Chapter 672 --672

Chapter 672: Chapter-672

He raised his head, his battle-scarred face etched with absolute, unbreakable loyalty.

"The day that slave flag touches the sky," Kael swore, his eyes burning, "the Vanguard Southern Division will rise from the earth and burn this capital to the ground for you."

Heena offered him a faint, genuinely warm smile. "I know you will, Kael. Now go. Before the Prime Minister’s spies notice the troop movements."

Kael bowed one last time, rose to his feet, and slipped out of the room as silently as a ghost.

The heavy oak doors clicked shut. Heena let out a long, shuddering sigh, rubbing her temples where a dull, rhythmic ache was beginning to pulse again.

"That was incredibly dramatic," Heena muttered to the empty room. "I should have written a script."

"It was a highly tactical contingency plan," the System’s blue orb phased back into existence, hovering over the nightstand. "But Host, you do realize that giving away your elite guard while simultaneously convincing the entire capital that you are carrying the Vanguard heir makes absolutely no logical sense?"

"It makes perfect sense," Heena closed her eyes. "The pregnancy is a shield to explain my physical decline. The hidden soldiers are the sword for when I am dead."

The blue orb flickered, its digital interface swirling with a mix of processing static and genuine, exasperated confusion.

"Host, I truly cannot understand you at all," the System complained, floating closer to her pillow. "Our primary mission is ninety percent complete. You literally just told me you still don’t even know who the regressor in this timeline actually is. Let’s just find him, capture him, trigger the extraction, and stop this mission before your brain completely shuts down!"

Heena leaned her head back against the heavy oak headboard, turning her pale face toward the moonlight filtering through the paper lattice window. The shadows in the room seemed to stretch and stretch, mirroring the exhaustion settling deep in her bones.

"System," Heena murmured, her voice completely devoid of its usual arrogant, weaponized edge. "Do you know what happens if we rush this? If this world fails and the timeline collapses because we left a loose end, that bastard up there will just hit reset and send us right back here."

She let out a dry, hollow chuckle that lacked any real humor. "Do you really want to come back here and work through this exact same political nightmare a second time? Because I absolutely refuse to marry that sociopathic scholar twice."

"Well, no," the System admitted, its glowing blue light dimming slightly in defeat. "But isn’t dragging this out practically useless? We secured the military. We broke the civil court’s treasury. We basically completed the grand objective."

"Waiting a few more months is not going to be that hard," Heena reasoned calmly, pulling the thick silk blankets tighter around her shoulders to ward off a sudden, bone-deep chill. "And anyway, with my blood clotting and this body declining so incredibly fast, who knows how much time we actually have left? I might not even make it to the six-month mark. We have to clear the board while I can still see the pieces."

The System hovered quietly for a long moment, processing the sheer, relentless pragmatism of the woman it was bound to. She was actively dying, completely aware of her impending expiration date, and yet her only concern was ensuring she didn’t have to repeat the paperwork.

A rare, strangely soft digital smile icon flashed across the System’s circular interface.

"Sometimes," the System sighed softly, its robotic voice carrying an undeniable trace of genuine affection, "I cannot understand your mindset at all."

Heena closed her eyes, a faint, unapologetic smirk touching her pale lips.

"You don’t need to," she whispered.

And then, there was only silence in the room—heavy, absolute, and completely undisturbed as the Vanguard Madam finally surrendered to the dark and let herself sleep.

The heavy, suffocating drowsiness was by far the worst enemy Heena had ever faced. It was infinitely more dangerous than any sword, because it did not strike from the shadows—it simply dragged her down from the inside out.

She began to lose time in terrifying, disjointed fragments.

One moment, she would be sitting at her mahogany desk, listening to Saura Chijen rattle off a list of embezzled property deeds, and the next, she would violently jerk awake, realizing a full hour had passed. A massive puddle of black ink would be pooled on her pristine parchment where her brush had slipped from her limp fingers.

Worse than the exhaustion was the terrifying erosion of her own mind. She started waking up with completely blank spaces in her memory. She couldn’t remember what she had eaten the previous night, or what tactical commands she had given Kael before he left with the shadow guards. The sharp, invincible warlord was rapidly dissolving, leaving behind a woman who felt like she was constantly grasping at smoke.

"Mother, if we route the extortion funds through the Ministry of Works, we can bypass the imperial tax audit by claiming it as a structural donation," Chijen explained one afternoon, holding his wooden abacus. "But we need your official seal on the... Mother?"

Heena stared at him, her mouth slightly open. She had been halfway through issuing a command, but the rest of the sentence had simply vanished. She looked at the bookshelf, then down at her hands, desperately trying to find the words. It wasn’t just a slip of the tongue; the actual concept in her brain was entirely gone, wiped completely clean by the expanding blood clot.

Samuel, sitting quietly by the window with his medical texts, immediately looked up. His golden eyes darkened. Without missing a beat, he stood and walked over to the desk, smoothly placing his hand over hers.

"The Madam was about to say that routing it through the Ministry of Works is too slow," Samuel lied flawlessly, his voice calm and grounding. "Use the Southern Military emergency fund loophole instead. It bypasses the civil court entirely."

Chijen blinked, completely unaware of the terrifying medical crisis happening right in front of him, and dutifully clacked his abacus. "Understood, Father."

When Chijen left the room, Heena slumped over the desk, burying her face in her hands. The humiliation burned hotter than the physical pain. She was a weapon, and she was rusting away in real-time.

God only knew how much longer she actually had. At this aggressive rate of cognitive decline, she wouldn’t even make it to the end of the month with her sanity intact. The meticulous, elegant long-game she had planned with Samuel was a luxury they could no longer afford. She didn’t have the brainpower left to play chess.

She slowly raised her head, her dark eyes hollow but burning with a sudden, feral intensity.

If she couldn’t out-think the Prime Minister over the next few months, then she was just going to have to physically and politically curbstomp him right now.

"Samuel," Heena said, her voice dropping all pretense of exhaustion. The warlord was back, operating purely on survival instinct and malice. "Stop drafting eviction notices. It’s too slow. I keep forgetting my own sentences, and if I have to listen to another one of his civil lackeys preach at me while my brain bleeds, I am going to murder someone in broad daylight."

Samuel closed his book, giving her his full, undivided attention. "What is the new strategy, Wife?"

"We skip the extortion," Heena declared, standing up and grabbing her heavy military cloak. "I am going to beat that bastard of a Prime Minister into the dirt before I forget how to throw a punch. Gather the remaining guards. We are paying the Gu estate a visit."

To Samuel, her aggressive complaint about her "brain bleeding" was just another one of his wife’s colorful, hyper-violent idioms. He had absolutely no idea she was being terrifyingly literal. In his genius, albeit sheltered, scholar’s mind, she was simply complaining about a massive stress migraine caused by the sheer, overwhelming incompetence of the civil court.

Samuel chuckled softly, completely unaware of the ticking time bomb expanding inside her skull. "Very well, Wife. If you wish to expedite the process with physical intimidation rather than paperwork, I will not stop you."

Despite her sudden, feral burst of homicidal energy, Heena did not march out of the Vanguard estate with her usual battalion of heavily armored soldiers. She only took five or six elite bodyguards with her. The entire capital currently believed she was a delicate, expecting mother; bringing a massive army to a civil dispute would shatter the carefully constructed facade she needed to hide her physical decline.

The bribed imperial physician was certainly earning his illegal gold. No matter what happened—whether Heena vomited, suddenly forgot how to speak, or nearly collapsed in the hallway—the doctor would simply wave his hands at the panicked family and declare, "It is just the pregnancy! Every woman experiences trimesters differently!"

It was the perfect, unbreakable excuse.

Yet, sometimes, when Heena caught her grandmother looking at her, she saw a fleeting, devastating shadow of genuine pain in the old woman’s eyes. But just as quickly as the pain appeared, it would be aggressively swallowed up by bright, forced happiness and frantic baby preparations.

Heena often thought her grandparents were just actively fooling themselves. Deep down, they were seasoned war veterans; their instincts were too sharp not to sense that something was fundamentally, deeply wrong with their granddaughter. But the pregnancy narrative gave them a desperately needed anchor. They clung to the lie because accepting the alternative—that their last remaining bloodline was actively rotting away in front of them—was simply too horrifying to endure.