Chapter 60: Manner of their Downfall...
Keiser gritted his teeth, staring at Lenko with a fury he could barely contain.
Lenko, however, only met his gaze with the steady expression of a man who had already made his choice... and who had no intention of regretting it.
"I’m a Reinhardt," Lenko said firmly, his voice steady despite the tension in the air. "As your vassal, it’s my responsibility to make sure his highness lives. If I let you push yourself any further, after everything you’ve already gone through... that wouldn’t be responsibility. That would be negligence."
Keiser’s eyes followed Lenko’s... down to his own hand, still bandaged, blood beading still. The state of his body spoke louder than words. Layers of linen bound his torso and shoulder, climbing almost to his neck beneath the tunic and cloak.
Strips of bandages wrapped both arms, winding all the way down his calves. His body was a patchwork of wounds, and every movement reminded him of it... the dull throb of muscles forced to heal too quickly, the tight pull of fresh scars not yet settled.
Fever had only just broken, leaving his body overheated, his head heavy, his breaths weighted with the ghost of sickness.
He should still have been resting. Recovering. He should have been lying still, letting time knit his body back together.
But he couldn’t. Not when he was standing here, right in the middle of the storm’s eye, with too much already at stake.
He wasn’t fit to fight... not properly. Not recklessly. Not the way he once had.
And yet, Keiser knew.
If he faltered here, if he gave in to weakness now, it wouldn’t simply be him who fell. It would drag them all down with him. And that was something he could never allow.
That truth only stoked the fire in his chest.
Anger surged through him, sharp and suffocating. He hated it... hated the way Lenko looked at him as though he was something fragile, something to protect.
Because deep down, Keiser couldn’t shake the feeling that he wasn’t doing his part. That he was failing.
Once, he had led men into the thick of battle. He had stood at the forefront, blade cutting the path forward, scars and blood tallying the weight of his command.
He was the one who bore the brunt, who carried the bloodiest hands, who made certain the others could follow through. That was who he was. That was who Keiser had always been.
But now... now he was trapped in a body that dragged him down. Muzio’s body.
A body that, even with its abundant mana and the strange edge of blood scripting he could wield almost by instinct, could never fully match what Keiser once was.
He had plans... clear steps, carefully laid paths.
He knew how to shape the future, how to drive things toward the outcome he wanted. But here, he couldn’t seem to make it work. He couldn’t communicate the strategy, couldn’t rally this frail flesh into the commander’s role he was used to.
And beneath it all, emotions he had tried so hard to suppress since waking as Muzio surged up at the worst possible time.
The old betrayal. The pain of inhabiting a life that wasn’t his. The endless frustration at his own limitations... at being too slow, too weak, too uncertain when every second mattered.
If he wasn’t stronger, faster, sharper, then the future would repeat itself.
The same losses. The same ruin.
It was too much.
The words tore out of him before he could stop them, far louder than he should have allowed in the stifling dark of the dungeon, where every echo might betray them to the knights.
"I don’t need you to do that," Keiser snapped, barely recognizing his own voice. "I never did." His rage and desperation bleeding together.
The echo rang sharp against stone walls, lingering like a knife-edge in the silence that followed.
And in that hollow stillness, Keiser wasn’t sure who he had meant the words for... Lenko, standing resolute before him, or himself.
The truth was, Keiser hadn’t been like this for recklessness’s sake. He’d been baiting the elf, needling them into anger, because he needed something only they could grant.
His plan... if it could even be called one... was to force the elf into laying a death-curse upon him and Lenko both.
A curse meant boundaries.
A curse meant rules.
With such a seal binding them, there would be a threshold, a fixed point that said when, how, and where Muzio’s and Lenko’s ’deaths’ would come.
It would no longer be a wild, untethered fate drifting out of his reach, but something he could see and brace against.
It was a dangerous gamble, and he knew it.
He also knew he couldn’t explain it to Lenko... not now, not in the middle of this corridor, with the elf’s shadow twisting over them.
If he confessed what he was doing, Lenko would never allow it.
He’d pull him back, curse him for madness, and the chance would slip away.
So Keiser bore the weight of silence. He let Lenko believe he was being reckless, stubborn, su*cidal.
It was easier than admitting the truth... that he was trying to write their deaths into the world on his terms, rather than wait helplessly for fate to spring its trap.
Because the future he carried in his head... the one that belonged to Muzio, to Lenko, to him... was already clouded.
He knew something was waiting down the line, an end marked with blood and ruin.
But the shape of it was blurred, smudged as though smeared across the glass of time.
Knowledge without clarity.
Warnings without maps.
And to walk forward like that, blind and stumbling, was to doom them all the same.
So Keiser reached for the one thing he could still seize.
Control over the manner of their downfall.
If the elf cursed them, then their deaths would no longer be a mystery but an inevitability he could see coming.
He could prepare.
He could change the edges around it.
He could turn what fate meant for an end into a line he could bend.
It was madness, perhaps. But it was the only madness that made sense.