As the Mason Legion marched out of the scorched wasteland shrouded in miasma, the air finally grew a little cleaner.
The soldiers pulled off their masks and drew great, greedy lungfuls of air.
But the march had lasted only a few hours when the vanguard up ahead suddenly ground to a halt.
In the middle of the road knelt several refugees who looked to be in the most wretched state imaginable.
A man and a woman, both so filthy that the original color of their clothing was unrecognizable. The man gripped a gaunt, skeletal little boy with both hands, while the woman cradled an infant still swaddled in wrappings, its cries so feeble they barely rose above a kitten's mewl.
"Soldiers! Soldiers, have mercy!"
The man kowtowed desperately in the mud, his voice shaking with tearful sobs.
"We fled from Jasu... We want to go back and find our second daughter! Please, have any of you seen a little girl, about six years old, with braids tied in hemp rope?"
The woman's eyes held a kind of ashen, hollow hope. Her hands, red-raw from the cold, clutched desperately at a soldier's sleeve as she wept until she could barely breathe.
Inside the carriage, Victoria's slender fingertips lifted the curtain just a fraction. Those pale-gold eyes of hers held not a trace of pity — only the amused, appraising look of someone watching a particularly shoddy stage performance.
The acting is embarrassingly overdone.
A mother who had supposedly been fleeing through the wilderness for days — her hands and face were dirty enough, yes, but there wasn't a speck of soil under her fingernails from digging up roots to eat?
And that crying infant... The sound was weak, certainly, but the rhythm was far too steady and regular. It didn't sound like a baby that hadn't eaten properly in days.
The King of Olan apparently thought Sophia was the sort of soft-hearted country lord who could be played with simple emotional appeals.
This "family of four searching for a lost child" routine wouldn't survive the first three acts of even the cheapest court drama in the Imperial Capital.
I'd wager a gold bar that Sophia is thinking exactly the same thing I am right now.
Victoria let the curtain fall and glanced over at the little girl sleeping soundly on the cushioned seat, the corner of her mouth curling in a sardonic smile.
These people's objective was too transparent — transparent enough to feel like a naked insult.
They weren't just probing Mason's limits; they were here to take away the only witness. And besides — that little girl's hemp-rope braids weren't something she'd had when they found her. Victoria had tied them herself this morning, unable to stand the sight of the child's tangled mess of hair.
Sophia did not step down from the carriage.
She looked down at the family from on high, silver hair drifting in the cold wind, those pale-gold eyes utterly calm — not a single ripple disturbing their surface.
"The Royal City of Jasu has been reduced to rubble. There were no survivors."
Sophia's voice was cold as ice, cutting with unusual sharpness across the silent wasteland.
"Even the mining districts outside the city walls were swept clean by Olan's catapults and fire oil. What makes you believe your daughter could possibly have survived?"
The man's body stiffened for a moment, then he kowtowed even harder than before.
"She is my own flesh and blood! Even if she's a corpse, I have to bring her home... Please, my lord, can you not help us?"
"Is that so."
Sophia cut him off, her tone even and certain.
"Bardess. Go check this father's hands."
Bardess might be brash and easygoing by nature, but after so long at Sophia's side, her mind had sharpened considerably.
She swung down from her horse, strode up to the man, and without a word snatched his right hand and flipped it over with a sharp jerk.
A palm that should have been covered in the calluses of farm labor or the wounds of a refugee's flight — smeared with clay, yes, but when Bardess rubbed hard, what appeared beneath were the distinctive thick pads at the knuckle joints that could only form from years of gripping some kind of long, slender blade.
Not from a hoe. From a crossbow or a poison dagger.
"Heh. These hands are softer and smoother than a sow's trotters."
Bardess let out a cold laugh, the saber at her hip sliding fractionally from its scabbard with a sharp, ringing scrape.
In an instant, the Mason soldiers around them raised their black muskets in perfect unison, black muzzles leveled at all four members of the "family."
The touching, pitiful atmosphere evaporated in a heartbeat, replaced by the thick, suffocating smell of gunpowder.
The carriage door was pushed gently open, and Victoria stepped down with her characteristic elegance, the lake-blue hem of her skirt utterly out of place amid the surrounding chaos.
"Since the performance has fallen apart, there's no need to keep hugging that poor child as a prop."
Victoria fanned herself with her ivory fan, her smile radiating the kind of cold, intellectual beauty that made one's blood run chill.
"Did you think our carriage was the sort of thing any stray cat or dog could flag down? Or does the master pulling your strings truly believe that whatever this little girl is carrying is worth your lives?"
The man and woman's faces darkened instantly. Every trace of meekness and misery was swept away, replaced by the flat, bone-chilling emptiness unique to professional killers.
Bardess quietly breathed a sigh of relief — she was glad she hadn't rashly felt sorry for these people.
Her Majesty and the Third Princess really are something else.
She'd just been feeling a pang of sympathy for the poor little baby, and it turned out the whole lot of them were assassins?
Not only do they know we've rescued someone — they actually dared to come up and run this scam on us?
Her Majesty was fishing the whole time!
She deliberately drew the march out, nice and slow, just to coax these rats out of hiding on their own.
This "family" was never refugees. They were a moving trap sent by Olan.
Looks like the grass here is going to run red before we can march on in peace.
Sophia sat astride her horse, fingers running lightly over the hilt of her sword, her voice stripped of all warmth.
"Bardess. Everyone except the infant and the boy — if they cannot produce information of value within ten seconds..."
Sophia's fingertip traced the engraved pattern on the sword's hilt, those pale-gold eyes as indifferent as a mirror that reflects everything and feels nothing.
She wasn't looking at the two assassins. Her gaze seemed to pass through the farce playing out before her and settle somewhere on the distant wasteland beyond.
Bardess understood. She began the count at once.
"Ten."
A single, glacial word — like the first toll of a funeral bell.
The man, still wailing a moment before, went rigid as stone in that instant.
He could feel it: those black musket muzzles around him were not bluffing. One gesture from that silver-haired girl and they would both be torn to shreds, false skins and all.
"Nine."
Victoria fanned herself with elegant composure, her skirt stirring softly in the breeze as her gaze swept over the woman's face.
Inside, the assassins were in turmoil.
They had underestimated the young Queen — but what unnerved them even more was the woman standing beside the carriage, excessively, unsettlingly elegant: Victoria.
Before setting out, the King of Olan had issued secret orders: beyond silencing the little girl who might know the truth about the Royal City's fall and delaying the Mason Legion's march as long as possible, there was one other core objective — find a woman named Victoria.
The intelligence described her: hair and eyes remarkably similar in color to the Mason Queen's, a kinship in their aura, but with entirely different facial features.
The King had hinted that this woman held some kind of variable capable of turning the tide.
But none of them had ever imagined that the very target they were supposed to search for, capture, or quietly eliminate would be standing right here in Mason's camp, wearing a priceless gown, watching their performance like a spectator at a circus.
"Eight."
Cold sweat broke out on the man's forehead. The carefully performed grief had vanished completely, replaced by the trembling dread of a man who feels a viper's gaze lock onto him.
Damn it all. How did it come to this?
The man's peripheral vision fixed desperately on Victoria.
The intelligence said the Mason Queen was cold and ruthless — but it said nothing about her keeping such a razor-sharp mind at her side!
This woman... could she be the one the King was searching for?
Then why is she helping Mason?
Had Olan's plans been compromised all along? Or had she been embedded in Olan, deceiving their entire Royal House?
"Seven."
The count remained perfectly steady, without the slightest fluctuation — even the rhythm of the finger tracing the sword hilt hadn't changed.
Bardess felt a faint film of sweat gathering on the palm pressed to her saber. She could feel the killing intent radiating from Her Majesty atop the carriage — suppressed to its absolute limit, coiled and ready.
She stepped half a pace forward, positioning herself in front of Sophia's horse, the admiration she felt for Her Majesty swelling past any point she could have named.
Just look at her. That is Her Majesty.
Facing these desperate killers, and she hasn't even blinked.
Those ten seconds were never mercy. That was Her Majesty measuring the land for coffins.
And the Third Princess — looks delicate as porcelain most of the time, but the moment she opened her mouth, she cut off every last escape route.
The two of them working in tandem like that — playing these Olan rats like toys in the palm of their hands.
Serving a master like this, if I still managed to get fooled by this cheap trick, I might as well go slam my head straight into that iron gate.
"Six."
The woman holding the infant had let her fingers creep silently toward a gap in the swaddling cloth.
Concealed inside was a poison dart coated in instant-kill venom.
But before she could move, Victoria's cool, mocking voice rang out again.
"If I were you, I wouldn't touch that dart."
"Before it leaves your hand, we have at least three ways to incinerate your organs on the spot — and the barrage would send that sorry fake infant straight up to the heavens along with you."
The woman shuddered violently, her motion freezing mid-reach.
It was a total rout.
Being seen through so completely from start to finish — it inflicted on these professional killers a sense of defeat unlike anything they had ever felt before.
"Five."
Sophia was still counting. Her eyes had gradually grown darker.
The smell of gunpowder in the air was overwhelming.
The assassins' minds were in frantic conflict.
Continue serving an Olan King thousands of miles away — or seize this sliver of a chance at survival and betray a master who had already lost all his cards?
In that moment, the man stared at that face — bearing the same coloring as Sophia's, yet full of cold intelligence and contempt — and finally understood: they were not facing a single Queen. They were caught in a pincer between the two most apex predators on this wasteland.
"Four."
Bardess pressed her fingers to the guard of her saber, her voice dropping a shade lower.
The wind across the wasteland seemed to freeze in that instant, leaving only the flat, merciless countdown, methodically stripping away the last of the group's disguise.
"Three."
The man's pupils contracted violently. He opened his mouth, and that face smeared with filth still wore its practiced expression of nauseating pleading and misery.
"My lord, we truly only want our child back... You cannot do this... The Holy Spirit is watching you!"
"Two."
Victoria twirled the tassel of her ivory fan with idle fingers, and a flicker of pity passed through her eyes — the pity one feels for fools.
The Holy Spirit?
Invoking the Holy Spirit in front of a creature like Sophia was less useful than offering her a fresh bucket of lamp oil.
These people still hadn't grasped it: they were not facing a merciful ruler who could be shackled by moral appeals. They were facing a harvester who was calculating the most cost-efficient way to erase a threat.
"One."
Bardess's voice cut off sharply. The hand pressed to her saber guard clenched tight, her gaze sharp as a hawk's.
Time's up.
Sophia sat in the carriage without so much as a flutter of her lashes, and let a few quiet words fall from her lips.
"Break his leg."
BANG!
A thunderous crack split the silence of the wasteland, smoke billowing in the morning breeze.
Bardess hadn't even drawn her saber. She went straight for the short-barreled black musket holstered at her hip.
Amid a burst of muzzle flash, a lead ball carrying enormous kinetic energy punched cleanly through the man's right thigh.
The impact shredded his leg in an explosion of blood mist, the crack of splintering bone ringing out clearly across the silent marching column.
The force knocked the man off his feet as though struck by a war hammer, sending him flying backwards several steps. A shriek tore out of him — raw and piercing — before he crashed heavily into the mud.
The gaunt little boy he had been gripping the whole time was yanked off his feet by the impact and tumbled to the ground beside him.
The boy fell next to the man, stared at the leg that was now held together by little more than skin and sinew, blood pumping in great spurts — and finally, his face broke into an expression of pure, unmasked terror.
"AAAAAH! My leg! My leg!"
The man thrashed wildly in the mud. The deliberately rasped, hoarse voice he had been performing with had been torn away by agony — what came out now was high-pitched and sharp, and carried an accent that was decidedly not from Jasu.
The woman holding the infant let out a short scream and instinctively lurched backward. The bundle in her arms swayed violently — and from inside it, not a single cry came.
"Is this what you call the love of parents searching for their daughter?"
Sophia's voice was cold. That distinctive cadence, Sophia's alone, drifted over the blood-soaked mud, sounding somehow both pristine and pitiless.
Willow, standing to one side, added with a hard expression,
"Your husband's leg has just been blown to pieces, and your first instinct is to retreat? Olan's severance pay apparently doesn't cover the part where you suffer together. Or is it that you were never family to begin with — just a group Olan assembled to make the deception more convincing?"
The Mason soldiers stepped forward as one, black muzzles still locked on every joint of the two assassins' bodies.
Bardess looked at the man now barely clinging to consciousness. There was no mercy left in her eyes.
This is Her Majesty's judgment.
No outright kill — but no wasted words, either. One shot, and his mobility is gone.
This wasn't just a warning to these killers. It ripped their refugee disguise apart right in front of everyone.
Just look — that man was crying a moment ago about being a hard-working miner from Jasu, an honest man. The moment a bullet hit him, even his screaming had a certain trained, professional sharpness to it.
One shot from Her Majesty is worth more than ten interrogations.
I really am too stupid on my own. Without Her Majesty and the Third Princess, I'd probably have been taken in entirely.
Following Her Majesty is a daily reconstruction of everything I think I know about tactics.
When you're dealing with rats, you need thunderbolt methods and nothing less.
Sophia sat unmoved in the carriage, pale-gold eyes looking down at the man howling in the mud with the detached curiosity of someone observing a beetle flipping on its back.
"Next is the left leg."
Sophia's voice carried not a degree of warmth, as though the previous shot had nothing to do with her at all.
"Same question as before: did the King of Olan send you to take that child — or to confirm whether Victoria is alive?"
Irene, standing nearby, watched the man's shifty, calculating eyes and could tell he was still scheming for another angle. She adopted a deliberately vicious tone and said,
"I'd say we don't need to waste another bullet on the other leg. Just hack it off clean. Don't worry — Bardess's swordsmanship is excellent. She'll take it off very neatly."
The man was nearly fainting from pain. He looked at the ring of Mason soldiers around him — iron-hard, black-clad, their faces filled with discipline and fanaticism — and the terror that flooded through him finally overwhelmed whatever was left of his so-called loyalty.
This army... this Queen...
This was nothing like any of the two-faced, performance-for-show rulers they had ever dealt with before.
She would never spare them for the sake of appearances or to signal her own mercy.
"I'll talk... I'll talk!"
The man raised a trembling hand, blood soaking deep into the earth beneath him, staining the dead-yellow grass a dark, livid red.
"Yes — to find the Third Princess... Vic... toria... His Majesty the King said she carries the key that can open... open that thing deep inside Jasu..."
Victoria's hand paused in its fanning. Those pale-gold eyes narrowed instantly, a dangerous, icy glint flashing through them.
That thing? What thing?
Victoria's mind sounded an alarm. She had no memory of possessing any key capable of opening anything in Jasu — she had never even set foot in Jasu.
And a move like this, designed to sow suspicion — if Sophia harbored even the tiniest seed of doubt, there would be no way Victoria walked away from this intact.
In just a few seconds, Victoria had worked it out.
The old King of Olan must have learned she was likely still alive. If she was alive and staying close to Sophia's side, Victoria would naturally do whatever it took to survive — and her greatest value was what she carried in her head, as well as her knowledge of other nations' affairs.
That knowledge posed a certain threat to Olan and kingdoms like it.
So the King of Olan had devised this scheme. Send people out under the pretense of finding Victoria. If she was alive and with Queen Sophia, plant these words — words designed to breed suspicion — so that Sophia would begin to doubt her.
That way, even if Sophia had accepted Victoria before, the fact that Victoria could never produce some "Jasu key" would keep the doubt festering indefinitely.
Olan. What a clever little scheme.
The wind across the wasteland seemed to carry a mocking whistle.
The moment that bloody-legged man shouted the word "key," something shifted in the air — the lethal tension that had settled over the scene gained a new, sticky layer: suspicion.
Any other sovereign with a hint of a paranoid streak would have already swung their gaze toward Victoria by now.
But Sophia sat exactly where she had been, unmoved. Those pale-gold eyes showed none of the fury or suspicion the man had been counting on.
On the contrary — the corner of her lips tilted upward, by the barest, almost imperceptible fraction.
It was an utterly cold smile, but threaded through with contempt.
Victoria's palms had broken into a fine sweat.
Her mind was racing, already preparing to speak — to explain that she had never been to Jasu, that she possessed no such key.
But she knew: in a moment like this, any explanation would be hollow.
She needed a way to prove it.
But before she could open her mouth, Sophia's cool, clear voice got there first — and shattered the assassin's last illusion.
"A key?"
Sophia turned her head slightly, her gaze passing over Victoria's taut, exquisite face and coming to rest on the man.
"The King of Olan's understanding of me appears to have stalled back when I was a student in the Imperial Capital. Or perhaps he overestimates his own skill at framing people."
Sophia raised one hand slowly, fingertip tracing a light line through the air.
"On the night I found Victoria, she had nothing on her but a ruined, worthless formal gown. Not a single spare copper coin. And I personally watched her take that gown off."
"My people were standing guard right outside the door. No one knows better than I do exactly what Victoria was carrying."
Her tone took on a faint edge of mockery.
"If the 'key' you speak of is that silk dress — which I threw into the furnace and burned to ash — then I'm afraid the King of Olan will have to come sift through the cinders himself."
Victoria went still.
All at once she was back in that dimly lit temporary palace, the night Sophia had watched her with those cold, clinical eyes — the same look one reserves for a specimen — and supervised every moment as she changed out of that elegant dress and into the new one.
At the time, Victoria had taken it as punishment. A deliberate humiliation. A trampling of her dignity.
But in this moment, it hit her like a revelation.
It wasn't only punishment. It was the most perfect alibi Sophia could have built for her.
Because Sophia had personally confirmed she carried nothing — any accusation of hidden contraband could never survive logical scrutiny on Sophia's end.
That little stone-faced girl... could she possibly have calculated this far back then?
Victoria stared, slightly dazed, at Sophia's upright, composed silhouette. The tension she had been carrying in her chest settled back into place — and in its wake rose something she didn't particularly want to acknowledge: a warmth, quiet and unnamed.
The old Olan fool had miscalculated completely.
He assumed everyone would sink into suspicion the way he did, but he never knew: Sophia's trust was never built on feeling. It was built on the kind of absolute, airtight certainty that only comes from seeing something with your own eyes.
Bardess listened to the exchange, stood there for two blank seconds, then slapped her thigh so hard it made a dull thwack.
So that's what it was!
I'd always wondered why Her Majesty had to personally watch the Third Princess change clothes herself. We'd even suggested letting Miss Willow oversee it, or just having us stand guard outside to make sure the Third Princess didn't try anything.
But Her Majesty refused. Chased us all out, insisted on watching herself, and made the Third Princess strip right there in front of her and put the new dress on in front of her too.
And that gown — straight into the fire. Every last little accessory on it, gone.
At the time Bardess had assumed Her Majesty had some particular quirk she couldn't be talked out of, so no one said anything. Turns out she was setting a trap for Olan all along!
Her Majesty had already foreseen that Olan would pull this exact trick — framing and driving a wedge between us.
Since Her Majesty verified the goods personally, it doesn't matter what story this man tells. It's worthless.
Her Majesty is extraordinary. She sees around every corner.
That shot was perfectly aimed — and this counter-espionage move was even more perfectly timed!
Following Her Majesty, even if you fell into a ten-thousand-foot pit dug by Olan, she'd probably reach down and fish up whatever treasure was buried at the bottom on the way out.
This kind of thinking — move one, plan ten ahead — I, Bardess, will never in my lifetime even come close.
Sophia's gaze returned to the man contorted with agony, and her fingertip stilled.
"Since your intelligence is this thoroughly contaminated with useless lies, your continued existence serves very little purpose."
Sophia gave Bardess a small nod.
"Dispose of them. These two assassins are of no further use."
"The infant and the boy — handle them carefully. Olan sent these people, which means all of them will have been equipped with measures to deal with us."
"Yes, Your Majesty!"
Bardess's expression went grave. The black musket in her hand rose again.
The man stared at that black muzzle. He stared at Sophia's back — still, composed, not a tremor in it — and understood at last that the King of Olan, in this gambit, had been losing from the very first move.
BANG! BANG!
Two sharp shots rang out. The wasteland returned to silence.
Whatever clumsy disguises those supposed family members had worn, along with their malicious lies, were buried together under mud and blood.
After Bardess led a search of the bodies, it was discovered that the small boy's pocket contained a knife — and that he was not a child at all, but a short-statured adult in disguise.
As for the infant, it was carrying some kind of toxic substance on its body; anyone who came into close contact with it would have felt dizziness and disorientation. The three assassins had apparently taken an antidote beforehand and so were unaffected.
The infant itself was already dead — Olan had apparently timed things precisely so that it would die in Mason's hands.
But they hadn't counted on our Queen seeing through the scheme and keeping the infant at a distance the whole time.
"Well done."
Sophia said, and turned her head toward Victoria, who was standing beside the carriage in a slight daze.
"What are you standing there for? Get in."
Victoria drew a slow, steady breath, gathered her skirt, and stepped up onto the carriage board. This time, her step was lighter than it had ever been.
She understood now: from this moment on, her interests and Mason's had been locked together — bound irrevocably, in that blood-stained morning, by the absolute clarity of Sophia's reason.
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