Chapter 90: The Girl on the Warship

The relentless parade of memories inside her mind became too much to bear, a sickening carousel of her own making that she desperately wanted to turn away from. Lenora didn’t even want to watch it anymore.

She tried to close her eyes, tried to rip her consciousness away from the theater of her own failures, but the reel kept spinning with terrifying clarity.

It started from the very beginning of her descent—from the cold, calculated missions where she treated human lives as mere variables, to the agonizing day she watched her entire guild crumble and fall because of her stubborn refusal to rely on anyone else. And then, the loop dragged her deeper, forcing her to relive that catastrophic, failed resonance mission.

She remembered the hum of unstable energy, the deafening alarm of the containment grids, and the sudden, violent rupture that tore through the sky above the bustling settlement. She didn’t need to see the explosions or hear the screams again; the memory of the sheer, cataclysmic pressure was enough.

In a matter of seconds, the sky had split open, raining ruin down upon the crowded streets below, completely erasing a thriving world settlement from the map. It was a disaster born of her overconfidence, a catastrophic failure of judgment that had reduced thousands of innocent lives to ash and rubble.

The weight of that guilt pressed down on her chest so heavily that Lenora felt as though she were suffocating in the sterile quiet of the hospital room.

She was in so much pain, drowning in a suffocating sea of remorse, that she literally did not know what to do with her hands, her body, or her mind.

Paralyzed by the sheer magnitude of her past, she did something desperate: she just let the memories play in a continuous loop, watching them over and over again, hoping against hope that the sheer repetition might somehow dull the edge of the pain. She wanted to burn out the nerve endings of her soul through sheer exposure.

But numbness didn’t bring relief. It only brought a hollow, aching emptiness.

These were choices she could not change. No matter how many times she rewound the tape in her mind, no matter how much she begged the silent ghosts of her past to act differently, the outcome remained stubbornly, cruelly unalterable.

She could only sit back and rewatch it all with a blinding, helpless regret—a heavy, suffocating pain that slowly, methodically numbed her little by little until she felt like nothing at all.

Her consciousness drifted further inward, trapped in the grey wasteland of her own making, until the edges of her awareness began to fray.

And then, cutting sharply through the oppressive silence of her internal torment, a voice broke through the haze.

Lenora blinked, the endless loop of her internal torment finally fracturing as she slowly raised her head. Standing quietly beside her hospital bedside was Miss Baker, her loyal maid.

Miss Baker noticed the hollow, haunted look her lady gave her, but wisely chose to say nothing about the despair written across Lenora’s face. On the small bedside table, a plate of neatly sliced apples sat untouched, looking entirely unappetizing as no one had bothered to look at them.

Without missing a beat, Miss Baker continued softly, "Ma’am, we have received word from the communication arrays... the Graves family ship has secured Young Master Orson."

Lenora didn’t reply immediately. Her mind drifted back, heavy with fresh pangs of guilt. Orson was also one of the people she had deeply wronged. Their marriage had been nothing more than a political sham, an arrangement of convenience born of cold necessity, yet she knew all too well how much she had hurt him through her aloofness and manipulation.

In a voice that barely carried over the hum of the heart monitor, she finally asked, "How is he?"

Miss Baker lowered her gaze, her expression solemn. "We are not sure yet, ma’am. Not until the Graves ship reaches this district. The government is still enforcing strict border blockades, refusing to allow a war ship to enter District 5 airspace."

Lenora looked away, her eyes dropping back down to her trembling hands. She didn’t say another word, letting the heavy, suffocating silence settle back over the room as the reality of her past choices closed in around her once more.

Meanwhile, Silvercrest City stood as a sprawling, breathtaking human settlement, stretching from the administrative core of District 1 all the way out to the rugged outer reaches of District 12.

As one of humanity’s main sanctuary havens, it hummed with sprawling infrastructure, but its rigid political zones were heavily enforced. A massive warship hovered heavily above its skyline, gliding deeper into the city’s airspace.

However, because District 5 was shielded by an advanced, government-controlled energy dome, breaching the perimeter without official clearance was entirely impossible.

Inside the bridge of the warship, a small figure stood looking down through the reinforced observation glass toward the scarred horizon of District 12.

Though she dressed and carried herself with authority, she looked more like a young girl than a woman, her petite frame contrasting sharply with the terrifying aura she projected.

She peered down through an interior viewing pane at Orson, who lay unconscious on a sterile medical table under active trauma surgery.

A small smile touched the corners of her lips, though to anyone watching, the expression lacked any warmth—it was chilling, unsettling, and entirely creepy.

"You know, Orson..." the girl murmured softly into the empty air, her dark hair framing a face that had been altered with an entirely different appearance. "I don’t like men very much. I mean, first there was my brother, who talked a lot of grand things but did absolutely nothing. And then my second brother... well, even my father ended up doing the exact same thing."

She tilted her head, her smile widening just a fraction as she stared at the battered man fighting for his life behind the glass.

"But you... you are different. You actually did it," she whispered. "You managed to get what I wanted."

She paused, her eyes narrowing slightly.

"Still... this is not enough for him."

Just then, the automated pneumatic doors hissed open, and a senior physician hurried to her side.

"Miss Robin," the doctor said, bowing his head respectfully.

The small-bodied girl looked up, her dark eyes locking onto his. "What is it?"

"Your brother, Sen, is finally prepped for transport," the doctor reported quickly. "District 2 Hospital has the finest neurological and spatial-trauma equipment in the sector, so our ground-transfer team is ready to move."

Robin, wearing her altered face and dark hair, merely gave a cold, dismissive nod. Without another word, she turned her back on the operating window and walked away with the doctor, leaving the observation deck behind.

Down in the ship’s emergency medical bay, away from her unsettling gaze, Orson remained in critical condition. The medical staff continued to race against time, working frantically around the clock to pull him back from the brink of death.