I Married Three Calamities (And Got A System For It)

Chapter 26: Chapter 26: Shackles of Emotions

Gifts were more than just gifts.

It was a well-known fact in New Earth, especially among those at the top of the ladder and those with high-level Gifts, that the powers granted when the Dream World appeared didn’t come free.

A Gift affected people at their fundamental existence, and whenever something could influence your very being... there were always side effects involved.

Solaris’s Gift was called Heart of Sun. A literal S-rank Gift, a level few people had, granting her the power to manipulate fire and light.

But that very same Gift made her emotions extremely volatile, which turned her into someone easy to provoke into a scandal.

But it wasn’t only high-ranking Gifts that had side effects.

Mars’s Gift was only D-rank, but his side effect was obvious to Solaris as she looked at him now.

When Mars Fox reached a certain level of anger... he felt nothing.

His emotions shut off completely, as if his very Gift — Shackles of Emotions — literally shackled his own feelings far away.

And when someone no longer felt anything: no love, no hatred, not even remorse...

...the lengths they were willing to go to get what they wanted could reach a level of violence few could grasp.

That was why...

"Where is the money?" Mars asked in a flat tone, staring down at Loris, held down by Solaris, his hazel eyes cold.

Loris began to struggle, but his body was already too heavy for that level of mobility, and with Solaris pinning him down, it became even harder.

Solaris lowered her hand from his mouth and tightened it around his throat, giving him room to speak.

Loris breathed heavily, his brown eyes fixed on both Solaris and Mars, burning with anger and hatred.

"You!" Loris growled, huffing loudly. "You think you can rob me of my money? The money I worked hard to earn?"

"You mean the money you exploited others to earn?" Mars retorted. "You pay us only 7 euros an hour, Loris, when the minimum in New France is 9.5 euros. And even then, you don’t pay us for the overtime we work."

"This is my restaurant!" Loris shouted back. "My rules! My rules, you fucking son of a whore! You think you’ll walk away from this safely?"

His brown eyes bulged with such condescension and hatred it was repulsive to witness. "The Local Protectors are here! You won’t get out of this unscathed, son of a whore! I’ll make your life hell!"

"This is truly hilarious," Solaris interjected, laughing as her hair began to burn at the tips, destroying the black dye Moon had put on it. "Why are you talking like you’re going to get out of this alive?"

She cocked her head, her eyes now burning too with barely restrained anger, the contact lenses melting away and revealing her golden eyes for all to see.

Loris’s eyes widened as he took in that sight.

Many people could have golden eyes. But there were golden eyes, and then there were GOLDEN EYES. The former was something anyone could have.

The latter was a trait only a Lightbringer possessed.

The two were extremely easy to tell apart. It was almost instinctive.

So when Loris saw Solaris’s eyes, he knew instantly who she was. Solaris was wildly infamous. And when he looked back at Mars, kneeling beside him, ready to resign from a job he’d held for six years, all of a sudden, and thought about the two days Mars hadn’t come to work, which lined up with the news of the infamous princesses being married off to a...

Loris’s eyes widened in sudden realization.

"You... Mars, you fucking bastard, you married the—!"

"What did I tell you before we came here, Solaris?" Mars said, confirming Loris’s guess.

"No killing," Solaris replied, and her hair burst into flame.

"He knows who you are, and that you’re linked to me," Mars continued, gripping the steel staff tighter. "It’s too early for them to know. We’re not ready yet."

Solaris began to grin coldly. "So now are we going to kill him?"

Mars smiled emptily at Loris, whose face had gone pale as paper. "I guess so. But first..."

He ripped off part of his own shirt and stuffed it over Loris’s mouth.

"...let’s get the money out of him."

Solaris acted immediately, with overwhelming glee. She’d been pent up with stress this whole time, with one disaster after another.

Finally, she had the chance to let some of it out. And the only way she knew how was violence.

So she did.

She began to burn Loris’s whole body with such fine control — thanks, in part, to the Ring of Sunlight — that it was maddening.

Loris began to thrash, his eyes bulging with tears as he tried to shout for help. But Mars took the steel staff and cracked it down on his legs to stop him from moving them.

The pain blanked out his mind for a moment.

Throughout it, Mars kept asking the same question, over and over,

"Where is the money?"

For the first five minutes, Loris was determined to stay silent. He was a greedy man who loved his money more than his own family.

But once Solaris started truly enjoying the torture, finding new ways to inflict pain — like setting his testicles on fire — it reached a level of agony he’d never imagined existed.

The fat man broke instantly, stuttering and begging as he told them where he kept the money.

Mars acted immediately while Solaris kept Loris pinned and silent.

He took the key from Loris and opened a drawer just beneath the table. Inside, he found a large amount of cash and several documents.

Mars didn’t bother sorting through them. He swept everything into Solaris’s space ring.

Then there was a spot just under the table, on the ground, beneath the carpet.

Mars was relieved his strength had increased, otherwise he’d never have managed to pry it open.

The moment he did, though, his eyes came to a staggering stop.

Inside the hiding spot was a box, medium-sized, all red. It could only be opened with Loris’s fingerprint.

The first thing Mars thought, seeing it, was that it was far too sophisticated for someone like Loris. Already, he could sense something was wrong.

Still, he picked up the box, and the second thing he noticed was how heavy it was, despite its size.

He brought the box to Loris, and Mars could see the horror in his eyes. It was as if the man hadn’t even realized he’d given away the hiding spot.

Mars grew even more curious.

He grasped Loris’s fat, meaty hand and pressed it to the box, opening it with a loud click.

Loris tried to scream, but Solaris shoved the cloth Mars had used to gag him deep into his throat... then set it alight.

Loris’s throat began to burn, literally.

Mars, for his part, didn’t even register that level of cruelty. It seemed Solaris knew that, in his current state, Mars wouldn’t flinch at anything she did.

That knowledge made her all the more willing to let her true self loose, the one who’d crippled her own sister in a fit of rage. The one who’d burned her own servants back at the Lightbringer household and watched them burn for hours.

That Solaris. That was who she truly was, at her core; what her Gift and her status as a Seed of Calamity had made her.

So she let herself go free, beside her own husband.

Mars, meanwhile, was focused on the contents of the box. It was far bigger on the inside than it looked from outside.

Inside was even more money — far, far more, piled up loosely. But alongside it, Mars saw pills, white and pink, scattered there too.

It didn’t take him long to figure out what they were.

Drugs.

Not the ordinary kind that only affected unawakened people. The real ones.

Mars’s eyes widened blankly.

There was something else inside too: a gun with a symbol engraved on it, alongside a letter in red. The symbol was a grinning mouth with sharp teeth, bleeding.

"This is..."

"Mars!" Solaris called out to him, her tone suddenly urgent, her glowing eyes fixed on the door, brow tight. "I hear footsteps. Someone’s coming."

Those words snapped Mars out of his thoughts. He turned to Loris and saw the man in a wretched state.

Mars’s mind raced in every direction, trying to find a solution. He couldn’t let anyone see Solaris.

That would cause far too many problems, especially given their current situation.

It could also make her more unstable, her progression climbing and pushing her closer to destruction.

Bad choice. The worst possible choice.

So Mars came up with something fast and brutal. He swept everything from the box, except the gun, into Solaris’s space ring.

"Destroy the window, Solaris!" Mars hissed at her. "Blast it wide open, like you’re escaping! Then hide!"

Solaris’s eyes widened. "What? What about—!"

"Just do it!"

At that exact moment,

KNOCK! KNOCK!

"This is Raymond, the Local Protector who spoke to you earlier about the drugs," a voice echoed from behind the door, and both Solaris’s and Mars’s faces drained of color. "I seem to have left my weapon here: it’s a gilded steel staff. Can I—!"

Mars and Solaris didn’t stay to listen any further.

Before Solaris could blast the window, Mars grabbed her hand and mouthed at her to burn him.

Solaris’s eyes widened. As she tried to shake her head in refusal, the Local Protector knocked again, more urgently this time.

Mars urged her, his face deadly serious. In the end, she had no choice but to obey, and she burned Mars’s whole body.

The pain was dreadful, and it took immense willpower for him not to scream in agony. Solaris watched him with wide, shaking eyes, her own hands trembling.

Mars truly felt like he might black out. But his current emotional numbness made him more resistant to it all.

He lifted his head weakly and waved his wife away.

Solaris bit her lip hard before turning to the window. She began gathering a large amount of mana.

The knocking turned brutal.

At the same time, Mars, his mind in strange state, forced Loris’s hand around the gun he’d found in the box, and with trembling, drooping eyelids...

"Kill yourself."

...Loris’s eyes widened in horror as Mars used Loris’s own hand to press his finger against the trigger, at the exact moment Solaris blasted the window open, Mars crying out in horror.

BANG! BOOOOOMM!!

"NOOOO!"

Loris’s head hit the ground, blown apart, dead. Mars fell beside him, Loris’s blood on him, his body burned and wounded, barely breathing, while Solaris was nowhere to be seen in the room.

That was exactly when the Local Protector burst through the door, only to freeze in shock at the sight before him.

"...What the?"

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!