Beast Gacha System: All Mine-Chapter 79: Checkmate

SLAP!

Anton’s palm connected with Elara’s cheek with an annihilating force. She was thrown sideways, collapsing to the floor violently.

"SHUT UP!" Anton bellowed, standing over her, his breath ragged. "This... this is how you repay a lifetime of my trust? My love? Woman, you have misunderstood me. I am Anton Vasiliev. And you are just a woman from the human Empire’s Capital."

He turned the full, scorching weight of his disdain back to his son, his finger leveling once more. "Cecilia Araceli was a fake Saintess? Hah! You are wrong. She was the only real Saintess this continent has seen in a century. And that Ruby girl you fancy? She is the fraud."

A low scoff came from the head of the table. Arkai leaned back in his chair casually and crossed his arms. The sound drew Arzhen’s horrified attention.

"Of course she’s the fraud," the Black Wolf King said, coldly amused. "She stood before the world and prophesied my glorious death atop Mount Saede," He spread his hands. "Look at me. Do I appear dead to you?"

The blood drained from Arzhen’s face, leaving him waxen. Right. Ruby. She had directly offended the one being in the north whose wrath was a force of nature.

"Not to mention how you and the Delanivis pup scrambled over my territory like jackals the moment you heard the news," Arkai continued, his sneer deepening. "Thinking I was carrion. It’s fine. I’ve... forgiven you, boy. It will make a little anecdote at family gatherings."

"WHAT?!" Anton barked, swaying on his feet, his fury finding a new, hotter fuel. He whirled on Arzhen. "YOU LITTLE BASTARD! YOU BRING CECILIA BACK TO THIS FAMILY, OR I WILL NEVER CALL YOU MY SON AGAIN!"

His wild gaze then landed on the weeping figure on the floor. "AND YOU—" The word was a curse. "You scheming bitch. Get her out of my sight."

Elara gasped, a wounded animal sound. "Anton! My love, please—"

Arkai gave a lazy wave of his hand. Two of his stone-faced guards materialized from the shadows, their grips impersonal and firm as they hauled Elara to her feet. Her screams turned to desperate, ragged wails. "Tell him, Arzhen! Tell your father what the Delanivis did to him!"

Arzhen remained rooted to his chair. He couldn’t spin a lie about the attack on his father here, not in this viper’s nest with Arkai’s piercing gaze dissecting every twitch.

To accuse the Delanivis might trigger a ’memory’ in Anton, and under the Black Wolf’s scrutiny, any fabrication could unravel. He couldn’t let Arkai suspect the truth, that the attacker was in this very room.

Himself.

If only they were home. In his own halls, with his own power absolute. If only this wasn’t the belly of the beast, Arkai Dawnoro’s impregnable keep...

Arzhen would have immediately killed Anton.

"Since your disappearance... and even before," Arzhen began, "tensions with the Delanivis have escalated beyond diplomacy, Father. That is why I brought the army."

He leaned forward, his eyes pleading, desperate to escape the trap. "Let me explain everything properly. Let’s go home. We’ll bring Gregor and Thalia home, give them a proper rest in our soil. And I swear, I will find the proof that points to the Delanivis. Just..."

"Oh?" Anton’s voice was deadly quiet. "So you wish to march to war with the white wolves? Did your ears fail you? You are not my son until you find Cecilia. I will issue a decree that any army marching under you does so without the true Tiger King’s sanction. I will not name you my heir until you undo this catastrophe."

He turned to Arkai. "Let my Brother be the witness to this. I will not set foot on Vasiliev soil until this is resolved. I stay here. Gregor and Thalia stay here. They will not be buried in our ancestral earth until you find your way back to the light. You accuse the Delanivis? Then my Brother here will ascertain the truth."

"FATHER!" Arzhen finally snapped, the last of his restraint shredding. "WHY CAN’T YOU TRUST ME, FOR ONCE IN YOUR LIFE?!"

"HAVE YOU EVER GIVEN ME A SINGLE REASON TO, MY SON?" Anton spat back.

"Especially," Arkai interjected, "as the Delanivis have formally accused you of orchestrating the attack on their lord, leaving him in a coma."

He shook his head. "So. This is what you do? Compete in treachery, scrambling for my north like rats, then turn your knives on each other?"

Anton looked at his son, and the last vestige of paternal hope died in his eyes, replaced by pure disgust. "You..." he seethed. "Leave this very instant."

***

Anton didn’t stop there. From the steps of Winter’s Keep, with the glacial wind whipping his robe, he faced the sea of striped fur and gleaming armor that was his own army and gave the order that would echo through every court on the continent.

Fucking. Leave.

The vast Vasiliev force was to turn around, march home, and return to their barracks with their tails literally and figuratively tucked between their legs.

And behind Anton, stood Arkai Dawnoro.

The Black Wolf King said nothing. He didn’t need to. His mere presence was enough. A hundred of the Vasilievs’ most formidable near-humanoid commanders, warriors who could level villages, felt the primal weight of that gaze and thought better of any protest.

This was the wolf who had stared down a volcano and won. They were not insane.

Anton planted his feet. He would not be moved. He would not retreat to his sick bed in the east. And he made sure the world knew it. Through a network of communication crystals, his voice crackled across palaces, council halls, and trading posts.

He announced everything.

The formal, Dawnoro-hosted investigation into the attack on his person. His official, neutral stance on the spiraling conflict between the Vasiliev, Delanivis, and Dawnoro houses. His near-disownment of his heir, Prince Arzhen, citing the disastrous divorce from the former Saintess Cecilia Araceli and her subsequent, suspicious disappearance as the final fracture.

And, most damning of all, his refusal to return to the Vasiliev territory until clarity and order were restored.

Imagine the implications.

It declared, without screaming it, that he no longer trusted his own house to hold power. That he believed the very soil of his domain was compromised. That the Vasiliev throne was, for now, illegitimate in the eyes of its own king.

This single move checkmated the Delanivis as well. However furious they were, however convinced of Vasiliev guilt, they could not legally march on a territory whose own sovereign lord had publicly repudiated its current leadership and placed himself under the aegis of a neutral, infinitely more powerful third party.

Their accusation was now in a limbo either, its validity questioned by the very victim. Who could trust the testimony of the accuser’s own men? They just claimed it was the Vasilievs based on their own investigation, after all.

And presiding over it all was Arkai Dawnoro.

No, of course he hadn’t declared protection. He’d only declared hosting. He was merely providing the venue for truth. But ’hosting’ the injured Tiger King on his sovereign land was functionally identical to extending a shield over him.

The Delanivis, already on his blacklist for their Saede prophecy and land-grab, could only swallow their rage like shards of glass.

Instead, the gossip that set every tongue wagging from taverns to temples, wasn’t the thwarted war. It was the method of Anton’s salvation.

A Dragon’s physician?

...that kind of person existed?

How such a mythic figure had walked among them, had braved the hellscape of Mount Saede to aid the Black Wolf, and had performed a miracle on the dying Tiger King... it overshadowed everything.

It painted Arkai as a man touched by legends. It painted Anton’s recovery not as luck, but as a divine-tier intervention.

But that was a story for another day.

At this point, Arzhen and Elara were trapped in the guest quarters of Winter’s Keep. They could not simply slink home. To leave without Anton would be to cement the narrative, that the Tiger King found his own house so repugnant he chose a wolf’s den over his heir’s halls.

The humiliation would be generational. Their own officers and soldiers, who had witnessed Anton’s furious disavowal, now looked upon them with a distrust that bordered on mutiny.

So, Arkai, with a generosity that was itself a form of exquisite cruelty, hosted them.

He gave them rooms befitting their station. He provided food, warmth, and every courtesy owed to a visiting prince and queen mother.

"You couldn’t have done a better job."

The voice came from directly behind him. Arkai flinched, a full-bodied, rare jolt of surprise from the Black Wolf King. He spun only to find Cecilia leaning against the stone wall in the shadowed corridor.

"You—Cece, you shouldn’t be here—" he began, his voice a low, urgent rasp, his gaze darting down the hall toward the occupied guest wing.

But Cecilia just giggled, the sound bright and dangerous. Before he could protest further, she darted forward, her fingers closing around his wrist. She yanked him, tucking them both into the deep shadow behind a massive, carved pillar.

"Shhh," she whispered, pressing a finger to her own lips, her eyes glittering with mischief. She peered around the stone edge, her body pressed close to his side in the confined space. "Uncle-in-law," she breathed, "let’s hide. We mustn’t get caught..."