THE PRINCE AT MILDERN DUKE HALL MANOR! - (The Nation of Gamatose Arc)

THE PRINCE AT MILDERN DUKE HALL MANOR Volume II — The Nation of Gamatose Arc Series Description Three years after the world almost ended, Mildern Yazukaze is nineteen and trying to be something other than what he was. He holds a seat on the Council of Eight. He drinks tea before dawn. He has learned, painfully and incrementally, that staying is harder than running and more worth doing. The child he found in his forest three years ago is eleven now and attends the Academy and has finally, on a quiet gold-lit morning, told Mildern his name. Saku Fedo. Two words that cost three years of patience and mean more than either of them says out loud. It should be enough. For a while, it almost is. Then a traveling noble with grey eyes and a white coat starts appearing in merchant district back rooms across the Noble City, making trades that end one way regardless of whether the other party holds up their end. Clean work. Efficient. The kind of violence that leaves structural damage in stone walls and bodies that investigators spend a long time trying to explain. Lord Fenrath, they call him. Eastern territories. Vague affiliation. Nobody who matters. He is not nobody. Beneath the white coat and the aristocratic contempt and the perfect stillness of a person pretending to have a pulse, something else entirely is waiting. Something that was built from grief and rage and a dead king's unresolved wrong. Something powered by an immortal core that no weapon in the known world can touch. Something that has Mildern Yazukaze's name on a piece of paper and has been patient about it for a very long time. Gamatose Hazuki was the First King of Garudore — a fantastic king, a beloved ruler, a father weeks away from watching his eldest son get married. His kingdom was peaceful. His people loved him. His friendship with the Yazukaze royal family was genuine and years-long and real. Then the Yazukaze army arrived without warning and burned everything he loved to the ground. He died in his throne room believing his friend had betrayed him. He died not knowing the invasion was built on forged letters and manufactured evidence by a seventeen year old named Hanuto Yama — the younger brother of the Hollow Prince, never revealed, never suspected, patient in ways his theatrical older brother never was. Hanuto needed two kingdoms destroyed and one bloodline broken and a dead king's rage pointed in exactly the right direction, and he built all three with the quiet precision of someone who has never once needed to be in the room when the damage lands. The soul that didn't pass on. The body that was built for it. The core that cannot be killed. What Gamatose has become is hunting the last Yazukaze across a Noble City that doesn't know what is walking its streets, and somewhere in the machinery of that hunting is a truth neither of them has been given yet — that the prince Gamatose wants dead was eight years old when Garudore fell, and innocent of everything, and is carrying guilt about it anyway because that is simply what Mildern Yazukaze does with things he had no power over. This is Volume II. It is bloodier than what came before. It is darker in the specific way that rooms are dark when the monster has a family portrait folded in its heart and holds it with more care than it holds anything else. It is the story of a dead king who deserved better, a mastermind who has been three moves ahead since before Mildern was old enough to understand the game, and two people — a prince who stopped running and a kid who finally said his name out loud — standing in the path of something that was never supposed to be their problem and refusing, as they always do, to move. RATED: MA26+ | Blood And Gore | Horror In Very Bloody Ways | And Swearing To