"My apologies, Professor," I said loudly, my tone dripping with impeccable, polite concern. "As a dedicated servant of Lady Lysandra, I am trained to intercept flying debris and messes before they can soil her presence. I did not realize you were demonstrating a floor-sweeping technique."
A single, muffled bark of laughter echoed from the upper balconies. It was quickly silenced, but the damage was done.
Valmont pushed himself up onto his hands and knees, his eyes burning with humiliated rage. His fangs fully extended, his B-Class aura flaring violently.
"You... you insolent little blood-bag!" Valmont roared, preparing to lunge.
"Valmont."
The voice was soft, cold, and echoed with an unnatural, bone-chilling resonance.
The entire hall froze.
Up in the balcony, Lysandra stood gripping the railing. Her crimson eyes were glowing with a terrifying, dense light. The S-Class aura I had stabilized this morning flared outward, slamming down into the pit like a physical weight.
Even from twenty feet away, Valmont choked, forced back to his knees under the sheer pressure of her bloodline.
"The audit is complete, Professor," Lysandra said, her voice dripping with royal authority. "My Servant has proven his competence. If you raise a hand to him again, I will personally ensure you are sweeping floors for the rest of your immortal life. Do I make myself clear?"
Valmont trembled, his pride completely broken under the weight of her Progenitor aura.
"Crystal... clear, Lady Lysandra," he choked out.
Lysandra sat back down, the oppressive aura vanishing as quickly as it had appeared.
I bowed deeply toward the balcony, pressing my right hand over my heart.
"Thank you, My Lady."
As I straightened up, my eyes scanned the terrified faces of the Initiates, the shocked expressions of the nobles, and finally, the shadowy alcoves of the upper tiers.
We had made our point. The Sunless Spire was no longer the dumping ground for an outcast. It was a fortress.
And now that the perimeter was secure, it was time for me to go hunting for a Princess named Carmilla.
The applause in the grand lecture hall did not come in a wave of polite clapping. It came as a heavy, stifled murmur of unease.
When Professor Valmont finally dragged himself back to his feet, nursing his broken nose with a trembling, clawed hand, the hierarchy of the first-year class had fundamentally shifted. For a vampire, humiliation was worse than death. For a human to inflict that humiliation using nothing more than pristine footwork and a domestic silver tray? That was an insult written in blood.
"Dismissed," Valmont spat, his voice trembling with a mixture of rage and residual terror as he glared down from the podium. He didn't dare look at the upper balcony. He didn't dare look at me. "Report to your designated housing districts. Orientation is over."
The students scrambled. The human Initiates fled the pit like startled sheep, desperate to distance themselves from the walking target I had effectively painted on my own back. Even Chloe gave me a wide-eyed, frantic wave before bolting toward the fledgling dorms.
I stood my ground, smoothly adjusting the cuffs of my white shirt.
Up on the second tier, the velvet-lined private booth rustled. Lysandra swept down the grand staircase, her black-and-crimson gothic gown flowing behind her with effortless elegance. The lingering traces of her S-Class aura had receded, but the residual shockwaves of her dominance still lingered in the air. As she approached me, the student body parted instinctively, terrified of coming within three feet of the "defective" princess who had suddenly found her teeth.
She stopped right in front of me. Her crimson eyes searched my face, checking for hidden wounds, bruises, or fractures. Finding none—not even a single hair out of place—she let out a micro-sigh of relief, though her expression remained locked in cool, aristocratic stone.
"You are entirely reckless," she murmured, her voice carrying just enough for the nearby nobles to hear.
"I am entirely efficient, My Lady," I replied softly, offering a shallow bow. "A messy altercation would have reflected poorly on your household."
"Come," she commanded, turning on her heel. "Before Duke Alaric decides to send another lapdog to test our patience."
We walked side by side—or rather, with me trailing that precise, obedient half-step behind her—out of the lecture hall and back toward the sprawling, gothic arteries of the Vesper Academy. But as we crossed the courtyard toward the perimeter wall leading to the Sunless Spire, I noticed something different.
The atmosphere of the academy had shifted from casual mockery to calculated observation. From the high windows of the administrative towers, shadows moved. Eyes watched us.
The Crimson Inquisitors.
Now that Princess Carmilla's radar had been pinged by our public display of power, we weren't just a localized nuisance to Alaric anymore. We were on the watchlist of the Academy's apex predators.
By the time we returned to the Sunless Spire, twilight had fully settled, turning the artificial sky above the Dominion into a bruised canvas of purple and charcoal.
The tower, however, felt less like a tomb and more like a sanctuary. The Alchemical heater I had installed yesterday hummed quietly, keeping the stone walls comfortably warm. The mahogany table in the parlor was clean, polished, and smelled faintly of lavender and old wax.
Lysandra dropped her heavy crimson mantle onto the coat rack—which I had also polished and reinforced—and collapsed into her armchair by the fireplace with a soft groan. The fierce, imperious princess mask vanished instantly, replaced by a very exhausted eighteen-year-old girl who had spent the entire day playing a very dangerous game of psychological chess.
"I thought Alaric was going to burst a blood vessel," she muttered, resting her head against the back of the velvet chair and closing her eyes. "Did you see his face when Valmont hit the floor?"
"A truly memorable architectural contribution to the lecture hall," I agreed, walking over to the kitchenette. "Shall I prepare evening tea? Chamomile to soothe the nerves, or something with a bit more iron to celebrate your victory?"
"Surprise me," she whispered.
I opened my sub-space inventory. While Lysandra decompressed, I had work to do.
My encounter with Chloe earlier had confirmed what I needed to know: Princess Carmilla, head of the Crimson Inquisitors, operated out of the restricted monastic wing deep within the Vesper catacombs. If she was the one who held the 'Thorned Rose' crest—the very crest associated with the Pureblood who had kidnapped my sister and murdered Seraphina—then I couldn't wait for her to make the first move.
I needed intelligence. And to get intelligence, I needed to slip past the academy's internal wards.
"A shadow doesn't break a lock, Lucian," Seraphina's voice whispered in my memory, as clear as day. "A shadow flows through the keyhole. If you're caught, you're just meat. If you're a ghost, you're truth."
I set a small kettle of water on the stove and reached into the deep recesses of my inventory, pulling out a small, specialized kit I had packed before leaving the human settlements: Alchemical Ghost-Ink and a set of Runesmithing Gravers.
Since my [Sanguine Thrall Form] was still on a long cooldown—roughly thirteen hours remaining—I had to rely entirely on human ingenuity, stealth, and my base 18 Perception.
While the water boiled, I sat at the corner of the kitchen counter, meticulously carving anti-detection runes into the lining of my spare uniform jacket. Each stroke of the blade had to be precise. One millimeter off, and the Academy's blood-barriers would scream the moment I crossed the threshold of the monastic wing.
"You're quiet," Lysandra's voice drifted over from the parlor.
I didn't stop carving. "Merely plotting the evening's chores, My Lady."
"Chores?" A soft, skeptical huff came from the other room. "You treat espionage and survival like housework."
"The two are fundamentally identical," I replied evenly, adding a drop of ghost-ink to seal the runes. "Both require a meticulous eye, zero wasted movement, and an absolute intolerance for unmanaged filth. The only difference is that in a kitchen, the mess is vegetable peelings. In an academy of vampires, the mess wears a tailored suit."
A quiet pause stretched between us, broken only by the crackle of the fireplace and the gentle whistle of the boiling kettle.
"You don't talk about your past," Lysandra said suddenly, her tone shifting from playful exhaustion to something much more fragile. She didn't open her eyes, but I could feel the weight of her gaze directed toward the kitchen archway. "You fight like a veteran, but you have no magical core. You protect me, but you don't ask for favors, power, or blood in return. What are you running from, Lucian?"
My hands paused over the fabric.
I looked down at the dark, rune-woven threads of the jacket. For a brief second, the phantom smell of iron and ash filled my senses. I saw the flash of a carriage wheel disappearing into the dark, and the cold, unblinking eyes of Seraphina as she fell.
"Don't let your anger write checks, your blade can't cash," Seraphina had told me once, cleaning a grease stain off her favorite revolver. "A cook needs a cool head, or the soup burns."
I set the graver down, picked up the kettle, and poured the steaming water over a fresh infusion of dark tea leaves. I plated a small, delicate slice of honey-glazed fruit bread—soft enough for her delicate fangs—and carried the tray out to the parlor.
I set it gently on the table beside her.
"I am not running from anything, My Lady," I said, my voice as calm and steady as a glass of still water. I stood at attention beside her chair, keeping my posture impeccably straight. "I am simply completing an itinerary."
Lysandra opened her eyes. She looked up at me, her piercing crimson gaze searching my face for any hint of a crack. She found none. My [Absolute Composure] skill kept my expression locked in absolute, unyielding serenity.
She took a slow breath, picked up the teacup, and looked back at the fire.
"An itinerary," she repeated quietly. "Dangerous words to use in a place like this."
"Life is dangerous, My Lady. That is why one must always keep their quarters clean." I offered a faint, polite bow. "Please enjoy your tea. I have... an errand to run in the upper corridors."
Her eyes snapped back to mine, narrowing with sharp, intuitive suspicion. "An errand? At midnight? In the restricted zones?"
"Merely checking the perimeter," I lied smoothly. "A good servant always ensures the doors are locked before he sleeps."
Before she could question me further, I turned on my heel, slipping into the shadows of the staircase.
The clock tower of the Vesper Academy struck midnight.
Twelve deep, melancholic chimes echoed across the stone courtyards, swallowed instantly by the perpetual red mist of the artificial sky.
I stood on the narrow stone ledge outside the third-floor window of the Sunless Spire, the rune-woven jacket dampening my thermal signature and completely masking my presence from the lower-tier ward sensors.
To anyone with magical sight, I was nothing more than a stray gust of wind.
[ Passive Skill: Demon Hunter Martial Arts (Lv. 3) activated. ]
[ Perception: 18 ]
[ Environmental Scanning enabled. ]
I leaped across the chasm separating the outer spire from the main academy complex, my boots catching silently on a slick, rain-slicked gargoyle statue. I pivoted, vaulted over a wrought-iron railing, and melted directly into the shadowed corridors of the administrative wing.
My target wasn't the dormitories. It wasn't even Duke Alaric's lavish chambers.
I was heading deep into the subterranean cloisters of the monastic library—the restricted archive where House Vesper kept the ancestral records of the Crimson Inquisitors.
If Princess Carmilla held the answers to the plague of Black Blood, the Pureblood who took my sister, and the murder of my Master, I would find them written in the dust of her own archives.
And heaven help anyone who tried to stop me from cleaning house.