Chapter 590: Spoiled Princess
In the penthouse, Anya pulled back from the embrace and fixed Charlotte with a contemplative gaze.
"You’ve broken free of your shackles." She said quietly. "Haven’t you, Charlotte?"
Charlotte looked at her in surprise.
"Earlier today, when that scene played out—the blood, the violence—you stayed. You watched. You didn’t run, didn’t hide, didn’t retreat into yourself the way you used to."
Anya’s smile was proud. "I’m so impressed with you, you know."
"Your older sister is proud too!" Astrid nodded vigorously. "I thought it would take years more before you could handle something like that. But today, you proved me wrong!"
Both sisters beamed at Charlotte, their earlier teasing forgotten in the warmth of genuine admiration.
Charlotte forced an awkward, strained smile, looking down at her lap.
"Thanks..." She murmured, her fingers tightly gripping the bedsheets.
"I...I’ve always wanted to improve. I wanted to prove to Mika that I’ve finally moved on."
"Especially since...he was the one who suffered the absolute most, yet he moved on so effortlessly. It felt pathetic for me to still be living in the past while he’s perfectly fine."
Anya and Astrid exchanged a grave look.
"But honestly." Charlotte continued, her voice growing quieter. "I haven’t really moved on. Not completely. There are still nights when I wake up screaming. Nights when the nightmares come and I can’t escape them no matter how hard I try."
Her face had grown paler, her hands trembling slightly in her lap.
"I still hear his screams. Mika’s screams. They echo in my ears constantly, day and night."
"Those sounds of pain, of terror, of absolute despair—they’ve carved themselves into my soul, and I can’t get them out. Sometimes I think about taking a pen and..."
She pressed her fingers to her temples, her voice dropping to barely a whisper.
"...think about stabbing it into my ears. Just to make the sounds stop. Just to have silence. Just to..."
She trailed off, her earlier vibrancy completely evaporated.
In its place was a woman teetering on the edge of an abyss that had never fully closed beneath her feet.
Anya and Astrid exchanged worried glances.
They knew Charlotte’s story. They knew what she had endured, what Mika had endured because of her.
While Anya’s trauma had been forged in isolation and darkness, and Astrid’s had been born of pursuit and survival...
...Charlotte’s had been something else entirely.
Something more insidious.
The proof of that horror lay in Mika himself.
After the incident in the underground cave with Anya and the hunt involving Astrid, Mika hadn’t been severely altered.
After just a few days of quiet rest, his internal mana had stabilized, and he had returned to being the exact same old Mika—completely relaxed, nonchalant, and entirely unbothered by the violence.
But after what had happened with Charlotte...Mika had completely, fundamentally broken.
The family remembered that dark period with absolute terror.
For three whole weeks, the boy hadn’t spoken a single word to anyone.
His eyes, which had always retained a fierce, vibrant spark no matter how dark they were had turned completely hollow, vacant, and dead.
It was almost as if his very soul had been violently severed from his body.
The sheer, unadulterated agony he had suffered at the hands of Charlotte’s incident had crushed his iron will.
For twenty-one days, the family had wept, utterly paralyzed by the terrifying belief that they had lost the real Mika forever.
And Charlotte had imprisoned herself in her own guilt, shackled by the knowledge of what her actions had cost the person she loved most.
But to know what happened to Mika, one would have to travel all the way back to when he was seven years old and Charlotte was eight.
—
If you were to stop any random person on any random street in any random realm and ask them a simple question—
"If you could choose to be born into any family in all the worlds, which one would you pick?"
—the answer would be immediate and universal.
Of course—once upon a time, decades ago, the answers might have been different.
Someone might have named a celebrity. To live in the shadow of a famous actor, to be the child of a beloved singer.
Someone else might have chosen a multi-billionaire, imagining a life of unimaginable luxury and excess.
A royal family, perhaps. A king’s daughter. A queen’s son.
But that was before.
Now, in this age, there was only one answer.
"I’d want to be born into the Battle Angel family."
Everyone said it.
The young and the old. The rich and the poor. The blessed and the unblessed. It didn’t matter who you were or where you came from.
The Battle Angels were the pinnacle. The summit. The absolute apex of everything anyone could ever aspire to be.
Because the Battle Angels weren’t just powerful. They weren’t just influential. They weren’t just famous.
They had transcended all of those categories entirely.
Every single one of them wielded power that could reshape continents with a thought.
They could shift the course of nations with a single word.
If one of them woke up tomorrow and decided that a particular country no longer suited her aesthetic preferences, that country would cease to exist before lunchtime.
And yet, they didn’t.
They used their power to protect, not destroy. They had stopped the rampage of the Eternal Queen when no one else could.
They had saved not just one world, but countless worlds across countless realms.
They were heroines on a cosmic scale, admired and revered wherever sentient beings drew breath.
Because of that people admired them wherever they went.
Crowds gathered just to catch a glimpse of them.
Their images were displayed in homes and temples and public squares across countless civilizations.
They had transcended the very concepts of fame and fortune and power, ascending to a level that no one—no king, no emperor, no ruler of any domain—could ever hope to reach.
Not forget, they were beautiful. Heart-stoppingly, legendarily, almost unfairly beautiful.
It didn’t matter whether you were attracted to women or not—looking at a Battle Angel was like looking at a masterpiece painting or a perfect sunset.
So, to be born into their family. To live in their household. To wake up every morning and share breakfast with them.
To speak with them, laugh with them, be held in their arms when you cried.
To call them Mother. To call them Aunt.
It was the dream of every living soul in all the realms.
And Charlotte? Charlotte knew that she lived that dream every single day.
—
She figured it out when she was very young.
Most children don’t really understand their place in the world. They don’t grasp the concept of social hierarchy or privilege or the sheer, staggering luck of their birth circumstances.
They take their lives for granted because they don’t know anything else.
Charlotte was different.
She remembered the first time she truly understood.
She had been maybe three years old, riding on her mother Yelena’s shoulders through a crowded city street.
The crowds had parted for them like water before a ship’s prow. People had gasped and pointed and whispered. Some had even bowed.
And Charlotte, looking down at all those faces full of awe and wonder and desperate, hungry admiration, had felt something click into place inside her mind.
’They’re looking at us like we’re gods.’
’We’re not gods. But to them, we might as well be.’
’And I’m part of this. I’m one of them. I’m a Battle Angel’s daughter!’
The realization had filled her with a warmth that spread from her chest to the tips of her fingers and toes.
It wasn’t arrogance, exactly—or at least, not only arrogance. It was certainty.
The absolute, unshakeable knowledge that she was exactly where she was supposed to be.
That she had been born into the greatest family in all the realms, and that this fact made her special in a way that nothing could ever take away.
From that moment on, Charlotte carried herself with the confidence of a princess.
No—more than a princess. Princesses could be deposed. Princesses could lose their thrones.
Charlotte’s position was even more secure than that.
She was a Battle Angel’s daughter, and that was a title that no revolution could ever strip away.
---
"ASTRID! Call me Princess Charlotte!"
"I’m not calling you that."
"Why not?! I’m clearly a princess! Look at me! Everything about me screams royalty!"
"You’re four years old and you have jam on your face."
"The jam is part of my royal mystique!"
Charlotte stood in the middle of the playroom, her hands on her hips, her chin lifted high.
Astrid, who was only slightly older but already possessed of that exasperated older-sister energy that would define their relationship for years to come, stared at her with the flat expression of someone who had been having this argument for several hours and was running out of patience.
"You’re not a princess." Astrid said. "You’re my little sister. And as your older sister, I have authority over you. That’s how it works."
"That is NOT how it works! I’m a princess, and princesses outrank older sisters! It’s in the royal rulebook!"
"There is no royal rulebook."
"You don’t know that! You can’t read yet!"
"I can too read!"
"Barely! I saw you sounding out words yesterday! You read at a baby level!"
"I do NOT read at a baby level!"
"Baby reader! Baby reader! Astrid is a baby reader!"
The argument devolved from there, as their arguments usually did.
But the interesting thing, the thing that would stick with Charlotte for years afterward was that she never doubted herself for a moment.
Even when Astrid made logical points, Charlotte’s confidence never wavered.
She knew she was right. She knew she was special. The details were just details.
—
With Anya, things were even simpler. Charlotte didn’t bother arguing with Anya at all.
"Anya! Come play with me!"
"But I was reading..."
"Reading is boring! We’re going to play princess and knight! I’m the princess, and you’re the knight who has to protect me from dragons!"
"Can’t Astrid be the knight?"
"Astrid is busy being a baby reader. Come on!"
She grabbed Anya’s hand and pulled her away from her book without waiting for a response.
It never occurred to her that Anya might not want to play.
It never occurred to her that Anya might have her own plans, her own desires, her own preferences.
Charlotte’s world revolved around Charlotte, and she simply assumed that everyone else’s did too.
Anya, being Anya, went along with it. She always did.
That was the dynamic between them—Charlotte led, and Anya followed.
Charlotte demanded, and Anya acquiesced.
Charlotte took up all the space in the room, and Anya made herself small to accommodate her.
It wasn’t malicious. Charlotte loved her sister deeply.
She just...didn’t think about her very much.
Anya was part of Charlotte’s world, a supporting character in the grand drama of Charlotte’s existence.
And Charlotte, in her childish self-absorption, had never considered that there might be anything wrong with that.
—
The Battle Angels themselves were not immune to Charlotte’s demands.
In fact, they might have been the worst enablers of all.
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