Beast Gacha System: Chapter 340: Binding a Monster

Chapter 340: Binding a Monster

"Your Majesty, please ascend. This is already ten days since the death of your imperial father. This is already the longest the throne has sat empty since the passing of the founder king himself..."

The voice behind Damon was strained. Whoever it was, he was desperate since he had been pleading for the better part of an hour and was beginning to suspect that his words were landing on deliberately deaf ears.

Damon was sitting on the grass.

Not on a bench, mind you. Not on the carefully arranged garden furniture that had been placed at aesthetically pleasing intervals along the winding paths.

On the grass, directly on the winter-browned lawn, his plain clothes gathered dirt and dead leaves. He faced the sunset, which was bleeding gold and rose across the western sky, and he did not turn around.

His clothes were even plainer than what he had worn to et Cecilia yesterday. That outfit had been unremarkable. This one was...

You know, the kind of tunic a farr might wear to nd fences and the kind of trousers that had seen better days and were not interested in seeing more.

He looked more like a man who had wandered into the palace by accident and had not yet been asked to leave.

Behind him, arrayed in a semicircle of increasing desperation, knelt four Dukes and seven Marquises. The highest nobles of the greatest empire on the continent.

Their elegant court robes, color-coded by rank, embroidered with sigils that represented centuries of accumulated power and prestige, were getting grass stains on the knees.

They were begging.

Literally begging.

Praying, even. Invoking the founder king. Invoking tradition. Invoking the stability of the empire itself. Their voices had started the hour strong and formal. Now they were fraying at the edges.

They just realized that, ahhh, the throne they needed filled was being avoided by the only man qualified to sit on it.

anwhile, Damon could not give a single fuck.

Not even a partial fuck. Not even a quarter of a fuck. His reservoir of fucks, which had never been particularly deep to begin with, had run completely dry soti around the third day of mourning and had shown no signs of replenishnt.

After all, for him to start give another fuck was if these people start pulling their own weights and not embarrass him in front of his own people.

"Who are you calling ’Your Majesty,’ hm?" He asked lazily. "Am I not still the rumored murderer of my father? Did anyone check? Has the court reached a consensus yet, or are we still taking votes?"

"Your Majesty, we have taken care of that!" A marquis said. "No one dares to say slanderous things about you! The matter is resolved!"

The other nobles nodded, frantically synchronized.

"I don’t know." Damon shrugged. "According to my step-mother, that is not the case. And she seed quite certain."

Duke Leclerc, one of the four kneeling Dukes, a man whose cousin had the profound misfortune of being Lady Vera, cleared his throat.

"Your Majesty, please do not mind what my... delirious cousin said." He emphasized the word ’delirious’. "She was overco with grief. Her judgnt was compromised. You know better than to take her words to heart."

Damon humd noncommittally.

"The investigation into my father’s death has not yet shown any progress." He said. "If only soone decided to tell the truth of what she saw that night my father died. Perhaps we would get so clues. So direction. Sothing to work with, rather than this endless, circular nothing."

The nobles exchanged glances.

Not the subtle, aningful glances of skilled politicians communicating in silent code. These were the wide-eyed, slightly panicked glances of n who had just realized they were standing on thin ice and could not rember which direction the shore was.

They did not know why they had all gathered here.

No, that was not quite right. They knew why they had gathered. The throne was empty. The empire needed an emperor.

Tradition demanded that the Crown Prince ascend, and the Crown Prince was sitting on the grass in peasant clothes, watching the sunset like a man who had no appointnts and no obligations and no intention of ever having either again.

But they did not know why they had to be the ones to beg.

Why did it have to be this man?

There was still Prince Reginald. The Second Prince. Younger, certainly, and less experienced, but pliable. Malleable. The kind of prince who could be guided, influenced, shaped into whatever the nobility needed him to be.

Reginald would ascend the throne with gratitude and humility. Reginald would listen to his advisors. Reginald would be manageable.

But every ti one of them tried to imagine Reginald on that throne, picturing the young prince wearing the crown and holding the scepter and making the decisions that would shape the continent for generations, their minds simply... refused.

It was not that Reginald was incapable. It was that the image looked scary! Because soone else was looming nacingly in the background!

And the thought of letting this man loose on the streets, free of any obligation or restraint... that was cosmic horror!

L*vecraftian!

You know what? At least if he sat on the throne, he would be bound.

Bound by divine law, the ancient oaths that governed the Iondora emperors. Bound by the weight of the crown and the scrutiny of the temple and the thousand invisible chains that ca with absolute power. They could still hold him accountable that way!

They wouldn’t need to have their eyes wide on their beds at night imagining what kind of people Damon Iondora was with and what kind of ideas he was planting in their heads!

The throne was a cage as much as it was a seat, and Damon Iondora needed to be in that cage.

For... everyone’s safety.

For everyone’s sanity, at the very least.

This demon—

He knew exactly what he was doing!

"Also." Damon’s voice cut through their spiraling thoughts. "Check on the Saintess." His eyes, still fixed on the bleeding sunset, darkened. He smiled wickedly. "Perhaps she will have an answer for who killed my father."

"That..." The Marquis who spoke did not finish his sentence. His face, like the faces of his colleagues, had beco complicated.

Damon’s smile widened by a fraction.

"Why?" He asked curiously. "Were you not the ones who were so pleased with her coronation? Were you not the ones who advised my father to sanctify her as quickly as possible? To throw away the forr Saintess like garbage? Like seventeen years of service ant nothing?"

The nobles flinched.

Damon Iondora had been one of the few people who had expressed his disagreent.

At the ti, they had dismissed it as sentintality. The Crown Prince had known the forr Saintess and had grown up alongside her. He had perhaps ford an attachnt that clouded his judgnt, after all.

They proceeded with the sanctification of Ruby Vaiva anyway, because Ruby was the true Saintess, and the true Saintess was what the empire needed. Her prophecy had been pleasant until recently, so what was the harm?

And now look at what they had.

A Saintess who could prophesy disasters but couldn’t do absolutely shit to fix them. At least Cecilia Araceli could fix them—

No. Perhaps now that it was their turn to fix it, they just realized how convenient it was having her around!

anwhile Damon sighed.

There were reasons why Damon had not told Cecilia that Ivy proposed to kill Ruby Vaiva.

First, and most practically, killing Ruby Vaiva was killing two birds with one stone. Perhaps three. Perhaps an entire flock, if one was feeling ambitious.

Ruby Vaiva was Cecilia’s enemy. The woman who had taken her title, her position and her life’s work. She had appeared from nowhere and claid everything Cecilia had built, and then watched as Cecilia was cast into the gutter without a second thought.

Killing Ruby ant revenge. It ant justice, of a sort. It ant Damon could avenge her.

Second, it would hurt that bastard Arzhen Vasiliev, Damon did not yet have the entire story but he could imagine the betrayal. Whatever Arzhen had done to Cecilia, killing his precious Saintess would be a blow he would feel for the rest of his miserable life.

Third, it would solve the incompetent Saintess problem. Ruby Vaiva felt more like a seat warr than a real Saintess now. Especially after the remarkable feat Cecilia had done in her ti of service. Ivy was right. Iondora might not yet feel the brunt like the other nations, but soon, they would.

Removing her would clear the way for soone better. Soone like the candidate the Cassian Twins had been hiding. The people of the world would be pleased, and they would thank him for sponsoring her.

The problem was, Damon knew that if he told her about Ivy’s plan, Cecilia would not accept that conclusion. So he had said nothing.

And now he wondered what would happen when Cecilia spoke to Ivy herself. What consensus would they reach?

He was looking forward to finding out.

"Fine. I will ascend the throne tomorrow." Damon said.

Relief flooded the garden. Damon could hear it, the exhales, the rustle of fabric as shoulders dropped, the barely suppressed sounds of eleven powerful n rembering how to breathe. He was giving them what they wanted and the empire would have its emperor.

"On one condition."

The relief curdled into wariness.

"Yes, Your Majesty?"

"Hmm..." Damon humd. "How about... you don’t tell

who to marry? I will choose myself."

A beat of silence.

"Eh?"

Damon lay back on the grass, fully horizontal now. His plain clothes gathering more dirt and dead leaves, his dark hair spreading across the winter-browned lawn. He ignored the nobles’ confusion completely.

The sky above him was darkening, the sunset’s gold and rose fading into the deep blue of approaching night. The first stars were beginning to erge. Damon looked at them and wondered.

What kind of face would Ivy Cassia make when she found out Cecilia was still alive? Maybe her jaw would hit the ground?

Heh.