CHAPTER 191: SHADOWS IN THE COURT OF ASHES

Deep beneath the royal capital, in a soundproofed vault usually reserved for state treason, four men sat around a single tallow candle. The air was thick with the scent of unwashed velvet, stale wine, and cold panic.

Duke Valerian of Oakford poured another cup of wine with hands that shook so violently the silver goblet clinked against the decanter. Beside him, Marquis Corvin gnawed at his thumbnail until it bled, while Chancellor Oswald nervously adjusted his fur-trimmed collar. Only Grand Commander Teryn sat still, though his hand never left the grip of his longsword.

"The King is going to sell us out," Oswald hissed, leaning across the iron table. "Did you see his eyes? He looks at us not as his loyal councilors, but as four heads waiting to be chopped off to buy his own crown another decade!"

"He won't wait the full year," Corvin muttered through gritted teeth. "If Mount Eldoria refuses to send their Archmages, Alden will have us bound in chains and dragged to the Alban border by spring. I know how his mind works. He's already drafting our execution warrants in his sleep."

"Then we strike first," Duke Valerian rasped, slamming his goblet down. "Not against Alden, but against the monster sitting in the Duchy."

Grand Commander Teryn let out a low, humorless laugh. "Strike Caius? With what army, Valerian? The royal guard won't march into Alban. The local lords are already sending secret trade couriers to Malakor to avoid paying taxes. We have no soldiers left who can breach that border."

"We don't need an army," Valerian said softly, his eyes glinting with a desperate, manic fever. "An army is noisy. An army alerts his Orc constructs and dark elf scouts. We need something that moves through the shadows, something that doesn't breathe, doesn't bleed, and doesn't care about dual-elemental cores."

Valerian reached into his cloak and produced a heavy leather pouch that clinked with the dull, unmistakable ring of high-purity astral diamonds, a secret fortune siphon from his provincial mint. He struck the table thrice with his ring.

From the pitch-black shadows of the vault's corner, the darkness stepped forward. The shadow did not walk; it bled across the stone, coalescing into a tall, impossibly slender figure wrapped in grey, light-absorbing silk. Where a face should have been, there was only a porcelain mask carved with three weeping blood-red eyes: an operative of the Eclipse Hand, the most feared guild of void-assassins in the continent's history.

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"Four hundred astral diamonds," Valerian whispered, pushing the pouch across the cold stone. "We want the head of Caius. The bastard sovereign of the Citadel."

The masked figure did not reach for the gold. A voice like dry autumn leaves scraping across gravestones echoed directly inside the minds of the four men.

"The dual-vortex Sovereign... His mind sea is vast, his senses overlap with spider-silk matrices across an entire province. An ordinary blade will shatter upon his skin. A soul-poison will be consumed by his black flame."

"Can it be done or not?!" Corvin burst out, trembling.

"For four hundred astral diamonds... we deploy the Void-Needle of the Phantom Monarch," the voice whispered softly. "An artifact forged from the stilled heart of a fallen void dragon. Once pricked, his core dual-vortex will collapse into a self-destructive void."

The assassin’s slender grey hand swept out from the robes, taking the pouch before dissolving backward into the stone wall. "The Sovereign shall sleep before the first winter snow."

The mission failed before the assassin could even step foot inside Alban’s inner sanctuary.

The crystalline seed planted within Caius’s mind sea, coupled with the Arachne spider-silk detection network spanning the entire province, caught the void-assassin the instant they stepped through a spatial tear along the border. They never even got the chance to draw the Void-Needle.

Three days later, four heavy wooden crates were delivered directly to the gates of the four named nobles' estates in the royal capital, delivered by silent, shadow-cloaked couriers.

When Duke Valerian opened his crate, his knees buckled and he vomited onto the marble floor. Inside lay the flayed, preserved skin of the Eclipse Hand assassin, stripped clean from head to toe.

Carved deep into the bloody, parchment-like hide with dark-mana burns was a simple, terrifying message:

YOU STILL HAVE 300 DAYS. ~ C

Retaliation for the cowardly attempt was swift and absolute. That very night, Caius dispatched Old Bones alongside his elite assassin cohort from the Quick Reaction Legion. Moving like silent phantoms across the border, they bypassed the human scouts entirely and targeted Fortress Ironwatch, a major human border citadel guarding the entrance to Duke Valerian's own home province.

By dawn, the three-thousand-man garrison of Fortress Ironwatch had been completely slaughtered, their throats cut in their sleep without a single alarm horn sounding. The fortress was reduced to a blackened, hollow shell of smoking rubble before sunrise.

When news of the failed attempt, the flayed skins, and the total annihilation of Fortress Ironwatch reached the Royal Council, the four nobles were seized by an absolute, paralyzing terror. They sat in the court shivering in silence, their faces pale as corpses, realizing that every desperate move they made only brought the Sovereign’s dark blade closer to their necks.