The World Is Mine For The Taking-Chapter 1278 - 197 - The Fall Of Milham Kingdom - Part 1 (1)
Moriarty’s POV
Sara was eating.
And when I say eating, I mean she was absolutely devouring the food in front of her like someone who had just been rescued from the worst buffet in existence.
Which, to be fair, wasn’t far from the truth.
During her time in prison, she had been starved to the point where her body looked dangerously thin. Her bones had been visible under her skin, and anyone seeing her back then might have mistaken her for a walking skeleton.
But Sara had vampire blood running through her veins.
Which meant recovery worked a little differently for her.
Once she absorbed enough energy—enough nutrients, enough blood, enough... well, food—her body began restoring itself rapidly.
Right now, she had already returned to her original appearance.
Healthy. Strong.
And very, very satisfied.
"Phew!" she said while stretching slightly. "After eating nothing but disgusting crap in that prison for so long, I finally got something decent!"
She took another bite and grinned.
"This is actually pretty good!"
Watching her eat was... honestly a little unsettling.
Not because of the way she chewed.
But because she looked way too happy about it.
Still, considering what she had been through, I supposed she had earned the right to enjoy a proper meal.
Sara had been locked away in one of the most heavily guarded prisons in the region.
Security there was so strict that infiltration was considered practically impossible.
And given the crimes Sara had committed—heinous ones, even by criminal standards—it wasn’t surprising that she had been thrown into the lowest level of that facility.
The kind of place where people were meant to disappear.
Thankfully for us, we had Claire.
She could permeate through solid structures like liquid. Walls. Floors. Barriers. To her, those things were more like mild inconveniences than actual obstacles.
She simply flowed through the structure of the prison itself, bypassing every layer of security without triggering alarms, without leaving traces, without anyone realizing what had happened until it was far too late.
And just like that, Sara was free.
Right now, the only person missing from our group was Aunt Marie.
Unfortunately, things hadn’t gone as smoothly there.
The Faceless Playwright had apparently predicted that I would try to retrieve her.
Which meant he had hidden Marie somewhere even Claire couldn’t reach.
That alone told me something important.
He had been expecting us.
Waiting for us.
But honestly?
That didn’t surprise me.
I had already anticipated something like this happening.
Right now, everything had reached the boiling point.
The pieces were all moving.
The board was set.
And that meant it was finally time.
Time to play our cards properly.
I picked up my phone and dialed the Emperor’s number.
***
Hertrude’s POV
I was in a dream.
Or at least... I swear I was.
The kind of dream where everything feels too vivid to just be something your mind randomly cooked up while you were sleeping. The kind where the air feels heavy, where the sounds echo a little too clearly, and where every little detail sticks to your memory like it’s been burned there.
It had been a long while since I last experienced a dream like this.
And that alone already made my chest tighten.
Because whenever something like this happened—whenever one of these dreams came—I knew, without a doubt, that something was about to occur. Not maybe. Not possibly.
Something would happen.
A sea of fire stretched as far as the eye could see. Flames rolled across the land like waves in an angry ocean, crackling and roaring as if the world itself had decided it had enough and just lit everything on fire. The heat was suffocating. Even though it was a dream, I could almost feel it licking at my skin.
And in the distance stood the castle.
Or what was left of it.
Armies were approaching from every direction, dark shapes marching through the smoke and the burning fields. Their silhouettes flickered between the flames like ghosts made of steel and blood. Step by step, closer and closer they moved, their numbers swelling until they surrounded the castle like a pack of wolves circling wounded prey.
The gates didn’t last long.
They raided the castle with brutal efficiency.
Screams tore through the air as soldiers stormed the halls, cutting down anyone in their path. Maids who had probably never held anything more dangerous than a tray were dragged out and killed without mercy. Servants ran for their lives only to be cut down before they even made it to the courtyard.
Even the magic knights—people who were actually trained to fight—fell one after another.
Steel clashed. Magic burst through the halls in flashes of blinding light. But in the end, none of it mattered.
They were overwhelmed.
The only person who had been captured alive was the Queen herself.
I wasn’t even sure if "alive" counted as mercy in this situation.
Because after she was taken, bound and dragged away like a criminal, she was sentenced to execution.
Just like that.
I had no idea why I was seeing something like this now.
Or why it had to be now, after all this time.
My visions were never random. They never showed me pointless things like someone dropping their breakfast or a noble tripping over his own robes, which, honestly, would’ve been way more entertaining.
No.
The visions I received were always fixed.
And that was the worst part.
I couldn’t change them. I couldn’t bend them. I couldn’t even slightly nudge them in a better direction. Believe me, I tried before. A lot. It never worked.
They simply allowed me to glimpse the future.
A future that was already set in stone.
Predetermined.
No matter how much I tried to interfere, no matter how desperately I tried to prevent it, the result would always find its way back to the same ending.
Sometimes I wondered if the universe was laughing at me.
Of course, technically speaking, I could try to prevent things.
But the cruel joke was that sometimes the very actions I took to stop a disaster were the exact things that caused it to happen in the first place.
