As far as Zaid was concerned, there wasn’t a single subordinate he could truly rely on. Everyone was his inferior—a mere puppet awaiting his command. He had deemed only a rare few in the world worthy of being called brilliant, and if ever someone emerged whose talents he envied, they became his adversary by default.
To Zaid, someone he could not manipulate—could not control—was an enemy without exception. The strong competed, devouring each other in their climb to the top. Such was his life. It was all he’d ever known. And now, the person he recognized as the most talented among his family was blocking his path.
“That blasted Rashid!”
The face of his eldest son, born of his first wife, lingered in his mind. Rashid had always been intelligent, even from a young age. He excelled in every field, especially trade, and had even been his father’s favorite for a time. Zaid had seen something rare in his prodigious son and personally ushered him into the world of commerce.
Ari and Nhid, Zaid’s sons from his second wife, were straightforward, malleable fools. They stood no chance of becoming enemies. Rashid, on the other hand, was too brilliant. From the very beginning of his days as a merchant, it hadn’t taken him long to rise to his father’s level and compete with him as an equal. Even then, Zaid had known that he would never be able to bring the boy under his control.
To start, Zaid had given his eldest son a trifling amount of capital. That had been the spark. He had instructed Rashid to use it in his study of commerce, hoping the boy would learn the knowledge necessary to carve out his own future through repeated trial and error. Instead, Rashid defied all expectations. It was as though he couldn’t even taste defeat. In the profit-and-loss world of merchants, his talents ensured he profited every time.
Zaid was pleased at first, attributing his son’s achievements to luck. Yet, a full month later, what had once been a small sum of pocket change had grown into a vast fortune that eclipsed even the wealth of the most powerful people in House Sarenza. Zaid’s opinion of his eldest son changed in the blink of an eye.
Rashid possessed a talent for trade so immense that not even his father, the governor of the entire Mercantile Free State of Sarenza, could hope to keep up. Unable to exert control over his son, Zaid elected to keep him at a distance, sending him to another residence and even pushing away the boy’s mother. It hadn’t been much later that Zaid received the news that his first wife—a woman he had chosen to marry based on appearance—had passed away. He suspected she had unwittingly ingested poison meant for Rashid, and that the culprit was one of his many relatives wary of the boy.
It was hard to say whether it was the instigating factor, but losing his mother made Rashid more devoted to trade than ever before. Though he had once kept to the buying and selling of various goods, he soon purchased a headquarters for his business, which became a conglomerate as he absorbed more and more companies. Not even several months after his introduction to the world of trade, he had managed to purchase and monopolize his own city district. Then, by his tenth birthday, he had taken over half of the entire capital.
As expected, his actions stirred resentment within his family. Since the days of old, it had been an unspoken rule among those of House Sarenza never to encroach upon one another’s territory. But young Rashid, still just a child, was trampling that principle without a care.
In time, many in the family came to loathe Rashid, outraged to have had their domain—or what they’d thought was their domain—seized and toyed with. But not even their fury made Rashid obey the words and warnings of his father, the family patriarch. The situation was completely out of hand.
Rashid’s behavior—which showed no regard for the community of mutual interest known as family—earned him the animosity of many. It was no surprise, then, when assassins came for him in droves, each sent by those hoping to reclaim their lost assets through force. Despite his young age, he was already a threat to the status quo of House Sarenza.
And yet, the boy survived every attempt on his life. In some cases, he even hired the very assassins sent to execute him, winning them over with promises of better pay. It wasn’t long before he rose beyond the reach of his family—even Zaid.
By twelve years of age, Rashid practically owned Sarenza City.
And then, without word or warning, he offered to relinquish his grasp on the capital to take charge of the remote leisure facility known as the City Forgotten by Time. He was abandoning his stronghold for the world of gambling—a child’s pastime, compared to the true world of commerce.
Many of Rashid’s relatives were delighted to hear the news. They interpreted his choice as him finally recognizing the danger that would come to him if he stayed in Sarenza City. He had been presented with two choices: remain in the capital and accept the risk that came with it, or abandon his profits and run, preserving his life in the process. The little problem child had weighed up his options and finally made a mature decision.
Zaid, for his part, placed not an ounce of faith in that interpretation. He did not—could not—understand what Rashid was thinking. To claim otherwise would have been folly. So, he continued to keep the unstable factor at a distance. To a ruler, an unknown variable was something to be dealt with before it could evolve into an enemy. To allow someone superior to you to exist in the world you controlled was the height of contradiction.
Zaid had long since moved past any feelings of fatherly affection. To him, Rashid was no longer his son, but an uncertainty. He was a pure and genuine threat—one so incomprehensible that he had to be feared.
Just like the monster of a man King Clays had sent his way.
“That cunning old fox,” Zaid muttered. “Letting such a thing loose in my country. Reopening diplomatic relations? What a joke.”
The man from the screen mirror who had annihilated an entire legion of primal golems was far beyond the scope of a mere bodyguard for Princess Lynneburg. In fact, he was the greatest threat Sarenza’s status quo had ever faced. One would never be able to tell from his appearance, but he possessed an unfathomably terrifying degree of strength. And from the way his weapon so easily shattered primal golems—which turned away even mithril and orichalcum—it had to be the Kingdom of Clays’s hidden treasure, the Black Blade.
Why had King Clays given that man his weapon—a sword said to have no equal? The reason was unclear to Zaid, but it held no particular importance. What truly mattered was that it was here, in Sarenza. The very idea seemed preposterous, especially when the Divine Shield alone would have been overkill for the princess’s security detail.
Zaid couldn’t believe he had invited such a threat into his own lands. What had driven him to do it?
Aah. But of course.
He had put his trust in another and fallen for the cajolery of that elf. And because of that, he was suffering the heaviest losses he’d ever experienced. Not only had he invited that terrifying thing into Sarenza, but he’d even allowed it to join hands with Rashid. This was the consequence of neglecting his own principles: an approaching disaster of unprecedented scale.
Zaid had gleaned the truth of the matter, more or less. Unless he was mistaken, Rashid had not simply lost to that man in his Trials; he had strategically maneuvered him into being a controllable asset. Because House Sarenza had frozen the wealth Rashid had gathered over his childhood, there was gald in the hundreds of trillions forever beyond his reach. So, he’d accepted defeat and taken on a tremendous debt, which he would use as a pretext to seize the funds back. He was using the man with him as a proxy bank.
And now, with a sum hanging over his head that could easily mean death, he had come to the capital for one final gamble. He had but one chance, and failure would cost him everything. How was he capable of such an act of madness?
Zaid had sensed that something was amiss when Rashid first transferred to the City Forgotten by Time. He’d known that his eldest, of all people, would never make such a move without some grander scheme in mind. And seeing him now only confirmed that suspicion.
In leaving the capital, Rashid hadn’t given up on anything. He’d simply been biding his time, waiting for his moment to strike—expecting a chance to come along that he could entrust his fate to. And that chance had come in the form of the Black Blade’s wielder.
For his eldest to have gone to such lengths, he must have had an equally galvanizing motive. Zaid hadn’t the slightest inkling as to what it might be. Did he want revenge for having his fortune unjustly taken from him? Payback for those who’d sent assassins his way? Or was he acting on deep-seated resentment toward the family who’d taken his mother from him? Perhaps it was a combination of all those reasons—or something else entirely. Zaid could think of any number of incentives for Rashid to hate House Sarenza, but it was impossible to discern which were true.
The unknown variable was a monster Zaid didn’t understand—the only individual to have surpassed him. But if there was one thing he did recognize, it was that Rashid was coming for him with all his might, hell-bent on seizing his fortune, his status, and his country.
Zaid felt his arms and legs tremble violently. His heart rate quickened, and each breath he took became more shallow. They were all too natural reactions, given the circumstances. The two worst enemies he could have imagined had joined hands: a force strong enough to obliterate primal golems with a single arm, and an intellect that had nearly monopolized an entire merchant city on a child’s whim. Both were closing in on him.
“But don’t you dare think this is the end of me...” Zaid muttered darkly.
Indeed, he had yet to admit defeat. He believed he still had a chance to recoup his losses. But to do so, he would need to resort to the method he despised most for its uncertainty: a gamble. The last option available to him was to trust in that deceptive elf. Surrender wasn’t even worth considering—not to his own son, and certainly not to that accursed King Clays.
Thus, Zaid needed to be calm and composed. It was already clear that his efforts to postpone the catastrophe were nearing their limit. Even so, he had to buy as much time as he could—no matter how disgraceful the methods he used might be.
“After everything you’ve done, I won’t let you return home in one piece!” Zaid grumbled. There was no one else in his palace to hear the hatred in his voice.