Beast Gacha System: All Mine-Chapter 114: In Any Other Life
Eastiel Edengold stood in the center of his sun-blasted receiving hall. Gone was the heavy fur coat he usually wore at the empire’s capital. Here, in his element, he wore a simple, stark white desert robe that made his golden mane and tanned skin seem to burn.
His body was coiled tight. The fatigue was still there in the shadows beneath his eyes, but it had been transmuted. It just made him seem ten times more dangerous. A beast running on pure adrenaline.
A beast in a silent rampage.
"I see you still have the guts to show your face in my line of sight," Eastiel said. His voice was like stone grinding against stone, no greeting, no preamble.
Arzhen gritted his teeth, the muscles in his jaw standing out in cords. The Lion King’s appearance... This wasn’t just anger. This was the ravaged, hollowed-out look of a man grieving a mate torn from him. It was a depth of devastation Arzhen had never associated with Cecilia, or with anyone’s connection to her.
Seeing another man so visibly wrecked by her death should have filled him with a dark satisfaction. He was the one who had ended it. He owned her final moment, her heart, her forever. But instead of triumph, a strange and corrosive irritation seeped into his veins.
Someone else, someone he hadn’t even properly considered, had been coveting what was his. And this man was mourning her with such a raw, public pain that Arzhen himself had never felt, would never allow himself to feel.
No. Why would he mourn? He had won. She was his, eternally, in the only way that truly mattered. So why did this lion’s grief feel like an insult?
"What do you want?" Eastiel sneered. "Unable to use your precious Meleth Flower on your true beloved, so now you crawl here to try and silence the only witness?"
Arzhen’s eyes widened in shock, a split-second before his beast’s pride surged. He let out a low, warning growl. "Eastiel Edengold, watch your mouth."
The two Temple acolytes, who had been hovering nervously in the background, now swiveled their heads toward Arzhen, their expressions shifting to sharp suspicion. "Your Highness?" the older one asked, his voice tight. "What is the meaning of this?"
"Why don’t you ask him?" Arzhen shot back, gesturing violently toward Eastiel. "Hear what vile slander he dares to spew!"
"HAHAHAHAHAHAH!"
Eastiel’s laughter was a short and explosive burst of rage. Where did this murderer find such brazen audacity? To stand here, reeking of guilt, and play the aggrieved party?
"Of course! Yes! It’s your word against mine," he spat, the laughter dying into a deadly calm. "But remember this, princeling. Not everyone in this world is fooled by a title. Some will look at you and see a snake. And some," his golden eyes glinted, "will only ever believe me."
He turned his scorching gaze on the two acolytes.
"For your official report," he began.
"Tell the world I said that the Saintess, Cecilia Araceli is missing. And this man..." he pointed at Arzhen without looking at him, "...still possesses the Meleth Flower they were supposed to use to sever their bond mutually. Draw your own conclusions. That is all I will say to you."
The younger acolyte gasped aloud. The older one snapped his head toward Arzhen, his eyes wide with horror.
Arzhen’s growl deepened into a roar of fury. He knew Eastiel had no body, no murder weapon, no tangible proof. It was a matter of accusation. But the accusation itself, laid so bare before the Temple’s representatives, was a landmine.
"You dare accuse me of murder?!" Arzhen thundered, the sound shaking the delicate mosaics on the walls.
Eastiel didn’t even dignify it with a response. He turned his back, dismissing him, and spoke to his stone-faced guards stationed by the doors. "See the Prince and our guests from the Temple out. Their audience is concluded."
He finally looked back over his shoulder at Arzhen, disgust deepening the hollows under his eyes and the tired set of his shoulders. That look, the grief, the contempt, the exhaustion, it was a mirror held up, and in it, Arzhen suddenly saw not just an accuser, but a rival.
A click echoed in the depths of his mind.
What... had been the real nature of Eastiel’s relationship with Cecilia?
This was personal. Viscerally, destructively personal.
"You—" The word left Arzhen’s lips on a sharp breath. "Could it be... the reason she was so eager to discard our bond... to speak of divorce... was it you?"
Eastiel’s retreating steps froze.
Arzhen’s voice rose into a thunderclap of outraged fury.
"DID YOU HAVE AN AFFAIR WITH MY WIFE?!"
Suddenly, the simmering fury inside Eastiel ignited. A heat blazed to life in his core, hotter than the desert sun, swelling into a second sun at the center of his world.
"What." He turned, the movement slow. "Did." His golden eyes were molten pools, the pupils slitting into vicious points. "You." The air crackled. "Say?" 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝚠𝕖𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝕖𝚕.𝚌𝗼𝗺
"You—" Arzhen spat. "You gave her ideas. You whispered in her ear, turned her against me. You dared to covet what was mine? The woman who belongs to me?!"
Eastiel felt it then, a coppery, burning tide of fury so potent he could taste blood at the back of his throat. The rage churned, bitter and scalding, a geyser of contempt for the monster standing before him.
"Did you hear yourself, Arzhen Vasiliev?" His voice dropped.
He took a step forward, and with it, a visible nimbus of golden lightning began to crackle around his frame, snapping at the dry air, lifting the strands of his mane.
"Tell me, oh pure prince. For a man who proclaims his one true love is another... who never touched his bonded mate to preserve some sacred purity for his Ruby... why, then, did you drench Cecilia’s entire world in your scent?"
"You marked her belongings, her space, her very air with your musk so thickly she carried it without her knowledge, your scent more pervasive than any bondless mating?"
Arzhen’s eyes flew wide.
This lion knew. He knew Cecilia had died untouched. He knew the details of the environmental marking.
"You shielded your body from her to keep yourself ’pure’ for another," Eastiel taunted, the words sharp as shards of glass, "yet you smothered her purity, hiding it with the stench of your possession."
This man... he knew more about Cecilia, about the truth of her life and his than anyone else possibly could.
"SHE IS THE LOVE OF MY LIFE!" Eastiel’s roar was a force. It shook the mosaics loose from their mortar, a rain of colored stone. "The one woman you never saw, not as a Saintess, not as a woman, not as a wife. But you..."
He took another step, the lightning around him intensifying, casting jumping shadows across the hall. "...of all the wretched souls on this continent, you should know."
CRACKLE—BLAST!
A searing lance of actual lightning, conjured from the storm of his rage, jagged down from the sky, striking the stone floor between them. The entire palace was plunged into a strobing storm-light and violent shadow.
Arzhen flinched, his eyes darting from the smoldering scar on the floor to the incandescent figure before him. This power—!
It was impossible. Eastiel Edengold had never been this strong!
"In any other life," Eastiel stated, "in any other turn of fate’s wheel, Cecilia Araceli would have been mine." He lifted his chin, the lightning wreathing him like a crown of divine wrath. "And that is why, in this life, despite your filth, despite your theft, despite your murder, she is mine."
