The Extra's Rise - Chapter 437

Chapter 437: Southern Sea Sun Palace (7)
Daedric Solaryn’s expression darkened as he sat in his grand office, the weight of his thoughts pressing down like an iron mantle. His mind kept circling back to the so-called investigators now housed within the palace walls.

‘I can’t push them away,’ he thought grimly. He knew that much. The Red Sun, with its limited powers he could access, had already shown him enough. Their strength wasn’t just notable—it was alarming.

Li Zenith and Nero Astrellan were both Immortal-rankers. That alone would have been enough to command respect, but they weren’t the problem. No, the issue was him.

Magnus Draykar.

Even with the Red Sun amplifying his senses, Daedric couldn’t gauge the man’s full power. That alone spoke volumes. It was a void, vast and unmeasurable, a presence so far beyond his understanding it felt like staring into an abyss.

A sharp knock on the door jarred him from his thoughts. He straightened, his expression cooling into one of distant authority.

“Enter,” he said, his voice clipped.

The door creaked open, and his daughter stepped in.

“What are you doing here, Deia?” Daedric asked, his crimson eyes narrowing as they settled on her. She resembled him, her crimson hair and golden eyes a mirror of his own. But where his gaze burned with unyielding ferocity, hers held only a soft, muted glow.

“I heard we have guests,” Deia said carefully, her voice quiet but steady.

“We do,” Daedric replied curtly, waving a dismissive hand. “But don’t waste your breath on them. They are nothing to concern yourself with.”

Deia hesitated, her expression conflicted. She seemed poised to say something more, but thought better of it and lowered her gaze.

Daedric’s mood soured further as he studied her. His sharp eyes took note of something that only added fuel to his anger.

“You’ve been training more,” he stated coldly.

“Yes, Father,” Deia admitted softly, though her posture stiffened in preparation for what was to come.

A surge of mana erupted from Daedric like a tidal wave, forcing her to her knees.

“How dare you?” he snarled, his voice like thunder cracking through the air. “Did I not make myself clear? A woman trains no more than four hours a day, twenty hours a week at most! You are destined to bear my heir, not waste your time playing at warriors!”

Deia’s lips tightened, her gaze fixed firmly on the floor as her fists clenched at her sides. She didn’t argue. She never argued. That was not her place—not in his eyes.

Her silence only served to deepen Daedric’s scowl, though he said no more. Instead, he turned his gaze toward the window, his thoughts returning to the investigators and the boy who had no right to exist with such strength.

His foul mood, already a storm, grew darker still.

The door opened again, and two figures stepped inside. Daedric’s eyes flicked toward them before returning to his desk, his expression unreadable as Alyssara Velcroix and Cassius von Noctis entered the room.

“Go, Deia,” he said curtly, dismissing his daughter without so much as a second glance. She bowed silently, her face carefully neutral, and slipped out of the room.

Alyssara watched the girl leave with peripheral awareness, but her mind was elsewhere. The image of Arthur Nightingale surrounded by those four girls still burned in her thoughts, an unwelcome ember that refused to be extinguished. She had been unprepared for the visceral reaction that seeing him had triggered—a strange, hollow ache in her chest that felt both foreign and achingly familiar.

It wasn’t merely the boy’s strength that intrigued her, though that alone was remarkable. Integration-rank yet wielding power beyond the Wall? Such a contradiction should not exist. But it was more than that. Something about his azure eyes, the particular way his brow furrowed when he was concerned, even the cadence of his voice—all of it struck chords of recognition within her that she couldn’t explain.

Alyssara settled into the chair opposite Daedric with practiced grace, her movement fluid and deliberate as always. She maintained her faint, amused smile, the expression as much a part of her arsenal as the crimson threads she wielded in battle. She had perfected this mask over decades, a face that revealed only what she wished others to see—playful cruelty, casual confidence, the benign disdain of a predator amid prey.

But behind that mask, her thoughts churned like a tempest. The golden-haired saintess beside him, the ice princess with her silver hair, the crimson-eyed imperial princess, and the auburn-eyed mage—they surrounded Arthur like defenders around a king. The way they looked at him, the casual intimacy of their movements around him, the protective stance they adopted when her gaze had lingered too long—it all spoke of bonds deeper than mere friendship.

The thought made something dark and possessive twist inside her. A feeling she had no name for, a hunger that went beyond the familiar desire to break, to control.

“Looks like things are getting interesting,” Cassius remarked, sliding into one of the chairs with an ease that bordered on insolence. His obsidian hair framed features too perfect to be anything but inhuman, his crimson eyes gleaming with predatory interest.

Alyssara felt his gaze on her, heavy with desire and desperate devotion. Cassius von Noctis, Prince of Vampires, heir to the Monarch himself—and utterly beneath her notice except when useful. His fixation had amused her once. Now it was merely tedious, a distraction from more intriguing puzzles.

Puzzles like Arthur Nightingale.

“I wouldn’t call it interesting,” Daedric replied with a weary sigh, his gaze flicking between the two of them.

Alyssara could feel the hatred radiating from Daedric. His loathing for vampires was ancestral, passed down through generations of his bloodline. She had never bothered to feign concern about his feelings. What use was the sentiment of a man who would be dust long before her plans reached fruition?

“Alyssara will be dancing at the dinner, right?” Cassius asked, his crimson eyes narrowing slightly, their hue as dark and rich as freshly spilled blood.

Daedric nodded, his fiery red gaze meeting Cassius’s briefly before flicking toward Alyssara.

“Yes,” Daedric confirmed. His gaze lingered on Alyssara for a moment longer than he intended.

She noticed, of course. Alyssara noticed everything—the way Daedric’s pupils dilated slightly, the quickening of his pulse when he looked at her too long, the subtle tells of a man fighting against desire. Men were so transparent, their wants and fears written across their faces for anyone with the patience to read them.

But Arthur had been different. When their eyes had met on the train, there had been recognition—not of her position or her power, but of her. It was as if he had looked beyond the mask and seen something hidden beneath, something she herself had forgotten was there.

A memory flickered at the edges of her consciousness—a field of flowers, sunlight streaming through cherry blossoms, and a crown of woven daisies placed upon her head by gentle hands. The memory was so vivid, so seemingly real, yet she knew it couldn’t be hers. She had never known such gentleness. Such… happiness.

Had she?

“Remember,” Cassius said, his tone calm but carrying the weight of a threat as his fingers tapped rhythmically against the polished surface of the desk, “there can’t be any complications.”

“There won’t be,” Daedric replied evenly, though his words carried an edge of warning. “Not as long as all the vampires are gone.”

“We’re the only two in the palace now,” Alyssara said with a faint smile, leaning back in her chair as if the entire conversation amused her. Her cyan-green eyes sparkled with a playful light, though the sharpness beneath it was impossible to miss. “I’m looking forward to the performance tonight.”

The words, like everything she said, were perfectly poised. A simple statement, yet layered with subtlety and unspoken implications.

But for once, she wasn’t thinking about the dance, nor the carefully orchestrated game they were playing with the investigators. Her mind kept returning to Arthur, to the strange pull she felt toward him.

The flower crown memory had surfaced the moment she saw him—unbidden, unwelcome, yet persistent. It wasn’t her memory. It couldn’t be. And yet… the ache in her chest when she saw him with those girls felt too genuine, too raw to be dismissed.

Alyssara had long ago learned to mistrust her own emotions. Feelings were weapons to be wielded against others, not indulgences to be heeded. Yet this feeling refused to be mastered, refused to be bent to her will.

She would need to investigate this Arthur Nightingale more thoroughly. Perhaps then she could make sense of these fragments of memory, these echoes of someone she had never been.

As the meeting concluded and she rose to leave, a single thought crystallized in her mind: Arthur Nightingale belonged to her, though neither of them yet understood why. And Alyssara Velcroix always claimed what was hers.

The dance tonight would be more than a performance. It would be a declaration—the first move in a game only she knew they were playing.

She paused at the door, her fingers lingering on the handle as another memory flashed before her eyes—clearer this time, almost painful in its vividness. A different world, a different life.

“Are you alright?” Cassius asked, his voice cutting through her thoughts.

Alyssara turned to him, her mask sliding back into place with practiced ease. “Of course,” she replied, her tone light and musical. “Just thinking about the dance.”

But as she walked away, her steps measured and deliberate, the question echoed in her mind like a haunting refrain: Was the memory truly hers? Or was it simply another weapon in a game she didn’t know she was playing—a game where, for the first time in centuries, she might not hold all the cards?