Chapter 477. They Weren’t Surrounding a Prisoner; They Were Surrounding a Catastrophe

Chapter 477: 477. They Weren’t Surrounding a Prisoner; They Were Surrounding a Catastrophe

"Your Majesty," William said.

His voice didn’t waver; it didn’t even rise. He spoke to Theron without turning his head, his gaze remaining fixed on Alden like a predator tracking a wounded animal across a killing field.

"It might be wise for you and the others to retreat to somewhere safer."

"Behind reinforced doors... Behind stone and iron." A pause, brief and chilling. "This is about to get very messy."

"William, wait—" Theron started, his voice cracking with a desperate, helpless alarm. "You can’t possibly."

"I’ll be fine," William interrupted, the words cutting through the king’s protest like a guillotine blade.

His eyes never left the Delmore prince. "I just can’t promise the same for them."

The Delmore soldiers didn’t hesitate. They moved in with practiced cruelty, seizing William by the arms not with the deference shown to an instructor, but with the rough handling reserved for prisoners of war.

They marched him out through the towering eastern doors of the Hall of Accord and into the palace’s central courtyard.

The courtyard was a vast, unforgiving expanse of pale marble that had witnessed centuries of royal glory, coronations, sacred treaties, and triumphant processions.

Now, it was being transformed into a slaughterhouse. A thin, cold drizzle had begun to fall from a slate gray sky, turning the marble into a treacherous mirror and causing blood to bead on the raised hilts of drawn blades.

The Delmore soldiers spread out with terrifying synchronization, forming a tightening circle of steel that constricted around William. Their boots scraped against the wet stone in a rhythmic, grinding sound that echoed off the surrounding walls like the cocking of a thousand crossbows.

Along the edges of the courtyard, sheltered beneath the marble colonnade, the witnesses gathered in a tense, huddled line. Theron stood at the forefront, his face pale with rage and helplessness, Albert beside him like a statue of grief.

Catherine had followed them out, her notebook abandoned in the hall, her knuckles white where she gripped the railing. Her eyes were fixed on the ring of soldiers with an intensity so raw, so primal, that the guard stationed nearest to her unconsciously recoiled, sensing the storm brewing behind her calm exterior.

"Instructor Wade!"

The scream tore through the tense murmur of the gathering crowd. Kaela came charging through a cluster of stammering ministers, her hair streaming loose from its tie, her face a mask of pure terror.

The moment her eyes landed on William standing alone at the center of that closing circle of hostile steel, her color drained completely, leaving her ghostly in the rain.

"Instructor Wade! Get out of there!" she shrieked, her boots skidding on the wet stone as she attempted to sprint toward the circle.

Before she could breach the perimeter of blades, Catherine’s hand shot out, closing around Kaela’s forearm with bruising force.

"Let him," Catherine said. Her voice was quiet, but it held a strange, terrifying certainty that cut through Kaela’s panic. "Let him."

Kaela struggled, tears mixing with the rain on her cheeks. "Vice headmaster, they’ll kill him!"

"There are too many of them!"

Catherine didn’t flinch. She didn’t look away from the circle.

"Look at his eyes, Kaela."

"Really look at them." Her grip tightened, anchoring the warrior who could punch through stone. "Trust him... Trust what he is."

Kaela wrenched against Catherine’s grip once, twice, a desperate, animalistic struggle born of pure terror before finally, reluctantly, going still. Her chest heaved in ragged, shallow gasps, each breath visible in the cold air.

Her body was coiled like a spring, ready to snap, but her eyes never once left the center of the courtyard. She watched with the horrified fascination of someone witnessing their own execution.

At the center of that tightening ring of steel stood William. He looked impossibly small against the backdrop of dozens of armored killers, yet he didn’t appear vulnerable.

His hands hung loose at his sides, relaxed, almost casual. Aetherion remained sheathed at his hip, the blade dormant, waiting.

William closed his eyes. For one suspended moment, the world seemed to hold its breath.

He reached inward, past the anger, past the cold fury, down into the marrow of his bones, where the old power slept.

He searched for that familiar current, the same one he had first learned to coax from the air in a training yard at this very palace months ago.

Under Selena’s patient, careful instruction, he had learned to dance with it; now, with the weight of vengeance pressing against his ribs, the power didn’t just answer—it roared.

The air around him began to move.

It started as something subtle, almost imperceptible, a faint stir at his ankles that lifted a thin haze of grit and rainwater off the marble, spiraling upward in slow, lazy curls.

Then, the wind began to obey him. His hair shifted and lifted, strands dancing in a rhythm that defied the gentle autumn drizzle.

There was no gust behind it, no storm on the horizon; there was only the unnatural pressure of something ancient awakening.

The nearest Delmore soldiers, hardened veterans who had marched through plague lands and blood-soaked trenches, found their eyes drawn to that small, wrong movement. A primal unease began to crawl up their spines like insects.

Their fingers twitched against their sword hilts, their breathing growing shallow. They were professional killers, trained to fear no man, yet something about the way the raindrops seemed to curve away from William made their blood run cold.

Bracken, the commander of the unit, watched from the front. He was a broad-shouldered mountain of a man with a jagged scar cutting diagonally across his cheek, a souvenir from a siege that should have killed him.

In twenty years of slaughter, Bracken had never known the hesitation of fear. He had personally handpicked every man in that circle, selecting only the most ruthless, the most unbreakable.

He had built this formation to be an iron cage that no man could escape.

But as he watched William stand there in the center of the storm he was creating, a voice in the back of Bracken’s mind, the voice of a man who had survived three separate campaigns by trusting his gut, was screaming at him to retreat.

That old, reliable instinct was telling him that all their training, all their armor, and all their numbers were meaningless. They weren’t surrounding a prisoner; they were surrounding a catastrophe.

Bracken felt his own resolve waver, a hairline fracture in his iron discipline. He swallowed hard, tasting copper in his mouth.

He couldn’t show it.

Not here.

Not in front of these men.

Gritting his teeth until they creaked, Bracken raised his sword high, the steel catching the dim light of the gray sky. His knuckles were white, his voice pitched to carry across the courtyard like a thunderclap.

"Attack!" he roared. "Kill him!"