Chapter 59: The Stratergic Disadvantage: Missing Lighter

"Don’t you have ears? In what language i spoke? Espanol? estás sordo?" Fukuro’s voice didn’t rise in pitch, but the words left his mouth with a flat, rhythmic snap that cut clean through the ringing in Cassius’s ears.

Fukuro straightened his spine. He didn’t offer a hand. Instead, he reached down, his fingers wrapping around the worn wooden handle of his broom where it rested against the base of the bucket.

He lifted it with a sudden, fluid motion, bringing the frayed bristle-end up to eye level like a guard presenting a ceremonial saber.

"In what language should I speak to get through that thick, aristocratic skull of yours? Because I can repeat it if the vocabulary is too complex for a man who currently has the cognitive function of a wet turnip."

Cassius blinked, his mind still sluggish, his tongue feeling three sizes too big for his mouth. But, he wasn’t a normal vampire to get defeated in any circumstance.

"¿En ese caso, hasta un sordo es más inteligente que tú!" Cassius spat, his voice dropping into a harsh, vibrating snarl as the foreign words tore past his teeth.

The straight, unadulterated rage completely overrode the agonizing rattle in his chest. His human gray eyes, stripped of their usual calm and lazy ink, glared up at Fukuro with a lethal, venomous intensity.

Fukuro didn’t blink. He didn’t even flinch. He simply stood there, casually balanced against his broom like a lazy soldier on guard duty, letting Cassius’s fury roll right off his drab, oversized uniform. The absolute indifference on the clerk’s face only made the humiliation burn hotter behind Cassius’s ribs.

"Oh, look at that," Fukuro droned, his voice maintaining that agonizing, deadpan nasal rhythm as he tilted the broom handle slightly. "The birdy can chirp in two languages when he’s angry. Truly impressive."

Fukuro pointed the broom like a sword towards Cassius who was now sitting in a comfortable position on the ground.

"Shall I bring you a cracker, or would you prefer to keep bleeding out your dignity onto the floor?"

Fukuro said with a flat voice, calm expression like he had control on Cassius.

Cassius’s knuckles ground against the solid marble as he tried to push himself backward, his breath catching in his throat. The sulfurous gray paste was bubbling aggressively against his collarbone, fighting the icy, phantom numbness that Vilucious had stamped into his veins.

"Never expect even a fork from you; your IQ is still miles behind in the queue," Cassius hissed, his voice raw but sharp with venom.

He didn’t wait for Fukuro’s inevitable, deadpan retort. Shoving his weight downward, Cassius locked his hands flat against his knees, using his own legs as a crude, trembling scaffolding to force his body upward.

His joints popped in the heavy silence of the room, a dry, hollow sound that echoed off the cold masonry. His muscles screamed, still half-frozen by the residual weight of the King’s phantom domain, but his pride refused to let him remain on the floor for a single second longer.

When he finally stood straight, the room tilted violently to the left before settling back into a grim, physical reality. There was no grand bed canopy here. The high, shadowed rafters of the royal suite had vanished.

Cassius staggered forward a step, his bare feet tracking faint, damp smudges onto the floor as he began to explore the space. He looked around, his dark grey eyes narrowing as the true layout of the room pressed through the lingering fog in his brain.

Looks like a storeroom made out of an abandoned library, he thought, his chest heaving as he breathed in the stale, suffocating air.

The air was dense, thick with the choking stench of old parchment, damp rot, and something far more bitter- charcoal.

He navigated his way into the small, narrow aisle running between the towering wooden structures. The shelves rose up like crooked teeth toward the darkness of the ceiling, crammed tightly with heavy volumes, rolled blueprints, and discarded ledgers. Cassius reached out, his pale fingers brushing against the spine of a massive, leather-bound tome.

A thick, velvet layer of grey dirt shifted under his touch, leaving a dark, oily smudge across his fingertips. Beneath the dust, the edges of the pages were black and curled, badly singed by a fire that had long since died.

Every single shelf he passed was the same- books choked in ash and charcoal, their titles completely burned away, left to rot in the damp dark of the palace underbelly.

Behind him, the rhythmic, scraping shruf-shruf-shruf of the broom started up again. Fukuro wasn’t just sweeping; he was conducting a personal, aggressive war against the floor. With his spine curved into that signature, miserable slouch, the clerk focused entirely on his work, swinging the broom with an absurdly mechanical, furious intensity.

The result was an immediate, weaponised cloud of grey debris. A massive, swirling vortex of ancient dust, ash, and charcoal particles rose from the floorboards, sailing through the air like a localized storm front and heading directly into the narrow book aisle.

Cassius’s face contorted into an expression of pure, unadulterated disgust. His eyes squeezed shut, his nose wrinkling as the heavy cloud hit him full in the face.

"Achoo! Hack—cough, cough!" He let out a series of hacking, violent coughs, a sharp, choked "Gah!" tearing from his throat as he waved his hands frantically in front of his face to ward off the grey fog.

The sheer frustration boiling in his veins threatened to spill over; he was trying to maintain the aura of a brooding, mysterious phantom, and he was currently being choked out by a low-wage janitor’s backswing.

Turning back to the shelves to escape the dust, Cassius reached out toward another shelf. The moment his fingers pressed against the spine of another half-burnt book, every single muscle in his face completely froze.

The cold dread that struck him had nothing to do with the King’s magic.

"My lighter..."

The whisper tore out of his mouth, incredibly slow, fragile, and laced with a sudden, sharp panic. His hands immediately dropped to his sides, his fingers flying to the pockets of his crude, slave-like trousers. He shoved his hands inside, his fingers clawing desperately against the coarse fabric.

Nothing.

He checked the left pocket. Empty. He checked the right pocket, ripping the lining flat against his thigh. Empty. The small, heavy weight that usually comforted his hip was gone.The panic instantly crystallized into raw fury.

Cassius turned on his heel, his dark grey eyes flashing as he took long, aggressive, and incredibly fast steps right out of the aisle, storming straight toward the clerk.

Before Fukuro could even look up from his sweeping, Cassius lunged. With a swift, predatory snap, he snatched the wooden handle clean out of the clerk’s grip and violently threw the broom across the room.

It clattered against the stone wall with a loud, hollow bang.In the very same motion, Cassius closed the distance, his fist bunching into the fabric of Fukuro’s oversized gray shirt. With a sudden, savage surge of his remaining physical strength, Cassius hauled upward.

With a sharp, breathless "Oof!" and a loud, comical "YIIIIKES!" Fukuro’s feet left the marble floorboards. The sudden loss of gravity sent the clerk into an absolute, frantic tailspin. His eyes snapped wide open, turning into two massive, terror-stricken saucers as his arms and legs began flailing wildly in the empty air like a beetle flipped onto its back.

"Ah! Ah! Wait! Put me down! Reverse gravity! Reverse gravity!" Fukuro shrieked, his voice losing every ounce of its flat drone, skyrocketing into a high-pitched, panicked squeak that vibrated right against the low ceiling.

He clutched desperately at Cassius’s forearms, his fingers scratching frantically against his bare skin.

"My seams! You’re going to rip the palace cleaner uniform! Do you know how much time to repair a damaged uniform requires?!"

Cassius leaned in, his face inches from the trembling clerk’s, his voice a low, lethal snarl.

"Where’s my lighter? You took the credit for saving me... not for robbing me! Don’t forget you are still just a human, and you have no idea what I can do to you."

Fukuro, suspended two feet off the ground, squeezed his eyes shut, his knees tucking upward into his chest in a defensive, ball-like posture. He looked utterly terrified, his jaw trembling as he tried to look anywhere but at Cassius’s dark grey eyes.

"Firstly!" Fukuro squealed, his voice cracking violently on the syllables as he swung back and forth like a heavy pendulum.

"Your... your threats are highly unnecessary! And secondly, your bare chest is actively radiating excessive, sweaty body heat onto my uniform’s fabric! Please, spare the uniform, it didn’t do anything to you!"

Cassius’s grasp loosened, instantly releasing his white-knuckled hold on the fabric. Fukuro dropped to the ground with a heavy, ungraceful thud, his knees buckling beneath him as he hit the solid stone.

The clerk sat there on the floorboards, immediately clutching his chest with both hands. He let out a series of ragged, heavy breaths, his shoulders heaving as if he had just survived a plunge into a frozen lake.

With trembling, frantic fingers, he reached up to adjust his crooked spectacles, shoving them back onto the bridge of his nose while glaring upward through the glass with wide, highly offended eyes.

"You—you absolute brute!" Fukuro wheezed, his voice still vibrating with a high-pitched, panicked rattle. "My spine! I felt my lower lumbar compress into a different dimension! That is a clear violation of the sanitation authority’s safety guidelines!"

Cassius didn’t even look down at him. The clerk’s theatrical gasping faded into a dull background buzz as a sharp, sudden memory clicked violently inside his brain.

The fog in his mind cleared just enough to reveal a single, vivid image from his descent into Vilucious’s domain. He hadn’t been robbed. He remembered it now- the small, silver casing of his lighter, catching the dim, blue-black light of the deep sea. It hadn’t been in his pockets when he woke up because it was still down there.

He had seen it with his own eyes, tumbling weightlessly through the phantom water, swimming lazily downward into the crushing depths of the endless ocean right before the true darkness had taken him. It was gone, resting somewhere at the bottom of a magical graveyard that no longer existed in the physical world.

A heavy, bitter silence settled over him. Cassius stood rooted to his spot, his dark grey eyes scanning the room, looking here and there across the dirty floorboards, the ash-choked shelves, and the scummy bucket. There was no silver glint. No familiar weight.

"Fine," Cassius muttered, his voice dropping into a flat, icy register as he let his hands fall to his sides. He cast a single, freezing glare down at the shivering clerk. "Useless."

He didn’t waste another second waiting for Fukuro to regain his composure or launch into another sarcastic lecture. Turning sharply on his heel, Cassius pivoted away from the narrow book aisles. His eyes locked onto the far wall of the dim, abandoned library, catching the faint outline of a structure buried behind a stack of rotting ledger boxes.

It was a door.

The wooden frame was warped, the ancient panels split down the center and hanging precariously from a pair of rusted iron hinges. It looked almost entirely broken, a neglected exit that the palace architects had long since forgotten.

With a sudden, explosive burst of his remaining physical energy, Cassius sprinted toward it.