Chapter 108: Despair

Seraphina watched him go.

Her heart hammered in her chest, but her mind was functioning with the cold clarity of a survivor.

He was leaving.

They were not going to be eaten immediately.

They had time.

She looked down at the freezing iron floor of the cage, at the terrified, weeping children huddled in the corners. She looked out at the massive, cavernous hall filled with cursed treasures and screaming ghosts.

’He thinks we are just a flock of sheep he gathered for hunting,’ Seraphina thought, her small hands clenching into tight, white-knuckled fists. ’He thinks he can just lock us in a cage and wait for us to marinate in despair.’

She lifted her head, her dark eyes entirely devoid of childish panic, replaced by a cold, calculating resolve.

She was Seraphina von Nacht.

She had been adopted by the Reaper, audited an industrialist, and crushed a priceless ruby without blinking. She was the Sovereign of the Vanguard.

And her Papa had promised her, with a blood oath sworn on a silver dagger, that he would never leave her in the dark.

’You messed up, clown,’ Seraphina thought, glaring at the retreating of the demonic Trickster. ’You didn’t just steal a bunch of mundane kids. You stole the Leviathan’s bait. And when he finds this place... you are going to wish you had stayed extinct.’

Kaelus was coming.

She knew it with the unshakeable certainty of gravity. He was currently tearing the Verdant Gate apart, fueled by a homicidal rage that would make the gods themselves weep in terror.

She just had to survive until the Reaper arrived.

"Okay, everyone, listen to me," Seraphina whispered, turning around to face the huddled mass of crying children. She dropped the facade of the terrified orphan, her voice ringing with the quiet, absolute authority she had learned directly from the Archduke. "Stop crying. Crying wastes water, and we don’t have any."

The children blinked, startled by the sudden shift in tone from the small girl in the crimson dress.

"He’s gone," Seraphina continued, crawling toward the center of the cage, adopting a commanding, cross-legged posture. "He wants us to be scared. If we are scared, he wins. So we will not be scared."

"But... but he’s a monster!" a little girl wept, clutching a torn piece of canvas. "He’s going to eat us!"

"He’s an idiot in a bad coat," Seraphina corrected flawlessly, channeling her inner Sir Gallahan. "And my Papa is looking for me. My Papa is the biggest, scariest monster in the whole wide world. When he gets here, he will freeze that clown into a popsicle and shatter him into a million pieces."

She looked around the cage, meeting the terrified eyes of the abducted children with a fierce, unwavering confidence.

"We just have to wait," Seraphina declared, folding her arms across her chest. "Now, who wants to play a game? I know how to fold an excellent paper duck. We can use the merchant boy’s fancy shirt."

As the terrified children slowly, hesitantly gathered around the tiny, fiercely confident girl in the crimson dress, the darkness of the Grand Conservatory seemed to recede just a fraction.

The Trickster thought he had captured a cage full of helpless prey.

He had no idea that he had just locked himself in a room with the most dangerous, highly trained, heavily spoiled strategic anomaly in the Empire.

And outside, across the dimensional tear, the storm was already beginning to rage.

The silence in the grand, cavernous hall was a fragile, trembling thing.

Inside the cold iron cage, Seraphina’s words had barely begun to take root as a few of the older children had stopped their hysterical sobbing, drawing in ragged, shaky breaths, clinging to the absurd, impossible hope that this tiny girl in the crimson dress was telling the truth.

They huddled together on the freezing grating, shivering, waiting for the promised monster of the North to tear through the ceiling and save them.

Seraphina let out a slow, measured exhale, maintaining her cross-legged posture of absolute authority. She was projecting confidence, but internally, she was calculating the structural integrity of the cage and the ambient mana density of the room.

She needed to buy time.

She had a Dark Mana core, but so what? She wasn’t as strong as her father; she can’t do anything even if she tries. Nothing would come out well even if she were to sacrifice her life here.

So, isn’t the best option to buy time and wait for someone to rescue them?

Seraphina was wrong this time... because she didn’t know the help wouldn’t come until a long while.

The universe, it seemed, was devoid of mercy.

The heavy, ornate double doors at the far end of the hall had not even fully clicked shut.

CLACK.

The sound of the latch engaging reversed instantly.

The heavy wood groaned as the doors were wide open, slamming against the bone-white stone walls with a deafening CRASH that made the children shriek and cover their ears.

From the shadows of the doorway, a sound erupted that froze the blood in Seraphina’s veins.

It was a sound of laughter.

But it was not a human laugh.

It was a chaotic, overlapping, multi-tonal screech of hysteria. It sounded like shattering glass, grinding metal, and the howling of a thousand dying animals, all layered over the smooth, silken voice of the Trickster.

He hadn’t left.

He had never intended to leave.

He had walked to the door, placed his hand on the latch, and waited. He possessed the hearing of an apex predator, and he listened to the children’s sobs quiet down, listened to the tiny spark of hope ignite in the darkness of the cage.

He had waited for them to feel, for just one fleeting, pathetic second, that they were safe.

Because despair, to a demon, was only truly delicious when it was seasoned with the ashes of shattered hope.

"Oh, marvelous! Truly, breathtakingly marvelous!" the Trickster cackled, strutting back into the blinding light of the chandeliers.