Maria looked through all of the notifications and noticed that it was mostly informing her about the Vampire Covens that had sworn allegiance to her. It would seem that during her days off, Maria’s subordinates hadn’t been idling around and were constantly doing everything they could to solidify her rule over the continent. Many vampire covens had surrendered to her new regime and they all swore fealty to her.
A few minutes later, there was a knock on her room and she quickly spoke up and allowed the person who was knocking to come inside.
“My Queen, are you well?” Ash said after he walked in.
He didn’t go too far into the room before kneeling down on the ground with two other women besides him. One of them was Carmilla and the other one was the former Blood Queen, Elizabeth Bathory. Maria glanced at her for a moment before replying to Ash’s question, “I’m fine. I took a long break to recover, so I’m good now. It seems that you’ve been busy, Ash.”
Ash smiled before nodding, “After we took down the castle and announced the fall of the Blood Faction and the rise of the Dire, we quickly had our troops enter and occupy the lands that we swept through. Naturally, we didn’t forget to ‘persuade’ those that had surrendered to swear fealty to you, my Queen.”
“Good job, but there’s someone here that I don’t know. Mind introducing her? You guys can stand now. It’s not like this is in the Throne Hall or anything, so be at ease.”
Ash and the two vampire women stood up before Elizabeth stepped forward and slightly bowed her head to Maria and introduced herself, “My apologies for the lateness, Your Highness. I am Elizabeth Garm, formerly known as Elizbeth Bathory. I am Ash Garm’s First Bride and sister to Lady Carmilla Bathory of House Bathory. It is my utmost pleasure to meet you.”
“You managed to survive after we freed you from Garm’s influence, huh? Well, that’s good. It would’ve been quite sad if Ash or I had to take your life.”
Elizabeth nodded and said, “I sincerely thank you, Your Highness, for saving me on that day. If not for you, I would have been made an eternal slave to that evil spirit and I wouldn’t have been reunited with my beloved.”
Maria was still a bit conflicted though. Her subordinate, Ash, now technically had two brides. It wasn’t his fault, however, since Ash did take Carmilla as his new bride after coming to the conclusion that his former bride had been killed by Siegfried. If Carmilla had told them that Elizabeth had survived at the time of their meeting, this confusion would’ve been avoided.
“The three of you have sorted out your…familial relations, right?” Maria asked.
Carmilla was the one to answer as she said, “We have, Your Highness, and I apologize for my wrongdoings in keeping my sister’s situation a secret from you.”
Maria waved her hand and replied, “Never mind. I don’t really care about that, since you must have had your reasons. At the very least, you didn’t intend to do Ash nor I any harm by keeping her situation a secret, but from now on…no more of that, alright?”
“Yes, Your Highness!”
“So right now, I’m guessing we’re at Castle Bran, yeah?” Maria asked after looking around the grand bedroom once again.
“Yes, my Queen. These are the royal chambers of the Castle, which are naturally your quarters.”
“Our ministers and officials should’ve arrived in Transylvania by now, right? Have them all convene along with the families that swore fealty to me. I should address how we’re going to move forward from here on out.”
Maria stretched her body before activating her [Metamorphosis] just so she could stretch her wings before reverting back to her normal form and walking out of her chambers.
“It doesn’t have to be right now, since I know some of the other family leaders are living in faraway areas, but it must be within the next 3 days. For now, I want to have a tour around the city…”
“May I accompany you, Your Highness? I know the city so I can act as your guide,” Elizabeth said.
Even though this vampire lady had been her enemy just a few days back, Maria nodded and decided to show her a little bit of faith.
“Alright, then that’ll leave Ash and Carmilla with the task of informing our people.”
Ash hesitated as he seemed to want to say something, but he backed down and received Maria’s orders, “As you will, my Queen.”
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“Yes, Your Highness.”
The two vampires left in different directions while Maria and Elizabeth walked down to the castle’s courtyard area and out the castle gates. It was kind of interesting that the Castle Bran dungeon was now her home and what was more interesting was that she could actually customize the dungeon through a menu that she found while browsing through the notification messages in her system log.
She wanted to see how that worked but Maria decided to save it for later because, right now, she just wanted to see what Transylvania looked like. Her invasion of the city had passed, so she wanted to see what kind of state it was in because, from what she remembered, the city had an extremely horrible layout with winding roads and alleyways that made the entire district behind Wall Dracul like a complete maze.
“I’ll be in your care, Elizabeth. Please guide me around the city. From what I saw, this place has a horrible structure, so we’ll need to rebuild the city.”
“...Yes, Your Highness.”
Elizabeth nodded and began walking ahead of Maria as she guided her around the city, moving through the winding and confusing roads that were a horrible characteristic of the place.
“We really need to do something about this… how did you vampires live in such a messy place? Isn’t it hard to get from one place to another with everything being this chaotic?”
“Your Highness, we vampires usually travel by flying from one place to another, using our wings or our enchanted carriages. It was likely because of this that previous generations never really bothered to care about the city’s infrastructure,” Elizabeth replied to her question.
Maria grumbled before saying, “But as the race that’s known as the ‘nobles of the night’, I expected some semblance of elegance and uniform to your capital city…or any of your cities and towns for that matter.”
Now that Maria thought about it, she noticed that every vampire city or town she passed through and conquered on her way to Transylvania, all of them had pretty bad infrastructure.
“Heltania City is way more organized than this dump…”
“...” Elizabeth could only smile wryly at her comment because she had gone to Heltania City once and saw how beautifully organized it was. She couldn't find any rebuttal to her queen’s words.
Maria spent the entire day inspecting the entire city and the conclusion Maria came to was that they needed to evacuate everyone still living in the city’s Wall Dracul District to Wall Baobhan District before completely tearing everything down inside Wall Dracul District to the ground.
When she voiced her intentions, Elizabeth was a bit shocked because she didn’t know just how much money that would cost. Not to mention that it would likely cause many of the surviving vampires’ dissent, but Maria didn’t care about them at all.
The ones living in the Dracul District would be those that she trusted. As for anyone else, they would be ousted, and that included the previous residents. Those surviving vampires should be thankful that she showed a little bit of mercy to them during the invasion because if she went with her original plans, every single resident in Wall Dracul District would've been killed.
Elizabeth had received a rundown from her husband regarding Maria’s character after she had recovered a few days prior, so she didn’t say anything. Although their reunion was tearful, Ash couldn’t relax just yet and had to continue working for his Queen, so she wanted to help out as best she could to make up for her wrongdoings.
Maria could sense that Elizabeth seemed to want to say something, so she asked, “What’s wrong? You want to say something, Elizabeth?”
“Huh? N-No, Your Highness,” Elizabeth quickly said while shaking her head.
“Just spill it. I won’t be angry. I bet Ash said something to you, right? About how some of my demands may be unreasonable but you should never question them or anything along those lines?”
“...”
Although Elizabeth shook her head and tried to deny it, the brief expression of guilt and surprise on her face that was there for a moment gave Maria the answer she was looking for.
“I’m definitely going to punch that guy later,” Maria mumbled before speaking up, “Just say it. What concerns do you have? Is it those residents’ dissent?”
“...”
“I won’t get mad, just say it.”
“...Y-Yes, they’ve lived here for centuries, so I’m sure they wouldn’t like being kicked out of their homes. Your Highness will definitely be met with resistance if Your Highness decides to do this.”
Maria shrugged and said, “I know they wouldn’t just leave, but what can they do?”
“Huh?”
“If they don’t listen…I’ll just kill them all.”
“...”
“My original plan was to purge Transylvania, but I guess I’m not heartless enough to do that. If I don’t need to, then I won't spill any more blood than necessary…even though to me this is all just a game.”
Maria mumbled the latter half of her sentence so Elizabeth couldn’t hear it, but she was rather shocked to hear that her Queen’s original plan was to destroy everything. She never would have thought that such a beautiful and innocent-looking woman would have such dangerous ideas, but thankfully, her Queen was apparently too kind-hearted to enact them.
“My soldiers will start relocating them tomorrow. If they don’t like it, then that’s their problem. I’ll forcefully remove them if I have to and if they try anything, then that’ll be the death of them,” Maria turned to Elizabeth and said, “Make sure you give an announcement to everyone in the city. This will at least give them some time to prepare.”
“Yes, Your Highness.”
This city was going to be the biggest stronghold Maria had on this planet. At the very least, she didn’t want anyone that could compromise the safety and security of the haven she was going to build to be living inside of it.
‘I have to start planning ahead with the players in mind. Anything behind Wall Dracul should be completely prohibited to the players. Wall Victoria and, at best, Wall Baobhan should be the only places they should have access to.’
Maria was deep in thought but Elizabeth interrupted her at the next moment as she called out to her, “Your Highness.”
“...What is it?”
“I…I would sincerely like to apologize and thank you for what you’ve done for me,” Elizabeth said.
Maria turned to look at her and saw the deep sincerity in her eyes, so she said, “You have already apologized and thanked me earlier. There’s no need to say it again since I’ve received your sincerity.”
Elizabeth shook her head and said, “Even though I did that earlier, Your Highness, I feel that it just wasn’t enough. Merely speaking out like this, feels like it isn’t enough as well.”
“...”
“For centuries, after I felled Siegfried with that demonic blade that I should’ve never used, I was possessed by the sword's evil spirit. For what felt like an eternity, my mind, my soul, my heart, and my body were tortured until, eventually, I almost lost control of everything… if it wasn’t for Your Highness saving me… I…I don’t know what kind of unspeakable horrors that evil spirit would’ve committed using my body.”
Maria calmly looked at her before pulling something out of her inventory, “You see this vial?”
The thing Maria showed to Elizabeth was a vial with some kind of murky light trapped inside of it. It was wriggling ominously inside and there was a rather familiar feeling radiating from it.
“It…seems familiar, but what is it, Your Highness?” Elizabeth asked.
“It’s Garm, or to be more precise, it’s his essence.”
“!”