Papers. Papers and more papers. The damn things kept stacking up, no matter what he did with them.

Trajan sighed from behind his desk. The moon was high in the sky, but his assistants and secretaries just kept bringing him papers for him to look over.

Of course, at the sixth-tier, Trajan’s need to eat, drink, and sleep weren’t quite what they used to be—he could probably go for weeks without any if pressed—the human mind still needed those things to function well. In short, Trajan was tired, and while he could keep working if he wanted to, he very much did not.

At least August had been taking more of the reins since his bloodline awakening, taking some of the work from Trajan’s desk. The elder Prince silently hoped that this meant he could return to the Bull’s Horns soon, but he wasn’t going to count on it. There was a tension in the air, an almost terrifying silence to the Royal Palace that gave him the creeps. Made him think that something was going to happen.

There hadn’t been any serious concerns brought before the advisory council, no changes in the King’s condition, no public quarrels between August and Octavius—both Princes seemed to be actively avoiding each other whenever possible, which Trajan believed was for the best—but Trajan still couldn’t shake the feeling of dread he felt as he continued to read through his papers.

Within these dreaded sheets of pulped wood and plant matter was a story that he didn’t want to read but couldn’t stop himself from doing so. He was a Prince, after all, and though he had renounced his claim to the throne and allowed his younger brother to become King, he still felt it was his duty to see peace reign in the land.

But the mercenaries being hired by the high nobility was not a sign of peace. Fifteen percent or so of the nobles living in the capital practically fleeing over the past few months for countryside estates was not a sign of peace. The recent sharp spike in the price of weapons and armor indicating an increase in demand for such things was not a sign of peace.

At least the vampiric threat seemed to be in hand. The Legion had gone after them quite aggressively, and thousands of the blood-suckers had been found and killed, but most of them had been worshippers of a fire demon, lending a troubling amount of credence to Leon’s claim that it was a single demon responsible for so many of the monsters appearing within their borders.

What was more, the investigation into Justin Isynos had, so far, gone nowhere. Not even a single solitary clue had been found connecting Isynos to the fall of House Raime. By all accounts, he hadn’t even been in the Kingdom when Argent Palace had been attacked and Kyros Raime killed.

Trajan couldn’t account for the activities of Justin’s subordinates, though, and so far, the one person that the Spymaster had managed to subvert in Justin’s staff hadn’t found anything of import—just matters to do with Justin’s place in August’s retinue. There were no indications that Justin and his people were doing anything nefarious.

The investigation had gone on for a year with little to show for it. The end of the report that Trajan quickly finished reading concerning these matters ended with a recommendation to end the investigation by the woman that the Spymaster had appointed to spearhead the investigation. Perhaps her recommendation might have been different if she had known that Prince Trajan himself had ordered Justin Isynos to be looked into, but without his word, there was no evidence that Justin was anything but a steward with great diligence toward magical training.

In fact, the only thing truly worthy of noting about Justin other than his being a capable manager and administrator was that his power was still unknown. There were no records of what magical tier he had reached, and no one who had personally interacted with him knew what tier he stood at, though the seventh seemed most likely.

‘Perhaps Julius would know, he appointed Isynos as an Exarch in the first place, but my brother is hardly in a position to divulge anyone’s secrets…’ Trajan bitterly thought, praying to the Ancestors with all that he had that Julius would soon wake.

He momentarily played with the idea of bringing Caecilius back out to chat. The Bluefire Guild founder wasn’t that talkative—or even useful when it came to navigating politics—but he could hold a conversation quite well. The ruby was nearly always in Trajan’s pocket, but as he was still thinking about taking a short break to talk to an old, long-dead mage, his door burst open.

Just behind the door came a knight practically falling into Trajan’s office. He was sweaty, his clothes were in relative disarray as if he had just run a marathon to reach Trajan’s office, and on his face was an expression of pure terror. Trajan recognized the young man; he served as a squire to one of Trajan’s lower-ranked knights and had been recently knighted for his part in killing a small group of bandits along the Gold Road. He had then transitioned into a full-fledged member of Trajan’s retinue.

“Your Highness!” the knight shouted in panic before Trajan could say so much as a single word. “Sir Leon Ursus has been found dead, killed by vampiric assassins!”

Trajan’s vision went red just as his heart seemed to stop. His instinct to act from two centuries of preparing for war kicked in, and without even asking for details, he said to the young knight, “Take me there! Now!”

“Yes, Your Highness!” the knight replied, hurriedly turning around and wasting no time running out of the office.

Trajan had a large retinue, and because of this, he could afford to have a relatively significant amount of force waiting just in case situations such as these came up. When Trajan came barreling out of his office with soaring killing intent, his twenty fourth-to-sixth-tier knights waiting in the wings leaped to their feet and joined their Prince without a word. They didn’t need orders to move when the Prince was so clearly agitated.

As they ran after the messenger knight, those who weren’t already armed and armored retrieved their accoutrements from their soul realms, with Trajan, in particular, pulling out a massive war hammer that seemed to vibrate with earth magic as Trajan’s magic power flowed into it, and a suit of thick plate armor made mostly out of wyvern scales and rare manticore leather. It was expensive, destructive equipment, and Trajan could sense that he’d need it if Leon had been so quickly killed without alerting half the city to the battle.

For the sake of the weaker and slower members of the party, Trajan and his retinue jumped into a few wheelless carriages pulled by fast horses, though they had to wait for an excruciating five minutes as the arrangements were made, during which time Trajan both explained to his knights what was happening and pressed the messenger knight for more details as his head cooled.

For their part, the rest of his knights were at least passingly familiar with Leon since he was so prominent in Trajan’s retinue, and whether or not they liked him all that much didn’t much matter; they were all angry that one of their own had been supposedly killed while they were stuck in the palace not doing a damn thing about it.

“What was Ursus doing?!” Trajan demanded of the messenger knight.

“I’m not entirely sure, Your Highness,” the knight replied. “I simply happened to be in the area and responded to the sounds of battle. Since I could relay the information to you quickly, I left the site to bring word back to you. Knights of the 1st Legion were already arriving by the time I left.”

“And the battle?” Trajan asked.

“Again, Your Highness, I’m not sure, but it seemed to have been short and brutal. No bodies other than Sir Leon’s were found, though a few of the responding knights managed to get a brief look at the assailants and determined that they were vampires.”

Trajan frowned, clarity returning to his mind with the cool night air, and along with that clarity, he started noticing strange things about the knight. The young man seemed nervous—understandably so, but Trajan was still bothered by it—and he was being quite vague in his answers.

However, Leon’s possible death wasn’t something Trajan was going to take any chances with—something was clearly going on and he wanted to investigate it—so he only had one more question.

“Where did this take place?”

“A deserted part of the market district, Your Highness,” the knight hastily replied, quickly furnishing Trajan with all the details that the Prince wanted. The area was on route to the Heaven’s Eye Tower from Leon’s villa, but the zone was commercial and thus devoid of people when it was so late.

As the wheelless carriages pulled up in front of the palace’s main building, Trajan momentarily glanced back over his shoulder. The palace was in a bit of an uproar over one of the Princes sprinting through it fully armed and armored with twenty knights of his retinue in a similar state of agitation, but he wasn’t going to stop and explain himself, even as he saw a number of other knights starting to trickle outside either to watch or to ask him questions. However, he did glance at the weakest member of his party aside from the messenger knight and growled, “Stay here. Find Minerva and tell her what’s happening.”

“… Yes, Your Highness!” the middle-aged fourth-tier knight unhappily replied. He was a strong warrior and had earned his place in Trajan’s retinue. If the Prince was going to battle, then he wanted to be there with Trajan, not looking for Minerva like a lowly courier. Still, if Trajan was asking that of him, then perform that duty he would.

Trajan, his nineteen knights, and the messenger packed themselves into three carriages and they sped off, the messenger guiding them along the way. They didn’t encounter much traffic this late, so the going was quick, and they arrived close to the location before too much longer.

When they arrived, they were ushered in through a cordon of Legion soldiers that had secured the entire zone of the district. The presence of these soldiers quieted some of Trajan’s doubts about what had happened, but in doing so increased his fears that Leon was truly dead. Whether or not that was the case, something had clearly gone down here just based on the Legion presence alone.

The Prince’s heart madly beat and there was a lump in his throat. It was hard for him to fathom that this was happening, but as the messenger led them further into the locked-off part of the zone and they passed more Legion knights, burn marks started to appear on the ground and walls. Marks reminiscent of lightning magic could be seen on nearby walls, and the air itself seemed choked with lightning magic, the stench of ozone permeating through the nearby buildings.

“In here, Your Highness,” the messenger said, bringing Trajan’s group to the door of a warehouse guarded by four Legion knights who bowed on Trajan’s approach. The warehouse itself was clearly in shambles, even from the outside. The door was barely hanging on its hinges, the glass in all of the windows had been recently shattered, and Trajan could see broken furniture inside.

Trajan projected his magic senses in an attempt to survey the battlefield where Leon had supposedly fallen, but when his magic senses touched the building, they were immediately scattered. The entire building had been warded against magic senses.

With a deepening frown, Trajan gave a few practiced hand signals to his knights, and most of them stopped outside the warehouse while only four accompanied Trajan inside. Trajan himself was suddenly aware of just how many knights from the 1st Legion were around; he and his knights were outnumbered by a good three-to-one.

“What was Ursus doing in here?!” Trajan wondered out loud, hoping to get the messenger talking—he knew the place was between the Heaven’s Eye Tower and Leon’s villa, and if Leon did get ambushed here, then he was probably only passing through on the way to either his home or the Tower.

“I couldn’t say, Your Highness,” the messenger smoothly replied.

The warehouse offices that they stepped into were certainly trashed like there had been an intense fight inside, with hardly an intact chair or desk to be seen and papers covering the floor, but Trajan was starting to look more and more to the messenger rather than to the rest of the building.

To his credit, the messenger didn’t bat an eye under Trajan’s scrutinizing gaze and simply led the group on through the offices to the warehouse proper.

Stepping out onto the warehouse floor, Trajan found the place as dark as a moonless night, but he and his knights could still see perfectly fine. The warehouse was relatively large, but not overly so. Large enough that the shelves of goods created a maze that would take a few minutes to search through, even if most of the shelves hadn’t been knocked over, spilling the goods stored on them all over the ground.

“Where is h-“ Trajan began as he turned his attention from the warehouse to the messenger, but a spear came hurtling out of the darkness and pierced right through his armor, soundly interrupting him. Trajan was hurled into the wall by the force of the blow, while the stone floor of the warehouse erupted into spikes, instantly impaling the four knights accompanying Trajan, killing the two fifth-tier knights instantly and mortally wounding the two sixth-tier knights.

Trajan groaned in pain, the spear biting deep into his chest and blood rapidly soaking into the gambeson padding beneath his armor, but he was still alive. Using as much strength as he could, he looked up, and in his darkening gaze, he saw the proud, handsome features of the Earthshaker Paladin stepping out of the shadows.