Chapter 220: (5/5): The Deepest Betrayal

The peace and quiet that Camilla seeked did not last long.

After leaving the Heat Forest in search of other locations, on the fifth day, there began to exist a persistent buzzing in the back of her mind. It was so intrusive that even Kagriss knew about it and although Camilla had begun to calm down and return to how she was before, the change was merely temporary.

From the moment that buzzing began, Camilla felt the familiar feeling of someone watching her. A kin of hers was seeked to make a connection with her through their shared blood and without thinking, Camilla closed herself off to them.

But somewhere in the back of her mind, she knew that the kin continued to try and get through to her. Without even checking, she knew it was her so-called mother.

Kagriss looked at the hand grasping her so tightly and cursed to herself. Her plan didn’t work. It was working until now, or so she thought; in truth, she had no idea if it was a lasting solution, but now she’ll never get the chance to prove things one way or another.

“Kagriss… I don’t want to leave you…” 

Clingy was the only way to describe how Camilla was acting.

This wasn’t the Camilla she knew.

Of course, she’d never abandon Camilla even if Camilla remained like this, but there’d always be a part of her that will lament the change. Camilla was supposed to be strong, as well as someone proactive and who took the lead.

Camilla should be the one to rebuff her advances and make her keep her distance, not the only way around.

The quiet life that Camilla promised her seemed to be slipping out from between her fingers, and Kagriss could no longer watch as the woman she had been infatuated with at first sight and fell in love with disappeared.

“Isn’t it about time for you to let go?” Kagriss asked, making her voice stern.

Camilla flinched and shook her head. “I don’t want to.”

“You’ve been like this since Victoria showed us that record of the past. I know you’re upset that she kept it secret from us for so long, but for you to act like this…” Kagriss trailed off and stared at Camilla, unsure what to say. She dodged around the real issue.

“It’s not that! If she succeeds in undoing that ceremony, we’ll both die! Something like bringing back the flugels—I don’t care about any of it!” Camilla shook her head, her voice choking. “I don’t want to leave you. I don’t want to separate from you for any reason!”

In truth, Kagriss knew that was what upsetted Camilla the most. How could she not, when that was what Camilla protested against in her head almost constantly? However, she didn’t want to think about it herself, so she avoided it all.

The whole past few days, they did not speak about it at all.

Kagriss looked down on the ground and pulled her knees toward her chest. Camilla’s mood must have affected her. It must have.

“I hate her,” Camilla said through gritted teeth.

Kagriss looked up. “Her… you mean Victoria?” She could not believe that Camilla was actually going to talk and start the conversation herself.

“Yes. She planned all this from the start! From the moment she turned me into a vampire, from the moment she saw from my hair the legacy of the flugels, she plotted all this!” Camilla shouted. She sniffed and punched the ground as the anger she had held in for the past few days was unleashed.

The ground cracked beneath her fist, but at the same time, little shards of rock cut into her unprotected knuckles. Camilla didn’t notice.

“I see it now. She always claimed that she could not help with this, could not help with that, but it was all to drive me to come here where she could ask me to help her with that damned revival.”

With wide eyes, Kagriss realized that although Camilla was no longer being clingy, the bottled up emotions had gone out of control. The restrictions on emotions were lifted when they evolved, but now, Kagriss wished that it never disappeared.

“Wait,” Kagriss asked, trying to pull her back. “It’s unreasonable to say that she planned everything. Weren’t you the one to choose the task?”

“Yes, but she knew the truth from the start. She knew that one thing would lead to another, and it all led back to the undead in those bastions, and if I wanted to get rid of them, I had no choice but to come to her for help. She really played us…she set a trap and I walked right into it.”

Camilla lifted her fist again, about to hit the ground, but Kagriss quickly put her hand in between the descending fist and the stone. The fist stopped abruptly and slowly lowered to nestle in the center of Kagriss’s palm. Camilla took a deep breath to calm herself, and the burning waves of anger that washed over Kagriss through their bond subsided.

“If… undoing the ceremony didn’t involve losing you, she could just ask me directly and I wouldn’t have hesitated to agree,” Camilla whispered. “But I met you, and now I can’t bear to.”

“Milla…”

Kagriss didn’t want to see Camilla like this, but she could understand why Camilla felt like things were so hopeless. Opposing the ceremony meant making an enemy of Victoria, and neither she nor Camilla had the confidence that they could evenly match Victoria and the power, both martial and political, at her disposal.

Still, she clung to one hope. “Maybe she can’t do it herself,” Kagriss said. “She was given the first key, and then obtained the second and third key herself. However, it seems that the fourth key was only accessible by someone with traces of flugel left in them. What about the fifth key?”

Her guess seemed to have a slight effect. Camilla raised her head.

“...Really? You’re right. We can run away, can’t we? Let’s just leave and never come back. We’re already so far away…”

Although Kagriss really wanted to, she shook her head. “But what about the task you posed upon yourself? Are you okay with abandoning it?”

“Why are you reminding me of this now?”

“I’m Sorry. I just don’t want you to have any regrets about things you haven’t done. Knowing you, you’d probably never forget it.”

Camilla sighed and tugged on her hair before fiddling with it. “If you keep being so straightforward about this, it’ll be hard for me to forget anyways.” She sighed again. “And if we run now and Fleur gets here, Victoria will never let them live a peaceful life…”

The realization that escape was impossible left them both in silence.

As much as Camilla tried to block out Victoria, Victoria remained persistent. Finally, accepting her fate, Camilla allowed the connection through their bloodline to go through, and she withdrew into her subconsciousness where she met Victoria in their usual meeting spot, a small white room with a tea set.

However, this time, something was different.

A third person joined them at the table, manifesting behind Camilla, standing like a protector. Victoria and Camilla were equally shocked to see the person present, and their resemblance finally became clear with both of them staring wide-eyed at Kagriss.

If the mood wasn’t so serious, Kagriss might’ve smiled.

“What’s wrong? Don’t you have something to say?” she asked Victoria. Her words stirred the powerful vampire lord from her shock.

“How did you get here?”

“Who knows.” Kagriss put her hand over Camilla’s shoulders to steady her. How she got here was simple: her deepened bond with Camilla. When Camilla was drawn into this space in her subconsciousness, Kagriss felt a slight pull as well, and from there, it was easy for her to follow the familiar presence of Camilla into this room.

Victoria didn’t have to know that.

Nor did it matter. It only took a moment for Victoria to get over her shock and then it was business as normal. She gestured for them to sit and manifested a third chair for Kagriss.

As soon as Camilla was seated, she crossed her arms. “What do you want from us? Don’t tell me that you want us to die for your goals after deceiving us for so long.” She went straight to the point.

Perhaps knowing what she did was wrong and feeling guilty, Victoria did not deny anything that Camilla said. She looked down at the table, unwilling to face Camilla directly.

“What’s wrong?”

The question seemed to spur Victoria into action and Victoria shook her head as if clearing her mind. Her eyes became clearer and she nodded. Instead of speaking, she merely held up her hand and a small bloody mist appeared over her palms.

At the sight of the mist, Camilla shuddered and Kagriss took Camilla’s hands into her own, trying to warm them up.

What was Victoria going to show them now…

The last time was the terrible truth, and this time is…

An image appeared in the mist and once again, Camilla and Kagriss saw the once-proud walls of Amaranthine Point. At first, neither of them could see anything out of place, but soon, the change happened.

The solid, enchanted gates of the fortress bulged outwards and then burst open under the colossal force of a huge skeleton larger than anything Camilla had ever seen before. Even Kagriss had never seen something that big, yet her lips quivered as she recognized it.

“That thing… is an undead king. I didn’t think it existed! It’s supposed to rule over our city, but none of us had ever seen him before! Where has it been…?”

“What if that research was all a cover to find a way to wake it up?” Camilla said. “No, more importantly, it’s broken out of the fortress!”

Camilla and Kagriss watched in horror as tides of undead that had previously been held back by the massive gates flooded out of the fortress. Accompanying the rank and file were larger figures. Skull liches. Skull warriors. Lord-class variants of the same. They clearly towered over the normal, human-sized lesser undead while the higher-rank zombies were lost in the crowd.

The mighty army overran the outposts that guarded the fortress in an instant, and although the templars and clerics that manned the outposts put up a last stand, their efforts were ultimately futile. When the scene displayed in the mist faded, the last thing that Camilla saw was the army of undead heading into the forest, filled with purpose, as if they knew exactly where to go.

Camilla could guess their destination.

Before she could close her eyes, the scenery changed. She could not even look away as the army laid siege to Moltrost, and although the barrier that protected the city seemed to hold for a little while, the defenses ultimately failed without any apparent cause.

“Sabotage… there were really traitors,” Camilla whispered, her voice cracking. Even when she realized that Justin had revealed the secrets she made him keep, she had hoped that it was merely a false alarm, but now, she could no longer be so naive.

Moltrost fell. The army moved southward, and other cities fell in rapid succession. The only detour that the undead army made was to wipe out the hidden templar strongholds in various locations, and the Cloud Order did not escape.

Camilla watched, unable to blink, as the undead king presided over her old Order’s destruction. Except for the few that managed to escape, every last person was slaughtered, and before her very eyes, raised to join the ranks of the undead army.

When the last scene faded away and the mist disappeared back into Victoria’s hand, Camilla glared at her with teary eyes.

“Why are you showing me this?” she asked.

Instead of answering, Victoria disappeared from the meeting room, fading away in a cloud of bloody mist, leaving Camilla and Kagriss alone in the white room.

Camilla stared numbly at the table, barely registering when Kagriss tugged on her hand. 

Her old home that took her in when she had nowhere to go was gone. The home that she shared with Arvel was gone as well. In one swell swoop, she had nowhere left to return to.

Perhaps that should’ve wiped away the bonds she had with humanity like she claimed. Perhaps she no longer owed them anything now that the people she owed favors to were all gone except for a select few she wasn’t sure she could even find now.

But the pain she felt in her chest when she saw the destruction was not fake. A thought flashed through her mind.

“Kagriss…”

“Yes?” A voice that was as gentle as ever replied to her, even though she should’ve known that Camilla had thought just now.

“I’m sorry… I can’t do it…” Camilla said. Her throat closed and the tears she thought she stopped spilled from her eyes. “I thought I could leave it all behind, but after seeing this, I…”

Kagriss was her world and Kagriss was the person that she promised the rest of her life to, or so she thought. Now, it seemed that there was something of even greater importance that she’d simply never realized until she was on the verge of losing it.

Scum. After leading Kagriss on for so long, only to have second thoughts when the time came to make a decision, there could be no other word to describe her.

She could not even face Kagriss; she did not have the right to.

“I’m so sorry… your core…I’ll take it out…” Camilla said. “Maybe if you go far enough, if you find a place that can protect you—”

“CAMILLA!”

A loud shout interrupted her and Camilla froze in her words and movement. She shrank back as Kagriss towered her, but quickly recovered. She could not shrink back now; she had nothing to fear, and whatever Kagriss wanted to do to her, she’d take it without complaint.

Camilla looked down, only to have warm hands cup her face and make her look up into the same gentle violet eyes she’d always loved to look at.

“You’re not running away anymore. I’m glad.”

Those were words that Camilla never expected to hear—did not want to hear.