The meeting room's temperature had plummeted far into the negatives.
Emilia Von Crown's raw magium pressure was so catastrophically intense that it had completely crystallised the entire chamber in thick, jagged sheets of frost. It was clear to everyone present that her fury had reached an absolute, unprecedented zenith—surpassing even the day she discovered Victoria Jackson, the Headmistress, had dared to send Amon on a high-risk suicide mission.
The individuals trapped inside the room, trembling beneath the weight of her presence, were Victoria Jackson, Jacqueline Augustus, Celestia Greenwood, Judy Pincer, Melissa Souls, Oberyn Lockhart, T.S. Khalia, and Velzoyr Nova.
After receiving the critical report of Amon's near-fatal condition and the sequence of the assassination from Jacqueline, Emilia had personally descended upon the R.S. Advanced Academy like a calamity, instantly demanding a tribunal with the institution's top-class Professors and the Headmistress. Khalia and Velzoyr had been forced to accompany Emilia Von Crown, having absolutely zero other choice but to follow in her icy wake.
"Tell me," Emilia began, her voice dropping into a cold, terrifyingly quiet whisper that echoed off the frozen walls. "What precise kind of pathetic, administrative security measures are currently deployed within this academy... that allow my son to be targeted by an assassin in broad daylight?"
Her gaze, sharp as fractured glass, slowly washed over the room, carrying a heavy, suffocating wave of murderous intent.
No one answered. Even Victoria Jackson, who usually maintained an incredibly bold, unshakeable attitude regardless of the crisis, remained completely, tightly silent. The rest of the elite Professors couldn't even force their vocal cords to vibrate under the crushing, sub-zero physical pressure locking down their chests.
"I offer my deepest, most sincere apologies for my incompetence, Your Highness," Jacqueline's soft voice broke the silence, heavy with a profound, crushing guilt. "I was not present to protect Master Amon from the threat."
"It is not your fault, Jacqueline," Emilia replied. Her gaze never once shifted towards Jacqueline; instead, she kept her murderous eyes locked entirely onto Victoria, practically daring the Headmistress to breathe. "My ultimate error was that I did not purge this upstart from the administration when I possessed the opportunity. I should have never entrusted my son's safety to the authority of a completely incompetent retard who knows absolutely nothing but lecherous, self-indulgent behaviour."
"Your Highness, while it is true that Victoria Jackson's carelessness has allowed this incident to manifest, placing the entirety of the blame on her shoulders is not exactly rational," Khalia spoke up, her voice remarkably calm despite the atmosphere. "There is actively a traitor—"
SWISH—!
She couldn't even finish the syllable.
A razor-sharp sword of condensed, black ice whistled through the air with terrifying velocity, grazing Khalia's cheek by a fraction of a millimetre. The sheer cold of the blade left a thin, frozen line of blood across her skin, the liquid instantly crystallising before it could even drip onto her collar.
"How incredibly incompetent must a Headmistress be to allow a traitor to operate within this Academy in the first place?" Emilia asked, slowly shifting her gaze toward the silenced woman. Her eyes burned with a glacial, unforgiving light. "And I do not recall granting you permission to speak, Khalia."
The absolute authority in her voice completely locked Khalia's throat, forcing her to bow her head in silent, tense compliance as the ice on the walls continued to spread.
At that moment, the frozen meeting room's heavy oak doors violently swung open. The sudden force shattered the frost clinging to the hinges, sending a shower of sparkling ice crystals scattering across the floor.
Standing in the threshold was Amou.
Clutched in her iron grip was a writhing, desperately struggling hooded woman. "It's honestly laughable to think that you lot were being so easily deceived by a pathetic insect like this."
Amou walked inside with a slow, deliberate stride, dragging the woman mercilessly along the frosted floorboards before hoisting her up and tossing her like a sack of dead weight onto the middle of the frozen meeting table.
The impact knocked the heavy hood back, revealing the woman's pale, panicked face.
"Professor Satou?!" Judy Pincer looked completely, utterly dumbfounded, her eyes widening as she recognised her colleague.
"She's the traitor?" Celestia Greenwood looked from the terrified professor to Amou, her expression completely bewildered. "How... how can you possibly be so sure of this?"
"The worthless vermin who shot my Master sang like a bird about this inferior existence," Amou explained, her tone dripping with a cold, merciless finality. "I spent what felt like a billion years peeling away her concept of self in a separate dimension of torture. She was more than happy to give up her accomplice. So, I took the liberty of dragging this insect to you all before I personally mangle her into unrecognisable paste."
"And what exactly were you and Tiamat doing when my son was shot?" Emilia Von Crown's voice cut through the air, her cold glare shifting directly onto Amou. The room's temperature dropped even lower. "You are his bound familiars. It was your duty to protect him from such a basic assassination attempt."
"I know damn well you aren't trying to lecture me, Emilia Von Crown." Amou's gaze snapped to meet Emilia's, her voice stripped entirely of warmth, radiating a raw, ancient malice. "I would never allow my Master to be assassinated under my watch. To think you're still sitting here questioning my devotion despite knowing exactly what I am."
Amou stepped away from the table, walking directly up to the matriarch of the Crown family. She stopped mere inches from Emilia's face, staring straight down into her cold glare with an unshakeable, fierce look of her own.
"The reality is simple: you have failed as a mother," Amou coldly spat. The atmospheric pressure in the room surged violently, her dark, primordial aura rising to perfectly match and push back against Emilia's suffocating, freezing magium.
"Master has had to drag himself through hell and back, and yet, the only maternal trait you can seem to exhibit is threatening everyone around you while offering absolutely zero real protection in return."
Emilia's eyes flared, but Amou didn't back down a single millimetre.
"I've looked deep into his memories," Amou continued, her voice echoing like thunder in the enclosed space. "The Leone Birthday Incident, ten distinct assassination attempts before he even reached sixteen years of age, the Saintess's escort mission, Victoria's pathetic suicide mission. In every single one of those catastrophic events, you failed to provide him with sufficient security. He had to exhaustively rely on the limits of his own brilliant mind to survive them. The only time you actually managed to save him was during the Saintess's escort—and other than that single occurrence, you have always, consistently arrived late."
Even though Amou's words infuriated Emilia to the point where her magium violently flared, threatening to rip the molecular structure of the room to shreds, she froze. The frost on the walls ceased its aggressive crawl.
Deep down, beneath the cold, imperial pride of the Crown lineage, she knew Amou was telling the absolute, unvarnished truth.
It was a recurring, agonising theme in her life. Every single time Amon's existence was placed on a razor's edge, she arrived too late. Though Amon consistently assured her afterwards—with that calm, terrifyingly mature composure of his—that as a Crown, he had to be fully capable of navigating such lethal thresholds on his own, Emilia knew she had failed to do enough.
She had tried. She had desperately attempted to assign guards to him, but Amon had fiercely, unconditionally opposed it. He had looked at her with a determined expression and refused, stating flatly that he would never use other people's lives as disposable shields to guarantee his own survival.
Jacqueline had only managed to bypass his stubborn independence and become his personal attendant after Victoria's disastrous suicide mission, thanks to Victoria's absurd persuasion and her antics. Emilia may not have displayed much on the surface regarding the arrangement, but in her heart, she had been profoundly relieved that Amon was finally accepting some form of protection.
"Master always projects the image that he is perfectly alright, but as his own mother, you utterly failed to recognise how deeply fractured he actually was inside," Amou said, her voice dropping into a low, resonant register that cut far deeper than any blade.
"He has never, for a single second, overcome the suffocating psychological trauma of losing those innocent lives during the Birthday Banquet incident. And as a direct, broken mechanism to cope with that failure, he became entirely, pathologically self-sacrificing."
Amou slowly moved away from Emilia, though her fierce, unblinking gaze remained locked onto the matriarch.
"He fundamentally ceased to care whether his own thread of life was severed or not; his calculation only cared if the other people around him lived to see the next day. Victoria's suicide mission is the textbook example of this pathology. He possessed highly advanced knowledge required to safely dislocate himself from the Black Chasm without wasting energy neutralising its core. But he deliberately went out of his way to dive deeper into the abyss to save Jacqueline."
A heavy, suffocating silence fell over the room as Amou stood by the edge of the frozen table.
"Even though Master fully calculated that his odds of survival were near zero, he chose to gamble his very life on the line. He chose to die so that Jacqueline could walk out of that hell alive."
Amou slowly turned away from the matriarch and snatched Professor Satou by the throat. The traitorous professor let out a muffled, terrified shriek, but before she could formulate a single plea for mercy, Amou's silhouette distorted into a dense, pitch-black void. With a muted pop that sent ripples through the frozen air, she completely disappeared from the chamber, dragging the writhing woman down into her personal pocket dimension of infinite torment.
For a solid, suffocating minute, absolutely nobody in the frozen chamber dared to speak. The only sound was the faint, rhythmic cracking of the frost settling across the heavy oak furniture.
"If I may, Your Highness," Oberyn spoke up, cleanly breaking the silence.
He leaned back slightly against his frozen chair, his tone remarkably gentle and smooth. It was an eerie, soft cadence that slightly unnerved both Khalia and Velzoyr to their very cores, though their trained political faces didn't betray a single shred of outward emotion.
"From that creature's words, it sounds like your son has been caught up in a sequence of catastrophic scenarios. Could you perhaps enlighten us?"
Emilia Von Crown didn't snap at him this time. Instead, she slowly lowered her gaze to the frosted surface of the table, her expression turning completely blank, carrying the immense weight of guilt.
"It all started from the Birthday Banquet Incident," Emilia began to explain, her voice devoid of its earlier imperial edge, leaving behind a cold, hollow resonance. "My son was abducted by the Aimus faction alongside the Leone family's primary heir, Costoria Leone. Within that subterranean stronghold, those Aimus bastards tortured my son by deliberately leaving his consciousness at the absolute mercy of the Red King."
A sharp intake of breath echoed silently among the professors. The Red King was a conceptual horror whose mere presence fractured human sanity.
"After somehow, miraculously surviving the maddening gaze of that ancient King twice," Emilia continued, her fingers lightly tracing the frost on her armrest, "he entirely dismantled and destroyed the Aimus's subterranean facility from the inside out, securing the life of Costoria Leone in the process."
"Ever since that specific day, the Aimus have been weaponising every asset in their arsenal to permanently eliminate my son," Emilia stated, taking a slow, measured breath to regulate her baseline composure. "They are doing this because they calculated that he possesses a specific operational potential—something that could fundamentally drive the entire Aimus faction to extinction in the future."
"Apart from the fifty targeted assassination attempts he neutralised growing up, the Saintess's escort mission was another primary threshold where the Aimus deployed three Harbingers to execute him."
"But, Your Highness," Khalia interjected smoothly, her brows furrowing as her mind reviewed the imperial archives. "Wasn't the entire strategic plan of that specific operation to deploy Amon as a high-profile decoy... simply to lure the hostile assailants entirely away from the Saintess's transport transit?"
"The Aimus deliberately manipulated our intelligence channels so that we would devise a plan exactly like that, creating the perfect opportunity for them to execute my son far away from the main squadron," Emilia countered, a bitter, phantom smile momentarily gracing her lips.
"Amon was the one who personally suggested to Chloe and me that he should assume the decoy role to pull the Aimus strike team into the open. The Aimus were never actually hunting the Saintess. They were solely hunting him."
"So, in other words, the Aimus completely outsmarted us during that entire operation," Khalia muttered, facepalming as the grim implications finally settled into her mind. "They weaponised your personality and Amon's intellect, using them as leverage to isolate him from the primary squadron. To think that Grand Duchess Crown and Grand Duchess Nova actually got outsmarted so cleanly..."
"The Aimus have always been exceptionally cunning," Velzoyr chimed in, his voice perfectly measured, clinical, and rational. "It is simply that Amon miscalculated the true scope of the Aimus's motives and walked straight into their trap. None of this cascading sequence would have ever manifested if he hadn't gotten involved in the first place."
"And that is exactly why," Emilia said, slowly looking up. Her frosty gaze washed over the terrified professors before settling entirely onto Khalia, locking her in place. "Khalia, you will formally join the R.S. Advanced Academy roster as an active Professor."
The majority of the Academy staff sat there utterly dumbfounded by the sudden executive decree. However, Oberyn, Velzoyr, Jacqueline, and Victoria remained perfectly still; they understood the motive driving Emilia's words.
A visible vein popped onto Khalia's forehead as her professional composure threatened to snap. "Your Highness, with all due respect, I am not going to spend my time babysitting your son. There are already two active Primordial Beasts and a literal Champion of the Solathian Empire present within this Academy to ensure his survival! Not to mention Oberyn, a Prosecutor, is also operating on the grounds! What could make you think—"
SHNF—! SHNF—!
Two more razor-sharp swords manufactured from black ice hissed through the air, perfectly mirroring the trajectory of the first. They grazed Khalia's cheeks with mathematical precision, drawing two fresh, parallel lines of crimson that instantly froze against her skin.
"Despite every single one of those variables, he was successfully assassinated in broad daylight," Emilia whispered. Her voice carried a dead, absolute chill, and her glare was sharp enough to freeze the ambient moisture in a person's lungs. "I do not care a single fraction about what you have to say, Khalia. You will commence your instructional duties here tomorrow morning as a Professor. As for your current post as the Director of Magic Research, you can easily operate from here without any difficulties."
She then slowly turned her terrifying, unforgiving gaze back toward the head of the table.
"From this exact moment onward, I will be directly interfering in the administrative matters of this Academy," Emilia declared, staring straight through a hollow-eyed Victoria. "Because of your absolute operational incompetence, a traditionally non-political institution—the R.S. Advanced Academy—is formally being placed under the direct jurisdiction of the Crown Duchy."
Emilia smoothly rose from her seat, the frost on the walls cracking violently as her aura shifted.
"This meeting is officially adjourned."
- - -
Amon stood at the edge of the jagged cliff, holding his wand tightly in his hand. The atmosphere was incredibly heavy with gloom, and the sky above was overcast with thick, dark clouds that threatened a violent downpour. Seraphina stood just a few steps away from him, her expression a mix of confusion, growing dread, and absolute panic.
"I am sorry, Seraphina." His voice was soft, soothing in its tone, but heavily weighed down with a lifetime of guilt and unspeakable sadness. "It was all my fault that everyone suffered."
He slowly raised his arm, pointing the tip of the wand directly at himself.
"Maybe... God will forgive me for my faults, and I hope you do as well."
"No! Amon, don't!"
Seraphina reached out her hand, her heart leaping into her throat as she dashed forward.
But she was too late.
The next moment, a blinding, white light violently engulfed him. The force of the magical displacement kicked up a sudden gust of wind, tearing through the gloomy air.
When the light finally died down, the cliffside was empty. The only thing that remained in his place, slowly drifting down through the cold air to land on the damp stone, was his familiar crimson blindfold.
Seraphina's knees hit the cold, damp earth of the cliffside. The impact sent a sharp jolt through her body, but she barely felt it. Her outstretched hand remained frozen in the empty air, fingers desperately grasping at nothing but the lingering static of that blinding light.
The wind howled, whipping her hair across her face, but her eyes remained wide, glassy, and locked onto the patch of dirt where Amon had stood just seconds ago.
There was no body. No blood. No lingering warmth.
Only a piece of cloth.
Slowly, her hand drifted downward, trembling uncontrollably. Her fingers brushed against the fabric. It was his crimson blindfold, lying stark and quiet against the dark soil, completely unbothered by the growing storm. She pulled it to her chest, clutching the rough material against her heart as the first heavy drops of rain began to fall from the black clouds.
"Why...?" she whispered, her voice cracking, swallowed instantly by the roaring wind. "Why would you do that?!"
She squeezed the blindfold tighter, her tears finally spilling over, mixing with the cold rain running down her cheeks. She squeezed the blindfold tighter, her tears finally spilling over, mixing with the cold rain running down her cheeks.