The grand table was now fully occupied by the eighteen family heads.
Anna's father sat at the far right, directly opposite Ryuji's father. A visceral tension simmered between them—an ancient enmity barely restrained.
Anna's father wore attire reminiscent of French nobility: a grand coat with gold embroidery and a high bow circling his neck.
Ryuji's father, by contrast, attended the formal meeting armored—a choice that immediately drew murmurs of criticism from the other heads. His armor was a pragmatic masterpiece: robust, battle-worn, yet engineered for fluid movement. The chest piece bore the Takashiro family crest: a stylized dragon coiled around a blade.
"Why wear armor?" Anna's father asked, his tone clipped.
"It is the Takashiro way, Henri," came the curt reply.
A figure in silver-gleaming knightly armor stepped forward. Though his helm rested on the table, his soft-spoken tone softened the air.
"You all know of the quest," he announced, hoping to spark conversation among the other seventeen heads.
Most listened with thinly veiled irritation, save one—a man with flowing dark hair and piercing red eyes, draped in an enormous fur-lined chaperon and a velvet-red cape.
His family crest was a snake coiling around a tree, the ground beneath it bloodstained.
"Don't you think we already know?" he taunted, a sardonic smile playing across his lips.
"I'd suggest we share any knowledge we have with one another. It is the 500-year quest, after all," the knight muttered.
Silence followed. No one spoke.
The quest before them was no ordinary task issued by a sage—it was issued by Sage Rolhim.
Leonardo could feel the weight of it. His body begged him to collapse into the ground.
The pressure descends—not merely physical, but metaphysical. A force so overwhelming it threatens to dismember the very architecture of consciousness, reducing beings to their most primal, fragmented state.
Leonardo becomes landscape—a terrain of suffering. Each muscle is a battlefield where survival negotiates with annihilation. His lungs, once instruments of breath, now feel like crushing chambers of desperation. Each incomplete inhale is an act of rebellion against a force engineered to erase existence itself.
When the pressure finally dissolves, silence becomes a living entity.
"Ah, I spoke too loudly," the sage says simply.
Leonardo collapses. Tremors ripple through him—aftershocks of a near-extinction event.
Elara sinks to her knees, her surrender a concession to their shared flesh. Tears hover on the brink, held back only by a will forged in the crucibles of unspoken trauma.
"That was hard," Henri mutters to Koroko.
Koroko nods in agreement. Except for the heirs and the guides, the other heads show only minor frustration before their heads slam against the table.
Koroko looks upward. His eyes are stale, empty—lifeless. They lock eyes, and history settles between them like dust in an ancient tomb.
"You're one nasty prick," Henri says, his voice tight. Blood rushes to his face as memories flare—flame, gasping, his fists bloodied.
"What's even the point of living?" he snaps.
Koroko smirks, the expression creeping toward his ears as he slowly leans forward, his scar-bound face fully exposed.
"You gave your son all your worst traits," Henri hisses.
"Ryuji will become a better man than I ever was," Koroko replies. "And I'll admit it—I am a bad father."
"Where is Marquis?" a voice suddenly breaks in from the table.