The emergency evacuation horn continued screaming through the shattered forest, its piercing wail vibrating straight through the black ash beneath Scarlett’s boots.
The blood-red light of the emergency crystals pulsed across her face, casting long, eerie shadows over the smoking remains of the Elder Dread-Stalker.
She was still breathing heavily, her chest heaving with exhaustion as she stared at Valerius.
The faint curve of his lips felt more unsettling than the monster she had just killed.
Before she could form a single word to counter his chilling prophecy, the heavy crunch of tactical boots shattered the silence.
”Step away from the scholarship student, Lord Thorne!”
Chief Enforcer Ethan strode through the settling fog, his green kinetic energy humming violently around his fists.
Behind him, a dozen elite enforcers moved in a tight tactical formation, their plasma weapons raised.
But their eyes weren’t on the danger around them.
Every single barrel was pointed directly at Scarlett’s chest.
”By order of the Academy Defense Matrix and the high mandate of the Syndicate Council,” Ethan announced, his face grim, “Scarlett is to be detained immediately for displaying unregistered, high-threat forbidden mana.”
”Detained?!” Julian Vane’s voice cracked from the sidelines as he stumbled out from the ash, his face pale but his eyes burning with a sudden, toxic malice.
“She didn’t just deploy it, Commander!
She controlled the volcanic core!
She is a dangerous anomaly hiding in our ranks!”
Julian stepped forward, his eyes locking onto Scarlett with a freezing intensity.
As her hidden hunter handler, his mind was racing with fury.
How dare this weapon expose herself like this?
He needed to drag her back under his control before the Syndicate stripped her away from him.
”Drop the weapon and kneel, human,” Julian hissed, stepping closer to Ethan’s squad, trying to assert his authority over her.
“Your mental block is failing.
Hand over the stylus-dagger before the kinetic barriers crush your neural network.”
Scarlett’s jaw clenched so hard she tasted copper.
The star-shaped scar on her wrist was throbbing with a dull, angry heat.
She looked at the weapons pointed at her, then at Julian’s manipulative, toxic gaze.
This is the trap, her mind whispered.
If she kneeled, Julian and her handlers would lock her away forever.
If she fought, the enforcers would kill her.
But before she could even shift her weight into a combat stance, a freezing, absolute pressure swept through the clearing, instantly suffocating the humming plasma weapons.
He simply took a single, deliberate step sideways.
His broad, armored frame completely blocked Scarlett from their line of sight, standing between her and the entire world like an immovable mountain of shadow.
”You are barking up the wrong tree, Vane,” Valerius murmured.
His rich, silken voice was quiet, yet it carried an underlying frequency of absolute dominance that made the enforcers instinctively take a step back.
”Lord Thorne,” Ethan warned, sweat breaking on his forehead despite the sudden drop in temperature.
“The High Council’s directive regarding forbidden anomalies overrides even your rank.
Move aside.”
”A directive?” Valerius let out a low, dark chuckle that sent a shiver straight down Scarlett’s spine.
He tilted his head, his bottomless eyes reflecting a dark, sharp focus.
“The Obsidian Forest sits on my family’s estate.
The trial you are disrupting was hosted under my name.
If a hidden weapon is found on my property, Ethan…
it belongs to House Thorne.
Not the Syndicate.
And certainly not to a toxic dog trying to claim what isn’t his.”
His eyes snapped directly onto Julian, his absolute telepathy crushing Julian’s thoughts into pure panic.
“If your hunter cells want her back, tell your supreme commander to file a request at my estate.
Until then, she remains under my personal custody.”
”Valerius, I don’t need your—” Scarlett hissed from behind him, her silver eyes flashing with rage as she tried to push past his armored shoulder.
She hated being talked about like an object.
Without turning around, Valerius reached back.
His cold, pale hand wrapped around her uninjured wrist with an iron, inescapable grip.
He didn’t just hold her; he anchored her behind him, his fingers squeezing tight enough to let her know that any further resistance would be useless.
”Be quiet, little ghost,” he whispered over his shoulder, his tone dropping into a possessive command.
“Let the monsters handle the trash.”
Knowing he had won the psychological standoff, Valerius didn’t wait for Ethan to recover.
With a swift, commanding jerk of his arm, he pulled Scarlett along with him, forcing her to move past the frozen enforcers as he led her straight toward the private VIP extraction shuttle hovering near the edge of the sector.
The moment the pneumatic doors of the private shuttle slammed shut, cutting off the flashing red emergency signals and the roaring wind of the forest, the silence inside the cabin became deafening.
Scarlett violently ripped her wrist out of his grip, her chest heaving with a mixture of rage, pain, and exhaustion.
She slammed her back against the sleek interior wall of the shuttle, glaring at him with pure hatred.
”What the hell do you think you’re doing?!” she yelled, her voice trembling with rage. This chapter was taken from g.com without permission.
“Custody?
Property?
I am not your shield, Valerius!
And I definitely don’t need a psychotic pureblood monster hiding me behind his back!”
Valerius closed the distance between them in a single, blurring stride.
Before she could raise her dagger, his heavy hands slammed against the wall on either side of her head, effectively trapping her body within the narrow space of his arms.
The cold aura radiating from his combat armor pressed against her, shutting out the rest of the world.
He leaned down, his face inches from hers.
His gaze held a strange, unreadable intensity as he stared into her defiant silver eyes.
”You think I did that to save you, Scarlett?” he whispered, his voice a low, gravelly vibration against her skin.
He didn’t look angry; he looked absolutely fascinated by her hatred.
He reached down, his thumb deliberately brushing over the hot, angry red star-shaped scar on her wrist, pressing just hard enough to make her gasp from the intense friction.
”I don’t care about your safety,” he murmured, his gaze dropping to her tightly clenched jaw.
“But you are the first thing in three hundred years that has made my mind go silent.
You are a beautiful, lethal anomaly, Scarlett.
And I am not letting the Syndicate or your pathetic handler Julian dismantle my new favorite mystery before I can figure out how to break you myself.”
Scarlett didn’t flinch.
She leaned forward, her breath mingling with his, her voice dripping with venom.
“Then you’re going to be disappointed, Valerius.
Because the only thing that’s going to break…
is your grip on me.”
The corner of Valerius’s mouth lifted, as though he had just discovered something he refused to let go of.
The shuttle lifted into the dark purple sky, carrying them straight into the waiting jaws of the Grandcrest campus politics.
The scales of the Grandcrest chessboard are shifting.
Valerius has openly drawn a line against the Syndicate to keep Scarlett within his reach, but Julian’s toxic shadow is far from gone.
Question for the readers: Valerius claims Scarlett as his property to ‘protect’ her from the Syndicate, but Julian is her hidden handler who knows her weaknesses.
Who do you think poses a greater threat to Scarlett’s survival now—the psycho king who wants to break her mind, or the toxic handler who controls her past?
Let me know your theories in the comments below!