Chapter 192: Infravulent Choices — Act
The air in the office was stagnant, smelling of old vellum and the cold iron of Selma's suppressed fear. Leornars sat atop the mahogany desk, one leg swinging with a casual, predatory grace that made the heavy furniture seem like a throne. Selma's hands trembled as she worked the mechanism of a hidden floorboard, finally hauling out a stack of ledgers bound in stained pigskin—the "Black Books" of the knighthood's illicit tithes.
Leornars took them, his crimson eyes tracing the ink as if he could smell the corruption on the page. With a sharp flick of his wrist, the shadows in the corner of the room curdled like spilled ink. From the floorboards rose a Grave-Knight, its armor tattered and weeping ethereal soot. The undead soldier seized the ledgers with skeletal fingers and sank back into the abyss of the rug.
"Selma," Leornars murmured, his voice a silk thread through a needle. "Be careful. Loyalty that only flows one way isn't honor. It is merely a slow suicide for the sake of a crown that doesn't know your name."
Before she could gasp a reply, the space he occupied folded. A ripple of displaced air was all that remained. Selma stood in the hollow silence, clutching her chest as her heart finally rediscovered its rhythm. "What a terrifying... beautiful monster," she whispered to the empty room.
At the jagged outskirts of the city, the atmosphere shifted from political rot to literal decay. The stench of salt, unwashed bodies, and iron-rich blood rose from the southern ravine. Stacian and Zaryter crouched atop a rain-slicked stone ridge, overlooking the slave rig.
Below, the "civilized" world showed its teeth. Merchants in shimmering silks lounged on divans, sipping vintages that cost more than the lives of the demi-humans shivering in the iron-barratry below. The rhythmic *crack* of enchanted whips acted as a metronome for their laughter.
"Look at them," Stacian hissed, her voice a low, jagged blade. "Sucking the marrow out of people they call 'beasts' while they wear the skin of high society."
Zaryter checked the obsidian daggers at his belt, his eyes fixed on the guards. "The guards are bored, Stacian. That makes them dangerous. If we don't time the extraction perfectly, they'll slit the slaves' throats just to spite us."
"Then don't give them the chance to breathe," Stacian replied, her mana beginning to swirl in a sickly cyan hue. "You handle the cages. Break the chains, get them to the treeline. Do not look back, no matter what you hear me doing."
Zaryter glanced at her, noting the cold, glassy hunger in her gaze. "Try not to lose yourself in the red, Stacian. Leornars needs information, not just corpses."
"He'll get both," she snapped, leaping from the ridge.
She descended like a fallen star. As her boots hit the dirt, she didn't draw a weapon. she drew a circle in the air with her own blood.
"**Blood Magic: Terrestrial Carb.**"
The effect was instantaneous and grotesque. The merchants dropped their crystal flutes. Their fine wine turned to sludge in their throats, thickening into jagged clots. They collapsed, clutching their chests as their own circulatory systems began to crystallize, piercing their lungs from the inside out.
Stacian stood amidst the writhing men, her silhouette cast long by the braziers. "Death is a gift you haven't earned yet," she whispered. She tore a jagged hole in the fabric of space, a rift that bled violet light.
From the void stepped Salene. She wore a pristine white lab coat that seemed disturbingly bright against the filth of the slave camp. She clutched a silver clipboard, her eyes darting around with the frantic, twitching energy of a starved predator let loose in a granary.
"Materials?" Salene asked, her voice a melodic, high-pitched chirp.
"The highest quality," Stacian said, gesturing to the gasping merchants. "All yours."
Salene's face split into a grin that revealed too many teeth. The clinical mask shattered, replaced by the ecstatic glow of a sadist at the height of her craft. She approached a merchant who was feebly trying to crawl away, his silk robes stained with bile.
"Oh, a sturdy one!" Salene cooed, pulling a long, gleaming silver screwdriver from a hidden pocket. "Your bone density looks marvelous for a Grafting Sequence. Let's see how much pressure your vertebrae can take before they sing for me."
She drove the tool into the man's lower spine with practiced, surgical force. As he let out a thin, wet shriek, she snapped her fingers.
"**Link Breaker: Sensory Chorus.**"
A shimmering veil fell over the group. The spell acted as a neural bridge; the agony Salene inflicted on one man was mirrored perfectly in the nervous systems of the others. She pulled a pair of heavy-duty pliers and a jagged bone-saw from her coat, moving between them with the grace of a conductor.
"Don't die too quickly," Salene whispered, her eyes wide and unblinking. "I need to see how your organs react when I swap their positions. I'll warp your frames until your own mothers wouldn't recognize the meat that's left."
With a rhythmic *crunch*, she began folding their limbs in directions nature never intended. She worked with terrifying speed, snapping sinew and bolting living flesh together, forcing the contorted, screaming mass of men into a massive, reinforced glass vat. Eyes bulged against the glass as she jammed the "confiscated materials" into a mound of living, weeping meat.
"Don't worry," Salene giggled over the sound of a shattering pelvis. "By the time I'm done peeling back the layers, they'll tell me every secret their ancestors ever whispered."
Stacian turned away, unbothered by the chorus of agony. She dragged the ringleader—a man bloated with greed—into the darkness of a nearby cave by his scalp.
"Please!" he blubbered, snot mixing with the blood on his face. "I have gold! I have the names of the ministers who funded the rig! Just let me live!"
Stacian threw him into the dirt, looking down at him with the vacant stare of a goddess of ruin. "You mistake me for someone who cares about your gold. I only care about the void."
She raised a hand, her mana turning an absolute, light-devouring obsidian.
"**Disfiguration.**"
The floor of the cave vanished, replaced by a gateway to a pocket dimension of eternal stagnation. The merchant fell, his scream echoing into a sea of grey nothingness where a hundred thousand pale, translucent hands rose like weeds. They latched onto his skin, their touch caustic, dragging him down into a pool of black, toxic bile that began to dissolve his soul before it touched his flesh.
Stacian stared down through the rift, her cyan eyes burning like cold, distant stars.
"Extinguish," she said flatly.
The rift snapped shut with the sound of a closing tomb.
Miles away, in the velvet quiet of his manor, the high-backed velvet chair creaked softly as Leornars leaned back, the stolen ledgers from the knighthood splayed across his desk like the entrails of a fallen enemy. The candlelight flickered, casting elongated shadows that danced across his pale features. He drummed his fingers on the mahogany surface, his mind a whirlwind of tactical placements and missing pieces.
"The board is crowded, yet I am short-handed," he murmured into the silence. His voice was a low hum, vibrating with a cold, calculated energy. "Bellian is tethered to the throne in Avangard. Sumi and Miri are overseeing the borders... Zhyelena is already embedded within the Von Grantz manor, her eyes watching their every breath. And Avryl..."
He paused, a ghost of a smile touching his lips. "Avryl is exactly where she needs to be—haunting the halls of the royal castle."
His crimson eyes drifted to a specific name in the ledger, one circled in dried, dark ink. To dismantle a family as entrenched as the Von Grantzes, he didn't need a soldier. He needed a surgeon of chaos.
"Perfect," he whispered. "Marielle Sullivana."
With a sharp intake of breath, the air around him curdled and snapped. The manor office vanished, replaced instantly by the oppressive, golden opulence of the **Durmount Kingdom's** throne room.
The transition was silent, save for the sudden chime of a clock on the far wall. **Queen Natalie Sulina** sat upon her throne, a glass of dark nectar in her hand. She didn't flinch at the sudden rip in space; she simply raised her glass in a mock toast, her eyes twinkling with a weary sort of amusement.
"Ah, Leornars," Natalie said, her voice dripping with the effortless poise of a woman who had seen empires rise and fall. "To what do I owe this sudden intrusion? Have you come to conquer, or simply to ruin my afternoon tea?"
Leornars didn't move from his spot, his posture rigid and regal. "I have no interest in your tea, Natalie. I am looking for Marielle Sullivana."
Natalie let out a dramatic, exaggerated sigh, leaning her head against her palm. "Not poor, old me? Poo-hoo. You skip over the Queen to find the shadow. You've hurt my feelings, Leornars. Truly."
"Perhaps I'll comfort you later," Leornars replied, his voice devoid of emotion. "Where is she?"
The Queen gestured vaguely with her glass toward the arched stained-glass windows. "The backyard. She's indulging in that strange habit of hers—reading about things that actually happened. Dreadfully boring, if you ask me."
Leornars didn't offer a goodbye. He vanished.
The gardens of Durmount were a labyrinth of white roses and weeping willows. Marielle Sullivana sat on a stone bench, the sunlight filtering through the leaves to mottle the pages of her book. She didn't look up when the air rippled behind her.
"Lord Leornars," she said softly, her voice like the rustle of dry leaves. She closed the book with a deliberate *thud* and stood, performing a shallow, graceful bow. "The wind told me you were coming. It smelled of ozone and old blood."
"Come," was all Leornars said.
He reached out, his fingers barely brushing her sleeve, and the world inverted.
They reappeared in his manor in Ashvilliah. The transition was jarring for most, but Marielle simply smoothed her skirts and waited. Leornars didn't waste time with pleasantries; he slid the criminal ledgers across the desk toward her.
"Criminal documents, my Lord?" she asked, her eyes scanning the lists with a professional detachment. "Are we becoming bounty hunters in our old age?"
"I need you to destroy someone for me, Marielle. Not with a blade—at least, not yet. I need a catalyst." Leornars leaned forward, his crimson eyes locking onto hers. "Tell me. Among these monsters, these 'men' the kingdom has locked away in the dark... who is the most volatile? Who is the one that even the guards fear to feed?"
Marielle's finger traced the lines of text, stopping on a name that seemed to leach the warmth from the room.
"**Custazo**," she whispered. "The Butcher of the Lowlands. A mass murderer whose bloodlust was so great that the mages had to seal his mouth shut just to stop him from chanting curses. He is imprisoned for life in the deepest block of the Blackiron Pit."
"Perfect," Leornars said. His voice was a chill wind.
With a flick of his hand, he teleported Marielle away—not to her home, but to the shadows where she worked best.
For the next three days, Leornars did not sleep.
He sat at his desk, a stack of parchment growing beside him. He began to write. He didn't write as a King, or as a strategist—he wrote as a ghost. He penned letters to Custazo, each one filled with the specific, agonizing details of the Von Grantz family. He wrote of their wealth, their arrogance, and their supposed "disrespect" for the Butcher's legacy.
He wrote threats, supposedly from the Von Grantzes, mocking Custazo's imprisonment. He wrote of how they intended to execute him in a way that would erase his name from history.
Letter after letter, day after day. He poured his mana into the ink, ensuring that when Custazo touched the paper, the rage would seep directly into his marrow. It was a psychological siege, a slow-drip of poison intended to turn a caged animal into a guided missile.
On the evening of the third day, the door to his study creaked open. **Stacian** stepped in, her eyes rimmed with the exhaustion of her own missions, yet she paused at the sight of him. The room was filled with hundreds of sealed envelopes, all addressed to the Blackiron Pit.
"Lord Leornars?" Stacian asked, her voice cautious. "The air in here... it feels like a funeral."
Leornars looked up, his face gaunt in the candlelight, his crimson eyes burning with a terrifying clarity. He held up the final letter, sealing it with black wax.
"You're just in time, Stacian. I have a delivery for you."
"Letters?" she asked, walking closer and looking at the sheer volume of correspondence. "To the prison? Why waste your time on the condemned?"
"I am not wasting time. I am building a bridge," Leornars said, his voice a low, rhythmic growl. "I am sending Custazo to the Von Grantz manor. The twins cannot be safe while that bloodline breathes. They are a variable that refuses to be solved by diplomacy."
He handed the heavy sack of letters to her, his fingers cold against hers.
"The Von Grantzes think they are the apex predators of this kingdom. It's time they learned what happens when a real monster is given a map and a reason to hate. Deliver these. Ensure the guards are bribed to let him read every single word. By the time he breaks his chains, he won't be looking for freedom."
Leornars turned back to the window, watching the distant lights of the city.
"He'll be looking for them."