere. The entire palace grounds lit up with aetheric presence, moving, colliding, dying in places he couldn't process fast enough.
Solenne was already up, sword drawn, blood on her cheek from a cut she hadn't noticed yet.
"PREPARE FOR CONFRONTATION!" Her voice cut through the noise like something physical. "PROTECT THE ELVES!"
Arthur stared up at the shadow-shape still perched on the pillar, smiling down at all of it like a spectator at something he'd arranged himself.
Why are there two bodies. A clone. Some kind of transformation magic. None of that exists in the novel. There's no precedent for this. I've read two thousand chapters and there is nothing, nothing, that explains what I'm looking at.
A red box materialized in front of him, ignoring the chaos entirely.
[PLOT THREAD 70 COMMENCING]
+[20 RP]
'What is THAT,' Vexis hissed, somewhere between fury and panic. 'Why is there two bodies. Why does he look like ME. Arthur, what is happening—'
I don't know.
Arthur gathered his aetheric blood into his remaining hand, compressed it fast, dark water pooling at his fingertip, and fired it straight at the shape on the pillar.
The marble hit true.
And passed straight through, like the shape wasn't solid enough to stop anything, black scattering apart around the point of impact and reforming a half-second later.
The figure looked down at the hole where the attack had passed through him.
Then…
it laughed.
No sound reached Arthur.
But the widening grin was enough.
Slowly, deliberately, the figure raised one hand.
And waved.
A horn sounded somewhere beyond the walls, long and low, carrying through the broken ceiling and the falling dust.
Solenne grabbed Arthur by the good shoulder and hauled him upright. Across the wreckage, Cael and Thalon had already gotten Theodore between them, his head lolling, blood still running.
A streak of motion cut through the dust and resolved into a soldier, dropping into a bow directly in front of Solenne, breathing hard, armor scorched at one shoulder.
Solenne's face went from fury to confusion in an instant. "Krail? Why are you here?"
"Your Majesty." The soldier's eyes were wild, desperate, certain he was doing the right thing. "We've come to rescue you."
"Rescue me?" Solenne's voice cracked, sharp, disbelieving. "What are you talking about?"
"We received word you were being held. The Majesty ordered—"
Solenne's expression didn't just falter. It came apart.
"I DID NOT GIVE SUCH AN ORDER." Her voice tore through the wreckage, loud enough to cut over the screaming, over the horn, over everything else falling apart around them. "I AM NOT AND WAS NEVER BEING HELD CAPTIVE!"