Chapter 239: The First Strike of the War

The interrogation quickly lost any sense of urgency and, in a disturbingly appropriate way for a vampire ball, became part of the entertainment.

The musicians started playing again while the six werewolves remained suspended above a shallow pool of blood. Crimson chains bound their necks, wrists, and legs, servants resumed circulating with glasses, and some nobles were already quietly debating which prisoner would end up talking first.

Chysis kept hundreds of tiny blood needles inside the prisoners’ wounds, sealing vessels whenever one of them started losing too much blood, while Mirella, Eleonora, Dahlia, and Nera seemed to be enjoying the entire situation far more than they should.

Victor, on the other hand, had already lost much of his interest in the torture.

Seated at the table, he turned the small device found on the invaders between his fingers while keeping his eyes on its structure.

From the outside, he simply looked distracted by something.

Inside, he was talking to Rowena.

"If I can get you out of here without anyone noticing, can you track this?" he asked mentally.

Rowena took a few seconds before answering.

"Maybe. But I would need to take my wolf form."

"Why?" Victor asked as he ran his thumb over the inscriptions engraved into the device’s surface.

"My human body can sense natural energy, but my wolf form was made to live inside it," Rowena explained. "The sense of smell of a wolf like me doesn’t perceive only scents. I can feel mana residue, territorial marks, energy paths, and trails left by techniques. Nothing exactly like this existed in my time, considering I’ve been trapped for two hundred and eighty years, but the principle looks very similar to what I knew."

Victor examined the device again.

"So you could follow the message to whoever received it?"

Rowena snorted.

"I didn’t say that. There is a possibility. If this thing really transmitted natural energy to some distant point, part of the path should have remained recorded. The more time passes, the harder it becomes."

Victor smiled faintly.

"You’re becoming responsible."

"Shut up."

"Before, you would just say you could do it and figure out how afterward."

"Living with you taught me there is someone more irresponsible than I am."

Victor almost laughed, but continued staring at the device.

"I’ll talk to Serafall and try to keep this. I’m starting to enjoy this incident quite a bit."

Rowena remained silent for a moment before replying:

"A spy entered the Royal Palace, another group was waiting outside the Capital, and all of them can hide scent, heat, and presence. You have a strange definition of ’enjoy.’"

Victor shrugged.

"Now we have something to hunt."

Before Rowena could answer, a scream very different from the previous ones tore through the hall.

Victor raised his eyes and realized that Anette had finally lost her patience.

The Princess stood in front of the werewolf leader with one hand raised while every visible vein in his body turned dark red.

No instrument touched his skin.

No new wound had been opened.

Anette had simply taken control of the blood inside his body.

"Let’s try again," she said, moving her fingers slightly.

The werewolf arched immediately.

His muscles contracted in different directions, his vessels compressed, and his blood was forced against places that should never have received that pressure.

He tried to answer with some insult, but Anette slowly twisted her wrist and the next scream was so loud that even some of the vampires watching for entertainment lost part of their smiles.

"Who sent you?" Anette asked.

"N-no..."

She closed two fingers.

"Who?"

"ORDERS FROM ABOVE!" he screamed immediately.

Mirella raised an eyebrow.

"Well, look at that. The dog can talk."

Anette smiled and stepped a little closer.

"Good boy. Now continue."

The werewolf tried to curse at her, but another movement of her fingers made his entire body shake.

His resistance began to collapse quickly, and between one ragged breath and the next he started spilling information almost too quickly to organize the words.

"We received orders! That’s all! Get in, confirm the location, and wait for the signal!"

"Location of what?" Serafall asked, already far more serious.

"The thing that was inside this building!"

Anette squeezed again.

"What thing?"

"I DON’T KNOW!" the man yelled. "We weren’t supposed to know! We were only told we had to steal it! Blake would go in first, confirm where it was, and then someone would help with the extraction!"

The hall became significantly quieter.

Eleonora, who until then had been watching with some amusement, frowned.

"Someone would help you get out of here?"

The werewolf breathed with difficulty and nodded.

"After we got it... someone would open a route. We’d disappear before you understood what happened."

Eleonora crossed her arms and looked around.

"But what were you planning to steal? This building doesn’t have anything worth an operation like—"

She stopped.

Serafall stood so quickly that her chair was shoved backward.

Her eyes widened for a brief instant, as though some memory had finally fallen into place.

"Shit."

Her body turned into black mist and shot through one of the side doors at surreal speed.

Anette realized it almost at the same moment.

"SHIT!" she shouted before disappearing as well.

Victor started to stand, but Chysis extended a hand toward him.

"Wait."

He looked at her.

"You know what it is?"

"I have a suspicion."

Serafall crossed the inner corridors without slowing down until she reached a private wing of the Palace.

The reinforced door of an old office had barely finished opening before her mist passed through, and Anette appeared immediately behind her.

The office was completely intact.

No drawer had been disturbed.

No window was broken.

No shelf had been touched.

Even the security runes appeared to still be functioning normally.

Serafall looked at one of the walls.

Stopped.

Anette followed her gaze.

Between two large bookshelves was a lighter rectangular space, marked by the absence of something that had remained there for many years.

"They took it," Serafall murmured.

Anette approached the wall.

"What?"

Serafall did not answer immediately.

Anette studied the remaining marks and finally realized the shape.

"Wait... was that a painting?"

"Yes."

She turned quickly toward Serafall.

"What do they want with a painting?"

Serafall ran her fingers across the empty wall.

"That wasn’t just decoration. It was spoils taken directly from the old Palace of the Werewolf King."

Anette remained still for several seconds.

Her expression changed from confusion to anger at a frightening speed.

"And no one thought it was worth mentioning that you kept something stolen from the Werewolf King inside this building?"

"For centuries, nobody cared about it."

"Well, apparently someone started caring."

The two returned to the hall only seconds later, and Anette did not waste time trying to be delicate.

She marched directly toward the prisoners, stopping in front of the leader, who could barely keep his eyes open.

"WHAT DO YOU WANT WITH A PAINTING?!" she shouted.

The werewolf slowly raised his head.

His body had already suffered so much that his brain was beginning to shut down parts of his own perception of pain.

Even so, when he heard that question, something changed in his face.

He started laughing.

Anette narrowed her eyes.

"Answer."

"So... they managed it..."

Serafall stopped a few steps behind her.

"Who managed it?"

The man kept laughing despite struggling to breathe.

"You really lost."

Anette clenched her teeth.

He raised his face a little more.

"With so many powerful vampires gathered here... generals, marshals, Rakshasa, the Princess herself..."

His laughter became even more unpleasant.

"And someone still got in, took what they wanted, and left."

Anette remained motionless.

The werewolf gathered what little saliva he had left and spat directly into her face.

The entire hall froze.

"You lost," he repeated, smiling. "Again."

His head exploded.

There was no warning.

The blood inside his skull simply answered Anette’s will and expanded in every direction, destroying everything in a single instant.

Rakshasa’s chains continued holding the headless body above the pool while Anette slowly wiped her face with the back of one hand.

"I lost my patience," she said.

Dahlia looked at the corpse.

"We noticed."

Chysis, however, did not even pay attention to the response.

Her eyes were fixed on Serafall, and the General stared back at her mother in the same way.

Neither needed to speak.

A spy had passed through the security of the Royal Palace.

Another group had been found near the Capital.

There was a traitor or collaborator inside the Valentine structure itself.

And worse, someone had managed to remove an object belonging to the old Werewolf King during a night when some of the most powerful vampires in the world were gathered inside the same building.

Serafall slowly nodded.

Chysis answered with the same gesture.

This was no longer an investigation.

The war would truly begin now.

Grace, however, was not looking at either of them.

She remained near Victor, completely still, while a strange sensation began bothering her.

Ever since receiving Carmilla’s drop of blood, her ability related to cold had changed profoundly.

It did not merely produce lower temperatures anymore.

Now she could perceive thermal changes with almost absurd precision.

She could feel the warmth of nearby bodies, differences between walls, movement in the air, and even tiny variations caused by magic.

And something was wrong.

The environment was getting warmer.

Not by much.

But too quickly.

Grace frowned and touched one of the nearby columns.

Warm.

She raised her eyes.

It was not a single wall.

It was everything.

The floor.

The columns.

The ceiling.

The air itself.

"Victor," she called.

He turned immediately.

Grace felt the temperature rise again.

Her eyes widened.

"PROTECT YOURSELVES!"

Victor reacted in the same instant.

Rakshasa stood.

Serafall quickly turned her head.

Chysis released her energy.

But then a colossal magic circle appeared beneath the entire complex.

It was not inside the hall.

It was beneath the entire Palace.

Red lines began to appear around the foundations and spread in thousands of directions, crossing gardens, walls, towers, and corridors.

Runes hidden for who knew how long appeared in the stone at the same time, completing a magical structure so enormous that it covered practically the entire grounds.

Serafall looked down and understood.

"BARRIER!"

Too late.

The circle closed.

For one brief instant, there was no sound.

A red light appeared beneath the Palace and illuminated everything with such intensity that night vanished.

Then the flames were born.

They did not begin in a specific room.

They erupted from everywhere at once.

The floor exploded upward.

Corridors filled with fire.

Pillars ruptured.

Windows were torn from the structures before the glass even had time to melt.

The towers shook on their foundations while a gigantic column of flame tore through the center of the building toward the sky.

The explosion came immediately afterward.

The sound struck the entire Capital like a monstrous roar.

A sphere of red and black fire appeared where the Royal Palace had once stood and expanded in less than a second, consuming halls, gardens, walls, and towers.

The shock wave tore through nearby streets, ripping away rooftops, shattering thousands of windows, and hurling a wall of dust and incandescent debris over the surrounding districts.

For several seconds, there was no more music.

No ball.

No Palace.

There was only fire.

A colossal mass of flames climbed toward the red sky of the Realm while burning stones fell around it like a meteor shower.

The heat wave traveled for kilometers, and the blast continued echoing through the Capital long after the building had vanished.

When the explosion finally reached its peak, absolutely nothing visible remained where the Royal Palace had once existed.