Chapter 143: [X] - 143: Everything Is Fair In Love And War
Just as Alex was about to pass through the doors, he felt someone moving parallel to him.
He turned his head.
Valerius Bloodworth was also exiting at the same time.
’This guy again!’
Their eyes met across the short space of the corridor.
Zara’s eyes sharpened at once.
Her body tensed, weight shifting a fraction as if she were already calculating the distance between them and the fastest way to interpose herself if the moment turned violent.
Through the bond the sudden spike of alertness was clear and cold, a readiness that had nothing to do with conversation and everything to do with the possibility of steel being drawn in a public hallway.
Valerius’s red eyes moved to her first.
A slow smirk curved his mouth, deliberate and thin.
Then his gaze returned to Alex and stayed there, steady and unblinking, as if the presence of a Shadow Guard at the Third Prince’s side was worthless to him.
"You should remember something I once read in a book I loved a great deal," Valerius said.
His voice was calm, yet it carried cleanly in the stone corridor without needing volume to reach every listening ear nearby.
"Everything is fair in love and war."
He looked directly at Alex.
"And do you know what this is, Little Brother?"
The two of them held the gaze.
For a moment the tension between them thickened until it felt almost physical.
The residual noise from the training hall faded into the background.
Several retainers from both the Abyss and Bloodworth sides had already gone still, watching the exchange with the tight readiness of people prepared to intervene if a single step went wrong.
Hands hovered near weapons or the edges of sleeves.
No one spoke.
The air itself seemed to wait.
Valerius broke the stare first by turning.
He began walking in the opposite direction from the one Alex and Zara were taking, boots steady on the polished floor, posture unhurried, as if the entire conversation had been nothing more than a polite reminder delivered in passing.
"Think carefully about what you decide to do in the future," he said without looking back.
"Because everything you do will have consequences."
Now Alex and Valerius were briefly back to back in the wide corridor.
Alex spoke without raising his voice.
"If all is fair to win a crown, then no law, oath, or border will be left to protect you once you wear it."
’Not if you are going to go against me.’ Alex thought coldly.
"That is to say, if you even care to protect any of it."
Valerius, still moving away, raised one eyebrow.
He did not comment back.
He simply continued down the corridor until the distance between them widened and the moment closed on its own terms.
Both groups of retainers stayed tense for several more breaths.
Abyss side and Bloodworth side alike had heard every word of the exchange.
Hands had hovered near weapons or ready positions, the kind of collective readiness that only appears when two households with history stand this close to an open confrontation in a public space.
When nothing further escalated, the readiness slowly eased, though the undercurrent of hostility remained thick in the air and would not dissipate quickly once the corridors emptied.
Alex and Zara kept walking.
Neither spoke until the training complex was fully behind them and the palace corridors had swallowed the last echoes of the hall.
The message had already been delivered on both sides, and anything further could wait until they were no longer within earshot of people who would report every syllable.
The fight itself was already finished, but the news did not stay inside the training complex.
By the time the sun had moved another hour across the sky, the entire capital knew what had happened.
Word of the Third Prince’s public three against one victory over three Level 10 recruits spread with the speed of something people had been waiting for without realizing it.
Speculation followed immediately and without restraint.
In the markets, in the tea houses, in the private rooms of noble estates, the same questions circulated in overlapping waves.
What did this mean for the future of Winterfang?
Who would actually inherit the crown when no crown prince or princess had ever been formally declared yet?
Every noble house, from the highest ranked to the lowest, began calculating which side they wanted to support going forward and how much political risk that support would carry once the lines were drawn more clearly in the open.
Most of all, everyone wanted to know how the Third Prince had gained so much strength in so little public time.
People were now certain he had awakened a special shadow class.
No one knew when the class awakening had occurred, maybe on the day when he formed the core, maybe the time he went in isolation, no one knew.
No one any longer believed the reports that still listed him as Level 0.
Theories multiplied overnight and grew more elaborate with each retelling.
Some claimed he had been handed kills in secret so he could grow without any public record of the experience.
Others insisted the Abyss household had hidden an entire private training regimen for years, feeding him resources while the rest of the capital watched a carefully maintained facade of an ordinary, if unusually quiet, prince.
A few of the more extreme rumors suggested bloodline experiments or forbidden techniques drawn from older records that most houses preferred not to discuss in daylight.
All of them agreed on one point: the boy who had walked into that circle was not the same presence who had walked out of it.
It was another wave of chaos brought on by a single person standing in a single ring.
And soon the capital would receive another announcement, one that no one currently saw coming.
This one would not merely shake the Winterfang kingdom.
It would challenge a tradition that the entire human empire had treated as settled for generations.
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End of Chapter 143: Everything Is Fair In Love And War
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