Chapter 695 --695

Chapter 695: Chapter-695

She summoned the elite inner circle of the Vanguard guards. Her orders were absolute, delivered in a voice made of freezing iron: No one is allowed to enter my chambers. No one means no one. If the Emperor himself comes knocking, you break his legs.

Then came the most dangerous, unpredictable variable: Samuel.

Samuel had effectively taken over the Marquisate estate, ruling the servants and the logistics with a brilliant, possessive ruthlessness. He was currently tearing the country apart from his study, sending his own private guards out to hunt for divine physicians, hoarding foreign medicines, and trying to pull a miracle out of the void. But Samuel’s power within the estate was a borrowed illusion. He only possessed that authority because the Vanguard Madam allowed him to hold the leash.

Heena commanded him to travel immediately to a neighboring province, under the strict guise of intercepting a critical intelligence ledger regarding the Prime Minister’s hidden wealth.

Samuel, hyper-paranoid and fiercely devoted, instantly refused. He saw through the transparent excuse. He tried to force his way into her inner courtyard, his own elite guards drawing their weapons to bypass the lockdown.

But Heena’s Vanguard soldiers were the apex predators of the empire. Before Samuel’s men could even take a single step forward, they found cold, lethal steel pressed firmly against their throats. The twenty Vanguard elites left guarding the estate formed an impenetrable, human wall of armor around Heena’s courtyard.

Samuel stood on the other side of the courtyard gates, his beautiful face twisted in furious, desperate agony, shouting her name. Heena sat in the dark of her room, listening to his voice echo through the heavy wooden lattice windows, her fingernails biting so deeply into her palms they drew blood. The guards did not let him pass. Eventually, realizing he could not break a Vanguard siege without sparking a bloody civil war inside their own home, Samuel was forced to depart, leaving with a desperate vow to return with the ledger—and a physician—faster than any horse had ever ridden.

The silence that fell over the isolated estate was deafening. Heena sat alone in the dark, the heavy curtains drawn tight, the only sound the ragged, uneven rhythm of her own breathing.

Why had she banished the only man who truly loved her? Why push him away when the terror of the dark was creeping closer by the hour?

Because she had forgotten his face.

The realization had struck her like a physical blow in the carriage ride back from the palace yesterday, and sitting here in the shadows, she tried again. She closed her eyes and desperately, violently tried to picture the ethereal, flawless scholar who had massaged her aching legs just a day ago. She tried to recall the sharp shape of his jaw, the obsessive depth of his dark eyes, the soft, devoted curve of his smile when he handed her a sweet candy.

Nothing. There was only a smooth, featureless blur where her husband should be.

A dry, broken sob caught in her throat. The blood clot was systematically deleting her humanity. She was losing words mid-sentence. She was suffering from violent, dizzying bouts of nausea that left her clinging to the floorboards. She knew that in a few days, she wouldn’t just forget Samuel’s face—she would forget his name. She would forget the faces of her guards. She might even forget the purpose of the grand, bloody trap she had set for the Empress.

She refused to let them see it. She was the Vanguard Madam. She was a warlord, a tyrant, a mastermind who held the fate of an empire by its throat. She would not allow Samuel to watch her deteriorate into a babbling, empty shell who looked at him with the vacant, terrified eyes of a stranger. Her isolation was a necessary shield—both for her own unyielding pride, and to protect the critical political secrets that a damaged, malfunctioning brain might randomly spill in a moment of confusion.

With the estate entirely sealed and her isolation secured, Heena turned her failing focus to the grand chessboard. The final pieces needed to be moved into position.

She summoned the commander of the Shadow Guards, speaking to him from behind a thick silk screen, strictly refusing to let the man see her trembling frame. She reorganized the entire Vanguard intelligence network with ruthless efficiency.

Most of the shadow network was ordered to evacuate the estate. She arranged a fleet of exactly one hundred elite Vanguard shadows, keeping them highly mobile, completely untethered, and ready to strike the palace when the Empress’s birthday banquet commenced.

Only twenty of the most lethal, unshakeable veterans were left to guard the Marquisate estate, ordered to execute anyone—friend or foe—who tried to breach her isolation.

The rest of her vast, terrifying network was scattered into the wind. They slipped into the estates, the kitchens, the private studies, and the carriages of every corrupt aristocratic family in the capital.

"Do not engage," Heena commanded, the words slipping slowly, deliberately from her tongue, as she fought with every ounce of her fading strength to remember the vocabulary. "Just watch them. Every minister, every lord, every servant."

She leaned back against her velvet cushions, the heavy, blinding fog of sleep beginning to drag her consciousness down into the dark once more.

"Keep an eye on those bastards," she whispered, the echo of the warlord still ringing in the quiet room. "When the signal fires, ensure none of them escape."

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The days inside the sealed courtyard did not pass; they bled together into a continuous, suffocating smear of darkness and agony.

Without the sun to track the hours, Heena lost her grip on time completely. She lay on the massive velvet bed, trapped in a horrifying cycle. She would wake up to the sensation of her skull being split open with a physical wedge, ride out the blinding pain in total silence so the guards outside wouldn’t hear her scream, and then violently crash back into a heavy, narcotic coma.

Her mind was unraveling faster than a torn tapestry.

The little golden lion had entirely abandoned its capitalist extortion schemes. The System was now functioning exclusively as her external hard drive, floating anxiously by her pillow and feeding her the basic vocabulary she kept losing.

"Host, it is called a ’cup’," the System whispered gently, its digital paws resting on her forehead as she stared blankly at the porcelain object on her nightstand. "You drink water from a cup. It is not a ’water-holder’."

Heena closed her eyes, letting out a frustrated, rattling breath. "Cup," she repeated, committing the sound to whatever fragile fragments of her memory were still intact. "Right. Cup."

"You’re doing great," the System lied, its pixelated eyes welling up with digital tears. It had seen hosts die in a hundred different ways—stabbed, poisoned, burned at the stake, or blown up in sci-fi mecha suits. But watching this terrifying, brilliant warlord be systematically stripped of her words, her memories, and her pride was the most agonizing death it had ever witnessed.

"We just need to make it to tomorrow," the System reminded her, trying to sound cheerful. "Tomorrow is the Empress’s birthday banquet. We walk in, we trigger the imperial slaughter, the mission hits one hundred percent completion, and I instantly yank your soul out of this failing biological shell. You just have to hold on."