Chapter 93 Xavier- POV
Meanwhile, the morning sun was a cruel, brilliant eye peering through the high, stained-glass windows of the High Council Chamber, illuminating a scene of absolute, unmitigated ruin.
Outside, the capital of Drakmor was a hive of panicked murmurs; rumors had spread like a contagion from the Merchant District to the Palace gates.
By noon, the whispers had become a roar: The Kingdom is broke. The vaults are hollow.
Inside the chamber, the air was thick with the smell of spilled wine, expensive tobacco, and the sour sweat of terrified men.
"WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT IS GONE?"
The scream came from the Patriarch of the House of Reach, a man whose family had controlled the grain trade for three centuries.
He slammed his fist onto the mahogany council table with such force that a jade inkwell shattered, splashing dark stains across the white silk vest of Duke Hallway.
"Gone! Empty! Vacuumed!" Duke Hallway bellowed back, his face a mottled, unhealthy purple. He didn't even notice the ink.
He turned and delivered a stinging slap to the Captain of the Treasury Guard, who was kneeling on the floor.
"I personally inspected those wards yesterday! You were supposed to be the elite! How do you lose three centuries of royal wealth in the time it takes to change a shift?"
"My Lord, there was a ripple... a golden vortex..." the guard stammered, his lip bleeding.
"EXCUSES!" Duke Hallway kicked the man squarely in the chest, sending him sprawling across the polished marble floor.
"If the pay doesn't reach the garrisons by sunset, the army will turn on us! The city will burn, and your head will be the first one on a spike!"
Across the room, the representative of House Valerius was pacing like a caged panther, her heels clicking a sharp, staccato rhythm of impending doom.
She turned on the other nobles, her voice a sharp, icy blade. "Stop brawling like dockworkers! We have been outplayed. First the Merchant gold, now the Treasury. This isn't just theft; it’s a systematic execution of our leverage."
In the corner of the room, standing in the shadow of a heavy velvet curtain, Grace watched the chaos with a cold, sinking dread in her gut.
She looked at the luxury that surrounded them, the gold-leafed moldings, the silk tapestries, the diamond-encrusted chandeliers, and realized it was all a facade now. They were kings of nothing.
Who? the question hammered in her mind. Who has the capacity?
She thought of Elena. The girl was a prodigy, yes, but to hollow out the Royal Treasury required a mana capacity that should have burnt a rogue assassin to ash.
Is she working with a man called Dark behind my back? The thought made Grace’s skin crawl. If her master had moved without her, she was already a dead woman.
And then there was Leo. The coward. The moment the Merchant Guild went dark, he had vanished like a rat into the sewers, leaving her to face the fury of the nobles alone.
If she ever found him, she would peel the skin from his lying face herself. But the most terrifying thought—the one she refused to voice—was the King. Xavier.
"He's dead," she whispered to herself, her fingers digging into her palms until they bled. "I saw the earth fall. No one survives that."
But as Duke Hallway threw a crystal decanter at a cowering servant and the House of Reach began to openly accuse Valerius of treason, Grace realized she couldn't stay.
The palace was a sinking ship, and the sharks were already in the water.
She slipped out of the chamber, moving through the opulent hallways where servants were already beginning to loot the smaller silver statuettes from the niches.
The weather outside had turned from rain to a stifling, oppressive heat, the sky a bruised, hazy yellow that promised a summer storm of Biblical proportions.
She reached her private carriage, but she didn't head for her estate. She headed for the "Dead District"—the ruins of the old city where the true power of the Silver Sun resided.
Inside a crumbling mausoleum, hidden beneath layers of illusion magic, she knelt before a woman draped in a mask of obsidian silk. The air here was freezing, a stark contrast to the heat outside.
"My Lady," Grace choked out, her voice trembling. "The Royal Treasury... it has been taken. All of it. We are... we are bankrupt."
The woman in the dark mask didn't move. She sat on a throne of jagged, black glass, her presence a void that seemed to suck the light out of the room.
When she spoke, her voice was like the grinding of tectonic plates.
"You let the heart of my kingdom be cut out while you were busy playing at politics, Grace."
"We are hunting Elena Heart! The bounty is five hundred thousand—"
"With what gold will you pay the bounty hunters, you pathetic child?" the woman hissed. A flare of dark, violet magic erupted from her, throwing Grace onto her back.
"The gold is gone. The influence is gone. And if the King is indeed walking among the living, then your life is already forfeit."
Grace lay on the cold stone, staring up at the dark mask, the taste of copper in her mouth and the cold realization in her heart: she wasn't the hunter anymore.
She was the one being hunted by a ghost who now had the wealth of a world to buy her soul.
The atmosphere in the "Dead District" mausoleum was no longer just cold; it was necrotic. The woman in the obsidian mask stood up, her silken robes whispering against the stone floor like the scales of a serpent.
She stepped over Grace’s shivering form, her eyes, visible only as twin pinpricks of violet fire behind the mask, fixed on the crumbling stone ceiling.
"Duke Hallway and the others are useless," the woman hissed, her voice echoing with a magical distortion.
"They are men of ledgers and titles. They do not understand that gold is not just currency; in this kingdom, it is the medium for the System’s stabilization. Without the Treasury’s reserves, the ley lines will fray. The Titans will not just arrive; they will tear through the reality of Drakmor like paper."
She turned her gaze back down to Grace, who was clutching her bruised ribs.
"You say Leo escaped? Find him. He is a coward, but he knows the secret passages of the Palace better than anyone. If he is fleeing, it is because he knows exactly who is coming for us."