Chapter 163: Too late, little heroes!

"U-Um... guys?" Mariella whispered. "Didn’t Cadet Lucien specifically tell us to be careful with Marquis Vance? He said to subdue him instantly or knock him unconscious the second we saw him..."

"Well, this counts as instantly subduing him, right?" Bordon said, shaking the Marquis slightly. "He’s not going anywhere."

The Marquis, held captive by a group of teenagers, looked around. Realizing that his attackers were the heirs of three Great Ducal Families, the future Sword Saint, and a Royal Princess, a strange sound bubbled in his throat.

"Ha...! Ha! Ha! Ha!"

Vance laughed like a madman, the sound echoing eerily in the ruined corridor.

"Hah... I must’ve truly wronged the heavens to be attacked by such a prestigious roster," Vance wheezed, wiping a speck of blood from his lip. "But tell me, Your Highness, young Lords and Ladies... don’t you think this lacks the elegant courtesy expected between our noble houses?"

Elisha stepped forward, her violet eyes burning with disgust.

"You’re the one who betrayed the elegant courtesy owed to the Empire’s people. We saw the auction house, Marques Vance. We saw the children being auctioned."

"What did I do wrong?" The Marquis opened his arms defiantly, a sickeningly self-righteous expression on his face.

"Are you insane?!" Elisha snapped.

"Lady Ravenscroft, I spend my days working tirelessly for my Marquisate’s citizens! I negotiate trade! I balance budgets late into the night until my nose bleeds! I suppress unspeakable worries to keep the local economy afloat! That’s how I’ve lived!"

"...."

"Someone answer me!" Vance yelled, his voice cracking. "I’m one of the Empire’s twenty honorable Marquises! A family head! A loyal subject to the Crown! Why are you, the children of the Great Dukes, persecuting me for running a simple, highly profitable side-business?!"

The impassioned, almost delusional plea of a middle-aged man proud of his ’hard work’ might have had an emotional pull on a naive crowd.

But Celestia stared at him with absolute zero emotion. Elisha scorned him openly. Mariella turned her face away, unable to stomach the human ugliness radiating from him.

And Bordonon raged.

"How dare you spew such nonsense?!" Bordon roared.

"Ugh, aaah!"

Bordon grabbed the Marquis by his belt and collar and hurled him across the corridor.

CRASH!

"Ow! Urgh!"

The Marquis slammed into the stone wall and crumpled to the ground, clutching his ribs in agony.

"You dine on human misery!" Bordon shouted, stepping toward him. "You hide crimes in the courts! You and your vassals abduct vulnerable citizens who won’t be missed, selling children into slavery! And you dare talk to us about courtesy and hard work?!"

Realizing they had bypassed his ledgers and knew absolutely everything, the Marquis finally dropped his pathetic victim facade. His true face—that of a deceitful, Social Darwinist elitist—emerged.

He spat blood onto the floor and sneered.

"Hah...! You’re all so incredibly naive. You think this is evil? These are just the refined hobbies of the elite. The necessary grease that keeps the Empire’s wheels turning!"

"What?! You bastard!"

Thud, thud.

Bordon stormed over, fully intending to punch the man’s teeth in. He grabbed his collar again, hoisting him up.

"Urk!"

"Are you done talking?!" Bordon snarled in his face. "And you call yourself a noble?!"

"Of course I am a noble!"

With a sudden, frantic burst of desperate strength, Vance shoved his face close to Bordon’s.

"Noble lineage! Chosen blood! I am a noble through and through! You children are far too young to understand how the world actually works, but

this

is what nobility is! The lowly, the weak, the unwashed masses—they exist solely to serve the grandeur and desires of great leaders like us! It is the natural order!"

"Absolutely not!" Kael stepped forward, his aura flaring in pure rejection of the twisted ideology.

"Oh, really, boy? Did the Great Ducal Families only teach you about fairy-tale knights and righteous kings?! Heh heh heh!" Vance cackled, blood staining his teeth.

"Shut your mouth," Celestia commanded, raising her hand to cast a freezing spell.

"Yes! Silence me, Your Highness! Because you know I speak the truth!" Vance glared with demonic intensity at Elisha and Mariella standing in the back.

"I can at least respect Duke Eisenwald for toiling at the military frontlines like a brute! But what about Ravenscroft and Arlon? Your fathers are too hypocritical, aren’t they?!"

Elisha and Mariella flinched.

"Did those two old political monsters really not know about the massive Black Market operating directly beneath the Capital?" Vance sneered, his eyes wild. "Could a ’small’ Marquis like me operate the Empire’s largest underground slave ring without the knowledge of the Emperor’s court? Without the blind eyes turned by the great political Dukes?"

Silence fell over the corridor. The implications of his words struck like physical blows. The heads of House Ravenscroft and Arlon heavily influenced Imperium politics. They controlled trade and city guard deployments. It was mathematically impossible for an operation of this magnitude to exist right under their noses without someone high up taking a bribe to look the other way.

"They probably joined in," Vance whispered, a venomous smile spreading across his bruised face. "Didn’t they? Or perhaps they just collected the taxes from my ’hobbies’."

While the Protagonist Party stood frozen in shock at the psychological attack, Mariella suddenly noticed something terrifying.

While Marquis Vance had been rambling, making grand gestures and screaming about noble hypocrisy, his hands had been behind his back.

And the stone wall behind him was glowing with a sickly, putrid purple light.

"Wait!" Mariella shrieked, remembering my exact words. "He’s stalling! Cadet Lucien said to knock him out immediately!"

Marquis Vance’s eyes snapped wide open, glowing with absolute madness.

"Too late, little heroes!"

Do you think a man who built an empire of blood and coin would go down just like that?

Marquis Vance violently wrenched his hand free from Bordon’s loosened grip, revealing a heavy, obsidian ring on his index finger. As he frantically infused it with his corrupted mana, the ring sparked with a sickly purple light, humming with a frequency that made the very air vibrate.

The Protagonist Party’s heightened senses flared. They instinctively knew, right then and there, that they had crossed an irreversible river.

My advice—

’knock him out immediately’

—resurfaced in their minds, alongside the horrifying realization of their failure to follow it.

Bordon, still clutching the Marquis’s ruined collar, asked dumbly, "What... what did you just do, Marquis...?"

"House Vance will not fall alone," Vance wheezed, his eyes wide and bloodshot.

"What are you talking about?!" Kael demanded, his golden aura flaring defensively.

"The Black Market’s true failsafe," Vance grinned, exposing his bloodstained teeth. "Twenty-five [Tier-4 Alchemical Inferno Matrices]. I had them secretly etched into the foundations of the Capital’s most populous areas. The Grand Square. The Commercial District. The slums. All fully charged with refined mana stones from my mines."

The faces of the Ducal heirs and the Princess turned completely ashen.

"The firepower covers a hundred-meter radius from each circle," Vance continued, his voice rising in hysterical triumph. "It won’t just kill instantly; it will turn the very earth into a sea of molten slag! Oh... isn’t that so much more thrilling than a simple assassination? Aren’t you curious to see how those uneducated livestock will scream and burn in there?! Observing the lowly perish so the elite can rise from the ashes to lead with greater authority! That is nobility! That is my refined hobby!"

Vance threw his arms wide, welcoming the horror on their faces.

"So, you righteous heirs! You have exactly five minutes until remote detonation! What will you do?!"

BANG!

A gunshot rang out, deafening in the enclosed, ruined lounge.

A high-caliber bullet cleanly pierced the head of the aristocratic supremacist, blowing out the back of his skull and instantly silencing his madness.

Marquis Vance’s body went limp, collapsing onto the stone floor like a broken puppet.

I stepped through the shattered doorway, lowering the smoking barrel of my Winchester rifle. I pulled the hood of my Shadow-Weave coat back, revealing my cold, entirely unimpressed expression.

"...Looks like I’m late."

The Protagonist Party whipped around, looking from the headless Marquis on the floor to me. The usually composed Ducal heirs and the Princess were in a state of absolute panic.

Their expressions told me everything instantly. I was late. My fears had become reality.

"Kael. Princess Celestia," I said, stepping over the rubble, my voice flat. "You two seem marginally more composed than the others. I’ll ask simply. Did that bloated corpse just activate the detonation sequence?"

"...He did," Celestia answered, her regal facade cracking as she stared at the glowing obsidian ring on Vance’s dead hand. "Twenty-five locations."

I clicked my tongue, cycling the bolt of my rifle.

I shouldn’t have lingered in the auction house to secure Nero. But I also hadn’t expected the Protagonist Party to bulldoze their way into the VIP lounge this fast. I underestimated the sheer, reckless driving force of the Heroes’ narrative.

And their stupidity! I underestimated that, too! I explicitly told them to knock him out!

"So, Cadet Kael," I sighed, rubbing my temples.

"...Huh?" Kael looked at me, his golden eyes trembling.

"Stop spacing out and tell me. What now?"