The Count dismissed as well the damsel in the Persian veils and his lion. She was, alas, a fruit still a touch green upon the bough, and several more weeks of spring had to pass before she would be ripe for summer plucking.

  He retired then to the great sleeping dais, on which had sat his obedient consorts. One poured him an aromatic tea, while another fed him sweetmeats with her own delicate fingers, and a third applied herself to the kneading of his weary shoulders. They chirped around him like bush warblers, soothing his spirit with their praise.

  "Those rough men," he complained, "forget too easily whose grain fills their storehouse.”

  "Indeed," agreed one maiden. "They are like dogs that nip the hand which feeds them."

  "My Lord should replace them," urged another. "With men of more loyal heart. And without those ugly tattoos! To cover oneself in patterns like a lizard is surely a sign of a disordered spirit. A man's skin should be as flawless as...as, well, as your skin, Count.”

  "Not merely a Count," flattered a third, leaning close. "In a just world, KK-sama would be a Duke... or perhaps a King! King KK-sama...does that not sound sweeter to the ear?"

  "A King..." He mused. "A King is perhaps too high a cloud...but a Duke, certainly."

  The current title of Count was a recent elevation from the rank of Baron, yet it failed to capture the true breadth of his sway. King Ramiro had tutored him in the wisdom of staying in the shadows: that true power, like the moon, is often most effective when partially obscured. Just as the Company stood behind the Flaming Sun, so did He and Ramiro handle the darker matters of The Empire from behind the curtain.

  And before a fool mistook this bragging as a symptom of manipulation, the King had throughout given him much more material signs of trust beyond the insignificance of titles. One such token was that almost foolishly divulged by the crony.

  But never mind, he thought upon the staff, knowing that the order of secrecy upon these matters would be lifted shortly. Soon, they would take to the field of war, and The Count would openly chill the heart of the enemy with his majestic powers!

  He cast his gaze once more upon the displays of the business council. There, a Nigerian Duke sought to calm the flock of panicking sparrows. One Master of Alchemy had already departed from their ranks, his laboratory shattered and his body dissolved in a vat of corrosive fluids by the Tyrant's hand.

  Man bathing

  Seeing that another merchant with a similar entrepreneurial genius had already claimed the alchemist’s abandoned business, the Count felt a spark of rivalry.

  "Superb!” he cried. "The board is lively, and I have ever relished a contest."

  He tapped the sorcerous displays, tracking the Tyrant’s path of destruction so as not to be caught unawares for the next prime opportunity, and he dispatched orders to his loyalists. With a stroke of his finger, he diverted the coffers built over these days to purchase two thousand fresh maidens. His request claimed these were for the comfort of the troops, to further buffer their morale against the terror, though in truth most would be diverted to the lower functions of administration.

  Plans set in motion, his mind turned to lighter pastimes, specifically to his latest acquisition - the little cat with the eyes of the deep ocean and hair as green as pine.

  He had her brought before him, and after feasting his eyes upon her strangeness, he drew her down onto the silks of his dais. He began to fondle her through her humble servant’s garb, his lips seeking the softness of her cheeks, while she queried, with a voice as flat as her juvenile chest, "What is your intent, my Prince?"

  He paused, a predatory smile playing upon his lips, and whispered a verse in reply:

  “The slenderest branch,

  That bears no fruit to weigh down

  Its delicate spine,

  Is the one that bends deepest

  Beneath the Master’s dew.”

  With that, he delved beneath her robes, his hands seeking the secrets of her form, his gaze locked into the unnatural, abyssal vastness of her eyes.

  These alterations to her flesh, and that of the other maidens of his pleasure district, were a fancy of his own devising. He had perceived, with a clarity denied to lesser men, that the true miracle of these captive women was not merely their obedience, but their infinite malleability. With no fear or protest, their very bones could be lengthened or compressed like warm wax; the shape of their eye could be widened to encompass the moon; the fullness of their flesh could be redistributed to curve and swell in perfect harmony.

  Yet, as intoxicating as this outward sculpting might be, it was the reshaping of the heart that brought the truer ecstasy. He had once feared that his creator’s artifice would leave a blemish, that their mesmerisation would strip some essential quality of feminine resistance and mar the romance like a crack in a bell. But how wrong he had been! As these beauties had escorted him about the camp, they’d clung to his sleeve with a femininity beyond convention. When he spoke, they laughed not with the polite titter of society, but with a sincere, bell-like joy that seemed to spring from the very well of their being. Bestowed the gift of these affections, the Count had awakened to the great tragedy of all lesser human romances prior. No woman of the flesh—even one in the deepest throes of passion—could ever offer such a depth and severity of devotion. For in her, there is always the weed of the Ego, that stubborn, selfish root that stands as a blockade between two souls. While here...while here was the Ideal of womanhood, stripped of that burden of self, a mirror polished to perfectly reflect only the light of her master! In the embrace of such a creature, even the dullest soul could be struck by a divine lightning. In her presence, his every clumsy gesture becomes a dance, his every mumbled word a sutra of wisdom. She draws the nobility out of him as the moon draws the tide, allowing him to stand ever taller in the nakedness of his untrammelled grandeur.

  Love, love, love – this true and deepest love worked a miraculous alchemy, whereby a man, gazing into these eyes liberated from a woman’s judgments, finally beholds the highest nobility dormant in his maltreated loins!

  Overcome by this tsunami of emotion, the Count pressed his face to his kitten’s neck, and recited from the possessing spirit of love:

  “The mountain spring

  Flows clear and obeys the stream,

  Singing but my name;

  Ah, but why does the white snow

  Bear the footprint of a dog?”

  Alas, as his hand sought the warm volumes of her buttocks, the phantom of that crude, ink-stained hand overlaid his own. The memory of her defilement pierced his temples, and the room seemed to tilt like a ship in a swell. He strove to ground himself in her flesh, but the humiliation persisted. He saw again the thug’s ugly smile of challenge, and the snide, averted gazes of the others, judging his failure to strike down the offender.

  Under the weight of this shame, his exaggerated sceptre, which had been struggling throughout to rise, retreated in haste, much as its master had done when confronted by the brute. It shrank away from this spoiled love like a snail into its shell.

  He pulled away, masking his failure with a sigh of exaggerated weariness.

  "The noise of the world is too loud in my ears," he declared. "How can a man attend to the rites of spring when a lunatic rampages at his gate? Business must, alas, take precedence over pleasure."

  The maidens chirped their agreement in a chorus.

  "Truly," one cried, "the Master carries the weight of the world! It is only right that the sword be sheathed until the battle is won.”

  They competed to offer distractions, one suggesting a lotion of rare herbs, another a bath infused with petals, while a third, a girl of somewhat slow wits, innocently asked if perhaps a different concubine might better rouse his spirit.

  Ignoring that last sting, the Count summoned the display of his merchant affairs once more. Upon the battle tracker, the storm of the Tyrant had resumed its march, moving inexorably toward the main encampment of the King, just as the Count’s foresight had predicted.

  He highlighted certain rival businesses along the path of destruction in anticipation of his coming acquisitions, but in that instant, the vision was clouded. The stream of intelligence went dead, his superiors having severed the link to prevent locations being betrayed to the enemy’s ever-spying agents.

  In the communications from the other business proprietors, a flurry of panic ensued. The smiths and lesser merchants were directed to flee the path of the storm. Yet, to the Count’s sector, on the flank of The Empire’s headquarters, no such order came. He noted that one of his satellite brothels lay within the shadow of the enemy’s route. After a moment of weighing the scales, he decided to reduce its staff to a skeleton crew but left the doors open. If the gale of destruction snuffed it out, he would know immediately to seek shelter, proving that the paranoia of his cronies was not entirely without merit.

  The complaint tickets for his business had tripled since he last looked, as more and more of the short-sighted cowards added their bleating to the din. He answered them in a single stroke, dispatching a map of the enemy’s trajectory. He circled a dozen other targets—the armoury, the stables, the granaries—marking them as the true prizes that would serve as their shield.

  One of his concubines huffed with a pretty irritation. "To think my Lord must waste his genius on such matters! I cannot believe you have the patience for these insects.”

  "Now, now," reasoned another, stroking his arm. "We must remember that most souls are born with the depth of a saucer, and such shallow vessels cannot retain much of the world’s over-flowing complexity, unlike King KK-sama!”

  Another girl, renamed Rie, whose beauty was matched only by the emptiness of her head, sighed wistfully. "It is a shame we could not apply the art of mesmerisation to them all. If their minds were swept clean and enslaved, how much easier their lives would be! They could entrust all their anxieties to the rare class of competent decision-makers, like King KK-sama!”

  “Why, Rie-chan," teased another, "that is the most profound thought to ever leave your lips.”

  "Haha! Even a stone may be polished by such a teacher as KK-sama!”

  The Count laughed merrily, his humour restored by this worship. He reached out and grabbed two handfuls of soft flesh with a greedy vigour. "Enough of these dry matters!"

  Taking this as their cue, the girls began to giggle and swarm him like butterflies, their tongues lapping at his neck and nipples through his loosened robes. One hand reached for his groin, attempting to coax the silkworm from its slumber, but, once again, the creature remained obstinately asleep.

  The girl attending to that region quickly shifted tactics. She pushed him gently onto his stomach, announcing that they should begin with a massage to loosen his humours. She asked whose feet he desired to tread upon his back - a pastime the Count was known to favour.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  Feet

  As he lay there, ruminating on his embarrassing reduction to a mere massage, he decided to turn this defeat into a forbidden triumph.

  “Bring back Dina!” he commanded, his thoughts drifting to the Persian girl with the delicate brown toes, imagining how they might knead him into a more vigorous mood.

  Despite this command, there was no response from his concubines. The first girl merely repeated her question as though he had not spoken. Then, appearing in the air before his eyes, came a message from the invisible governors of this world:

  At this cold pronouncement, the last ember of his desire was choked by the bitter ashes of reality. The Count groaned with a profound repugnance. It was not, he reasoned in a silent fume, as if he intended to deflower the child; he sought only the innocent, harmless pressure of her tiny feet. He had, in fact, enjoyed such ministrations before, only the sequence and intention of events having been different.

  The European creators of this world were possessed of a chaotic morality - fascist puritans who sought to wrap even thoughts in cotton wool. It was the logic of cuckolds and moralising losers. It truly made him wonder how King Ramiro had circumvented their arbitrary laws. How was the consumption of human flesh—the very "vore" for which he had become infamous—not considered a sexual violation? Was the man simply murdering children to feast upon them? For nourishment? If so, was that not a degeneracy far deeper than a loving appreciation of a maiden’s budding petals?

  These reflections made the Count, who could not dream of bruising such gorgeous creatures, let alone turning them to meat, shiver with repulsion. For a fleeting instant, a thought passed through his mind that he might have allied himself with a villain. But this shadow vanished as quickly as it had come, chased away by the alluring rise of the figures on his merchant display, and by the heavy, squishing tread of the girls that this nanny-state system had permitted him to savour.

  “Rie and my little cat,” he cried, “you two flowers step on master’s spine!”

  The other concubines lamented as the chosen maidens celebrated, kissing his cheek in gratitude.

  After they mounted, he composed a verse to the rhythmic stamping as it eased his troubled soul:

  “My heart’s tangled knots

  Are smoothed away like silk threads

  Beneath treading feet,

  Finding in each cruel step

  A strange and heavy comfort.”

  This respite was briefly interrupted by one of his pretty loyalists who entered, parroting the warnings of the Arab and begging him to close the trade, the enemy now in striking distance as he ravaged the HQ. The Count, perceiving the puppeteer’s strings behind this diversion, drove the boy out with a stern rebuke, warning him not to forget his loyalties.

  He turned after to his ladies with a question of his equanimity, and they, soothing him like spring rain, praised his inestimable restraint in not slaying the traitor on the spot. They encouraged him to have his guards barricade the doors against further intrusions, that no more discordant voices might disturb their sanctuary of love.

  "It is always the chirping of crickets when one seeks to move a mountain," the Count complained. "These cretins cannot accept that I have weighed the stone against the feather. They do not see that I—even more than they—am not a man to cast my fortune into the sea on a foolish whim."

  His maidens offered up a chorus of praise, their applause falling upon his ears like the sweetest music—shrieking.

  Shit went down quick. The girls on his back fell sideways along with the others being cast off the bed, all launched horizontally towards the walls. The gentle pressure of their feet was replaced: two points of agony digging into his spine. These points instantly slammed down harder with the hydraulic force of a pile driver.

  “Ugh!” he groaned, the air thrust out of his lungs as his ribcage compressed beneath the weight.

  With the crack of twigs, the framing of the bed snapped in two. He sank into it, then, further, as the floor beneath caved in, his stomach lurching sickly in the freefall. All the luxurious shit above and the screaming women receded in a second. Then, lights out as a moving blanket of earth curtained it off above. Down and down.

  Total darkness cast him back into man’s primordial mole sensations. Airlessness. Weight radiating through his back and shoulders. A strong whiff of the cemetery: the raw, dirty stink of wet soil, copper blood, and steel, all fermenting in the stomach of a pig butchered in the tropics.

  Under attack. The first thought of action caught up with his panic. He scrambled for some counter-play. Hit Bullet Time, squirmed around to know the enemy: blindness, hands flailing through the blindness like a fucking noob. A desperate backhand at the thing pinning him. His knuckles rapped against fabric and the hard, undeniable bone of a human ankle.

  On his back: one guy. Just one fucking guy. The only guy, of course.

  "Fuck," he wheezed helplessly.

  The drop stopped hard, rattling his teeth in his skull. The crushing weight lifted, but before he could catch a breath, the ground moved—conveyor belt slide—thrusting him sideways.

  Flashbang. A Lightstone clattered onto the dirt.

  At last, squinting through the glare, the Count saw him.

  The guy: the kid.

  Kid looked like he’d been bathing in a slaughterhouse. Drenched in gore, wearing the troll-tier cosmetic of his farmer’s hat, draped shoulder to waist in the sweatlord-tangle of the other Legendaries. A massive shield—the thing that had crushed him—thudded down next to the kid, working in tandem with some floating obscenity: a woman’s amputated arm. At that abomination’s guidance, the earth of the cavern rippled around them, expanding outwards and flowing upwards to fend off any support flooding in to help above. The crackling fragments of the bed were sucked upwards like a car into a crusher.

  The kid stood there, eyes closed, propriocepting the turmoils above through the dirt.

  The Count felt a cold, sobering wash of reality. All fantasies of grandeur flopped into a moronic vulnerability. Caught pants down with his dick in hand, stroking the flaccid thing.

  The teen flashed a griefer’s smirk. "We can’t have this degenerate smut – not on my pure and Christian battlefield."

  Some of the weapons dislodged themselves. Here it comes, the Count thought, his heart squeezing through the final beats before liquidation.

  But it didn’t come. The swarm shot up through apertures in the ceiling like guided missiles. Noise of men filtered in from above as the labyrinth of earth opened one of its tunnels. Instant later: steel crackling like tinfoil bunched in the palm, grunts, wet gurgling.

  "Can’t believe that worked,” the teen snorted. "Heugh-heugh-heugh-heugh!"

  A mocking laugh – wheezing, seal-like, smugly victorious. The kid cut it short, his ADHD brain pivoting from the massacre above to the loot in front of him.

  "Your speed and performance on the following tests will determine what you keep,” he continued. “First: order your slaves to lie prone - no movement whatever happens. Now.”

  A spike of irrational terror pierced the Count as he complied, firing the order out. Before he could even process the fear’s origin or his next move after, the kid blinked away. Teleportation. Gone.

  More noises whooshing down from upstairs: spells buzzing, men screaming, hacking coughs, metal splitting. The Count scrambled, eyes darting around the cavern for an exit: four squat-height tunnels to the sides, one in the ceiling. Too many choices froze him. He pulled up his command interface, desperate to ping for assistance.

  Disaster. All the nameplates were greying out in clusters by the second. His goons—twinks and thugs alike, the conniving Arab, all of them—just all fucking washed.

  “Test two,” said the teen, reappearing as the noise outside was blocked again. “Don’t snitch about me teleporting back here. I am listening.”

  The kid’s ears were glowing a radioactive yellow. He reclined, falling gently into a bean-shaped chair of dirt. A smoothie glass houdinied into one hand. A straw sliding through his lips pushed in some of the gore caking his face, but there was no indication from his slurping that the flavour caused a bother. Extra tasty notes of raspberry: good shit.

  Refreshing beverage

  The Count stared, and his horror took a bleaker turn. The kid wasn't panting in his seat. No shaking of the muscles – calm and steady as the dead. No sweat either beneath the grime, probably. This demon was just taking a relaxed stroll through one massacre after another.

  Fucking over - everything. The rug already pulled from beneath their stupid feet.

  All his investments? All the Starblitz legacy? His ‘palace of pleasure’? Ash – it was all just fucking ash, just ash like every other enterprise attempted in this land of utter pointlessness.

  The realisation made him to want to weep…but he couldn’t – not yet. Now was his turn to grovel like the pendejo that he was.

  He squirmed on the dirt, dragged himself to his knees, and face-planted into the soil, executing a perfect dogeza. "Arigato for the mercy, Cripple-kun!"

  Kid slurped his beverage. A sadistic relish. Loud. Wet.

  “Nah, for you, Mr Lover Man, redemption won’t be so easy. That’s test four, the main test: you’ve got to kill this flesh business and sabotage any attempted rebuilds. I want it gone.”

  The Count, brain lagging in shock, didn’t catch the skipped number. He sighed. Helpless. Petulant.

  "Well, it is your empire now...but really? Do you have to be this much of a fascist prude?"

  He wanted to go further, pitch the merits of the operation - maybe work a miracle. But a look of the teen’s silenced him: humoured confusion. Kid couldn't believe it. This retard thought this was a negotiation? Thought they were equals brokering some low-cap investment deal? Laughable.

  The kid nodded at The Count’s delayed insight. “Why or how this ends is secondary to the fact I’ve said it will. Either you remove these whores, voluntarily, or—next time I’m forced to hit one of your dens—I’ll be removing them, involuntarily. Your little private collection, as well - don’t imagine you can hide them from the mountain later. I will take time from my schedule just to hunt them out - just to punish you, personally, for continuing to be a delusional fuckup. Back to test three: cough up the contraband.”

  The smoothie blinked out. The hand extended. Fingers slapping the palm. Gimme. Gimme.

  The Count’s heart sank. Further. Impossible depths. The realisation hit like a margin call.

  So it had leaked...

  He summoned the staff. The temperature in the cavern dropped instantly. A genuine Legendary - not the counterfeit trash circulating through the horde. That special token of trust from Ramiro.

  Well, he had been warned. Don't flex the goods to nobody. But, catastrophic retard that he was, he couldn't help it. The disrespect had gotten to him. Sick of being treated by everyone like a washed-up virgin loser.

  He stared at the weapon. Reluctance. But zero power to resist.

  "Could you at least name the rat?" he asked.

  It could have been any of those rats. Everyone conniving to steal his spot on top since day one in this shithole.

  The kid repeated the gesture. Slap. Slap. "This isn’t a trade.”

  The Count threw his head down. Shame. Absolute, beta fucking loser shame.

  Tossed the staff.

  Lazy catch from the kid. Fluid motion: initiated a spell to check the authenticity, cancelled the spell, vanished the treasure into his inventory.

  And that was that: gonezo.

  "Don’t grieve your losses yet," the teen commanded. "That’s another luxury we must relinquish. Refocus on the present. Ask, ‘What do I have that I can still lose?’ Work to keep that."

  The Count, who’d already prostrated in defeat, waved for this bully to teleport onto the next victim on the shitlist. "Yeah, man. Fuck…I heard your threat."

  "Maybe I was too subtle. If you botch this, I’m going to murder your harem. That’s what you’re still gambling on."

  "Yeah, yeah, you’ve won."

  "No. Register exactly what I’m saying: I. Will. Fucking knife. ALL of them. No hesitation."

  The teen spread his hands. A murderer’s flex: behind him, filling the cavern from floor to ceiling, a holographic wall flashed. A kill montage. Thousands of them. Poisonings. Stabbings. Beheadings. Crushings. Bleedings. Each one personally recorded. This first-person highlight reel of atrocities spread out like the manifold appendages of a demonic deity of snuff films.

  The recordings pulsed. Switch up to a sub-collection of favourites: knifings. The specific promise for a pimp’s whores.

  The Count turned away at the obscenity. What a fucking edgelord. The dramatic flair was cringe as fuck.

  "Yeah, I’ll do what I can to shut things down."

  "Nah, what you can do is not sufficient anymore. You’ll need to employ every remaining asset and go far, far, far beyond the pathetic capabilities that brought you to this state. Maybe some desperation will kick you into the proper gear."

  Desperation?

  The Count looked up. Questioning.

  Empty. He was alone in the cavern. Just the solitary Lightstone humming in the dirt.

  But no relief. The tone of the last comment hung in the air. Sinister. Something encroaching.

  Then the ceiling shifted. A wet, heaving motion, like the earth itself was gagging. From out of those churning currents, a stalactite of mud descended. It lowered slowly, agonizingly, dripping slime like a cooling candle. It was too thin to transport the teen - too thin for the bundle of weapons.

  But, as the Count stared, his brain stalling on the geometry, a sick, cold realisation hit him. It wasn't too thin for something else – for someone else.

  "No..."

  The plea died in his throat. His breathing halted. Eyes inflamed, straining against the dark. The loss of the staff, his businesses, the crushed ego - all of it shrank away, suddenly tiny in the face of a growing new despair.

  The earthen casing hung there for a heartbeat, trembling, before it split open. Something fell out. A limp bundle of rags and flesh, tumbling into the dim light. Falling.

  It hit the dirt with a wet, sickening slap - the sound of raw meat dropped on a counter.

  It—she—stumbled forward, driven only by the momentum of the drop. She was making a noise, a wet, rattling hitch in her chest that sounded like a broken fan. Spluttering. Her green hair—once that fresh colour of young pine needles—was matted flat, plastered to her skull by a dark, glistening fluid. Blood dripping everywhere: leaking from her ears, gushing down her neck, nose dribbling.

  She swayed, blind in the gloom, her head wobbling on a neck that looked like a snapped twig.

  "My prince?" she asked.

  The voice was a bubbling ruin. Her lips foamed with pink bubbles. She looked up, the heinous anime eyes blinking rapidly, uselessly, trying to peer through a thick veil of red to find the master who’d brought this ruin on her.

  In the place of the daft poetics, a scream tore from the Count’s chest, raw and human.

  He dashed forward. He caught her just as her legs folded. He cradled her. He sobbed: a pathetic, ugly, heaving sound that echoed in the silence. The frailty of her: the terrifying lightness, like a hollow dove blasted by a shotgun. She bled out onto him, soaking his robes with the heat of her life.

  The fleeting warmth: uncomfortably, feverishly warm, fading.

  Her body gave one final, violent jerk, and then, the tension slackened.

  From out the bloody matting of her crown, the soul rose as a mist. It hovered for a moment of silent judgement.

  The Count was too ashamed to face it.

  He continued to cradle the body as she left, as the last vestiges of temperature trickled away like hot water draining from a cracked teacup, and as she returned to the icy nothing that she’d been before his folly.

  And had he not been spiralling into the woe, he might have waxed his final feelings thus:

  “Cherry blossoms rain

  Upon a fragrant pathway,

  Crushed by passing steps,

  As fools squander affection

  On things destined for decay.”