Inside the great hall,
the reek of blood mingled with the icy chill of a change in power, congealing into an almost tangible pressure.
The throne's high dais, once a symbol of the kingdom's supreme glory and order, had become a stage for absolute power and the aesthetics of cruelty. Beneath the gilded dome, the inlaid gems still glittered—yet they seemed like cold, indifferent eyes, watching the slaughter below and the depravity above.
"Let go of Her Highness!"
Climb's hoarse roar ripped through the shroud of silence like the death-cry of a wounded beast. His voice carried nothing but the most primal impulse.
Princess Renner was everything he wanted to protect. In his world, she was the one irreplaceable light—the only warmth in this callous court, the grace and miracle that allowed someone of his low birth not just to live, but to have a shred of dignity. The meaning of his existence as a knight had long since fused with a single belief: protect the princess.
Now, seeing that incarnation of light profaned—her throat contemptuously gripped by that demon-like man—whatever thread called "reason" inside his mind finally snapped. Fear was drowned by something fiercer: anger, and a loyalty bordering on madness.
Death? That no longer factored into the equation.
What he could not bear was standing by, helpless, when the princess most needed a shield.
So he moved.
His steps were stumbling but resolute, a moth flinging itself at the flame as he charged up the unreachable throne dais. Every footfall landed in viscous pools of blood, kicking up dark red ripples. In his eyes there was only that golden figure—and the hand belonging to Rei Ao that defiled this sacred existence.
To the being above, however, the tragic charge did not even merit a flicker of attention.
Rei Ao—who reigned here by absolute power—kept his focus on the princess's face, exquisite beyond compare yet drained of expression. His gaze was terrifyingly calm. It was not contempt; it was the concentrated interest of a researcher examining a rare specimen.
His perception, as precise as the finest scalpel, had already peeled back the perfect shell people called the "Golden Princess," the "Jewel of the Kingdom," and reached her soul.
There he saw not pure goodness and light, but a landscape complicated and dim: a boredom with the ordinary, a hunger for extreme emotion, a suffocation under order and pretense that had birthed a distortion even she might not fully understand.
She longed to break her bonds, to taste thrills beyond the mundane; deep down, perhaps, lurked awe of absolute power—and a secret yearning for an extreme, domineering bond.
The discovery pleased Rei Ao with a joy that surpassed destruction. Smashing a flawless work of art brings an instant thrill; but taking one already laced with hidden cracks, whose inner structure had slipped out of balance, and remaking it to his will—giving it a new form and soul that were entirely his—held a far greater allure. He was no different.
As Climb struggled past the halfway point and his shout still echoed through the hall, Rei Ao parted his lips:
"Pointless struggling. It ends now."
The voice was not loud, yet like cold metal scraping metal it cut through all noise—branding itself on Renner's eardrums and in the pit of Climb's despairing heart.
As the words fell, his free left hand lifted lazily and closed in the air toward Climb.
That casual clench seemed to grip fate by the throat.
A dull, tooth-aching thud welled from inside Climb's body—like a waterskin bursting in an instant. His forward lunge froze, as if a binding spell had taken hold. The expression on his face—anger, resolve, and bottomless worry for his princess—solidified into a pale mask.
Then blood—thick and scarlet—surged out as if a dam had burst, gushing from his eyes, his nostrils, his ears, his mouth. The force on him was formless yet vast beyond comprehension.
It wasn't squeezing him from without; it erupted from every corner within him at once, as though countless invisible needles pierced and ground apart his organs, muscles, and bones in the same instant.
He had no time to feel pain, no time to scream, no time to speak the princess's name one last time. In a hundredth of a second, the blaze of life was pinched out. The light in his eyes dimmed at a terrifying speed. Even as life fled completely, what lingered in those wide pupils was not fear of death, but a final, frozen worry for the figure on the dais—and a refusal to accept it.
His body—now nothing but pulverized bone and meat—lost all support and slumped softly to the floor. It looked no different from the other cold corpses in the hall, save for the unclosing eyes, the most jarring punctuation mark in this scene of cruelty.
"Climb?"
The always-composed Princess Renner—who had even tried to navigate with wit—felt a crack in her mental bulwark. Her pupils tightened to pinpoints. Everything else in her vision blurred and receded until only Climb's rapidly cooling, seven-orifices-bleeding body remained.
Climb was not merely a loyal guard. In this filthy, duplicitous court, he was the one person she could control completely. As a controllable "pet," he had been her last anchor to her own humanity—even if that humanity was already warped.
Now, before her eyes, Rei Ao severed that anchor in the most brutal and direct way possible.
The shock surged through her soul like a tsunami.