Chapter 827: Terrifying Devotion
Despite Cassius’s warm and inviting tone, Darius remained utterly unresponsive.
He simply stared at Cassius, occasionally glancing up at the grotesque parade of bodies swaying gently above him.
Blood dripped steadily from the corpses, nourishing the garden below with a dark, crimson rain.
Cassius himself paid the grisly spectacle no mind.
He leaned forward in his chair, his expression shifting to one of cheerful reminiscence.
"You know, Darius." Cassius said, his tone conversational, almost lighthearted. "Last night, when I spotted your carriage rushing away from the festival grounds, I genuinely thought all my plans were going to ruin."
He grimaced slightly at the memory, shaking his head.
"I was certain that after the warning I gave you, you’d be smart enough to rush home, evacuate your entire household, and pull a vanishing act into deep hiding."
"For a fleeting second, I actually credited you with having a brain. I thought, ’Wow, Darius actually understands the scale of the threat coming for him.’"
"But then I got here." He shook his head, a look of profound disbelief on his face. "And who would have guessed? I walk into your manor, and there you are, sleeping peacefully in your bed without a single care in the world."
"Meanwhile...your family was having a midnight party of their very own right out here."
His smile faded into a slight, disappointed pout. He clicked his tongue.
"All of my careful rushing, completely wasted. I should have come at a much slower pace. It’s honestly insulting."
Cassius paused, expecting some reaction—a flicker of anger, a spark of defiance, anything.
But Darius simply stared at him as if he had completely lost his soul, his eyes glassy and unfocused.
Cassius clicked his tongue in annoyance.
"What is this, Darius? I come all the way to your home, and here you are completely ignoring me."
His tone was chiding, almost parental.
"You’re the one who talks about noble etiquette and what a proper noble should do in another person’s presence."
"Yet here I am, in your home, going out of my way to engage with you, and you’re just staring off into space."
"Is there a pretty girl back there catching your eye?" He glanced behind his own shoulder. "Someone more interesting than me?"
He turned back, sighing with a dismissive wave.
"No, not really. Just a bunch of hanging corpses. Truly tedious to look at after a while."
Cassius crossed his arms, tapping his foot impatiently.
"So, what exactly has you staring at me like a statue? I expect you to at least have the decency to react when I’ve gone to all this effort."
"..."
Receiving no answer, Cassius turned to Lucious, who had been standing by obediently.
"What’s wrong with him, Lucius?" Cassius asked, genuinely puzzled. "Why isn’t he responding? I’ve been nothing but welcoming, and yet he refuses to engage with me. It’s quite rude, honestly."
Lucius offered a pleasant smile, his hands clasped behind his back. "I believe that is because you slaughtered his entire family, Young Master."
Cassius blinked. "Oh. Right. That."
"And not merely slaughtered them." Lucius continued smoothly. "You slaughtered them in an exceptionally brutal fashion."
"You broke their bones, gouged out their eyes, disemboweled them, and hung them from a tree like decorations. I believe that may have contributed to his current...unresponsive state."
Cassius nodded slowly, looking back at Darius with a wave of superficial sympathy.
"Ah, yes. I suppose that would do it. Trauma of that magnitude does tend to have a paralyzing effect on the mind. It’s quite understandable, really."
"A man’s mind can only take so much before it simply...breaks."
He sighed, shaking his head. "If I had known you were this fragile, perhaps I wouldn’t have killed them so brutally. Maybe I would have just hanged them cleanly, without tearing out all their insides."
"A quick, dignified death. But where’s the fun in that?"
Darius flinched again at the casual cruelty in Cassius’s voice.
Bored of Darius’s silence, Cassius turned his curiosity toward his butler.
"What about you, Lucius? What would you do if someone hanged me up like that? If my insides were pulled out and my tongue was sticking out like his sister’s over there?"
He pointed casually toward the mutilated corpse of Darius’s sister, her small body swaying gently, her intestines dangling like grotesque ribbons.
"Would you grieve for me like this?" Cassius continued. "Would your mind break into pieces too? Would you become a hollow shell like our friend Darius here?"
Lucius’s expression shifted immediately. A deep frown creased his features, and his voice carried an unusual sharpness.
"What are you saying, Young Master? Please do not say such ominous things! I hate to hear such words even from you."
His tone was unusually stern, a rare sight from his usual composed demeanor.
It was clear that the very thought of Cassius being harmed offended him deeply.
He took a moment to collect himself, smoothing down his pristine butler’s uniform.
"Besides, given how powerful you are, nothing in this world could ever scratch you, let alone hang you like these cattle."
He gestured disdainfully at the swaying corpses.
"Do not speak of such ridiculous things. It is not becoming of a noble of your stature."
Cassius, amused by his butler’s rare display of agitation, poked him playfully in the shoulder.
"Oh, come now, think about it, Lucius. Imagine if I were somehow weak, and by some impossible fluke, I ended up hanging from a tree. Would you end up a hollow shell like Darius?"
The moment the words left Cassius’s mouth, Lucius’s cute, youthful face underwent a terrifying transformation.
His grey eyes darkened into pits of absolute malice as a dangerous, sharp smile spread across his lips.
It was the smile of something ancient and ruthless that had been hiding beneath the mask of a devoted servant.
"Of course not, Young Master."
Lucius said, his voice dropping into a low, lethal register that seemed to make the very air around him grow cold.
"I am not as pathetic as that fool."
He shot a glance of absolute disdain at Darius, the contempt in his eyes so pure that it seemed to physically burn.
"If anyone dared touch you." Lucius continued, his voice growing even darker. " I would track them down and tear them apart piece by piece, ensuring they survive just long enough for you to grant them the most agonizing death imaginable."
"And I wouldn’t stop there."
He stepped closer to Cassius, his eyes blazing with unholy fervor.
"I would hunt down their family—the elderly, the women, the infants—and butcher them all."
"I would slaughter their friends, their friends friends, their distant relations, their servants, their pets."
"I would systematically erase everyone they have ever spoken to, and everyone those people have ever known until there was no one left to mourn them."
"Oh...okay."
Cassius had only meant the question as a joke, but even he felt a flicker of unease at the intensity of Lucius’s response.
He looked ready to go on a warpath and slaughter everyone in the world just for daring to touch Cassius.
’How can a butler be so utterly devoted and so terrifyingly unhinged?’ He wondered. ’What kind of person inspires this level of loyalty?’
This display reignited Cassius’s deep curiosity about their history.
—
For a long time, Cassius had secretly probed Lucius about their past, desperate to understand the origin of this absolute, terrifying devotion.
Ever since Cassius had woken up in this world, Lucius had been fixture by his side—loyal even when Cassius had been entirely weak, useless, and vulnerable.
He had stayed when others would have abandoned him.
He had protected him when there was no benefit in doing so.
He had loved him when Cassius had given him no reason to.
Cassius constantly wondered what had transpired between Lucius and the previous soul occupying this body to forge a bond so fierce that Lucius viewed Cassius as the sole resident of his universe.
Unfortunately, Lucius never gave a proper reason.
He always avoided the core of the topic, a stubborn privacy that deeply frustrated Cassius, though there was nothing he could really do about it.
Lucius would do absolutely anything Cassius asked for; he would lay down his life on the spot without a second thought.
But when it came to certain memories, he drew a firm, unyielding line.
And after hearing this unhinged declaration of loyalty, Cassius’s curiosity only burned hotter.
But before Cassius could ask anything else, Lucius looked at him with stars in his eyes, his expression one of infectious enthusiasm.
"What about you, Young Master?" He asked, practically bouncing on his heels. "If I were to end up in that state—broken and unable to serve you anymore—what would you do?"
Cassius looked at him, his expression completely calm, stable, and resolute.
"That won’t happen, Lucius. As long as you are by my side, nothing will ever harm you."
"No, young master! It’s a hypothetical scenario!"
Lucius shook his head vigorously, mimicking an eager puppy.
"I already know our household is invincible, but I must know—what if? If something took me away, would you go on a bloody rampage for me?"
He reached out, tightly clasping both of Cassius’s hands in his own.
"To know you would commit an atrocity of that scale just for my sake...that would be the highest honor of my life!"
Cassius didn’t blink.
Locking his intense crimson eyes onto Lucius’s grey ones, he spoke with an unshakeable finality that caused Lucius’s heart to skip a beat.
"Like I said, Lucius. Nothing will happen to you."
"There is no hypothetical scenario, no alternate timeline, and no variable in existence where you are permitted to be harmed."
He spoke with a quiet, terrifying absolute certainty.
"No matter what, you will always be safe by my side."
The sheer gravity of the statement caught Lucius completely off guard. He froze, his heart racing wildly against his ribs.
A deep, furious crimson blush erupted across his cheeks, making him look incredibly delicate and effeminate.
The display was so intensely cute that Cassius felt a sudden spike of awkwardness.
He forced himself to look away, clearing his throat, thinking to himself that his butler was simply too dangerous for his own good.
Lucius, caught in a daze of profound happiness, let a beautiful, genuine smile grace his lips as he murmured under his breath,
"You really are still the same old Master I’ve always known...You haven’t changed at all."
Cassius’s ears perked up at the hidden meaning woven into those words.
"What do you mean by that?" He demanded, sensing a breakthrough. "What do you mean, ’still the same old master’?"
But Lucius immediately reverted to a mask of pure, wide-eyed innocence. "Mean by what, Young Master? I don’t recall saying anything at all."
Cassius sighed, accepting that his butler was playing a game he couldn’t decode.
He let it drop for now; Lucius’s absolute love was undeniable, and whatever secrets he kept, he clearly carried them out of absolute fidelity.
—
Turning his attention back to the silent Darius, Cassius groaned with frustration.
"Talking to him like this is so boring! It’s like conversing with a brick wall. A very traumatized, broken brick wall."
Suddenly inspired, Cassius leaned over and began slapping Darius across the face.
Smack! Smack!
"Darius. Darius, wake up. Come on, look at me!" He slapped his cheeks rhythmically left and right, trying to force a reaction.
"Snap out of it! I didn’t come all this way to have a conversation with a corpse that’s still breathing."
Normally, the mere hint of such disrespect would have driven Darius, a proud high noble, into a lethal rage.
He would have vowed to exterminate nine generations of the offender’s lineage.
But Darius’s mind was too fractured to even register the degradation.
Finally, Cassius drew his hand back and delivered a massive, resounding slap.
SMACK!
Darius’s entire face went red, and for the first time, a flicker of life returned to his hollow eyes.
He slowly turned his head, his gaze meeting Cassius’s. His lips parted, and a single word escaped his throat.
"...Why?"
It came out as a whisper, barely audible. It was the only question on his mind, the only thing that had been gnawing at his shattered consciousness.
Cassius’s face lit up with delight.
"Why?" He repeated, his voice full of enthusiasm. "You want to know why I murdered your family in the way I did? Well, let me explain!"
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