Cordelia lay stripped naked from the waist up, her wrists tightly bound, violently shoved to her knees before the imposing presence of her fiancée.
The freezing stone floor of the bedchamber bit into her feverish skin. Towering over her was an absolutely devastating beauty with a flawless, heart-shaped face and thick, strawberry-blonde strands cascading like liquid silk over her shoulders.
The girl’s eyes, bright as a cloudless summer sky, stared down with absolute, freezing cruelty. In her left hand, she gripped a tightly braided leather riding crop, while the sharp point of her riding boot mercilessly ground Cordelia’s face into the cold stone slabs.
The breathtaking, heavy swell of her breasts heaved violently against the sheer, diaphanous silk of her nightgown as she let out a sharp hiss of breath, thoroughly disgusted by the spectacular failure the younger Karsfeld heir had just reported.
Vivienne von Drachenberg was the daughter of Eleonora von Drachenberg, the terrifying sovereign of the mighty House von Drachenberg out of Arnsbruck. She was turning sixteen this year and was universally celebrated across the entire Duchy as one of the three great beauties of Ardenia.
However, appearances could be mortally deceiving. Buried beneath that angelic, flawless exterior was a violently sadistic, ruthless manipulator. Only a very select few knew exactly how quickly and with what sheer, psychotic delight she shattered her "toys."
This was precisely how she had violently discarded the legions of suitors and admirers who had passed through her chambers over the years - none of them capable of enduring the sheer physical and psychological torture that brought her such immense pleasure. Cordelia was simply the absolute newest acquisition. Even though Eleonora had explicitly authorized the betrothal for ruthless political gain, Vivienne harbored absolutely zero respect for her fiancée.
Her freezing, piercing gaze drilled into the bare back of the kneeling futa. Vivienne raised her arm and violently snapped the crop. The braided leather violently tore into the skin across Cordelia’s shoulder blades, leaving a blistering, bloody welt.
The younger Karsfeld violently ground her teeth together, desperately choking down a scream, but after two more brutal, blinding lashes, a ragged howl of pure agony ripped from her throat. This only further irritated the sadist, who viciously ground her heel deeper into Cordelia’s temple.
Had Cordelia managed to physically pry her eyes upward, she would have seen the delicate, snow-white silk panties barely concealed beneath Vivienne’s sinfully sheer blue nightgown - a garment explicitly tailored to shamelessly flaunt the aggressive curve of her buttocks, her tiny waist, and her heavy, swaying breasts. However, stealing a glance in that direction would instantly trigger another brutal barrage of lashes, so she desperately opted not to test her luck.
Having violently purged her immediate irritation, Vivienne let out a heavy sigh, lowered the bloody crop, and aggressively grabbed a fistful of Cordelia’s blonde hair, violently jerking her tear-streaked face upward.
"It appears that absolute, pathetic weakness is a genetic trait in your bloodline. How utterly repulsive..."
She rose gracefully from the edge of the mattress, casually shoved Cordelia flat onto the stone floor with her boot, and deliberately, heavily sat herself down upon the girl’s sweating, bruised back, treating her battered body as nothing more than a fleshy footstool.
"You are completely useless, do you understand that?"
The catastrophic failure of the assassination plot against Seraphine had plunged her into a genuinely foul mood. Exactly how mathematically difficult was it to slip poison into the cup of a sickly, half-dead futa?!
Not only had Cordelia spectacularly botched the execution, but the miraculously surviving Seraphine had aggressively pulled herself together, violently launching into physical training, completely obliterating the meticulously laid plans of Vivienne and her mother.
To make matters infinitely worse, intelligence had just reached Arnsbruck that the terrifyingly powerful House von Rosenfeld of the Greifenmark had officially betrothed their daughter to Karsfeld. If they failed to violently eliminate Seraphine and install Cordelia on the Baronial throne within the next few years, this entire betrothal would become absolutely mathematically worthless to House von Drachenberg.
Cordelia groaned in pain under the crushing weight of the aristocrat sitting upon her spine, while Vivienne muttered venomously under her breath:
"If you want something properly butchered, you truly have to do it yourself..."
Noticing the battered, bruised girl stealing a desperate glance upward at her, Vivienne’s face violently twisted in pure disgust. She aggressively shoved the heavy leather handle of the riding crop straight between Cordelia’s lips, violently shoving her head back down to the floor:
"Do not dare aim those pathetic eyes at me, you useless piece of trash! You haven't earned that privilege!"
Cordelia violently jerked her gaze away, spitting the leather handle from her mouth, and choked out a desperate, trembling question:
"Forgive me, my lady... What... what exactly do you intend to do?"
A venomous, sickeningly sensual smile bloomed across Vivienne’s angelic face, sending an involuntary, freezing shudder of absolute terror down the younger futa’s spine.
"Is it not painfully obvious? I am going to ride with you back to Karsfeld and personally break your elder sister. Hopelessly infatuated and utterly broken on her knees, she will desperately beg for my mercy, and then I will quietly suffocate the life out of her. Since you clearly lack the spine to execute such a childishly simple task."
Cordelia felt a violently conflicting war detonate in her chest. Her fiancée intended to sexually seduce Seraphine?!
Despite suffering through all these brutal humiliations and lashings, Cordelia herself hadn't even managed to drag Vivienne into her own bed yet!
The sharp, burning sting of intense sexual jealousy hurt vastly more than the bleeding welts on her back, but a split second later, a dark, sick satisfaction began to fester in her mind: if Vivienne was this absolutely merciless toward her, exactly what kind of hell awaited that arrogant Seraphine once she was hopelessly trapped in the sadist’s web?
Without waiting for a single syllable of protest, right on cue, Vivienne barked imperiously toward the heavy oak doors:
"Rika!"
The massive doors violently swung inward immediately. Striding into the chamber was Rika Voller - a towering, heavily muscled futa fully encased in gleaming, polished plate armor, a heavy broadsword strapped to her hip.
The sight of her sovereign lady sitting in practically nothing on the bare, bleeding back of her fiancée didn't trigger even a micro-expression of surprise on the veteran guard’s hardened face. She was entirely desensitized to these psychotic whims. She dropped to one knee with a heavy clash of steel.
"I await your command, my lady."
"Pack my trunks immediately. We are riding for Karsfeld."
Rika didn't even flinch. While acting as a glorified maid was a task entirely beneath the dignity of a sworn knight, she knew exactly what happened to anyone who dared defy the young Drachenberg heir.
"By your command, my lady!"
The armored warrior vanished back into the corridor. Within a matter of hours, a massive, heavily armed escort would be fully mobilized, hauling Vivienne and her battered, bleeding plaything directly toward the borders of Karsfeld.
***
Meanwhile, back in Karsfeld, Seraphine had devoured a massive, protein-heavy breakfast and marched straight down to the river to initiate the violent execution of her mechanized irrigation project - an aggressive, wheel-driven pivot system Evelyn knew flawlessly from her previous life.
This technology would permanently eradicate the grueling nightmare of hauling water by hand, successfully irrigating hundreds of acres while drastically reducing the brute manual labor required in the fields.
As she strode into the riverfront manufactory, Sabine Keller was aggressively overseeing the cooling of the latest batch of heavy steel ingots. Spotting the heir, the veteran futa vigorously wiped her calloused hands on the leather apron stretched across her muscular frame and greeted her with absolute, beaming pride:
"A glorious morning to you, my lady! I have been eagerly awaiting your operational directives on exactly what we are doing with all this steel!"
Seraphine flashed a wicked, predatory grin:
"I heard my Sire paid you a rather frantic visit yesterday. Did Adelgarde not issue her own absolute mandates regarding this newfound wealth?"
Sabine awkwardly scratched the back of her thick neck, leading the heir deeper into the heavily fortified brick warehouse:
"I eventually managed to tactfully convince her to delegate total operational authority back to you. When the Baroness laid eyes on this literal mountain of refined iron and steel, she was completely paralyzed by shock!"
Seraphine let out a short, sharp laugh. In her mother's position, she would have been equally terrified by the sheer scale of the operation.
"A highly tactical move. We will liquidate roughly three to five tons immediately to aggressively gorge the treasury. In this volatile geopolitical climate, we will absolutely not lack desperate buyers for weapons-grade bullion."
"And what of the vast majority?" Sabine asked, violently scratching her chin in anticipation.
The manic, obsessive fire of an engineer ignited in Seraphine’s sapphire eyes. She aggressively unrolled the massive schematics for the irrigation network across a heavy wooden workbench.
Sabine leaned her heavy frame over the drafts, her razor-sharp mechanical instincts instantly deciphering the sheer, terrifying genius behind the deceptively complex network of interlocking pipes and wheeled, pivoting sections.
"This is a mechanized engine designed to water the earth?" the master artisan asked in absolute, hushed disbelief.
"Precisely. Mathematically project our entire valley bound by this network - not a single furrow will ever go dry, and our crop yields will violently skyrocket past our most aggressive projections."
Sabine stared out toward the distant, rolling fields, where peasant women were currently breaking their backs hauling heavy wooden buckets. After a long moment of calculation, she raised a thick eyebrow:
"Will this not permanently eradicate the livelihoods of hundreds of women currently tied to the hoe?"
Seraphine slammed a firm, reassuring hand onto the artisan’s heavy shoulder, flashing a fiercely ambitious grin:
"We are going to violently rip them out of the mud and permanently station them at the helm of modern manufactories and mechanized workshops! They will receive a vastly superior, living wage for their labor."
The very word "manufactories" violently ripped the blinders off Sabine’s eyes, suddenly illuminating the absolutely terrifying scale of Seraphine’s ambition. The young heir had absolutely zero intention of stopping at a single steel mill. Her strategic vision mathematically projected decades into the future.
Construction on the primary arteries of the irrigation network was to commence immediately - Sabine aggressively calculated that within a few short months, the very first steel pipes would roll out into the fields, officially laying the industrial bedrock for the impending era of mechanized steel plows and automated seed drills.
Having fully locked in the technical parameters, Seraphine marched back up to the fortress. It was time to aggressively deploy diplomacy.
She locked herself in her chambers to rapidly draft a flurry of formal invitations targeted at the surrounding vassals, landed knights, and the subordinate houses officially swearing fealty to Karsfeld. She possessed the absolute perfect tactical pretext: an extravagant, formal engagement gala to celebrate her betrothal to Rosalie von Rosenfeld.
Initially, Evelyn’s modern sensibilities had violently recoiled at the concept of marrying a cousin - in her former world, such an act was universally condemned as abhorrent.
However, little Rosalie had proven to be a girl armed with a genuinely golden heart, completely uncontaminated by toxic aristocratic arrogance. And even if the betrothal was ultimately nothing more than a temporary, ruthlessly calculated political shield, a lavish gala provided the absolute perfect tactical theater to drag every local feudal lord under one roof and violently demonstrate that the frail, pathetic Seraphine of the past was permanently dead and buried.
As she aggressively scratched her quill across the heavy parchment, a soft, incredibly timid knock echoed against the oak door. Seraphine set the quill aside and pulled the heavy door open.
Standing on the threshold was Rosalie, carefully balancing a wooden tray loaded with spiced ginger biscuits and two steaming mugs of milk. The girl was dressed in a tightly fitted, incredibly elegant domestic gown, her cheeks burning with a delightfully charming, rosy flush.
"Would you... care to share a snack with me?"
Seraphine simply didn't have the heart to refuse. She warmly invited her fiancée inside, pulling up a heavy wooden chair right beside her desk.
As the young aristocrat carefully set the tray of sweets down, her sapphire gaze instantly darted toward the corner of the chamber, locking onto the heavy iron dumbbells and kettlebells.
"What exactly are those heavy blocks of iron?"
Seraphine bit into one of the crisp biscuits, the aggressive spices instantly triggering a wave of nostalgia for the baked goods of her former life.
"They are specialized tools for physical conditioning. They are mathematically designed to aggressively build raw strength and muscle mass."
Rosalie instantly lost all interest - the prospect of violently sweating over chunks of raw iron held absolutely zero appeal for her; she vastly preferred maintaining her narrow waist through leisurely strolls and courtly dancing.
Instead, her bright sapphire eyes locked onto the towering stacks of freshly inked parchments.
"And all these letters? To whom are you writing?"
Seraphine washed the biscuit down with a gulp of warm milk, casually gesturing toward the massive pile of documents:
"These are formal diplomatic summons for our official engagement gala. I intend to aggressively drag the entire local aristocracy here to publicly formally announce our alliance to the continent. With you standing firmly at my side, it will be vastly easier to violently secure their political backing and permanently butcher the pathetic rumors regarding my supposed frailty."
Rosalie stared at her, completely spellbound, tiny sparks of absolute, starry-eyed infatuation dancing in her gaze.
Seraphine was mobilizing a massive, extravagant gala exclusively to celebrate their betrothal?!
In the eyes of a twelve-year-old girl raised on an aggressive diet of romantic courtly literature, this was the absolute, undisputed pinnacle of romance!
While in Evelyn’s former world such lavish corporate networking events were standard operating procedure, she completely failed to compute exactly how devastatingly powerful an impact this calculated diplomatic gesture was having on her young fiancée.
"When exactly will this grand ball take place?" the young lady practically vibrated with excitement.
"In roughly a month and a half. I must first aggressively liquidate a fraction of our steel reserves to mathematically cover the massive logistical costs. This absolutely cannot be a modest, budget affair."
Knowing exactly how violently Adelgarde panicked over draining the baronial treasury, Seraphine had ruthlessly decided to finance the entire extravagant operation exclusively from her own industrial profits, saving her Sire from a massive coronary.
They spent the entire remainder of the afternoon happily devouring sweets and aggressively plotting the logistical minutiae of the upcoming ceremony.
Both women remained entirely, blissfully oblivious to the horrifying reality that an absolute, terrifying storm was currently marching straight toward the borders of Karsfeld, riding under the banner of the psychotic Vivienne von Drachenberg.