Chapter 821: You Want My Wives?
The entire garden fell into a deathly, suffocating silence.
Every eye was locked onto Cassius, who had remained perfectly quiet throughout the entire tirade, his face an unreadable mask.
The guests assumed he was frozen in place by pure, unadulterated terror.
Paralyzed by the realization that his women were about to be stolen right in front of his face while he lacked the power to lift a finger.
They braced themselves to witness the inevitable—expecting him to drop to his knees, shed tears of submission, and hand over the keys to his household just like the others.
But Cassius...
Cassius just took a slow sip of wine and set down his glass. He then turned his head slightly, and Lucius appeared at his side, whispering the full account of what had happened in the corridor.
Darius’s patience snapped.
"Are you ignoring me? I’m trying to make a generous offer, and you’re—"
Then Cassius looked at him.
And the world went cold.
"Arghh..."
Those crimson eyes, which had been so warm and welcoming earlier, were now pools of liquid fire.
They seemed to pierce straight through Darius’s soul, stripping away every layer of pretense and arrogance.
He took a step back. He didn’t mean to. His body simply did it, an involuntary recoil that he couldn’t control.
Behind him, he heard his knights shifting uneasily. The maids and the butler had gone very, very still.
And finally, Cassius opened his mouth, his voice a low, terrifying whisper that carried the freezing weight of the Arctic Ocean.
"You want ’my’ wives..."
Cassius murmured, enunciating every syllable with chilling precision.
"...underneath ’you’?"
The words were quiet, yet a sudden, invisible pressure slammed into the courtyard.
The guests felt a physical vibration in the air, their own voices caught in their throats as a suffocating weight began to compress their lungs.
Before Darius could force a reply through his trembling jaw, Cassius repeated the phrase in a even more chilling tone.
"You want my wives..."
"...to stay underneath you?"
Boom!
The pressure intensified exponentially!
It was no longer a feeling; it was a physical force.
A heavy, rhythmic shattering sound echoed through the garden as glass chalices and porcelain plates cracked under the sheer weight of the atmosphere, slipping from the numbed, trembling fingers of the high nobles.
But Cassius didn’t stop.
His eyes blazed like twin suns in the darkness, his voice rising in an escalating, rhythmic chant that struck the ears like the tolling of a funeral bell.
"You want ’my’ wives...to be underneath ’you’?"
Boom!
"You want ’my’ wives....to be underneath ’you’?"
Boom!
"You want ’my’ wives...to be underneath ’you’?"
Boom!
Every time the sentence left his lips, the pressure doubled.
The high lords fell out of their chairs, collapsing onto the grass as they clawed at their own throats, gasping frantically for oxygen that had suddenly vanished from the air.
The battle-hardened guards of House Valheim fell to their knees, their minds screaming in absolute panic as their survival instincts detected an entity that defied the natural order of the world.
And then Cassius took a deep breath. When he spoke again, his voice was quiet. Almost gentle.
But it carried more weight than a thunderclap.
"So basically..."
He said, pointing at Darius one final time.
"...you want my wives serve you while their underneath you."
"I...I...Ah..."Darius had never been so terrified in his life.
Every instinct screamed at him to run, to hide, to do anything to escape those burning crimson eyes.
But he couldn’t run. He couldn’t move. And he couldn’t lose face.
Not here. Not in front of everyone.
His reputation, his power, his very identity depended on maintaining his dominance.
So with a smile that felt like it was carved into his face with a knife, he nodded.
"Y-Yes." He said, and his voice came out steadier than he felt. "That’s exactly right. I...I want your wives to serve me in bed. To show me a good time."
"That’s what I—"
He never finished the sentence.
BOOM!
A pressure unlike anything the party had ever experienced crashed down upon them all.
"Ahh—!"
"Kyaaa—!"
"Arghhh—!"
It was not killing intent. It was not magical force.
It was something more fundamental, more terrifying—the raw, unfiltered weight of an emotion so powerful that it bent reality around it.
Every single person in that garden felt it. Nobles dropped to their knees. Knights stumbled and clutched at their armor as if it were suddenly too heavy to bear.
Plates and glasses exploded across the serving tables, sending shards of porcelain and crystal spraying across the ground. The musicians’ instruments fell silent as the players crumpled.
It didn’t stop at the garden walls.
The pressure rolled outward like an invisible tidal wave, sweeping across the Holyfield estate.
Boom!
In the trees, birds took flight in panicked swarms, shrieking as they fled.
Squirrels and rabbits bolted from their hiding places, scattering in every direction.
Even the harvest festival, still in full swing in the main square, felt the edge of it.
The laughter and music died in an instant. People stopped dancing. Merchants stopped hawking their wares.
A wave of goosebumps swept through the crowd, and conversations turned to panicked questions.
"W-What is that feeling?"
"Why do I have goosebumps? It’s not even cold."
"Something’s happening. Something’s wrong."
"Is it coming from the Young Master’s estate?"
Far away, Julie, Aisha, and Skadi were riding leisurely back toward the festival when the pressure hit them.
They felt a wave of cold that had nothing to do with temperature.
They recognized it immediately. They knew exactly what it meant.
Their expressions hardened in perfect unison.
"Cassius!" Julie said, and it was not a question.
They snapped their reins and spurred their horses into a full gallop, racing toward the estate with the speed of women who knew their husband needed them.
—
Back in the garden, the pressure was absolute.
No one could move. More accurately, no one dared to move.
Their bodies had locked up, frozen by an instinct far older than reason.
It was the paralysis of the rabbit who has spotted the wolf, the stillness of the mouse who hears the owl’s wings.
Darius Valheim felt it most of all.
The blood had drained from his face, leaving him pale as a corpse. His legs were shaking.
His bladder, to his absolute horror, was threatening to betray him.
All his life, he had been protected. Pampered. Sheltered from consequence.
He had never felt true fear, the kind of fear that makes your body forget how to function.
But now, standing before Cassius, he felt it. He felt like he was staring into the eyes of something that had crawled out of the abyss and was only barely pretending to be human.
The entire garden had the same thought, the same realization dawning on them like a cold sunrise.
’Cassius isn’t what the rumors said!’
’He’s not a useless degenerate!’
’He’s not a weakling coasting on his family name!’
’He’s something else entirely. Something terrifying. A monster wearing a nobleman’s skin!’
’And we’ve all made a terrible, terrible mistake!’
For one long, breathless moment, the world hung suspended. The pressure was unbearable.
The silence was absolute. Every pair of eyes was fixed on Cassius, waiting to see what the monster would do next.
And then—
The pressure vanished.
It didn’t fade. It didn’t recede. It simply stopped, as if a switch had been flipped.
And in that silence, Cassius’s expression completely transformed.
His eyes, which had been blazing with barely contained rage, suddenly went wide and pleading.
His posture crumbled. His hands, which had been steady as stone, began to tremble.
He looked, in the span of a single heartbeat, like a man on the verge of tears.
"Please!" He cried out, his voice cracking with desperation. "Young Master Darius, please! Leave my wives alone!"
The entire garden recoiled in confusion.
What was happening? Where had the monster gone? Who was this pleading figure standing in his place?
Cassius stumbled forward, his steps unsteady, his face a mask of anguish.
"My wives—they’re the only ones who love me in this world! My father abandoned me! My brothers despise me! The entire noble world looks at me with contempt!"
"But my wives—" His voice broke, and he had to pause to collect himself. "—my wives are the only solace I have!"
"They’re the only family that hasn’t turned their backs on me! If you take them away, if you do anything to them, I’ll have nothing left! Nothing!"
He took three frantic, staggering steps forward.
Darius, still reeling from the residual terror, instinctively flinched and took a sharp step back, his personal guards frantically reaching for their hilts, bracing for an execution.
Instead, to the absolute, jaw-dropping dismay of everyone present, Cassius lunged forward and grabbed both of Darius’s hands, clutching them tightly against his chest.
He looked up into Darius’s face with a gaze full of raw, weeping vulnerability.
"Please." Cassius begged, his voice raw. "Please, Young Master Darius. I’ll do anything! Anything at all!"
"Take whatever you want from me—my estates, my jewels, my treasury. There’s quite a lot in there, actually. Some very rare pieces. Family heirlooms."
"You can have all of it. Every last coin. Just...please."
He brought Darius’s hands together, clasping them between his own.
"Please leave my wives alone!"
The garden was frozen in a state of absolute bewilderment.
The nobles who had been cowering in terror moments before now stared at the scene with open mouths.
The monster they had glimpsed had vanished, replaced by a man who was literally begging at Darius’s feet.
Had they imagined it? Had the pressure been some kind of collective hallucination?
Aldric, standing at the edge of the crowd, felt his heart sink. He had believed, for just a moment, that Cassius might be different.
That the rumors might be wrong. And now here he was, debasing himself just like all the others.
It was almost worse, somehow, after that brief glimpse of something more.
