Chapter 103: Chapter 103: The Rapidly Advancing Threat

In the luxurious sanctuary of Duchess Clementine’s personal paradise, she sat regally upon an expensive sandalwood bench before a wide golden mirror.

She studied her reflection with quiet satisfaction, beautiful, regal, untouched by time. Just as she had been in her prime. Adelaide was dead in tge coffin, and not a single soul in this world came close to matching her beauty and grace.

It was in that self-satisfied moment that a shadow slipped into the room.

“Duchess. We have bad news.”

The voice was feminine, hushed, and laced with dread.

Clementine’s eyes remained on the mirror a beat longer before she turned, her brows knitting together like a storm gathering on the horizon.

“Speak,” she said.

The cloaked figure hesitated, a rare thing for a shadow guard. Her gloved hands curled at her sides as she forced the words out.

“The Young Lord is missing. His shadow guards were slaughtered, every last one of them, by the illegitimate bastard.”

“When we arrived to check on the Young Lord, we found only ashes. They were examined, Duchess. The aura… it matched his. We believe he may be…”

She stopped as she noticed Clementine’s face had changed from ivory to a deep suffocating shade of purple, and the air in the room had grown impossibly heavy.

“Finish it.” The order came low and precise, her eyes sharp as cold steel.

The shadow guard stumbled back a half-step.

“M-My lady, the Young Lord has been burned to ashes.”

Silence.

Then something behind Clementine’s eyes went out, like a candle snuffed by an unseen hand, and what replaced it was darker than grief. Darker than rage.

“Then tell me,” she said softly, almost gently, “why are you still breathing when my son is dust?”

The guard opened her mouth.

“Die.”

Splash.

A dark tentacle erupted from the air and struck with savage precision, crushing the guard’s head like a ripe melon.

Thud.

The body crumpled. Blood spread in a slow, quiet tide across the marble floor.

Clementine turned back to her mirror.

Her reflection stared back, beautiful, regal, and utterly hollow.

Soon, Clementine rose from her bench slowly, deliberately, the way a queen rises before declaring war. The grief that had cracked open inside her chest had already hardened into something far more dangerous. Something cold. Something with teeth.

She did not weep. Duchesses of House Kingsbane did not weep.

She acted.

“Summon them,” she said to the darkness of the room. “All of them.”

Within minutes, the grand hall of the Kingsbane estate filled with a silence that was somehow louder than noise. They came from the shadows, from the walls, from the very air itself, stepping into form one by one like nightmares given flesh.

The elite of elites shadow guards ranked between the 60-70 level, each one a weapon honed over decades of blood and service.

Their cloaked figures stood in perfect, terrifying stillness, heads bowed, awaiting the word of their Duchess.

More than 100 of them.

Clementine walked before them with the composure of a woman who had long ago made peace with cruelty. Her gown whispered against the marble floor. Her eyes, still dark with that hollow, possessed light, swept over her assembled force with quiet authority.

“My son is dead,” she said simply.

No dramatics. No trembling voice. The words landed like stones dropped into still water.

“The one responsible is the illegitimate bastard of this house who calls himself a student of the Royal Academy. Adonis.” She let the name sit in the air for a moment, let it be memorized, branded into every mind present.

“You will go to the Academy. You will find him. And you will bring him to me breathing.” She paused, her gaze sweeping the room once more.

“If anyone stands in your way, you will remove them. Be it a teacher, professor, a fellow student, it does not matter.

Even if it is the Dean himself, you will find him and bring him here, alive. Am I understood?”

The response was not words. It was the unified, silent bow of over one hundred heads, a wave of dark fabric rippling forward and back like the tide obeying the moon.

They moved out before the hour was done.

Commander Silva and Lucia watched this and moved secretly to warn Adonis.

—

The Royal Academy of Fernis Kingdom was not accustomed to being rattled. It had stood for over three centuries high above the city like the fingers of a giant reaching toward the heavens.

Kings had been educated within its halls. Heroes had been forged inside its training grounds. It was, by every measure, a place of power and prestige.

And yet, when the shadow guards of House Kingsbane poured through its iron gates like a black tide, even the Academy stopped breathing

Thud. Thud. Thud.

They moved through the courtyard in disciplined formation, cloaks barely stirring despite their pace, and the students who had been laughing and sparring and lounging in the morning sun stopped everything.

Books were forgotten mid-sentence. Soul swords were lowered. Conversations died in open mouths.

No one had ever seen so many shadow guards in one place outside of a battlefield.

A second-year student near the fountain whispered to his companion, “Who are they?” .

His companion, a girl with sharp eyes and sharper instincts, grabbed his arm and pulled him back a step.

“They are shadow guards, fool. Look at their emblems.”

And then the whispers began to spread, rolling through the gathered crowd like wildfire catching on dry grass.

House Kingsbane. The Duchess. The infamous shadow force of Duke Kingsbane himself, the man whose name alone had ended political careers and shortened lifespans.

One by one, the mouths that had opened with outrage or indignation quietly closed. Professors who had stepped forward with authority retreated with dignity, choosing wisdom over pride.

The Academy’s own security force exchanged uncertain glances but made no move to intervene. Everyone understood the hierarchy.

Only another Duke, or the King himself, held the power to challenge House Kingsbane’s shadow guards without consequence.

And so the Academy simply watched, tense and silent, as the black tide swept through its halls.

Among the watchers was Teacher Isabella Frostbite, who stood at the second floor corridor window with her arms folded tightly across her chest, her silver blue eyes tracking the movement of the guards below with barely concealed alarm.

She was not a woman easily frightened.

Years of teaching combat theory and magical application had given her a steady nerve and a cooler head than most.

But this frightened her.

She knew of Adonis. She had watched him, quietly and carefully, the way experienced teachers watch students who are either destined for greatness or destined to draw catastrophe toward themselves like a lightning rod draws storms.

Beside being a teacher, she had started watching him with taboo complex.

Her jaw tightened. She thought of his handsome face and his domineering aura, and felt a uncomfortable twist of worry settle in her chest.

She was thinking of intervening, when the news reached her.

It reached everyone at roughly the same moment, passed from mouth to mouth with the breathless speed that only truly shocking information travels.

A Royal Guard envoy had arrived at the Academy not long before the shadow guards, it turned out. Adonis had already been summoned. Not by House Kingsbane. Not by the Academy board.

By the Royal Palace itself.

The Royal Guards had taken him.

The tension in the Academy shifted immediately, the way pressure shifts in the air before a storm changes direction.

The shadow guards stopped their momentum as the word reached their commander’s ears.

They discussed something between them, the without fanfare, without explanation, they began to withdraw.

Isabella exhaled in relief, uncrossing her arms.

The students around her began murmuring again, louder now, the collective relief loosening tongues that fear had tied shut only minutes before.

But Isabella did not share in the relief. Not entirely.

She turned away from the window and stared at the stone wall of the corridor, her thoughts running ahead of the noise around her to a quieter, more troubling question.

The Royal Palace had summoned Adonis.

And House Kingsbane had come for him at almost the same moment.

That was not coincidence. That was a collision course. And whatever was waiting for him at the end of it, she suspected it was something far larger and far darker than anything the Academy walls could protect him from.

“Adonis, stay safe. Your Isabella, no your teacher is useless,” she murmured, quickly shaking her head in shame.

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