Ludger did not move. Not even a little.
Gustav went on.
“At the time, some people had begun falling ill in ways that didn’t make sense. Quietly. Not all at once. No obvious outbreak. No visible source that could be pointed at publicly. Just… a strange sickness moving through certain places, certain people.”
His mouth tightened.
“I was not involved in that part. Not directly. But when I received the order, I drew the obvious conclusion. Orleandul was almost certainly the one behind it.”
That landed hard. Not because Ludger had needed confirmation that Orleandul was filth. Because this was another layer of it.
Another proof. Another reason for old blood to stay unsettled. Gustav’s fingers curled faintly against the wood of the chair.
“Arslan’s family treated some of those who fell ill,” he said. “And from what I heard, they were effective. Not enough to cure everyone immediately. But enough to slow the deaths. Enough to buy time.”
Eclaire’s face had gone completely still now.
Rufas said nothing. No one did. Because Gustav had not yet reached the worst part, and they all knew it.
“They delayed the deaths long enough,” Gustav continued, “for a method of treating the curse to begin taking shape. Or at least that was what I heard from the reports passed back through channels.”
Curse. Not disease. Not poison.
Curse.
That word made the whole thing filthier. More deliberate. More cowardly.
“They were a family of apothecaries,” Gustav said, as if that explained everything. “Capable ones. Resourceful. Persistent. The sort of people who would keep digging into a problem until they found an answer if one existed at all.”
Ludger’s jaw tightened once. Gustav noticed. And kept talking, because stopping now would have been suicidal.
“That made them dangerous.”
There it was. Simple.
Ugly.
True to the logic of monsters. Not dangerous because they were warriors. Not because they led a faction. Not because they had armies or wealth or titles large enough to threaten imperial power. Dangerous because they were helping people survive something they were meant to die from.
Because competence, in the wrong place, had made them inconvenient.
“So the order came,” Gustav said quietly. “And because of what they were, because of where they lived, and because killing them openly would have created the wrong kind of attention… it had to be made to look like an accident.”
He paused there. Only for a moment. Then finished it.
“So I gave the job to Hans.”
The silence afterward was immediate and absolute. No one breathed loudly. No one shifted. No one interrupted with outrage, denial, or some useless half-formed attempt to soften what had just been said.
Because there was no softening it.
Gustav had just laid it bare. Arslan’s parents and sister had not died because they chose the wrong side in some grand political conflict. They died because they were too useful to the wrong people.
Too capable of keeping others alive. And Hans had been sent to turn that into an “accident.”
Ludger still had not moved. That frightened the camp more than if he had exploded. His silence no longer felt like restraint. It felt like pressure building inside stone.
Eclaire looked at him once, just once, then back at Gustav.
Gustav studied the murderous look in Ludger’s eyes for a moment longer, then spoke again before that silence could finally turn fatal.
“There is more,” he said.
His voice had gone quieter. More cautious.
Because even he could tell that what he had already admitted was enough to get him killed several times over, and yet the worst part had still not been spoken aloud.
“Orleandul had also begun getting rid of some of his own allies,” Gustav said. “The ones who had started growing uneasy with his methods. The ones who had begun asking too many questions. Or the ones who realized too late that the future he kept talking about looked less like reform and more like a purge with better rhetoric.”
That made Rufas’s expression tighten. Gustav continued.
“Some of them died to bandits.”
Jennifer’s eyes narrowed immediately.
“Convenient bandits,” she muttered.
Gustav gave the smallest nod.
“Yes.”
He didn’t bother pretending otherwise.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
“Others fell ill as well,” he said. “Quietly. Gradually. In the same way as before.”
That made the center of the camp feel even colder. Ludger did not take his eyes off him. Gustav swallowed once, then forced the rest out.
“Just like the Emperor.”
The atmosphere turned eerily quiet after that. Not merely tense. Not just uncomfortable. Quiet in the wrong way.
As if even the wounded people farther back in the hidden camp felt the shape of those words without fully understanding the details. The dim lantern light, the creak of the improvised wheelchair, the distant rustle of fabric in the night air, all of it seemed to recede behind that single implication.
Just like the Emperor. No one moved. No one interrupted. Because once that possibility had been spoken, everything around it became uglier at once. Gustav lowered his eyes for a second, then lifted them again. And finally admitted it.
“Orleandul had a hand in the Emperor’s death.”
There it was. Fully spoken. Not suspicion anymore. Not inference. Not a half-hidden conclusion buried under layers of implication.
A confession. A statement direct enough to poison the air all by itself. Rufas went completely still. Eclaire’s face hardened into something cold and sharp.
Jennifer looked like she had been expecting filth and still somehow found herself offended by the scale of it. Rowan’s silence deepened, which in his case was saying quite a lot.
Ludger, however, did not visibly react. That was worse. Much worse. Because his earlier fury had not vanished. It had only gone deeper, turned from heat into pressure. The kind that crushed instead of flaring.
Gustav noticed that too.
And perhaps because he now understood that there was no point trying to preserve any of the old structure, he kept going.
“With the Emperor gone,” he said, “control becomes simpler. The next one on the throne will inherit the title, the court, the ceremonies, the expectations… but not the real balance beneath them. Not if Orleandul keeps his current reach.”
“He has spent too many years building parallel loyalties,” Gustav said. “Too many quiet obligations. Too many officers advanced through his favor. Too many administrators indebted to his protection. Too many nobles convinced that their futures depend on his continued rise.” His gaze dimmed. “A young ruler, a pressured court, a weakened structure, and a commander already standing at the center of everything that actually moves…”
He didn’t finish the sentence directly. He didn’t need to. He could control the next one on the throne. That was the truth of it. Not necessarily with chains. Not with an open knife at the royal neck.
Worse than that. With dependence. With fear. With the slow tightening of every institution around a ruler too isolated to cut free without collapsing the state beneath him.
Ludger felt like he was about to explode. Not outwardly. That was the problem.
Everything inside him had gone tight enough that the anger no longer felt hot. It felt compressed. Dense. Like something packed into his chest and bones until it threatened to split him open from the inside if he didn’t break something with his fists.
And by something… His eyes stayed on Gustav. He wasn’t thinking about tents. Or walls. Or the ground. Just Gustav.
The broken man in the chair. The man who had given orders. The man who had handed work to monsters and called it necessity. The man who had just confirmed, piece by piece, that Ludger’s family had been fed into a machine built by ambitious filth who used the Empire like a carcass.
For a few seconds, Ludger said nothing. That silence was not calm. It was restraint under open strain.
Eclaire noticed it immediately. Rowan did too. Jennifer’s posture tightened by a fraction, not because she feared Ludger losing control blindly, but because she knew that if he chose to move now, the choice would be very deliberate and very hard to undo.
Gustav saw it as well. Probably everyone near the center of the camp did. The murderous intent coming off Ludger had sharpened to the point that even wounded retainers with no idea how deep this history ran looked ready to intervene on instinct and die for the mistake.
Ludger forced one breath through his nose.
Then another. He did not trust himself to speak for a moment. Because if he spoke too soon, he might decide there was no point hearing anything else. That would be satisfying. Briefly. But useless. And useless revenge was just stupidity wearing grief as an excuse. So he held it in.
Then, finally, he asked the next question.
“How does the Regent fit into all of this?”
His voice was controlled. Low. Flat. That somehow made it sound worse. Gustav blinked once, as if the shift in topic had surprised him. Then his brow tightened faintly.
“He doesn’t,” Gustav said.
Ludger’s eyes narrowed. Gustav continued before that stare could become a fist.
“I don’t know a single point of connection between the Regent and Orleandul or Armandis.”
That got everyone’s attention. Not because it resolved anything. Because it complicated it.
Rufas frowned immediately. Eclaire’s expression shifted into something colder and more analytical. Rowan looked toward Gustav with the sort of focus he usually reserved for battlefield anomalies. Jennifer’s eyes narrowed as if she was trying to decide whether that answer was useful, stupid, or suicidal.
Ludger said nothing. He just kept staring. Gustav swallowed once and held his ground as much as a broken man in a chair could.
“I’m not saying they couldn’t have had some indirect overlap,” he said. “They operated in circles where powerful men often brushed against the same interests, the same resources, the same kinds of ambitious rot. But direct coordination? Shared planning? Some hidden alliance I knew of?” He shook his head slightly. “No.”
The answer hung there. Ugly in a different way now. Because if Gustav was telling the truth, then the structure in front of them was not one clean conspiracy.
It was worse than that. Separate nests of poison. Separate groups pulling at the Empire for their own ends. Separate monsters creating the same kind of damage without necessarily needing each other at all.
Ludger’s jaw flexed once. That possibility irritated him almost as much as the rest. He would have preferred a cleaner target. One nest. One spine. One line to follow upward until enough heads rolled that the problem stopped breathing. But reality, as usual, was filthier than convenience.
Gustav noticed that thought settling in and added, more carefully, “The Regent may have had his own network. His own methods. His own reasons. But as far as I know, he wasn’t part of Orleandul’s structure.”
Eclaire looked at Gustav sharply.
“You’re certain?”
“No,” Gustav said at once. “I’m certain only that I knew nothing of such a connection. With men like them, certainty is a luxury for idiots. But if there had been a direct tie strong enough to matter operationally, I would have expected to hear at least a whisper of it eventually.”
That rang true enough to be annoying.
Ludger exhaled slowly through his nose. So the Regent’s hand in this mess might be political manipulation layered over a different rot entirely.
Or opportunism. Or blind greed. Or a separate power grab intersecting with older filth by coincidence and convenience.
None of those options made him feel any better. He looked at Gustav for another long second.
Then he spoke again.
“So either the Empire is being torn apart by multiple bastards at once,” Ludger said, “or the bastards are better at hiding each other than you realized.”
Gustav’s expression hollowed slightly.
“Yes,” he said. “That sounds about right.”
And that answer, in its own way, was almost as infuriating as everything that had come before.
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