CHAPTER 56: LYRIA CITY III

Fenric reached for the nearest ledger again, flipping it open with a careless flick of his wrist. "The moment my arrival reaches him, he’ll send something. Not a letter. Not a messenger. Something theatrical enough to make everyone in the room think they’ve just invited by him for an partnership"

Aria tilted her head. "And you’ll... play along?"

He looked up at her, his silver-irised gaze sharp as a drawn blade. "No. I’ll play ahead. The moment you follow his script, you’ve already lost. Drake’s greatest strength isn’t his influence—it’s his ability to convince you that every move was your idea."

She gave a low hum, stepping closer to glance over his shoulder at the scrawled numbers on the page. "So we’re not just fighting the Mortal Fangs."

Fenric’s lips curved in a humorless smile. "No. The mercenaries are pawns. Ragos’ Dagger is the knife. Drake is the mind that decides where it cuts."

Aria leaned on the desk, her voice low enough to be almost a whisper. "Then we’ll have to kill him to be alive ourself."

Fenric chuckled, a quiet, dangerous sound. "That’s the idea. But before that... we’ll make use of him."

He closed the ledger with a sharp thud, the sound echoing through the high-ceilinged room. "Send word to the guild masters. I want them here by sunset. Every single one. If they claim they’re too busy..." He let the sentence hang, his smile completing it for him.

Aria gave a small nod and moved toward the door. "And if the ’invitation’ from Drake comes first?"

Fenric’s eyes glinted. "Then we send him a gift in return—one that makes him believe I am on his team."

Aria raised a brow, but she simply nodded and slipped out of the room.

Fenric leaned back in his new office chair, the leather creaking under his weight. "I suppose... the real battle starts now," he murmured.

Up until this point, he had lived under the convenient shield of his "illness"—an excuse that kept certain predators at bay while he quietly rebuilt himself. But those days were over. His body was whole. His year of training complete. From here on, there would be no leniency, no pity. Just the unrelenting brutality of court politics, dressed in silk and steel.

"I’ll need to gather more and more... cheats," he mused, eyes half-lidded. The Lyra City arc was only the beginning—a Chapter where his power would grow beyond even the strongest figures of the original tale. He knew the story’s shape well: both the hero and the villain were overpowered monsters, forever clashing to stalemates that shattered the world around them. And every other "important" figure—guild leaders, nobles, ambitious lords—ended up as collateral in their battles.

Fenric had no intention of becoming collateral.

"My first cheat was taken from the villain himself," Fenric thought, fingers brushing against the Fairy Ring tatton on his finger. That single artifact had stripped the so-called villain of his Spirit Magic—shattering one of the greatest threats of the original tale.

"The second..." His eyes gleamed like moonlight on steel. "...will be the Eye of Lyra."

The Eye of Lyra was no trinket. It was the magnum opus of the Supreme Magicsmith—a woman whose craft was so legendary that entire armies once marched at the mere mention of her name. Even her birthplace had abandoned its old identity, renaming the city in her honor.

Of her countless creations, only a few bore her own name, each one a world-shaking masterpiece. The Eye of Lyra was one of them—though, despite its name, it wasn’t an eye at all. It was a sword.

A blade of dual miracles:

First—Absolute Cut. Anything it touched, no matter the material or enchantment, would be severed as though reality itself permitted it.

Second—Perfect Appraisal. With a single glance, the wielder could understand the composition, properties, and weaknesses of any object, from the rarest mineral to an enemy’s enchanted armor.

And according to the threads of fate, it lay somewhere in this very city.

Fenric’s lips curled into a dangerous smile.

"In the original tale, the hero was meant to claim it..." His voice dropped to a whisper. "...but this time, it’s mine."

**

Fenric allowed the days to stretch, making no visible hurry to seize the city’s reins. To the casual observer, he was simply acclimating—learning the streets, indulging in local cuisine, and politely nodding through endless formalities.

In truth, each meeting was a surgical operation.

Guild leaders came first, eager to measure the new "decorated young prince" sent to oversee them. They found a man smiling faintly, nodding generously, asking harmless questions about trade routes and spice prices.

The mercenary leader was next, a grizzled woman whose scarred arms told a dozen battles’ worth of stories. Fenric listened, feigning mild intimidation, and scribbled notes that looked meaningless—though each mark was a quiet record of her tone, her hesitations, and her loyalties.

Then came the so-called Mortal Fang—those infamous cutthroats whispered to be the most dangerous syndicate in the known world. They didn’t swagger into his audience hall; they lounged. Chairs were claimed without permission. Their leader, lean and smiling, looked him up and down like a merchant appraising a cheap trinket.

Fenric, all earnest smiles and soft eyes, played the part of the "freshly promoted fool" flawlessly. He thanked them for their service to the city’s... "underground stability." He even laughed when one of them jokingly called him "your harmlessness."

But behind that gentle mask, gears turned. Every polite word was measured, every glance cataloged.

When he poured them wine, his hand didn’t shake—though his hidden blade, strapped under the table, was already in reach. When they toasted to "new beginnings," Fenric’s smile never wavered, even as his mind replayed each threat disguised as banter.

And when they left, thinking they’d walked over him, he leaned back in his chair and muttered under his breath:

"Good. Keep thinking that."

One month later...

The air inside the dimly lit inn was thick with the stench of blood and stale wine. A single candle flickered on a warped table, casting grotesque shadows across the floor where a lifeless body lay sprawled—its chest caved in, limbs twisted at unnatural angles. Whoever had done this hadn’t just killed—they had made a statement.

The Mortal Fang leader, Sylens, stood over the corpse, his boots soaking in a slowly spreading pool of crimson. His sharp, wolf-like eyes—normally filled with cold calculation—were now burning with something far darker. This was no faceless subordinate. This was blood. His blood.

His younger brother’s glassy eyes stared blankly at the ceiling, lips frozen in a soundless scream. Beside him, scrawled in a jagged, dripping script across the floorboards, were the words:

"The Game Starts Now."

Sylens’ breathing turned ragged. His jaw flexed, teeth grinding audibly.

"...Who did this...?" His voice was low, almost a whisper, but it trembled with restrained rage. "Who... is this bastard...?"

The silence of the inn was broken by the faint creak of wood under his grip as his fists clenched hard enough to splinter the table beside him.

And then—

BOOM!

A shockwave erupted from his body, the sheer force of his fury manifesting as a sonic boom that shattered the inn’s windows and sent nearby patrons tumbling out of their chairs. The walls groaned, dust raining from the rafters. Even his own men staggered back, eyes wide at the eruption of raw killing intent that rolled off him like a storm tide.

Somewhere, in the far corner, his shadowed elder sister—hood drawn low—watched silently, her expression unreadable. Her eyes, however, gleamed with a spark that suggested she might know more about this "game" than she let on.

The war in the shadows had just been declared.

She was none other than Aria—the future Goddess of Assassins—now working in Fenric’s service. Her skills were so precise, so unnervingly refined, that she could step into a crowded public space, torture a man for hours, and leave without a whisper of suspicion. Even in the room next door, no one would know.

Now, she moved like a blade wrapped in mist, slipping into the city’s forgotten streets. The rain slicked cobblestones reflected a muted crimson where blood had already dried. Her eyes, once a calm storm, were cold as polished steel.

Fenric had given her this target the night before, after a scene he would not forget—A father walking into the council chamber, carrying the limp, lifeless body of a twelve-year-old girl. She had been violated, murdered, discarded like refuse.

And the man responsible? He had been tortured for three hours and only then he was allowed to die.

Now that same man brother sat in the corner of the Inn, trembling, face streaked with tears, hands shaking as if trying to hold onto something that had already slipped away. His sobs were choked, his throat raw from screaming, yet his eyes burned with something new—hatred, black and deep.

"This is just the start soon each of you will meet the same end" She thought looking at the Inn where she can see Sylens Crying blood tears.

Her presence was a silent knife—an unspoken reminder that justice in the shadows is not kind, nor clean. She stepped back, and her body seemed to dissolve into the mist rolling in from the alley, vanishing like she had never been there at all.

Only the wind remained, whispering through the gaps in the shattered windows.