The woman looked at me, confusion written clearly across her face until the meaning of my words came to her. She flinched as if I’d slapped her, and color rushed back to her cheeks in impotent rage. I watched in contemplative silence while she ground her teeth. I could nearly see the gears whirring around her mind in some foolish attempt to flee the situation.

We stared at each other for a minute or two before the woman burst out with a cry of anger. “You do not need to do this. Just kill us. What kind of child are you?”

I couldn’t help but laugh. Her words were so outrageous I didn’t know what else to do. “Is it so cruel of me to enslave the man who enslaved me?”

“He did not enslave you,” she argued, her hand moving to clench the hilt of her sword. I didn’t react to the aggressive move. The fight would be annoying, but the woman was not a threat to me, even if she drew her weapon first.

“I do not consider the physical act of enslavement to be much different from having the power to stop it and allowing it.” I gave her a shallow shrug. “Should it help your conscience, know that the individual who put the slave mark on me has paid the price and will continue to pay the price for many, many years to come.” Dralos would likely continue to serve me for centuries. With the advancements to my core, even at the silver tier, I was bound to live for nearly two hundred years. If I reached the diamond core once more, Dralos would be enslaved to my will until I was put down. No one knew where the lifespan of a Diamond-level Awakened ended; they had always been killed well before then. It had been the fault of my arrogance not to expect my life to end the same way.

“Are you a revolutionary, then?” the woman asked, jutting a finger in my direction. “A noble who opposes slavery and seeks to punish the sinful?”

“I couldn't care less about slavery as a policy,” I said with a soft chuckle. “Much as I have no qualms with swords being used to stab. I do, however, take issue when those swords are pointed at me. You and your father pointed swords at me.”

Her eyes widened and she stammered. “N-n-no. It was just me. My father had nothing to do with slavery. I… I convinced him of the economic benefits and sent slavers toward our border with Lysoria. The Marquess does not even particularly like slavery.”

I gave her another noncommittal shrug. “Truthfully, I do not care for your excuses. If you insist on being part of those at fault for my enslavement, then you will join him.”

While my initial plan had been to pull whatever information I could from the woman and simply kill her, her exposition about being the Marquess’ daughter had piqued my interest. The more I thought about it, the more I realized killing the woman was a bad idea. Keeping her alive and under my command would open an easy and direct path for me to enter the political scene of Lysoria as the one who not simply defeated Marquess Sharma but turned him and his daughter to Lysoria.

Or perhaps keeping her as a false hostage might work better.

As I contemplated what to do with her, the woman’s face twisted into the determined grimace of someone who had chosen death. “My name is Juniper Sharma, and you are hereby challenged to a deathmatch. State your name, warrior.”

I pinched my nose between two fingers and released a long sigh of exasperation. “You aren’t going to die here, you know.”

She drew her sword and shifted her weight into an offensive fighting stance. “State your name or lose your honor.”

With a groan and a shake of my head, I turned to fully stare at the woman. “You truly do not know who I am?”

Juniper shrugged. “You were a slave and are now covered in dirt and blood. If not for your voice, I’m not sure I would have even known you were a woman.”

I chuckled at that and acquiesced to her request, though I wasn’t sure why. I supposed I just felt like it. “I am Lilliana Silverwater, successor to the recently deceased Duke Collin Alistar and future Duchess of House Alistar.”

The woman visibly gaped and, despite her situation, had the wherewithal to look stunned. “Wait, the duke is dead?”

“Unfortunately, it is so,” I said with mournful sarcasm. “It is a sad fact of war that the first to go is sometimes the highest ranked. Especially when they’re at the forefront.”

Juniper stared at me with disbelieving eyes that seemed to analyze every inch of my expression. I didn’t bother hiding the rather self-satisfied smirk that had been threatening to show for hours now. “You… Did you kill him?” she whispered.

I frowned and put on a mask of great insult. “I did no such thing. He died from a stray blast of fire energy.” I paused. “Or was it magic?”

A scratchy, tired voice spoke from the shadows leading into the slave dungeon’s depths. Not old, exactly, but certainly exhausted and somewhat aged. Marquess Sharma limped out from that darkness with Nida behind him, prodding his ribs with the butt of her spear. He winced slightly whenever she jabbed him with it, though he never bothered to try avoiding it. “You seem quite nonchalant for someone whose liege died.”

Nida snorted. “He was powerful for sure. But Her Majesty's liege? Not likely. Temporary innkeeper maybe.”

I shot Nida a frustrated look, but the tigerkin woman only smiled. For a paragon, she was proving to be a pain. “They’re going to be dead or enslaved anyways. What’s the harm?”

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Both the Marquess and his daughter had their heads on a permanent swivel as they looked between us, mixtures of shock and confusion causing constant contortions of expressions.

“You’re a princess?” Juniper asked, clearly bewildered. “Of which count—”

Marquess Sharma cut her off. “The beastkin did not say ‘her highness,’ my daughter. She said ‘her majesty.’ That is a queen’s title, not a princess’s.” They both stared at me with that revelation. Juniper’s was more of a glare while Marquess Sharma’s was inquisitive. The silence broke when Marquess Sharma asked, “Are you… a queen, then? Of some foreign nation?”

I didn’t react to the question and certainly didn’t answer. For one, it was none of their business. Even if it was, I didn’t even know where to start explaining. So, I changed the subject to something I actually wanted to talk about. “Why is the Holy Kingdom here?”

Juniper lifted her chin and drew her sword. “You will not open our mouths to betrayal.”

“Junip—” Marquess Sharma started but was quickly cut off by his daughter.

“No, father. I know you wanted me to live. But I will not become the slave of some backwater bitch. My honor does not allow for that, no matter your orders.”

Nida bristled at the words, patches of her hair suddenly standing on end, reacting to heightened emotions. Her hair, which was normally a white mess of straight strands, was stiffened and spread out, each strand rising as if charged with a current of electricity. The effect was most pronounced along the crown of her head and down her spine, where her hair lifted in all directions, mimicking the way the fur of a feline stands up when startled or on guard. Her expression, one usually playful and mocking, was deathly serious; eyes wide and alert while her lips were peeled back in a feral snarl.

There wasn’t time to react before the tigerkin woman lunged at Juniper, her spear spinning with the deadly precision of a predator as she aimed for Juniper's throat. To her credit, Juniper was quick to dodge the strike, though not without incurring a slim red line across the edge of her throat. Small dots of blood trickled down to her collarbone and soaked into the red collar of her Cael uniform.

Nida didn’t give Juniper so much as a second to protest or even find her footing. The Paragon bombarded the Marquess’ daughter with a barrage of spear strikes that shot like bolts of lightning toward the silver core Awakened. At first, the fight was more or less equal, excluding the fact Juniper hadn’t expected the initial attack. But as the fight wore on, it became increasingly obvious that Nida would triumph. While their strength, speed, and even power were effectively equal, there was just something about the tigerkin woman’s raw ferocity that Juniper couldn’t seem to get a grasp on. The feral nature of Nida’s fighting style caused her to deviate wildly from standard fighting patterns. Where Juniper was bound to expect a straight thrust of Nida’s spear, she was instead met with the butt end of the spear arcing toward her head from a blind spot.

I watched in fascination, realization dawning on me that this was the first time I’d bothered to actually take the time and watch Nida’s combat techniques. It was clear that she was untrained, at least to my standards, but the way she wove in that random chaos to standard patterns was incredible. I had never seen a fighting style like that on Ordite, where an Awakened’s power was determined more by their ability to overwhelm another with heart energy than pure combat.

After all, once a punch could shatter a mountain, the mastery of a combat form tended to take a backseat. There was a reason why close-combat Awakeners were more likely to lose against long-distance combat Awakeners.

Though, a year or so before I’d been betrayed, I’d become suspicious of that mindset. Why was it one or the other? Wouldn’t mastery of martial arts and my knowledge of my own body increase my ability to circulate energy and use my core more proficiently?

I hadn’t had the time to truly indulge in such questioning beyond occasionally traveling to temples and foreign martial art academies, but I had come across a very old manual which had discussed dantians. The term dantian was, in general, interchangeable with heart core to some of the older Awakened.

But as I watched Juniper fight against the Paragon, I was again reminded of that word each time her magic core pulsed. The manual had said dantians. Not dantian.

I felt like I was nearing some sort of breakthrough of understanding when Nida’s spear at last found solid purchase on Juniper’s body. The spear slammed into Juniper’s ribcage with an audible crack, then it spun upward and slammed into the side of her head. The woman instantly crumpled like a broken doll.

A strangled cry came from Marquess Sharma, who tried to stumble over to his fallen daughter. He fell long before he reached her when his leg which was not completely broken seemed to give out from underneath him. He crashed to the ground with a look of pain on his face. Even on the ground, however, he continued to crawl toward her.

I glanced at Nida, and she shrugged. “She’s not dead yet.” The tigerkin woman glanced at Juniper and let out an exhausted breath. “I think.”

Partly because my thought process had been cut short and partly because I was annoyed at the drama of the scene unfolding before me, I let out a groan and made my way toward Marquess Sharma. With no interest in allowing the familial drama to play out as it had been, I took the orange slave marker from my pocket, activated it with a thought, and bent down to shove the flat of the prism into the Marquess’ neck. He screamed as it burned my insignia into him, a black crescent moon adorned with a black crown.

I reached out with the House Alistar coin to Field Marshal Link Marell, the one chosen to stay behind and begin the reconstruction of Sealrite. “I found Marquess Sharma by the slave Colosseum. Send for pickup and prepare an interrogator.” I looked down at the squirming Marquess. “I want to know exactly how he made that explosion earlier.”

“My… daughter,” he grumbled at my feet.

“She’ll be fine if you tell me your connection with the Holy Kingdom,” I said, squatting to lower myself a bit closer to the Marquess. Since the slave mark didn’t allow me to compel answers, and torture wasn’t always successful, I hoped he would just tell me. “You don’t have anything more to lose now, except for her. I guarantee she will live if you tell me.”

There was a long pause of silence as the Marquess’ face seemed to contort between horror, despair, longing, and shame in a veritable cycle. Eventually, he settled on shame and longing. “I reached a bottleneck in my magic core decades ago. They… the Church of Light, I mean, helped me breakthrough. I owed them everything. I would never have become the Marquess without their help.”

“How did they help you break through?” I asked, making sure to keep my voice neutral.

“They taught me about something called the Runic Language. The words of that language were so powerful, it alone nearly broke me through to the third tier of my magic core.”

“Did they put magic on you?”

The Marquess looked up at me oddly. “Do you mean to cast a spell on me?” I nodded, though I didn’t completely understand what a ‘spell’ was. He nodded. “Aye. They did.”

“Interesting. How did the Red Cardinal play into this?” When he didn’t answer, I shrugged. “Guess you don’t care about your daughter that much.”

“Wait, wait,” he shouted, trying to move but the pain his body was experiencing didn’t allow it. No doubt the toll of using Runic at that level had shredded most of his muscles, and I doubted his magic core was in much better condition. “She was sent as an intermediary to make sure we were following the plan.”

“Tell me about this plan."