Chapter 39: Flashback: Angry Assets and Dark Magic

Cassius’s red eyes sharpened with absolute seriousness. The gravity of their situation pressed down on his massive frame like a lead weight.

"What plan?" he murmured, leaning his head lower. His entire focus sharpened to catch the next words before they could be lost to the damp, suffocating twilight of the bedroom.

Fukuro didn’t answer immediately. Instead, a slow, calculated smirk curled the corner of his lips. He closed his eyes cinematically, tilting his chin upward with an exaggerated air of theatrical importance while his ink-stained fingers adjusted his crooked glasses with a sharp click.

"Mr. Cassius Victus," Fukuro began, his voice dripping with a chilly, unyielding professionalism that belonged in a high court tribunal rather than a rotted bedchamber.

"According to the historical annexes of the Upper Terrace, as well as several poorly preserved census registries, I am under the impression that you were born as a slave."

The giant’s brow dropped into a heavy, dangerous frown. The raw absurdity of the statement collided violently with his exhaustion.

"Is this even a time to discuss this?" Cassius hissed, a low rumble of genuine frustration vibrating through his torn chest. "What rubbish are you saying?"

The moment the frustration broke from Cassius’s lips, Fukuro’s entire bureaucratic demeanor shattered into pure, cartoonish melodrama.

The small clerk’s eyes suddenly began to shimmer with a watery, oversized brightness behind his lenses.

His lips pouted out in a ridiculous, exaggerated show of mock hurt. Before the giant could even register the movement, Fukuro lunged forward on his tiptoes. With lightning speed and theatrical precision, he placed his rigid pinky finger directly against Cassius’s cracked, bleeding lips to silence him.

"Baby, look there," Fukuro said.

He pitched his voice into a high, dramatically sweeping lady’s falsetto, batting his eyelashes with the frantic energy of a stage actress in a cheap tragedy. He aggressively tossed his head toward the heavy oak door, his spectacles sliding a catastrophic full inch down the bridge of his nose from the sheer force of the gesture.

Cassius’s face turned from pale to a violent, suffocating gray. In a fraction of a second, the blood-red humanity in his irises vanished entirely. His eyes went void, pitch black, swallowing the twilight of the room like two empty graves.

He didn’t just snap; his self aristocratic pride collided head-first with a wall of pure, unadulterated administrative disrespect.

With a guttural roar that rattled the loose windowpanes, Cassius raised a massive, soot-covered fist. The air around his knuckles warped, whistling with a sudden, lethal velocity as he drove the punch straight toward Fukuro’s arrogant, pouting face. It was a strike meant to turn the little clerk into a smear of linen and ink against the floorboards.

But the universe, or perhaps Fukuro’s pure survival instinct, had other plans.

Time slowed to an agonizing, cinematic crawl.

As the giant fist closed the distance, Fukuro’s magnified eyes behind his glasses went wide with a sudden, comical terror. The administrative mask didn’t just slide off; it exploded. With the frantic, erratic grace of a startled pigeon, Fukuro flapped his arms wildly, his small body swinging sideways in a ridiculous, physics-defying arc.

His lips stretched into an oversized, rubbery wail as he drifted through the air in extreme slow motion. A low, distorted murmur rippled out of his throat, echoing through the suffocating silence of the chamber:

"I... WAAAANT... TOOO... LIIVEEEE---!"

His spectacles peeled entirely off his ears, floating horizontally alongside his head as his muddy leather boots kicked uselessly at the empty air.

Cassius’s fist missed the clerk’s nose by a literal millimeter, the sheer wind of the punch spinning Fukuro around like a top. The massive, unstoppable force of the blow carried forward, burying itself dead-center into the solid obsidian pillar standing like a sentinel at the entrance of the bedroom.

CRACK.

The sound was sharp and deafening, like a lightning strike inside a cave.

For a single, breathless second, time snapped back to normal. Cassius froze, his knuckles buried deep in the dark, polished stone. Then, a web of glowing, pale grey fractures spider-webbed up the length of the pillar. The ancient, heavy column groaned under its own weight, tilted at a pathetic angle, and slowly- almost politely- toppled forward, crashing into the grit of the threshold with a heavy, dust-billowing thud.

Fukuro sat flat on the floorboards, his legs spread wide in a ridiculous, undignified V-shape. His crooked spectacles hung completely upside down from his left ear, dangling like a broken pendulum. His cheap linen uniform was covered in a fresh layer of dark obsidian dust.

He stared blankly at the ceiling, his lower lip trembling as he let out a pathetic, breathy whine.

"Madam... why me—?"

Before the final syllable could even leave his throat, the massive, cracked obsidian pillar finished its slow-motion tilt. It toppled over with a heavy, unceremonious THUD, landing directly on top of the small clerk.

The heavy stone pinned him flat against the floorboards, burying him up to his chest like a poorly placed paperweight. A tiny puff of grey dust erupted from beneath the pillar, followed by a faint, metallic clink as his upside-down glasses finally detached from his ear and slid across the grit.

A few paces away, Cassius stood in absolute, rigid silence.

The void pitch-black had receded from his eyes, leaving them dull, bloodshot, and overflowing with pure, unadulterated frustration. He didn’t look down at the wreckage. He didn’t check to see if the annoying human was still breathing. Instead, the giant firmly closed his eyes, aggressively crossed his massive, soot-stained arms over his chest, and turned his head entirely to the opposite side of the room.

His jaw tightened until the bone clicked, his broad shoulders heaving with a deep, irritated sigh that blew a small cloud of lavender dust off the nearby bedsheets. He looked less like a terrifying, battalion-shattering sorcerer and more like a deeply exhausted parent who had completely run out of patience at a county fair.

Madam Florianthum’s perfect porcelain composure completely fractured. Her eyes widened in a look of sheer, frantic panic as she stared at the pile of expensive debris. Because she could not speak directly to Cassius without triggering the tower’s hungry, listening wards, she lunged forward into the twilight and began to gesture with manic, over-the-top intensity.

She pointed a rigid finger at the heavy obsidian column, then pointed at Cassius, violently throwing her arms upward in a silent, theatrical pantomime that clearly meant: Pick up the rock! Lift it! Now!

She repeated the motion faster and faster, her face contorting into a mask of desperate, silent pleading. The only problem was that Cassius remained entirely rigid, his massive arms crossed tightly over his chest, his eyes firmly closed, and his head turned completely toward the opposite wall in petulant, stubborn frustration. He was intentionally, aggressively ignoring the entire room.

From beneath the crushing weight of the ancient stone, Fukuro’s muffled voice erupted with a screech of absolute, unadulterated exasperation.

"He is not even looking! What on earth are you doing, Mad-aaammm?!" he shouted, his voice cracking into a high-pitched wail as the heavy obsidian column thoroughly squished his small frame against the grit of the unwashed floorboards.

His legs kicked uselessly in their V-shape, sending up tiny, pathetic puffs of grey dust with every squirm.

"Your elaborate, interpretive dance routines are entirely lost on him! He has completely disconnected from reality!"

Cassius’s jaw tightened until the bone threatened to splinter. The sheer, overlapping absurdity of the clerk’s muffled shrieks and the frantic, silent rushing of Florianthum’s skirts in his periphery finally eroded the last of his ancient patience. A dangerous, low-frequency hum began to vibrate through the floorboards- not from the distant pipelines, but from the marrow of his own bones.

He was done being treated like a logistical inconvenience.

With an irritated, sharp intake of breath, Cassius uncoiled his massive arms and snapped his eyes open.

The blood-red humanity was gone again. In its place, two hollow voids of pitch-black re-ignited, but this time, the darkness was too volatile to be contained. A thick, ink-like black fire, viscous as melted oil, began to weep from the corners of his eyelids. It didn’t fall; it flowed upward and outward, a dark liquid smoke that defied gravity, licking across his pale cheekbones in a jagged, silent frenzy.

He raised his right fist, where the raw knuckles were still split and weeping from the impact with the stone. Thick, heavy drops of his own royal purple blood welled from the gashes, vibrant and glowing with an unnatural, toxic luminescence in the twilight.

Cassius didn’t speak.

He simply snapped his hand forward, flinging the glowing purple droplets directly into the rising tendrils of the black ocular fire.

The moment the two fluids collided, reality in the small space between the bed and the doorway seemed to buckle.

The purple blood and the black liquid flame violently fused, melting into a roiling, unstable pool of dark purple magical liquid that hovered in the air. The substance hissed like hot iron dropped in snow, churning with a wild, hungry sentience. With a sudden, fluid snap, the floating mass elongated, twisting and knitting itself together until it took the distinct, terrifying shape of a colossal, multi-jointed hand.

The spectral appendage, dripping with dark purple ooze, lunged downward toward the floor.It clamped its massive, liquid fingers around the shattered obsidian column pinning the clerk. With a single, effortless jerk that looked as casual as swat his away a fly, the magical hand hoisted the multi-ton pillar off Fukuro’s flattened chest and hurled it violently across the room. The stone sailed over the bedstead, crashing into the far corner with a deafening splinter of wood and a fresh eruption of ancient lavender dust.

Fukuro lay flat on his back for a single, breathless second, his chest rising and falling like a pair of frantic bellows. His knees trembled so violently they knocked together with a soft, rhythmic clink-clink-clink against the grit of the unwashed floorboards. Slowly, like a snail testing the air after a storm, he pushed himself up onto his elbows. His spectacles were still dangling precariously off one ear, and a thick, sluggish drop of dark purple magical ooze was vibrating on the very tip of his nose.

He looked entirely unhinged, shivering from head to toe with a frantic, cartoonish energy, but the administrative mask was already trying to claw its way back onto his face.

"E-exactly!" Fukuro squeaked, his voice pitching an octave higher than usual as he pointed a violently trembling index finger at the giant. He wiped the purple ooze from his nose with a shaky sleeve, though it only succeeded in smearing his cheek.

"T-this... this was precisely the plan to make you angry in the throne court, you see! Yes! All calculated! Because a furious, battalion-shattering sorcerer is highly predictable, making it infinitely easier for us to catch and infiltrate the vampire lord’s most precious pet!"

Cassius didn’t move a muscle, but the volatile, ink-like black fire slowly receded from his eyelids. The dark purple liquid hand dissolved into a harmless mist of grey soot, leaving only the faint scent of ozone and copper in the air. His eyes turned back to their normal, blood-red human state, narrowing into a look of profound, icy disgust.

He looked down at the shivering clerk, his chest heaving with a slow, dangerous rhythm. When he spoke, his voice was a low, rude, and deeply irritated growl that cut right through Fukuro’s trembling panic.

"Brief," Cassius commanded.

Fukuro scrambled to his feet, his muddy leather boots slipping once on the floorboards before he caught his balance. He aggressively shoved his glasses back up the bridge of his nose, clearing his throat with an incredibly loud, dry, and entirely unnecessary sound to regain his professional dignity. He crossed his arms tightly, trying to look elegant despite the obsidian dust coating his hair.

"To make you angry so you would use your power for our profit, Mr. Victus," Fukuro stated fluently, his tone snapping right back into that flat, aggressively loud monotone of a tax collector.

"An angry asset is a productive asset. Now, if you are quite finished demolishing the bedroom infrastructure, we have a tight schedule to keep."