Chapter 711 --711

Chapter 711: Chapter-711

She looked up at Heena, her mouth opening and closing like a suffocating fish. Her shattered mind simply couldn’t process it. How had this woman just executed her through the bars of a maximum-security prison?

​Heena looked down at the dying tyrant with total, unbroken apathy. With a casual flick of her wrist, Heena tossed the bloody, square-shaped silver blade through the iron bars. It landed with a dull clink right next to the Empress’s convulsing body.

​Then, Heena took a step back into the corridor, her face perfectly composed, and raised her voice so it would echo all the way to the guard stations.

​"Guards!" Heena shouted, her tone laced with a flawless imitation of cold shock. "Come quickly! The Empress has killed herself!"

Heavy, armored boots thundered down the damp stone corridor.

Within seconds, the prison warden and six heavily armed imperial guards skidded to a halt outside Cell Number 8, their halberds raised and their faces pale with panic. They looked through the iron bars and froze, the breath completely knocked out of their lungs.

The deposed Empress was slumped sideways in the filthy straw. A massive pool of dark, rapidly expanding blood soaked into the ground beneath her. Her hands were still weakly clutching her severed throat, but her eyes were completely glassy and fixed on the ceiling. Beside her twitching hand lay the blood-stained, square-shaped silver blade.

The warden, a battle-hardened veteran, stared at the scene in absolute horror. He slowly turned his wide eyes toward Heena, who was standing a polite distance away from the bars, her hands neatly folded in front of her crimson skirt.

"M-Madam Vanguard..." the warden stammered, his eyes darting between the clean-looking warlord and the dead woman. "What... what happened?"

"It is a tragedy, Warden," Heena said, her voice dripping with a flawless, chilling serenity. "I came to deliver His Majesty’s final words to the traitor. But it seems the deposed Empress could not bear the weight of her incoming execution. She must have had a concealed weapon hidden in her rags. Before I could call for you, she ended her own life."

The warden looked at the silver blade on the floor. Then he looked at the narrow gap between the iron bars. Then he looked at the complete lack of blood on Heena’s black silk top.

He knew. Every single guard standing in that corridor knew exactly what had just happened.

But they also knew who they were looking at. This was the Vanguard Madam, the woman who had just orchestrated the slaughter of half the imperial court with the Emperor’s explicit blessing. The Emperor wanted the Empress to suffer, yes, but he ultimately wanted her dead. If the Vanguard Madam decided to expedite the process, it was not the place of a lowly prison warden to accuse her of murder.

"I... I see," the warden swallowed hard, immediately lowering his halberd and bowing deeply. "A tragedy indeed, Madam Vanguard. We will... we will log it as a suicide. I will send a runner to inform His Majesty at once."

"See that you do," Heena nodded approvingly. "Clean this mess up. The stench is giving me a headache."

Without another word, Heena turned on her heel and walked away. The guards instantly parted like the Red Sea, keeping their heads bowed as the hem of her crimson skirt brushed past their iron boots.

She stopped at the front checkpoint just long enough to retrieve her leather-wrapped short sword. She strapped it back onto her thigh, letting the silk skirt fall perfectly over it, and walked out of the heavy iron gates of the Imperial Dungeon.

The humid, heavy night air of the capital hit her face.

Heena climbed into the waiting Vanguard carriage. The moment the heavy wooden doors clicked shut and the carriage began to roll forward, the flawless, terrifying posture of the warlord finally cracked.

She slumped back against the velvet cushions, letting out a long, ragged exhale.

"Host," the System whispered, its digital voice unusually quiet and somber. "One hour and ten minutes."

"I know," Heena murmured, closing her eyes.

The god-like invincibility of the Class-S Vitality Booster was still holding, but the absolute perfection of the high was beginning to fray at the edges. She could feel it—a microscopic, dull throb at her left temple. The dam was cracking. The drug had burned through almost all of her remaining life force, and when the timer hit zero, the intracranial pressure from the blood clot would instantly rebound with catastrophic, fatal force.

"Is the mission log officially closed?" Heena asked into the dark.

"Yes," the System replied, a small, sad blue light pulsing on the opposite bench. "The anomaly is dead. The timeline is secure. You... you did it perfectly, Host. The Bureau is going to use this run as a textbook example for centuries."

The heavy silence inside the ebony carriage was suddenly broken by a faint, unnatural hum.

From the shadows near the velvet ceiling, a small, glowing red ball materialized. It drifted down through the cool air, pulsing with a dense, chaotic energy, looking exactly like a solitary, blood-colored firefly.

Heena didn’t flinch. She simply raised her pale hand and, with effortless precision, closed her fingers around it, trapping the glowing light within her fist.

"Whoa!" the System yelped, its digital lion form jumping back on the velvet cushion, its blue lights flashing in alarm. "What is that, Host?!"

"This," Heena murmured, opening her fingers just a fraction to let the crimson light bleed through the cracks of her knuckles. "Is your anomaly. The exact thing that was causing this entire temporal ruckus."

The System crept closer, sniffing at the glowing orb with holographic curiosity. "Wait... that tiny piece of shit ball is the thing that was making her reborn again and again?"

Heena nodded slowly, her dark eyes reflecting the red glow. "Her ancestors must have been quite formidable to attract something like this. Or, more likely, they sinned so deeply that someone with immense divine power cursed their bloodline with this little ’miracle.’"

"Cursed?" The System tilted its head, genuinely confused. "But Host, how can a regression ability be called a curse? Isn’t that the ultimate good thing? A supreme cheat code?"

Heena let out a dry, humorless laugh, looking at the System as if it were a naive child.

"You idiot," Heena sighed, the exhaustion beginning to seep into her voice. "Do you think feeling your neck being sliced open, drinking poison, or bleeding out on a cold stone floor is fun? Experiencing the absolute terror, the physical agony, and the suffocating despair of death, again and again and again... how could that possibly be a gift? It looks like a blessing to the greedy, but it is the ultimate psychological torture. The curse forces the host to endlessly repeat their life, suffering through countless brutal deaths, until they manage to achieve a result the ’deity’ is satisfied with."

The System went entirely silent, its blue light dimming as the horrifying reality of the Empress’s existence finally clicked into place. The Empress hadn’t been blessed; she had been trapped in a meat grinder of her own ambition.

Heena casually tossed the glowing red orb toward the golden lion.