Lily stared at Hegemon, her heart aching at the sight of his hollow, blood-streaked face. The man standing before her wasn't the invincible anchor who had navigated fifteen hellish loops ,he was a warrior stripped of his greatest weapon, drowning in his own perceived uselessness.
She took a slow, deliberate step forward, ignoring the wet floor and the shattered wood. She didn't offer a patronizing hug or empty platitudes. Instead, she grabbed his bloodied shirt collar, forcing his vacant, bloodshot eyes to meet hers.
"Listen to me, Hegemon," Lily said, her voice dropping into a low, fierce whisper that cut through his despair. "You are forgetting who you actually are. You think you survived those loops because of some skill? Because of Mana? No! You survived because of this—" She jammed her finger hard against his temple. "—your mind. You calculated every path, every death, every single variable. That skill was just a tool, Hegemon. "You are the weapon."
Hegemon blinked, the harsh sting of her words slowly piercing the suffocating fog in his head.
"If a door is locked in your mind," Lily continued, her grip on his collar tightening, "then stop trying to smash your head against it. Adapt. Work around it like you always do. You know when they attack. You know how they attack. We don't need magic to outsmart cultists; we need a plan."
A quiet, heavy silence fell over the room. Hegemon stood frozen, his chest rising and falling in ragged breaths. Her words didn't instantly cure the crushing weight in his chest—the horror of seeing Diana, Lily, and the staff butchered was too deeply burned into his soul for a single speech to fix. He couldn't just smile and pretend he was fine. But a tiny, ember-like spark of cold logic flickered back to life amidst the ashes of his despair.
He slowly reached up, gently unwrapping Lily's fingers from his collar. "I... I need a moment," he rasped, his voice still raw, devoid of its usual polished warmth.
He walked over to the desk, pulled out a blank parchment, and sat down. His hands were still trembling, blood dripping onto the clean paper from his knuckles, but his eyes narrowed with a newfound, deadly focus. He couldn't afford to break down—not when the clock was ticking toward the subterranean assault.
Taking a deep breath, Hegemon began to map out the exact timeline of the impending invasion.
-"T-minus 2 hours:" Relay and Helar's forces breach the subterranean layers beneath the commercial district.
-"T-minus 1 hour:" The 299 vanguard cultists deploy to draw attention away from the high officers.
-"T-minus 0:" Tens of thousands of monster erupt, swarming the Noble estate and the inner city simultaneously.
"We can't stop the breach alone," Hegemon murmured, his voice cold and analytical as he stared at the red ink he was drawing with his own blood. "And I can't rely on a skill I can't remember. We need the Royal Knights pre-positioned "before" the ground ruptures."
Leaving Lily to bandage his hands, Hegemon washed his face with cold water, donned a fresh butler coat, and stepped out into the city. His expression was solemn, brooding, and intensely serious—a stark contrast to his usual pleasant facade. He didn't have time to fully heal his broken psyche, but he forced himself to move.
He sought out High Knight Xuka Astri and Captain Kenji, using his standing as the Noble family's head butler to request an urgent, classified tactical briefing.
Leveraging the exact details he remembered from the previous timeline—the specific sinkhole locations, Relay's spatial pendulum, and Helar's shadow locusts—Hegemon presented the information not as a premonition, but as intercepted subterranean intelligence from the Noble family's private network.
The battle for the kingdom was hours away, and though Hegemon's soul remained fractured, his mind was once again preparing to tilt the scales of fate.