The festival of Radiant Dawn had transformed Solara into a city with something between a celebration and a riot. Every street was flooded with worshippers in white robes, their hymns rising in layered waves above the noise of the crowd as they pushed forward beneath swaying golden banners.
Priests leaned out from temple balconies overhead, shouting prayers down at the masses below. The air had turned thick with incense smoke that clung to everything, wrapping itself around the sharper smells of roasting meat and wine being poured freely in the open streets.
Lucius couldn't have asked for better conditions.
He kept his hood pulled low over his face and let the crowd close around him, moving with the current instead of against it, one anonymous body among thousands. His divine sense worked quietly beneath the surface, sweeping the surrounding area and cataloguing guard positions; most of them had been pulled off their usual assignments to manage the swelling crowds in the streets, just like Seraphine predicted, exactly this.
[Divine Sense (Passive) — Active Scan]
[Palace guard presence: Reduced by 60%]
[Optimal infiltration window: NOW]
He pulled off the main street and dropped into a back alley tucked behind a merchant's stall, putting a wall between himself and the festival. He checked his supplies one more time.
Three vials of Seraphine's nullification serum, a single throwing knife, the divine charm resting warm and steady around his neck, its pulse confirming what his senses already told him, the sun god's presence was waiting somewhere ahead, inside the palace that dominated the city's skyline.
A shape detached itself from the crowd at the alley entrance. Seraphine came through, her face concealed beneath a dark hood, and Lucius found himself looking at someone he barely recognised compared to the woman he had first met four days ago.
The priestess who had seemed shattered when he found her had been replaced by something much quieter and considerably more dangerous, controlled in a way that came from having nothing left to lose.
"Everything is in place," she said, her voice low and clipped. "It will all happen in the temple square five minutes from now."
"Whats the distraction?" Lucius asked.
"One that will make the guards believe rebels are moving against the high priest in broad daylight." The smile that touched her lips held nothing resembling warmth.
"Every available man will abandon his post and go running." She passed him a folded bundle of cloth.
"It's a servant's uniform. Put it on the moment you're through the door."
"What about you?"
"I'll be in the square making sure it's convincing enough. When you hear the chaos start, that will be your signal to start moving." She turned to leave, then held still for a moment without turning back.
"Lucius. If it comes apart, don't surrender to them. They'll turn what they do to you into a public lesson."
"I'll make sure the plan won't fail no matter what."
She walked back into the crowd and disappeared inside it as cleanly as a stone dropping. Into deep water.
Lucius held his position in the alley and let the seconds accumulate. His heartbeat moved fast but didn't stagger. Adrenaline was doing its job, pulling the world into sharper edges and brighter detail.
His survival instinct stirred at the back of his mind, restless but not triggered. The real warning hadn't come yet.
Then the ground shuddered.
The explosion hit the temple square like something had reached down and struck the city with an open fist. Screaming tore through the air from multiple directions simultaneously. A column of black smoke drove itself upward into the clear sky.
Lucius was already running before the commotion became widely known.
He pushed hard toward the palace's eastern walls, following the route Seraphine's map had committed to memory, a service entrance on the far side used by kitchen workers ferrying supplies during major festivals.
All along the way, guards were abandoning their posts in the opposite direction, drawn toward the explosion like iron fillings toward a magnet.
The service door had a ward seal etched into its frame. Lucius snapped the first nullification vial open and poured the contents directly over the carved symbols on the door. They lit up red and spat and hissed against the stone, then went black and silent, the magic draining out of them completely.
He put his boot into the door and pushed through into the darkness beyond.
The interior corridors were exactly what the map had suggested, a narrow, poorly lit, passage designed for invisibility rather than comfort.
The palace's servant passages ran behind the walls of the grand rooms, built specifically so that staff could move through the building without being noticed by anyone who mattered.
He changed quickly, pulling the plain brown servants uniform over everything and forcing his remaining gear into a nearby supply closet. He kept the knife, running it up his sleeve and against his wrist where it would stay hidden.
[Streetwise (Passive) — Triggered]
[Route Calculation: Servant corridors → Central tower stairwell → Third floor eastern wing]
[Estimated time: 8 minutes]
[Guard encounters: Low probability]
He set a pace that was fast enough to make time but controlled enough not to draw attention. Divine Sense stayed active ahead of him, checking his environment for blessed manas before they rounded corners and became problems.
He had to duck into side rooms twice, pressing himself against the wall in silence while patrols drifted past in the main corridors. The place was genuinely labyrinth like, passages doubling back on themselves, stairwells hidden behind plain doors, but Seraphine had mapped it with meticulous care, and every turn she had marked proved to be exactly right.
Seven minutes.
The central tower stairwell opened up ahead of him. Two guards stood at the base, stationed there by default, though their posture made it clear that their attention had drifted entirely toward the noise and smoke bleeding in from outside.
Lucius spotted a tray sitting on a kitchen pass-through shelf nearby and picked it up without breaking stride. He walked past both guards with his shoulders curved slightly inward, carrying the body language of a servant already anxious about being behind schedule.
They registered him and immediately stopped caring.
He climbed the stairs, first floor fell away beneath him, then second and third.
The eastern wing corridor spread out ahead, long and straight and lined with doors that grew more ornate the further along it went. At the far end, warm golden light pushed out from beneath a pair of large double doors, soft and steady, like sunlight coming through fabric.
The prince's chambers.
His chest tightened. The divine charm had gone from warm to hot, pressing against his sternum like a brand of larva. The sun god was directly beyond that threshold, closer than he had ever been.
He activated divine suppression, folding his mana signature down to nothing, and moved in silence along the corridor.
The hallway was empty, with no guards anywhere along its length. Something about that absence was not sitting right at the edges of his awareness, but the festival chaos had to have stripped the wing clean, so he kept moving.
Fifty meters stood between him and the doors as he moved closer.
Then suddenly he heard sounds. Footsteps coming from a side passage to his left, deliberately paced, each one landing with the kind of measured weight that belonged to someone who was never in a hurry because they had never needed to be.
Lucius went flat against the wall and held completely still.
Then, slowly, a woman walked into the corridor.
She was built like someone who had dedicated her life to the craft of hurting people and had become very good at it.
She was tall, with the kind of muscular frame that came from training constantly in battle fields rather than training rooms. The armour she wore was black and gold and minimal, designed to protect without restricting her movements, leaving her scarred tan arms entirely exposed.
Her hair was a vivid crimson with dark roots showing through, cut deliberately uneven, tight and short on one side, longer and loose on the other, falling across her jaw. Her eyes were amber, sharp, and luminous, the kind that absorbed details of a room in a single pass the way a predator understood a terrain before attacking. There was nothing visible on her that resembled a weapon.
She didn't look like she needed one.
[Survival Instinct (Passive) — CRITICAL WARNING!]
[EXTREME THREAT DETECTED]
[RECOMMENDED ACTION: FLEE IMMEDIATELY]