Chapter 131: Chapter 131: The Hide And Seek

One Week Ago.

RUMBLE! RUMBLE! RUMBLE!

The sky thundered with rage and the grounds were obliterated with Chaos energy, a massive blue dragon’s voice rumbled through the destruction.

“He belongs to the Dragons!”

Millia arrived there a few seconds too late as the blue dragon carried the injured Adonis and Mariana away into the eastern sky.

She stood in the rubble and watched until they disappeared entirely from sight, misunderstanding Adonis as dead.

Then she shed tears of blood.

And something dark and ominous, something that had been sleeping quietly behind her restraint for a very long time, woke up.

She turned to face the Shadow-Blood Legion assembled behind her, her voice low and cold and carrying in it a quality that made even the veterans among them straighten instinctively.

“Listen well,” she said. “This marks the day we stop hiding from those disgusting royal bastards.”

No one spoke.

“They hurt our Master. They hurt your Lord. Therefore, we will show no mercy to anyone standing beside them. Not one.”

She let that settle.

“From today, we launch the Kill order. We will kill everyone standing with King Magnus and his allies. We will not stop until justice is carved into this Kingdom with blood.”

Valentina smiled faintly beside her, her vampiric teeth catching the dim light like the smile of a bloody queen who had been waiting for exactly this permission.

Rai Calder said nothing. He did not need to. His silence was its own agreement, heavy and absolute.

The Shadow-Blood Legion moved out.

Vampires descended on the chaos left behind, drinking deep in the aftermath. Shadows danced around the killing sites like celebrants at a dark festival, and the streets of the Kingdom began to understand, slowly and too late, that something fundamental had changed.

The hiding was over.

—

The first night, three noble estates burned to the ground before anyone understood what was happening.

The Royal Knights found the ash in the morning, still warm.

“What did this?” the Knight Commander asked, standing in the ruins of the first estate with his jaw tight.

Nobody had an answer.

By the second night, the pattern had become clear enough to be frightening.

The Shadow-Blood Legion did not strike randomly. They struck precisely, targeting every individual and institution that had pledged support to King Magnus during the confrontation with Adonis.

Supply chains were severed. Communication lines between the palace and its outer territories went dark one by one.

Three separate military outposts reported all personnel missing by morning. Their food were still warm on the tables, their weapons still racked on the walls.

The vampires fed freely in the aftermath of each strike, and the bodies they left behind told a story that the Royal Knights were not eager to share with the general population.

“We cannot tell the public about the bodies,” the Knight Commander told his senior officers on the third morning, “Not until we understand what we are dealing with.”

“We understand what we are dealing with, Commander,” one of the senior officers replied, his face pale beneath his composure. “We are dealing with something we cannot catch.”

He was not wrong.

Every deployment sent to investigate the sites arrived too late and found nothing but evidence of departure. Tracking teams followed trails that dissolved into nothing at the city’s edge. Scouts posted at anticipated target locations reported seeing nothing, then went silent themselves, found the following morning unharmed but unconscious, with no memory of the hours between their last report and dawn.

Millia had given very specific instructions about the scouts. They were messengers, not combatants. They would be spared and left as a message of their own.

The message was received.

By the fourth day, Valentina had begun operating independently in the noble district of the capital, moving through the remaining structures with the unhurried grace of someone taking a tour of a place she fully intended to own eventually.

She smiled at the Royal Guards she passed before they had time to register what they were seeing, and by the time the smile registered it was already too late for the information to be useful.

She reported back to Millia at dawn with blood on her collar and a satisfied expression.

“The noble district is developing a very healthy fear response. Another two nights and they will be sending Magnus their resignations.”

“Good,” Millia said.

Rai Calder said nothing, as was his habit. He simply cleaned his blades and sharpened them and waited for the next deployment with the patient efficiency of a man who had made peace with his purpose a long time ago.

On the fifth night, Millia herself moved.

She did not lead a team. She went alone, cutting through the outer military encampment that had been redeployed to protect the palace perimeter, moving between the tents and torches with the particular silence of someone whose entire bloodline had been optimized over generations for exactly this.

Slice, Slice, Slice.

She left no bodies. She left no ash. She left a single black rose at the entrance to the Knight Commander’s personal tent, placed precisely in the center of his map table on top of the tactical deployment plans he had spent three days constructing.

When he found it in the morning he stood very still for a long time.

Then he sent a rider to the palace.

King Magnus declared it a War against the Kingdom on the sixth morning, standing before what remained of his assembled court with the controlled fury of a man whose city was bleeding in ways he could not see or touch or address with the tools available to him.

“This is a coordinated attack on the sovereignty of Fernis,” he said angrily, but looked dignified. “We will treat it as such. Every resource, every knight, every available military asset will be deployed. Find them. Bring them to me.”

“Your Majesty,” the Knight Commander said carefully, “we do not know where they are. We do not know how many there are. We do not know what they want beyond the destruction they are causing.”

“They want chaos commander,” Magnus said. “And we will deny them it.”

The Knight Commander did not point out that the chaos was already well underway.

The sixth night was the longest.

Raids fanned out from the capital into the surrounding countryside, the largest military deployment Fernis had executed within its own borders in living memory.

Clang. Clang. Clang.

Thousands of knights moved in coordinated formations through the dark, their torches turning the rural roads into rivers of moving light visible from miles away.

The Shadow-Blood Legion saw them coming from a considerable distance.

“Mistress, they brought everyone,” one of the shadow operatives reported to Millia.

“Good,” Millia smiled evilly. “Let them find us.”

She had chosen the site deliberately. A wide stretch of countryside three hours ride from the capital, open enough that the approaching knights would feel the tactical advantage of numbers and space, enclosed enough on the distant edges by tree lines and ridges that retreat routes could be quietly managed.

She wanted them to think they had cornered her.

The seventh night.

The Knight Commander arrived at the site with four thousand men at his back and the grim satisfaction of someone who had finally, after six days of chasing shadows, found something to stand in front of.

The Shadow-Blood Legion stood in the open field and waited for them.

“Surrender,” the Knight Commander called across the dark field, “By order of King Magnus of the Fernis Kingdom, you are commanded to surrender and submit to royal authority.”

Millia stood at the front of her Legion and looked at him across the distance between them with her dark eyes that caught the torchlight and returned it wrong, too bright, too still.

“No,” she said.

In anger, the Knight Commander raised his hand.

“Thud. Thud. Thud.”

Four thousand knights moved forward.

The Shadow-Blood Legion met them in tactical combat.

The shadows moved through the formation in ways that armor and numbers and tactical positioning had no meaningful answer for.

The vampires operated at the edges, cutting their heads mercilessly while flying.

“Raah, Die! You monsters!”

The Knight Commander fought well. He was a genuine warrior and he acquitted himself with the dignity of someone who understood they were losing and refused to let that understanding become surrender.

But by the middle of the night the formation had broken, and the Shadow-Blood Legion had been driven back toward the northern tree line by sheer weight of numbers, and the Knight Commander allowed himself one moment of something that might have been relief.

“Millia, we are trapped,” Rai said, his face covered with his blood. “This is the end. You should flee”

Millia gripped her dagger tighter. “No, I Won’t flee. If Adonis isn’t in this world, I will not stay here either.”

Valentina saw the raw love for Adonis in Millia’s, and strangely she too felt deep ache in her chest, remembering Adonis’ kind face.

But then, suddenly—

Roarrrrrr!

Then they came through the clouds.

Three dragons, not the vast world-ending scale of the Dragon Queen’s arrival over the capital, but large enough to cut through the dark sky above the tree line with the unhurried certainty of things that had never needed to hurry.

THUD. THUD. THUD.

They descended toward the Shadow-Blood Legion cornered at the tree line and landed between them and the advancing knights with a ground impact that sent every person within two hundred meters stumbling backward

The largest of the three lowered its head toward Millia.

“King Adonis waits for you,” it said simply.

The field went absolutely silent.

Millia’s and Valentina’s heart started beating erratically.

“He is alive!”

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