Chapter 91: A Funeral Without Tears

The last rhythmic echoes of the vanguard’s heavy march faded into the damp masonry, leaving a suffocating, ringing silence behind.

Down in the grime, Fukuro’s fingers twitched against the wet granite.

Drip.

Drip.

A single drop of moisture fell from the vaulted ceiling, striking a broken piece of wood beside his face.

The sound was loud as a gunshot in the newly abandoned chamber. With a pathetic, trembling groan, Fukuro uncurled from his tight ball.

His ribs throbbed with a dull, fierce ache where the steel boot had caught him.

"Still alive," he wheezed, his voice cracking into a dry, dusty cough.

Hack. Wheeze.

"Unfortunately."

He dragged himself upward onto his elbows, his muscles shaking like wet paper. The stone floor beneath him was smeared with streaks of his own sweat, boot grime, and the unmistakable, oily residue of the iron-tainted mist.

Right beside his bruised hand lay his prize possession-the royal mop handle.

Snap.

It was splintered cleanly in two, the jagged wooden ends staring up at him like an insult.

Fukuro’s mouth fell open in a silent, tragic scream. They hadn’t just used him as a human rug; they had murdered his equipment.

"My mop..." he whispered, a genuine tear of grief finally spilling over his dirt-caked eyelashes.

"The great ancestor of the vault... taken before its time."

He scrambled to gather the broken halves, his knees scraping painfully against the stone.

But as his fingers closed around the splintered wood, a faint, unnatural reflection caught the edge of his eye.

Shimmer.

Just at the lip of the dark pool, where the prehistoric crocodiles were now settling into a sluggish, bloated quiet, a single droplet of violet fluid clung to a groove in the masonry.

It didn’t look like liquid; it looked like a trapped piece of a dying star, thick and pulsing with a faint, lavender luminescence.

And resting right beside it, half-buried in the wet moss of the lower track, was a jagged shard of metal.

It was a piece of the collar or the bindings that had held Cassius before the plunge.

Fukuro’s breath hitched in his throat. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. His heart, which had just begun to calm down, restarted its frantic drumming against his ribs.

Leave it, his survival instinct screamed, its voice sounding suspiciously like a very angry, sensible version of himself.

Pick up your broken sticks, crawl into the ventilation shaft, and pretend you are a very large, very ugly cockroach until your shift ends.

Yet, his eyes wouldn’t move. There was an eerie, magnetic pull to that glowing violet stain. The System of this godforsaken world didn’t leave accidental remnants without a purpose.

A heavy, suffocating curiosity, far more dangerous than any vanguard’s boot, tightened its grip on his chest. Trembling, he reached his hand toward the violet shard.

Meanwhile, far above the damp, subterranean horror of the execution vault, the grand corridors of the upper palace breathed a completely different kind of malice.

Here, the air smelled of crushed white roses, burning ambergris, and the faint, underlying metallic tang of preservation spells.

Sunlight didn’t enter these high towers and was a rare event in this Kingdom; instead, the sky outside was a perpetual, bruised twilight- the sky of an apocalypse that had frozen mid-breath, never allowed to grow young again.

Lordess Florianthum stood perfectly motionless beside the tall, arched window of the Eastern Conservatory.

Her long, pale fingers were folded over the heavy, dark velvet of her bodice, her posture so rigid she might have been mistaken for one of the marble caryatids supporting the vaulted ceiling.

Below, in the courtyard, she could hear the distant, synchronized thud-thud-thud of the returning vanguard units. They were back. Which meant the execution was over.

Which meant Cassius was gone.

Inside the locked vault of her mind, a scream was tearing at her throat, violent and feral enough to shred her vocal cords. Cassius. You fool. You brilliant, doomed fool.

But on the surface? Nothing. Her face remained a flawless, porcelain mask. Her dark eyes were as still as a frozen pond.

Don’t blink. Don’t let the heat rise to your eyes, and keep your mouth tightly shut, she commanded herself, the internal voice cold, sharp, and laced with absolute terror.

If a single bead of moisture forms on these lashes, or if a single treasonous syllable slips past these lips, he will know instantly.

Deep within her chest, where her core should have beaten with the warm rhythm of a living mortal, there was only a cold, heavy ache... the phantom weight of the soul-binding contract Lord Vilucious already held over her.

His grip on her soul was absolute, an invisible, barbed wire wrapped tightly around her very essence.

Because Vilucious already had her soul entirely captured, any physical ripple of true emotion or spoken word would travel directly up the tether to him like an electric shock.

The moment she showed a fraction of rebellion, the moment her grief for a traitor became a physical reality or an audible whisper, the system would alert him.

Vilucious wouldn’t just punish her; he would tighten the leash and completely crush her spirit, leaving her a mindless, hollow shell to decorate his court.

I cannot mourn you, she thought, her gaze fixed blindly on a dying rosebush in the courtyard below.

I cannot even give you the dignity of a tear or a spoken goodbye, Cassius. To the Raw Court, you are dirt. To the System, you are a deleted variable. And to me... I must pretend for others that you never existed.

Her eyes, swollen as she repeated these sentences in her mind again and again.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

The soft, rhythmic clicking of metal against polished obsidian shattered the silence of the conservatory.

Florianthum did not turn her head. She didn’t dare move so much as a muscle in her neck. Her eyes remained locked on the twilight bleeding across the courtyard, but her pupils dilated in pure, survival-driven instinct.

Out of the corner of her vision, a massive, heavily armored silhouette emerged from the grand archway.

It was Governor Kerwon.

He had followed the King’s retinue up from the lower vaults, but instead of proceeding directly to the grand banquet hall, his heavy boots had brought him here.

The dark plates of his vanguard armor gave off a faint, metallic clink with every slow, deliberate step he took.

The heavy scent of iron-tainted leather and ozone rolled off him, invading the delicate aroma of crushed white roses.

He was looking for a crack. He had been suspicious down in the vault, and he hadn’t let it go.

I am serene, Florianthum lied to herself, forcing her racing heart into a slow, artificial rhythm.

I am a loyal ornament of the Raw Court. The traitor is dead, and the world is correct.

Kerwon came to a halt barely two paces away, his giant frame casting a long, imposing shadow over her heavy velvet skirts.

His bare, tanned face remained an unblinking mask of pure discipline, but his sharp, scanning eyes were fixed directly on her profile, tracking the exact line of her jaw.

The tension in the room was so thick it felt like a physical weight pressing down on her shoulders. Her throat ached. The urge to swallow, to clear the lump of choked-back agony rising from her chest, was absolute torture.

But a loud swallow could be interpreted as hesitation. A single sigh would travel up the dark, invisible barbed wire coiled around her soul, alerting Lord Vilucious instantly.

"The wind carries a heavy chill today, does it not, Lordess?" Kerwon’s voice was a low, resonant baritone, dropping to a quiet, conspiratorial whisper that barely carried across the conservatory.

The trap was laid.

A single wrong word, a defensive remark, or even an aggressive denial would be enough to confirm the Governor’s suspicions.

And if he suspected her, he would report it directly into the King’s golden ear device, prompting Vilucious to pull the tether and tear her soul inside out.

Think of the dirt. Think of the janitor Fukuro covered in mud below, Florianthum reminded herself frantically. Do not think of Cassius.

"The apocalyptic air is always unpredictable, Governor," Florianthum replied. Her voice came out flawlessly melodic, a soft, smooth chime that carried no weight, no tremor, and no hidden depth.

It was the voice of a doll.

She slowly turned her head, her spine gliding with artificial perfection to meet his gaze. She didn’t blink. She couldn’t risk the moisture.

"I merely find the quiet after a successful execution to be rather... peaceful. His Majesty’s justice is a cleansing fire. To look back at what was burned is simply bad taste."

Kerwon’s eyes narrowed by a fraction of a millimeter, searching the tight corners of her eyes, looking for the telltale glint of a hidden tear, or the microscopic twitch of a trembling lip.

The silence stretched between them, heavy and suffocating, punctuated only by theistant, rhythmic drip, drop of the upper palace fountains.

Finally, the giant vanguard gave a single, rigid nod, his face remaining entirely unreadable.

"A loyal perspective," he murmured, though the sharp intensity in his eyes didn’t completely fade. He turned on his heel, his heavy boots creating a loud clank, clank, clank against the masonry as he moved to rejoin the royal guard down the corridor.

Florianthum didn’t move until the echo of his footsteps died out completely.

Her fingers, still folded over her bodice, dug so violently into her own flesh beneath the velvet that she could feel the dampness of her own blood seeping through her gloves.

I survived, she thought, her internal voice a ragged, bleeding whisper as she stared back out at the bruised, frozen sky. I survived another hour.

But as she looked down at the courtyard, she knew the real nightmare was just beginning. The banquet was prepared.

Lord Vilucious would soon expect her to sit at the high table, to smile, to drink the crimson wine, and to toast to the absolute destruction of the only person who had ever looked at her like she was human.

And she would do it.

She would do it flawlessly, because her soul was already captured, and she was legally forbidden to weep.