Beast Slayer Online: Initialization
Copyright© 2026 by CaffeinatedTales
Chapter 116: Fireball
Having something flung into his face.
Count Stessa had never suffered such a thing in his life.
His family was wealthy and noble. They had hired the most cultivated tutors to educate their children, and even those tutors had never dared lay a hand on them. After childhood, the years when a person was easiest to discipline, he had become the face of House Stessa itself.
Who would dare strike the face of such a noble?
He had not even seen the gesture before. No one dared lose their temper with a subordinate in front of a count. What if such behavior were taken for instability? Who would wager his future on that?
So when the papers struck Stessa’s face, he froze.
Instinct told him the blow was not meant to damage flesh. It was meant to attack dignity. Personhood.
What came first was not anger, but absurdity.
Men like him were meant to spend their lives steeped in honey. Ordinary air from outside tasted bitter on their tongues.
Fear spread through him before rage did.
When a man meets a kind of injury he has never known, fear is only natural. And now Stessa had also confirmed one thing: Lannor had never left him the option of living.
Fear had been a stone pressing on his heart. Now that stone grew heavier by the breath.
Once he understood there was no choice left, it collapsed.
Stessa’s once-steady gaze began to skitter. His lips trembled, bloodless. His well-kept face and beard, arranged with care, seemed to loosen under that constant shivering.
Lannor watched in silence as this powerful noble in the prime of his life slowly became a timid, terrified joke.
“So you should understand, my lord count.”
“I was well educated. That education gave me something precious, a view of the whole board. You tried to drown my thoughts in information and pin my eyes to one little Temeria. But when I heard those things, all I wanted to do was laugh.”
The chair creaked as Lannor braced a hand on the armrest and stood.
Stessa flinched at the sound.
Lannor smiled kindly and walked behind the count. Those bloodstained gloves patted his shoulder, light and almost polite.
Each pat made the handsome middle-aged man twitch.
“Don’t be afraid, my lord. I am not going to kill you now. In fact...”
He glanced down. The pendant at his throat had begun to tremble faintly. Lannor’s smile grew warmer.
“You may leave.”
The count looked up in astonishment, but from that angle he could only see Lannor’s eyes, narrowed into smiling slits.
“Don’t look so surprised, my lord count. I saw your cellar. The children down there are fed and clothed. They ought to thank you, really.”
Something in Lannor’s tone shifted when he mentioned the cellar, but Stessa’s mind, bound tight in fear, could not catch it.
“I ... I can leave? You won’t kill me?”
Stessa stammered, startled and delighted at once.
Even an ordinary man should have sensed something wrong by then. But death is the deepest fear. When fear has a road of escape, a man will take it, however absurd that road looks.
Stessa rose from the chair by inches, testing it. At first his movements were slow. When Lannor made no move to stop him, they became smoother.
He went toward the study door. His steps quickened, then quickened again.
He glanced back. Lannor still stood where he was, both hands resting on the back of the count’s chair, smiling as he watched him go.
The count turned away at once. With his back to Lannor, his face darkened, twisting with malice.
The closer he came to the door, the more fear inside him curdled into rage and cruelty.
A witcher. A mutant mongrel.
He had dared enter his estate, enter his study, touch him with filthy hands, threaten him.
He had to die. Once Stessa stepped beyond that door, his guards would surround and protect him.
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