Chapter 224: Escape
Up on the floor of the ruined auction hall, Baron Kiliyan was pressed flat against a sagging pillar.
He could have run. The doors hung wide open. But the moment that thought crossed his mind, a cold knot of dread clenched his gut. Out there, every citizen was hunting for him to claim a bounty. He wouldn’t last five minutes alone. As much as unhinged and terrifying as his two captors were, they were the only options to live.
Then he heard Harried footsteps echoing up the stairwell leading from the basement.
Kiliyan poked his head over the shattered marble balustrade, waving his stubby arms frantically. "Over here! Hurry, you fools! The guards fled during the tremor, but their reinforcements will swarm this sector within minutes! What happened below?! Where is the Lord of Flesh?!"
The words died in his throat, his jaw dropped, and his eyes bulged in horror.
They looked like they had crawled straight out of hell. Gold’s cloak was shredded, and the lower half of her mask was shattered.
And Eren was completely shirtless, his chest bleeding red, three, jagged claw marks carved clean across his chest and ribs. Yet he was grinning wildly while holding a hissing Shadow Cat cub.
"You absolute, brainless moron!" Gold was screaming at Eren at the top of her lungs. "Why did you open all of them?!"
"Hey, I thought it would be fun, Goldy!" Eren laughed, completely ignoring that the cat was still biting his arm.
Before Kiliyan could process what was happening, Eren ran past the pillar.
Without breaking stride, Eren grabbed Kiliyan’s bicep. With monstrous, casual torque, Eren yanked the fat nobleman off his feet, dragging him into the dead sprint with the effortless ease of a child pulling a sled.
"Move those legs, piggy!" Eren beamed, glancing back, his blue eyes blazing with amusement. "Unless you have a sudden craving to become paste!"
"W-What?!" Kiliyan shrieked, his stubby legs flailing uselessly in the air as he was hauled across the tilting floorboards. "Paste?! Why would I become paste—"
Kiliyan made the fatal mistake of looking over his shoulder.
His face was drained of all colour.
Dozens of starving, enraged contraband beasts were boiling up into the auditorium like a tidal wave of scaled nightmares, tearing through the splintered timber.
"WHAT IN THE HELL DID YOU DO DOWN THERE?!" Kiliyan screamed, his voice cracking into a high-pitched, hysterical wail as a monster snapped its jaws inches from his trailing boots.
Eren let out a bright, cheerful laugh.
"I just decided to leave Rujgard a lovely little gift!"
***
Far in the quietest, neatest sector of Rujgard was the office of the Lord of Contracts.
Silas, the Lord of Contracts, rubbed the bridge of his hooked nose, his thin, monocled eye twitching with clinical bewilderment. He looked at the finely dressed youth sitting in the velvet armchair across from him as if inspecting an exotic breed of dung beetle.
"Let me ensure I have recorded the terms with absolute fidelity," Silas said, his pen hovering over an iron-bound contract. "You traveled all the way through covert border routes to Rujgard... to hire an elite strike-squad of twenty veteran mercenaries... purely to kidnap a former maid currently enrolled in the Royal Academy?"
Reinhardt Angulas sat across from him.
The blue-haired simp nodded, his face flushed with desperate obsession. He slammed a fist onto the desk.
"Yes! Exactly! And I need them dispatched immediately!" Reinhardt spat, his eyes bulging with dramatic fervor.
"You don’t understand the tragedy unfolding right now! That wretched Eren Volsver has brainwashed Aria! He keeps her trapped at his side! I have to be the one to rescue her! Once she sees I am willing to tear the heavens apart to bring her back, she will realize who truly belongs in her heart!"
Silas stared at him in deadpan silence, his eye twitching so hard.
’A clinical case of terminal delusion,’ Silas thought dryly.
He knows everything. He knew how Reinhardt had spent years ignoring his devoted fiancée Aria, slobbering after the saintess-candidate Alice like an obedient hound. Then Eren Volsver had strolled into an official duel, dismantled Reinhardt with humiliating casualness, held up a mirror to the idiot’s pathetic double standards, and walked away having inspired Aria to end the engagement on the spot.
Soon after, Aria was officially claimed by the Volsver estate.
Yet, despite Reinhardt’s tragic buffoonery, Silas had received express directives from the syndicate’s central pipeline to entertain the Angulas heir.
Silas tapped his quill against the ledger, connecting the dots in his calculating mind.
’The syndicate wants Lady Aria out,’ Silas mused.
’If Aria Reedings rises to lead the Reedings Dukedom, she will inevitably throw the full weight of her house behind Princess Seraphina in the succession war. By using this blue-haired clown to get her back by blackmailing Eren, they sever the Volsver alliance and cripple Seraphina’s backing in one stroke. We couldn’t touch him since Emma was always with him. So blackmailing him with that maid who’s suspiciously close to him these days would be a better option.’
It was a tidy plot. Except for one anomalous variable.
Silas’s gaze fell on the file of Eren Volsver’s profile given by the Lord of Information.
For years, people saw the boy as an utterly useless, talentless idiot—a disgrace to the grand Volsver lineage, famous only for relentlessly stalking Alice like a lovesick puppy.
Then, three months ago, something changed.
The useless guy suddenly humiliated a sword prodigy, casually developed an impossible medical breakthrough to cure his sister Liora’s terminal Hyper Mana Accumulation, and showed talent in martial arts.
"Something is wrong with this boy," Silas muttered under his breath, adjusting his monocle as he stared at Eren’s file. "A sudden personality inversion? Or a terrifying monster hiding beneath a buffoon’s mask for a decade?"
Reinhardt blinked, his brow furrowing in haughty irritation. "What? What are you mumbling to yourself for?! Are you giving me my twenty men or not?!"
Before Silas could give the entitled pup a lesson in sovereign etiquette, the doors of the office burst open with a deafening bang.
A senior aide stumbled into the room.
Reinhardt sneered, waving a dismissive, perfumed hand. "Who the fuck are you? Don’t you know how to knock when nobility is having business—"
"MY LORD!" the aide screamed, completely ignoring the simp as he lunged toward the desk. "THE GRAND MENAGERIE! IT’S GONE! THE LORD OF FLESH IS DEAD!"
Silas froze, his sharp eyes widening behind the crystal lens. "Branagh? Dead?!"
"And hundreds of contraband monsters have flooded the central district!" the aide wheezed, trembling violently.
Silas rose to his feet.
"Ready my carriage," Silas barked, his voice snapping like whipcord as he swept around the desk. "Contain that sector. Now!"
"Hey! Wait! What about my squad?!" Reinhardt shouted in outrage, jumping up from his chair as Silas walked right past him. "What about my contract?! What about Aria?!"
Silas didn’t even turn his head. He didn’t spare the screaming duke’s heir a glance, barging out into the grand hallway as emergency bells began to toll across the city of Rujgard.