Chương 199: Sylvester's Paranoia

This long-awaited morning arrived at the ancient palace of the Williams family. Golden threads of sunlight cut their way through the gray clouds, illuminating the marble domes, the silver fountains, and the fluttering banners bearing the modified Lion crest. This day was supposed to be the most important in the province's history: Coronation Day, the day on which the Emperor and the nobles would officially recognize Sylvester as the legitimate Duke and absolute governor of the Western Province.

But the sun that shone over the city did not carry light to Sylvester's heart, it only revealed the darkness of his mind. The new tyrant was in his lavish and fortified royal wing, his face pale as the dead. He could not erase from his memory the image of the Old Crest carved in blue fire on the door of his study. A terrible headache was ravaging his skull, the aftermath of his excessive drinking in a futile attempt to calm his nerves.

While the tailors were trying to adjust the silk coronation robe with its gold-trimmed edges on his shoulders, the wing door was flung open with force. The commander of his new guard entered, the mercenary who had been promoted today after Sylvester had stabbed the previous commander in his fit of rage, his face dripping cold sweat, and his body visibly trembling inside his gleaming armor.

"My lord, Duke Sylvester..." the commander stammered as he knelt on one knee, not daring to raise his eyes to meet his master's.

"I have, urgent and catastrophic news." Sylvester dismissed the tailors with an angry wave of his hand and headed toward the table to pour himself a goblet of wine, his hands trembling.

"Speak quickly, you fool. I do not need more morning disturbances. What has happened? Has the Emperor's delegation been delayed?"

"My lord, the Third Unit of the Shadow Organization, the special assassination squad we sent to comb the palace's perimeter..." the commander swallowed with difficulty.

"They have disappeared. Not one of them remains, and they sent no magical signal. They simply evaporated completely."

"Disappeared?!" Sylvester screamed, the pressure in his head rising until the veins of his forehead bulged. He flung the crystal wine goblet with all his force against the marble floor, shattering it into a thousand pieces scattered like blood.

"How do five of the finest hired killers in the entire Empire disappear without leaving a trace?! These are men who merge with shadows, who can kill a company of the regional guard without being detected! Did the earth split open and swallow them? Or did they take the gold and flee like rats?" The commander continued to stammer, staring at the red wine stains soiling Sylvester's shoes.

"We, we sent a magical tracking squad to the last known location, in the alley behind the palace, my lord. They found, no sign of a battle. No blood, no burns, no traces of magical combat. They found only their empty leather suits lying on the ground, as though their bodies had dissolved from existence. And... there is something else even worse, my lord." Sylvester stopped screaming and froze where he stood.

An icy cold began to crawl from the base of his spine upward to his neck, as though death's own hand had touched his back. He breathed with difficulty and asked in a faint, hoarse voice: "What can possibly be worse than this?"

"The warehouses, my lord. The three secret warehouses in the industrial district. The guards who went to inspect them this morning found their steel gates completely melted from the center, turned into pools of liquid metal. And the warehouses, they are empty."

"What do you mean, empty?" Sylvester asked, his mind refusing to absorb the words.

"Do you mean they managed to breach the systems and steal some of the valuable Crystal Sword crates?"

"No, my lord..." the commander said, his voice nearly vanishing from terror.

"They are completely empty. As though a swarm of locusts had passed through them. They took everything. Thousands of swords, armor, lances, even the arrows. They left behind not a single rusted nail. We have been stripped of our entire reserve arsenal in a single night, without any alarm sounding, and they left only this." With two trembling hands, the commander drew from his leather satchel a small bundle of heat-resistant cloth, and opened it carefully to present to his master.

Inside it rested an ordinary bird feather, its edges charred, yet still bearing clear traces of scorching, indicating it had been burning before being moved and extinguished magically. This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience. Sylvester's eyes locked on the feather. The blue color. The same ominous color he had seen burning on the door of his study. The doubt began to gnaw at his mind like worms boring through a rotten apple.

He stepped back two paces and fell into his velvet chair as though he had lost control of his legs.

"Who, who is doing this to me?" he whispered to himself in a feverish voice, pulling violently at his neatly arranged golden hair until he tore out several locks.

"Marcus is paralyzed, half-dead and rotting in his bed. My trusted physicians confirmed it! Orgon is dead! Dex is dead, I saw his blood myself on his torn shirt! So who dares? Who possesses this terrifying power? A ghost? A demon from hell? Or, is there a great traitor among us? Someone who opens the doors for them from inside?" The walls of the wide room began to close in on him. Sylvester looked around with bulging, bloodshot eyes.

He saw the young servant gathering the fragments of the shattered goblet, and in the midst of his madness, the servant's hand appeared to him to be trembling suspiciously. Had this servant been the one who admitted the intruder last night? Had he poisoned the breakfast? He looked at the guard standing at the balcony door who had cast a passing glance toward the outer courtyard, and it appeared to Sylvester that he was exchanging secret signals with a sniper disguised outside.

The paranoia reached its absolute peak when Sylvester decided to leave his wing and head toward the throne hall to inspect the preparations. He walked the long corridor adorned with portraits of his ancestors, surrounded by ten personal guards, his eyes rotating in their sockets, watching every corner, every shadow, every movement however trivial. And suddenly Sylvester stopped, as though struck by lightning. There, on the lavish red carpet, lay a small feather dyed blue.

(In reality it was nothing more than a decorative feather that had fallen from the hat of one of the noble ladies who had visited the palace the day before to offer early congratulations.) But to Sylvester's shattered mind, it was no mere feather. It was a death sentence. It was conclusive evidence that the ghost was roaming his corridors in complete freedom in the full light of day. Sylvester went completely mad.

He let out a savage scream unbefitting any noble and drew his sword, brandishing it wildly in the air.

"Who put this here?! Who dares mock me in my own palace?!" The elderly head of servants came running, a kind man with white hair who had served the Williams family faithfully for more than forty years, since Sylvester's own father's day, hurrying to try to calm his master.

"My lord Duke, what is the matter? It is merely a decorative feather that fell from Lady Earl's..." Sylvester spun toward the old man with eyes that held not a particle of humanity. He seized him by the collar violently and lifted him off the ground, spitting words into his wrinkled face.

"You! You, you cunning old man! You are the one who holds the palace's keys! You are the one who opens the doors for these demons at night and plants these marks to terrify me! You are Marcus's spy!"

"My lord, I swear to you by the gods of sky and earth..." the old man pleaded, tears filling his eyes, watching the young man he had seen grow up before him transform into a monster.

"I am your loyal servant, I have never betrayed you..."

"Silence, you treacherous dog!" Sylvester roared in a hysterical voice that split the palace's silence. He hurled the old man with force to the ground, then turned to his stunned guards.

"Cut off his head immediately! Here and now! I want his head hung on the palace's main gate as a lesson to every traitor who breathes my air!" The guards hesitated for a moment, the man was old, defenseless, and loved by everyone. But Sylvester's bloodthirsty gaze left them no room.

Amid the screams of the maidservants and the tears of those present, the hideous sentence was carried out immediately in the middle of the beautiful corridor, and the red carpet was stained with innocent blood before the eyes of the terrified palace retinue, who understood that their ruler had completely lost his mind. This absolute madness and this random killing did not reinforce Sylvester's authority, it made even his closest inner circle take steps backward in fear for their lives.

The mercenary commanders from the Shadow Organization, who had been hired to protect him, moved not by honor but by gold and cold logic, watched the scene from an upper balcony with unconcealed disgust written across their hidden faces. The commanders convened an urgent secret meeting in one of the side rooms.

"This man has completely lost his mind," one of them said, wiping his dagger blade as a nervous habit.

"The city is haunted by a power we do not understand, it kills our finest men and erases them from existence, empties entire warehouses in seconds, and this lunatic kills his defenseless servants instead of facing the real threat. He is steering the ship deliberately into the rocks."

"If you want to stay alive long enough to enjoy your wealth," another commander said in a practical and cold voice, "we must move now. We will go to him, demand that he hand over the final and complete payment immediately, under the pretext of securing the coronation, and keep our men on alert at the outer walls. At the first sign of a real collapse, or the appearance of this ghost with the blue fire, we leave Sylvester to his fate and depart Seiron. We are killers, not suicides protecting a mad tyrant."

Sylvester was collapsing internally, isolated inside the walls of his crowded palace. He was surrounded by hundreds of servants, soldiers, and personal guards, yet he was completely alone. Alone in his terror, trapped by the illusions and the ghosts of his own mind created by his oppression. And this was precisely, with terrifying accuracy, what Dex Williams had planned.

He had succeeded in shattering his enemy psychologically, tearing his alliances apart from within, and breaking his mental armor, all before Dex raised his sword to deliver the first physical blow. The battle had been decided in Sylvester's mind before it began in the field.