Chapter 475. A Debt That Needed to Be Collected in Blood

Chapter 475: 475. A Debt That Needed to Be Collected in Blood

Lord Vane remained as motionless as a statue carved from obsidian beside Alden. Through all the admissions and all the grotesque revelations, his expression never wavered; there was not a flicker of shame, not a shadow of discomfort, only the patient, unsettling stillness of a man who had long since reconciled his conscience with the whims of his master.

William’s eyes locked onto Vane’s profile, dissecting the man with a cold, hunter’s focus. He understood immediately: Vane wasn’t a reluctant accomplice playing along out of fear.

He was the architect’s shadow, a man who had simply stopped questioning the morality of the design a very long time ago.

"You murdered our people," Theron said.

The words didn’t come out as a royal decree; they came out as a broken plea, his voice cracking under the impossible weight of the truth. "You didn’t just fight us!"

"You slaughtered them in their beds, in their fields, through their own hunger!"

"You let children starve to death while you watched from across the border!"

"You bribed our own blood, our own officials, to withhold the very grain that could have saved them." His hands were shaking now, the raw agony of a king who had realized his entire reign had been built on a foundation of corpses.

Alden’s response was immediate, and it was devastating.

"We could have simply let you all starve to death," Alden said.

The contempt in his voice was so sharp, so utterly devoid of human empathy, that it landed like a physical blow across the room, making the air itself feel poisoned. "We could have watched you wither away without spending a single coin on grain or bribes."

"Instead, we offered you a lifeline!"

"We gave you a way to survive, at a perfectly reasonable price considering the immense effort and resources we sacrificed to plan this little catastrophe so meticulously."

The insult was the final crack in the dam.

Theron exploded upward. His chair shrieked against the stone floor as it flew backward, toppling over with a crash that sounded like thunder in the tense silence.

The king’s face was no longer pale with shock; it was a deep, mottled crimson of pure, unadulterated rage. His breath came in ragged, desperate gasps.

His hand hovered convulsively near the hilt of a ceremonial sword, a relic of a warrior he hadn’t been in years, and though he knew he had no real intention of drawing it, his entire body coiled like a spring, straining forward as if his own bones might snap from the force of his restrained fury. He looked less like a king and more like a wounded animal ready to tear out a throat.

’Kill him,’ a dark voice screamed in the back of William’s mind. ’End this monster right now.’

His own fingers twitched against his crossed arms, his pulse hammering a war drum against his ribs. He could feel the blood singing in his ears, the instinctive urge to draw Aetherion and split Alden from crown to groin before the prince could utter another syllable of his poisoned lies.

Before Theron could lunge across the table, Albert moved. He was faster than the King’s rage, his hand closing firmly around Theron’s forearm.

His grip was iron, calm, practiced, and unyielding—the grip of a man who had spent a lifetime pulling kings back from the precipice of madness.

"Your Majesty," Albert whispered, his voice low and urgent, cutting through the king’s ragged breathing like a blade. "Not like this... Not here."

"Do not give him the satisfaction of seeing you break."

Theron’s breathing came in short, ragged pulls that sounded like something tearing inside his chest. His eyes remained locked on Alden’s face with a murderous intensity, fixed on those mocking eyes that had witnessed the deaths of thousands without blinking.

For several heartbeats, the hall held its breath; no one knew if Albert’s grip would be enough to anchor the king or if Theron would shatter the ceremonial table and Alden’s skull along with it.

But behind the king’s chair, something fundamental shifted within William.

It wasn’t the heat of rage. It wasn’t the familiar burn of anger that had been simmering in his gut since he first saw the evidence.

He had been braced for that fire; he had expected to join the King in his fury, to become another instrument of righteous destruction. But what arrived instead was something far colder, far more terrifying, and infinitely more dangerous.

It was a stillness he recognized with bone-deep familiarity, a stillness that belonged to a man who had already died once before, in a body that had ended with a blade lodged in his throat.

It was the absolute, glacial calm of a man who had finished restraining himself.

In the span of a single heartbeat, his mind stopped being a stream of emotion and became a tactical map. His thoughts didn’t scatter like a panicked man’s; they aligned with lethal precision, arranging themselves like a soldier laying out a killing field.

’There,’ his mind whispered, cold and detached. ’The target.’

Images flickered through his consciousness, not as memories, but as fuel. He saw the face of the student, the boy who had betrayed him, tears streaming down a face twisted by greed as the knife went in, the boy’s voice screaming, ’Everything was supposed to be mine!’

The memory didn’t hurt anymore; it only sharpened his resolve. He saw Kaela, not as the warrior she was, but as she had been that night on the moonlit bench, her hands trembling against her knees, her voice small and fragile as she whispered, ’I’m scared, Instructor Wade.’

He saw the faces of children he had never met—children who had become ghosts in his mind through Olivia’s ledgers and Albert’s buried reports. He saw their hollow cheeks, their sunken eyes, their small hands clutching at empty air, waiting for aid that had been deliberately strangled by Delmore’s greed.

Those children weren’t just numbers in a ledger anymore. They were an indictment.

They were the reason for the coldness spreading through his veins.

’They treated human lives like currency,’ William thought, his grip on his own restraint finally snapping with the quiet click of a crossbow trigger. ’They treated suffering like a tool.’

’They treated death like an asset.’

The fury was gone, replaced by something far more efficient: purpose. A single, quiet, absolute certainty crystallized in his soul.

He would not be the courteous instructor tonight. He would not be the patient protector.

He would not be the man who played by the rules of a world that had allowed such monsters to thrive.

He looked at Alden Delmore; he really looked at him and saw not a prince, but a debt that needed to be collected in blood.

He would not walk out of this hall until every single person responsible for that suffering understood, completely and without question, exactly what they had done.

And he would make sure that understanding was written in the crimson stains they would leave upon this floor.