Beast Gacha System: All Mine-Chapter 71: True Love
CRASH!!
Arzhen’s claws, partially shifted and gleaming like polished daggers, sank deep into the carved arm of his father’s high-backed chair. With a crunch of splintering oak and tearing velvet, he ripped the entire arm clean off, holding the ruined piece in rage.
"What," he enunciated, each word a chip of ice dropping into the silent room, "do you mean you still can’t find him?"
The men arrayed before the desk flinched as one. They were warriors, hardened scouts, elite trackers of the Vasiliev line. They knew their new king’s strength, his ambition, the cold fire that had propelled him to seize the throne in the vacuum of his father’s ’disappearance.’
Knowing it, however, did not make standing in the path of its full heat any easier. This was not the public-facing prince. Not the charming, decisive, the grieving son stepping into a burdensome role.
This was the shadow behind the crown. The creature who had killed a saintess for a flower and would scour the continent to ash to eliminate a rival or a loose end.
Especially this particular loose end.
"Where. Is. My. Father?"
Tap... tap... tap... tap...
Gentle footsteps on the polished stone floor approached from the shadowed archway behind the trembling scouts. A beautiful woman emerged into the lamplight, her long, dark hair a river of shadow down the back of an elegant sleeping robe. Elara Vasiliev sighed.
"Arzhen, my sun..." she murmured.
Arzhen didn’t turn. His gaze remained fixed on his scouts, but the muscles in his jaw tightened. "Mother. It is late. You should be in your chambers. This is not a matter for your... concerns."
"Isn’t my son so cold to his poor mother?" Elara pouted, folding her arms. "Why don’t you tell mommy what stupid little mistake you’ve made this time? Hmm?"
Arzhen finally turned his head. His eyes, the same hazel as hers but hardened to amber, narrowed. "It is none of your concern anymo—"
SLAP!
The sound was crisp, shocking in the heavy silence. Elara’s hand moved with viper speed, the blow not wild, but precise, rocking Arzhen’s head to the side. The scouts froze, eyes wide, wishing they could dissolve into the air instead.
"WHY CAN’T YOU DO A SIMPLE THING?!" Elara’s shriek was sudden. It was a violent explosion, all pretense of gentleness incinerated. Her beautiful face contorted with a rage decades deep. "WHY AM I STILL BONDED TO THAT IDIOT FATHER OF YOURS?!"
Arzhen slowly turned his face back, a red mark blossoming on his cheek. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t rage back. He simply gritted his teeth, the muscle in his jaw jumping. He was used to this. Her "little punishments."
"Look at me, Arzhen," she hissed, stepping closer, her voice dropping low. "Look at what I’ve wasted. Decades. My beauty, my ambition, rotting beside a herbivore in a tiger’s skin who couldn’t measure up to his own Black Wolf cousin." She spat the last word. "If not for you, my perfect, strong son... why would I have stayed? Hmmm? Tell mommy."
She brought a hand to her own cheek, and a film of tears glossed her eyes. A perfect sob hitched in her throat. "Didn’t mommy make it so easy for you?" she whimpered grievously. "I softened him. I poisoned him to the very brink... a walking corpse in a crown. Just... why? Why is finishing the job so difficult for you?"
Silence, as Arzhen closed his eyes.
"Escort my mother back to her chamber," Arzhen commanded.
A nearby guard stepped forward, reaching a tentative hand for Elara’s elbow.
She didn’t look at him. Her gaze was locked on her son. But her hand flashed out again to disdainfully bat the guard’s touch away as if it were a gnat.
And then, her voice changed once more. The tears vanished, the rage smoothed over. It became gentle again, lilting. "Kill him, Arzhen. Kill him and free your mother."
She took a half-step closer, her scent of night-blooming flowers and something faintly metallic filling the space between them. "You are my only hope in this cold, cold world... my beautiful, beautiful son."
Elara turned and walked away. She did not look back. The air in the room did not sigh with her departure, it simply died. It collapsed into a vacuum where the echoes of her words, the shriek, the sob, the lullaby command, now spun in suffocating orbits.
Behind her, she left only the ruin of a chair, the terror of lesser men, and her son standing at the center of it all, a king holding the splintered remains of a throne she had helped him seize.
"We gather arms," Arzhen stated coldly. The broken chair arm lay forgotten at his feet. "There is more than enough justification. The attack on our Lord Father. The Delanivis’ failed power grab. Their accusations."
He paused, his golden eyes scanning the faces of his men, seeing not individuals, but instruments. "Be it truly their doing or not... is irrelevant. We will ensure the history books record it as such. When we win."
When we win. Not if.
The war was inevitable now.
His thoughts, however, slid past the maps and supply lines, finding a single point of warmth in the desolate landscape of his mind.
Ruby.
She would believe him. She would have to. She was the only one in this hollow world whose love was pure, untainted. Not like his mother’s barbed affection. Not like his father’s honorable expectation.
Ruby’s love was everything he had always needed. She was the one good thing he hadn’t yet broken, the proof that he wasn’t all the monster. Not yet.
He just needed to reach her. To pull her from the gilded cage of the temple, from the orbit of that white wolf who’d stolen her by accident. He would take her away, and in her eyes, he would see not a king, not a murderer, but Arzhen. Her Arzhen.
And with her by his side, the world would finally snap back into the shape it was always meant to hold. Everything... would be corrected. He would have his throne, his true Saintess, and the peace that came with possessing, finally and completely, the only thing that had ever been meant to be his.
But there was something in a strange corner of... not his chest.
No.
His claws.
That specific memory lived in the very marrow of the bone, in the flexor tendons, in the razor-sharp curve of keratin that had been the final instrument. A sensory replay on a loop.
Ah. Yes.
The memory had a texture.
The initial give. The wet, thick blood... the vital heat that had followed, instantly coating his skin, steaming in the forest chill. The weight of the stolen heart, still pulsing its futile rhythm in his grasp.
And her eyes. Wide. Betrayed.
Love...?
Not her love for him. That had been an illusion he’d crafted. But something else. A question in her dying eyes that had seared itself into the memory stored in his claws.
Love.
"Cecilia..."
***
Anton Vasiliev woke.
He couldn’t believe it was not in the familiar, clawing way of the sick. There was no slow surfacing through layers of pain, nor the feeling of a body betraying itself.
It was a sudden, clean breach of a surface he hadn’t realized he was under. A deep, dreamless nothingness had released him, and he lay in the dark, adrift in a peace he hadn’t known in a decade.
Midnight. The air was cold. Disbelief was his first coherent thought. This must be hell. A cunning one, to mimic the cessation of agony so perfectly.
But as awareness settled, so did a second truth. His body... was light. The terrible, leaden illness that had dragged on his bones, compressed his lungs, and soured his blood was simply... gone. The constant, grinding ache behind his eyes had vanished.
He took a breath. A full, deep, unobstructed breath that didn’t end in a rattling cough. A miracle.
Moving slowly, he pushed back the heavy furs and sat up. The room was... Spartan, masculine, lit by a single, low-banked fire. He shuffled to the narrow window, his bare feet soundless on the cold stone, and scraped back the shutter.
A vast, moon-washed panorama of jagged black peaks and endless white snow met his eyes. The sight was as familiar as it was shocking. The northern spires...?
Winter’s Keep.
Arkai’s fortress.
He turned from the window, pulled on a borrowed robe that hung nearby, and moved into the silent corridor. His body obeyed with a fraction of its old, remembered strength. He knew this place, from happier days, from state visits and winter hunts before the world curdled.
His feet, guided by memory and a disbelieving urgency, carried him through the familiar, torch-lit stone arteries until he stood before the door to Arkai’s private study.
A sliver of light bled from under the door. He pushed it open.
"Brother Arkai...?"
Ah.
Inside, not the Black Wolf King, but a boy.
Arkai’s son, Rinne, sat sprawled in the oversized chair behind the massive desk. A mountain of scrolls and ledgers before him, his face intense in concentration as he pored over his father’s files in the dead of night.
The boy’s head snapped up at the sound. His eyes, wide and wolf-bright in the candlelight, landed on the gaunt, pale figure in the doorway.
For a heartbeat, there was only shock of being discovered. Then, the boy’s face dissolved into a brilliant, sunburst of a smile that seemed to ignite the whole dark room.
"Uncle!" Rinne chirped, as if Anton’s resurrection at midnight were the most delightful surprise. He dropped the scroll he was holding. "You’re awake!"
