Dex had barely finished his sentence, laden with the relief of a temporary victory, when the sacred silence of the room was shattered. A sharp buzz erupted, and a rapid, intermittent red flashing began emanating from the small crystals fixed above Marcus's chest. The metal bracelet around his wrist had begun emitting mechanical warning vibrations.
"Dex, the vital signs are spiking vertically!" Lumia warned in a whisper that cut like a blade, drawing closer and watching the sensing crystals that had begun spinning in wild circles. "His heartbeat has grown stronger, regular, pumping blood with the force of a warrior, not a patient. His body temperature is rising to normal levels. Sylvester's security array will begin noticing this 'positive deviation' and interpreting it as external intervention in under sixty seconds."
The moment was decisive. Any error now would mean triggering the alarms, awakening the B-rank killers frozen in their spatial isolation bubble outside, and bringing the entire palace guard down into this sealed vault.
"Do it, Lumia. Now!" Dex commanded as he rose swiftly to his feet, leaving the warmth of the family moment behind him. The mask of military coldness and absolute focus returned to cover his young face.
Lumia nodded without an additional word. She raised her slender, luminous-skinned hands above Marcus's chest and the instruments connected to it. Her silver eyes began rotating like vortexes of star-dust. She did not speak an incantation, instead she began weaving invisible threads of complex void magic.
She understood with her cosmic intelligence that she could not simply destroy or "disable" the instruments, because a sudden interruption of the signal would trigger the alarm immediately in Sylvester's wing, classified as "sabotage." Instead, she chose the more difficult and complex solution: graphical illusion.
Lumia isolated the small spatial region surrounding the sensors with an extremely thin and transparent layer of temporal void. This layer did not prevent the sensors from functioning, it severed them from Marcus's new physical reality. Then she began feeding the sensors a phantom image, a recorded loop of data from the previous hour, before the Nectar had been administered.
Beneath Lumia's hands, the angry red crystals stabilized and returned to their faint, slow pulsing. The metal bracelet ceased its vibrations and returned to reading a weak, dying heartbeat. Lumia had made the instruments, and by extension Sylvester's monitoring room, believe with complete conviction that Lord Marcus's heart was still weak and deteriorating, and that his mana core remained dormant under the poison's mercy, while in reality the body beneath those sensors was boiling with the astonishing healing activity of the World Tree's Nectar, building cells and cleansing veins in a silent and winning battle.
Dex drew a long breath when he saw the color of reassurance return to the sensing instruments. He looked at Lumia, who was maintaining the illusion matrix with intense focus, and said in a quiet and deliberate voice: "We will pour the remaining two drops of Nectar over the coming days, spaced apart. The first drop was for building the defensive wall around the core. The coming drops will be for expelling the poison from the extremities and restoring motor capability. Had we given him the full dose today, even your spatial illusion could not have concealed the energetic explosion of an SS-rank core recovering all at once."
"A wise decision," Lumia agreed, permanently stabilizing the void network to persist until their next return. "Gradual recovery will give him time to build his immunity, and will ensure we remain beneath our enemies' radar."
Dex turned to cast one final, sweeping look at his prostrate father. Marcus's face was now peaceful, breathing with a regularity resembling the sleep of veteran warriors after a victorious battle. He was no longer a ghost of death, but a man preparing to return.
"When they finally discover what has happened..." said Dex, a cold and terrifying smile forming at the corner of his mouth, "the Lion will already have awakened and reclaimed his roar, and we will have set the stage entirely for their bloody end."
Dex turned his back to the bed and looked around at the grand, dark hall that betrayal had converted into a prison and a death-bed. Then he raised his eyes toward the thick stone ceiling, as though he could see through it to the brightly lit upper floors of the palace, where his uncle Sylvester sat in his lavish wing, sipping his fine red wine and receiving the falsified physicians' reports, arrogantly believing himself the unchallenged crowned king of Seiron Province.
"Enjoy your numbered days, Sylvester," Dex whispered, his voice carrying the weight of a death sentence, cold as a guillotine blade awaiting its fall. "In your ignorance you believe you have buried the Lion in the deepest vault to be rid of him, but you have forgotten the golden rule of this world: the dark and deep vault is the place where the most precious treasures are kept, and the same place where the most lethal weapons are forged. In this impenetrable darkness that you built with your own hands, the true heir of the Williams family has been reborn, and the old Lion you believed you had shackled with poison has begun sharpening his steel claws directly beneath your feet."
Dex waved his hand, and the pair withdrew from the heart of the Chamber of Stillness with the same lethal silence and absolute caution with which they had entered. They crossed the white marble corridor, bypassing the two Shadow Organization killers who were still frozen inside their spatial isolation bubble, imprisoned in an endlessly repeating second. When Lumia dissolved the spatial bubble, the two guards regained their freedom, completely unaware of what had happened to them in the preceding hour.
They crossed back through the dark ascending stone tunnel, and Dex, using his blood and his deep knowledge of the palace's sealing mechanisms studied from the novel, reactivated all the defensive arrays and crystal gates behind them, as though no living soul had set foot in this place for months.
When they finally emerged from the mouth of the secret tunnel, piercing through the rocks, the cold and refreshing night air received them at the high rocky slope. Dex stood at the edge and looked downward. Before him stretched the sprawling lights of Seiron, glittering like a sea of earthly stars in the valley of the Western Province. The city was asleep, oblivious to the storm being born beneath the foundations of its ruling palace. Dex looked at those lights, and no longer saw mere words in a novel he had read, he saw his kingdom, his battlefield, and the future he would forge with his own blood.