Chapter : 899
The pieces, the horrible, impossible, and absolutely insane pieces, were beginning to click into place in Lloyd’s mind. A cold, dawning, and utterly catastrophic dread was beginning to rise in his gut. No, his mind screamed. It cannot be. It is impossible. It is a joke.
Amina, who could clearly see the dawning, horrified comprehension in his eyes, continued, her voice a relentless, beautiful, and devastating instrument of truth.
“For the past five years, since I came of age, my father has used the Jahl Challenge for a secret, and very personal, purpose. It was never just a spectacle. It was never just a culling of the arrogant and the foolish. It was a test. A trial. A public, and very brutal, audition.”
She turned her gaze from him to her father, who was still sitting on his obsidian throne, a look of profound, almost paternal, satisfaction on his face.
“It was,” she concluded, her voice a clear, final, and world-shattering bell of revelation, “his own, unique, and admittedly very dramatic, method for finding a suitable husband for me.”
The final word, ‘husband,’ detonated in the silent throne room with the force of a thousand of Iffrit’s fireballs.
Lloyd’s brain, which had been struggling to reboot, simply… blue-screened. The entire, complex, and beautiful edifice of his own strategic understanding of the world, his plans, his missions, his very purpose in this kingdom, all of it was consumed in a single, silent, and all-encompassing cognitive fire.
The Jahl Challenge. The prize of a lifetime. The key to his technological revolution. It had all been a lie. A beautiful, glorious, and magnificent lie. It had never been about the stones. It had never been about the glory.
It had been a bride-price.
He was a contestant on the world’s most dangerous, and most deadly, matchmaking show. And he had, through a series of brilliant, and now deeply, deeply ironic, maneuvers… won.
He stared at Amina, at the woman who was Sumaiya, at the kind, compassionate friend who had been his partner, his advocate, and who was now, apparently, his… his prize? His fiancée? He did not have the words. The universe had run out of words.
He was already married. He had a wife. A cold, terrifying, and very, very powerful ice-princess of a wife, waiting for him back in his own kingdom. A wife who was the cornerstone of a critical, and very fragile, political alliance.
The situation was no longer a crisis. It was a comedy. A black, terrible, and exquisitely painful cosmic comedy. And he was the punchline.
He felt a sudden, overwhelming urge to simply turn around, walk out of the throne room, out of the palace, out of the city, and to just… keep walking, until he reached the end of the world.
But the final, and most devastating, revelation was yet to come. The final, beautiful, and exquisitely cruel nail in the coffin of his own, self-inflicted sanity.
He looked at Amina, his mind a complete and utter blank, and he finally, numbly, managed to ask the one, single, stupid question that was left.
“The prize,” he croaked, his voice the sound of a dying man. “The twenty-five percent share of the mine.”
Amina’s smile, which he could not see but could feel in the very air around him, was a thing of pure, unadulterated, and almost sympathetic beauty.
“Ah, yes,” she said, her voice a soft, gentle, and utterly devastating murmur. “The prize. I am afraid there has been a small… misunderstanding.”
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Lloyd’s mind was a shipwreck, battered and broken on the jagged, unforgiving rocks of a reality he could no longer comprehend. The Jahl Challenge, his magnificent, high-stakes gambit for the resources he needed to build his future, had been a lie. A grand, royal, and utterly humiliating matrimonial trap. He felt like a master thief who had spent months planning the perfect, intricate heist, only to break into the vault and find a surprise party, complete with a confetti cannon and a cheerfully oblivious bride-to-be.
“A misunderstanding?” he repeated, his voice a dull, hollow echo of its former authority. He was no longer the Lord of Ferrum, no longer the Major General. He was just a man, a very, very confused man, who was on the verge of a profound, and possibly permanent, mental breakdown.
Princess Amina, who seemed to be taking a quiet, almost scholarly delight in his existential crisis, inclined her head in a gesture of gentle, apologetic confirmation.
Chapter : 900
“A small one,” she said, her voice a soothing, melodic, and deeply infuriating hum. “But a significant one, I will admit. You see, my father, the Sultan, for all his many virtues, is a man who enjoys a certain… theatrical flair. He believes that the truth is often more powerful, and certainly more entertaining, when it is revealed in a series of dramatic, and carefully timed, layers.”
She took a step closer to him, her presence a strange, disorienting mixture of the familiar, compassionate Sumaiya and the cool, regal, and utterly alien Princess Amina. “You fought for a prize, Lord Zayn. A magnificent prize. And you have won it. Of that, there is no doubt. But you have been operating under a slight, and I confess, a deliberately fostered, misapprehension as to the true nature of that prize.”
Lloyd could only stare at her, his mind a complete and utter blank. He had no moves left. He had no strategies. He was a player who had just discovered that the game he had been playing, the game he had been so certain he was winning, did not actually exist. All he could do was wait for the new, and infinitely more confusing, set of rules to be explained to him.
She turned from him and gracefully, elegantly, walked to stand beside her father’s obsidian throne. She was no longer the interpreter; she was now the co-presenter, the second half of this bizarre, royal, and deeply unsettling double-act.
“My father,” she began, her voice taking on a new, more formal, and more public tone, as if she were a herald delivering a royal proclamation, “is a man who believes in the sanctity of alliances. But he also believes that the strongest alliances are not forged in the cold, sterile ink of treaties and contracts. They are forged in the warm, and far more binding, crucible of shared blood and shared destiny.”
She looked back at Lloyd, and even through her veil, he could feel the weight of her gaze, a gaze that was now stripping away the last, lingering vestiges of his own, carefully constructed reality.
“The Jahl Challenge,” she continued, her voice as clear and as sharp as a diamond, “was never, as the world believes, just a brutal spectacle to cull the ambitious and entertain the masses. That is its public face, its convenient and useful fiction. Its true purpose, its secret, and far more profound purpose, has always been something else entirely.”
She paused, a master of dramatic timing, letting the weight of her impending revelation build to an almost unbearable crescendo.
“It was,” she declared, her voice ringing with the absolute, unshakeable authority of the throne, “a trial. A test. A public, and very brutal, and utterly definitive search. It was a crucible, designed by my father to burn away the weak, the foolish, and the unworthy, and to reveal the one, single thing he has been searching for for the past five years.”
She took a final, deep breath, and delivered the final, world-shattering, and absolutely, beautifully, and horrifyingly logical conclusion.
“It was a search for a man who was worthy of being my husband.”
The word, ‘husband,’ which had been a quiet, personal bombshell just moments before, was now a public, political, and historical supernova that detonated in the silent, echoing space of the throne room.
Lloyd’s brain, which had been on the verge of a blue-screen, simply… shut down. The lights went out. The system crashed. He was no longer thinking. He was no longer processing. He was simply… existing, a hollow, empty vessel in the heart of a reality that had become a surreal, and deeply unfunny, joke.
The Jahl Challenge was not a contest for a prize. It was a contest for her. The prize was not a share in a mine; it was a share in a life, a kingdom, a dynasty.
The full, breathtaking, and utterly insane scale of the Sultan’s grand, eugenics-based matchmaking scheme was now laid bare. He had not just been looking for a son-in-law. He had been looking for a worthy successor, a man whose proven, martial power would complement his daughter’s political and intellectual genius, a man who could be the sword to her crown. He had been breeding for power, using the most brutal, and most public, form of natural selection imaginable.
And Lloyd, the man who had entered the contest for the simple, pragmatic, and entirely selfish reason of acquiring some magical rocks to build a war machine, had just, through a series of magnificent, theatrical, and now deeply, profoundly ironic, maneuvers… won.
He had not just won a prize. He had won a princess.