From deep within the tavern's back corridor came a set of brisk, rhythmic footsteps.
Unlike Lucy's earlier sycophantic sway, these steps were unnervingly steady — each one landing as though it were keeping time with the pulse of the room itself.
The noise of the hall seemed to be pressed flat by some invisible force. Even the mercenaries drinking at the bar lowered their voices without quite realizing why.
A curtain was lifted by a pale, slender hand with dark-red painted nails.
The woman who stepped into Sophia's line of sight was a beauty of startling, almost violent impact.
She wore a deep-purple gown of Olan silk, its neckline trimmed with black lace, her skin carrying the cold, marble-white pallor of something sculpted rather than born.
Most striking were her slightly upturned phoenix eyes, the irises a rare dark violet — carrying within them the detached, glacial elegance of someone who had seen too much of the world and cared too little for what remained.
She did not offer the professional smile Lucy had worn. She simply stood there, still and silent, like a poisonous red poppy blooming alone in the dead of night — proud and dangerous.
"Using that gold seal to intimidate my staff is hardly the behavior of a gentleman," said Rita, the proprietress.
Her gaze rested on the seal for precisely one second before moving to Sophia. Her voice was low and melodious, yet carried an edge as sharp as a blade.
"This way, if you please, the both of you. Discussing weighty matters in a place like this is... poor form."
The three of them moved to a private booth on the second floor, its walls and ceiling layered with sound-dampening wool carpets.
Rita settled elegantly into a rosewood armchair and lit a long, slender ladies' cigarette. Curling smoke softened the edges of her face — a face almost too beautiful to be real.
"Good. No outsiders now," she said, exhaling a slow ring of smoke, her eyes carrying the weight of a careful appraisal.
"I don't know where you stole that seal from. But in consideration of the gold coins, I'll give you a chance to explain yourselves. You're carrying something that belongs to the King of Jasu — so what exactly are you looking for in Cors?"
Sophia sat across from her, hat still firmly in place.
Her legs were crossed, the sword at her side catching the lamplight in cold, hard flashes. Her tone remained as flat and devoid of feeling as a bureaucratic proclamation:
"The seal's owner sent me to retrieve something. To be precise — something the people of Olan have been desperately searching for, without knowing it's here in Cors."
Rita let out a soft, musical laugh and tapped her cigarette holder lightly with one fingertip.
"My dear guest, you can buy anything at Rita's. Olan wine, Olan spices — even the movement orders of Olan's armies. Name the right price and I can deliver. Which are you after?"
Sophia raised her eyes slightly. The pale gold of her irises flickered in the shadows with an absolute, deathly stillness.
"You know I'm not talking about any of that cheap garbage."
Irene, who had been sitting rigidly upright beside her, nearly choked on a laugh at "cheap garbage," and hastily covered it with a cough.
So this is what Her Majesty calls a dimensional suppression strike?!
Right to the face of the most powerful intelligence broker in the entire city — and Her Majesty just casually called the woman's entire life's work 'garbage.'
Look at that composure. She's not negotiating. She's settling accounts.
Her Majesty must have already read every layer of Rita's psychological defenses. For a woman like this, every monetary transaction is beneath her — only the power to decide life and death commands real respect.
The hat she's still wearing — that's deliberate. She wants to project the aura of a judge who just climbed out of hell.
The gold seal was just the door knock. The real killing blow starts now. I'd bet anything that every word Her Majesty says from here on will land like one of my high-yield explosives — straight through this woman's entire worldview!
Rita's smile stiffened. She was just drawing breath to steer the conversation back into diplomatic circles when Sophia spoke again — her voice ice-cold enough to cut:
"Jasu is gone."
The warm air of the private room seemed to vanish all at once.
Rita's cigarette holder jerked violently. A cylinder of ash fell onto her expensive silk skirt. She didn't notice. She only stared, fixed and unblinking, at Sophia.
"A joke like that... even here in Cors, that's not something you say lightly."
"It's not a joke."
Sophia sat up straighter, her tone so level it felt like despair given a voice.
"Three days ago, the Olan legions carried out a blood-rite massacre. Jasu's mines were caved in. The palace was reduced to charcoal. Except for the survivor I found on the road, there is nothing left alive in the entire Royal City of the Kingdom of Jasu.
"The only message that child carried was to come here."
Sophia gestured toward the gold seal. Her pale-gold eyes held not a single trace of sympathy.
"If you think I'm lying, by all means — go on tending your little collection of Olan delicacies. But Olan's liquidation squads are already on their way. When they find the key is not buried in the rubble, but here with you..."
Sophia paused, then added the final line.
"How much longer do you think this little red poppy called Rita will stay in bloom?"
Rita's exquisite, otherworldly face drained completely of color.
Inside the booth, the faint sweetish fragrance of the ladies' tobacco now seemed faintly nauseating.
Rita stared hard at the gold seal on the table, her dark-violet pupils trembling violently.
As a woman who had spent years navigating the razor-thin margins of inter-kingdom intelligence work, she knew better than anyone: an object engraved with royal secret-patterns and set with blood-marrow rubies was not something a few petty thieves could have lifted from the heavily guarded Royal City of the Kingdom of Jasu.
The only explanation was that the palace no longer existed — and the people who had guarded it had all become dry bones.
"You said... a blood-rite massacre?"
Rita's voice trembled faintly. That cold, striking face had taken on a sickly pallor.
"Even at their most unhinged, Olan wouldn't slaughter Jasu's entire royal line root and branch before they'd gotten their hands on that thing. Unless... they've already found a better substitute..."
"They haven't found one."
Sophia cut off her self-deception without expression, leaning fractionally forward.
The shadow cast by the brim of her hat swallowed half her face, leaving only those utterly motionless pale-gold irises — flickering in the dim light with the cold, rational calm of death itself.
"That is precisely why they caved in the mines — to bury every living witness under the rubble. Jasu's streets were piled with corpses there hadn't been time to burn. The moat had turned dark red. It was a chaotic, inefficient slaughter — nothing but an outlet for the Third Prince of Olan's cheap rage. There was no logic to it whatsoever."
Sophia's tone was as flat as if she were describing a pile of hay left out in the rain. But it was exactly that near-brutal objectivity that finally demolished the last of Rita's psychological defenses.
These two... were not Olan.
Rita swept her gaze quickly over Sophia and Irene's strange but sharply functional attire.
Olan soldiers carried a kind of rotted, feverish fanaticism. These two carried only cold — the kind of cold that treated everything in the world as expendable, so precisely calibrated it made the blood run still.
Seated to the side, Irene watched Rita teetering on the verge of collapse and could not stop herself from screaming internally — again.
I thought Her Majesty would spin some moving story to win this woman's sympathy. Instead she laid out the carnage like she was dissecting a corpse on a table.
Look at that presence. She was never trying to persuade Rita. She's using these blood-soaked facts to forcibly seize control of the woman's fear!
In a moment like this, any comfort is worthless. Only by projecting a control colder and more absolute than Olan's can Her Majesty make this intelligence broker understand who the real savior is.
Deliberately mentioning 'inefficient slaughter' — that's an intellectual insult to Olan, isn't it? The subtext is: those idiots can't do anything but kill people. Only by following Her Majesty will you have any way out.
Your Majesty... your psychological warfare makes my pressure cooker look imprecise!
"The survivor you mentioned..."
Rita drew a slow, steadying breath, raised the cigarette holder with trembling hands, and found the flame had long since gone out.
"Who is she? Someone who could escape that inferno — she is no ordinary attendant."
"Tulan," Sophia said quietly, releasing the name like something set down very carefully.
"A little girl who would claw through her own skin if it meant surviving another day. Her father was the head chamberlain of the Jasu royal palace — the last man to carve the secret into her body. We found her in a pile of the dead. Another day and she would have been gone."
"Tulan-Krieg?!"
Rita cried out. The cigarette holder fell from her hand and hit the floor.
That was the youngest daughter of the Duke of Jasu — and the Duke had been, in all this chaos, the only lifeline of contact Rita had ever kept in this part of the world.
Hearing that name, the last fragment of Rita's doubt collapsed straight to the bottom.
If even that beloved, pampered daughter of the Duke had been reduced to carving words into her own flesh just to survive, then the horror that had befallen Jasu was likely a hundredfold worse than what these two young visitors had described.
"It seems you do know her."
Sophia rose to her feet. Her silver hair traced a cold arc through the lamplight. She did not waste another word — she simply made the call.
"The coordinates are confirmed. The name checks out. Lead the way. Before Olan's liquidation squads tear Cors apart stone by stone, we need to take that thing back to where it belongs."
Rita was silent for a long moment. Then she gave a bleak, hollow laugh. She pressed out the cigarette, stood, and let a flash of cold resolve pass through her eyes.
"Since Jasu has become a graveyard, there's no reason for this poppy to go on blooming beneath Olan's heel."
She turned and pressed her fingertips against the wall in a specific sequence, at a point hidden behind an enormous decorative tapestry.
A heavy bookcase groaned and scraped, swinging open to reveal a concealed passage beyond.
"Follow me, the both of you."
Sophia fell in behind her immediately, her black cloak lifting slightly in the draft.
Irene slung her powder case tight across her back, sapphire-blue eyes igniting with excitement.
She knew — with Rita's surrender, this treasure hunt spanning hundreds of miles had finally entered its most breathtaking stage of excavation.
The passage was dim, lit only by the swaying alchemy windproof lamp in Rita's hand, which stretched and twisted the shadows of the three figures into long, warped shapes across the mottled stone walls.
The air held a mingled scent of aged paper and preservative herbs. With every step, the muffled echoes of their footfalls rippled back and forth through the narrow space.
Rita stopped before a stone door that appeared, at first glance, entirely unremarkable. She drew a deep breath, pulled from around her neck a mithril key she had never shown another living soul, and slid it into an almost invisible slot recessed into the wall.
Click.
The stone door slid slowly open, revealing a sealed chamber no larger than ten square meters.
There were no mountains of gold coins. There were no luminous divine artifacts. There was only a long obsidian casket, resting in silence at the center of a stone dais.
"In truth, it is not some strange treasure capable of annihilating an army in an instant," Rita said, her voice taking on an almost spectral quality in the sealed room. She stepped forward, her fingertips trembling as they brushed the casket's cold surface.
"It is a scroll. A treaty — the original document, handwritten and sealed by the last emperor of the ancient empire."
Sophia moved to the casket without expression. The pale gold of her pupils burned with a particular sharpness in the light of the lamp.
"A treaty?"
"Yes. A genealogical record sufficient to rob every royal house on the continent of a good night's sleep."
Rita clenched her jaw and threw the casket open.
Inside lay a scroll of silk woven from golden cicada-wing threads. Even after a hundred years, it still carried a faint, almost sacred luminescence.
"The evidence it contains shows that the royal bloodlines of five major powers surrounding this region — including Olan — are all descended from a traitorous lineage. Their ancestors were nothing more than betrayers of the ancient empire, and the true, legitimate heirs were slaughtered to extinction by them long ago.
"This treaty records the true line of succession and the rightful ownership of the land. The moment it surfaces, the century-old claim to legitimacy of the Olan royal house — and all the others — will collapse in an instant. They will be exposed as nothing more than a gang of kingdom-thieves."
Sophia stared at the scroll while her mind had already accelerated into a rapid chain of calculation.
She had expected a blueprint for some kind of cannon capable of blowing down city walls.
It turned out to be an ancient property deed and a copy of a household registry.
In other words, the bloodlines of many current major powers were not merely mixed — they were those of conquerors.
But... in a world that placed such extreme weight on bloodlines and titles, the destructive power of this document was likely greater than a hundred of Irene's explosive charges combined.
Sophia's fingertip touched the scroll, feeling the delicate texture of it.
Funny — I was just worrying about a lack of pretexts for absorbing all those minor principalities that keep causing trouble.
If I hold the highest authority to interpret this document, then Mason Kingdom's expansion is no longer conquest — it becomes the restoration of Order, carried out on heaven's behalf.
Sweep those irritating relics of the old nobility into history's dustbin with full legal justification. The logic is remarkably efficient.
No wars, no troublemaking criminals to deal with — just rapid agricultural and technological development, straight through to culinary freedom.
Beside her, Irene, having heard Rita's full explanation, had entered a state best described as her soul departing her body in awe.
She stared hard at Sophia's upright, utterly unruffled silhouette, and the reverence in her eyes had liquefied into something bordering on religious fervor.
This is Her Majesty's ultimate endgame?!
Her Majesty went straight for the foundations of the world!
That serene expression — she's not looking at a scroll. She's looking at a global redundancy list.
She must have planned all the way to this move from the very beginning.
In an age built on the doctrine of divine mandate and royal blood, pure military conquest invites endless resistance. But if you negate the very reason for your enemy's existence — at the level of logic and legal right — that is a dimensional suppression strike of the highest order.
With this in her hands, Mason is no longer a small kingdom. Mason becomes the sole legitimate divine representative on this entire continent.
If the King of Olan ever finds out, he'll probably bite straight through his own crown on the spot.
Your Majesty, your ambition was never to revive Mason. You were always planning to tear the old world order apart and rebuild it from scratch.
"Now," said Rita quietly. "It is yours."
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