Part One Hundred Thirty-Two — What Ivy Found

　Ivy left Horizoncrest quietly, without ceremony, the same efficient discretion she brought to everything since her own naming had settled into her — no announcement, no fanfare, simply a decision made and acted upon the moment the leadership circle's meeting concluded.

Someone orchestrated Myrath's manipulation. I intend to find out who, and I intend to do it properly, without wasting time on questions that torture rarely answers honestly anyway.

　She tracked the same payment chain she'd already partially unraveled, following it now with considerably more patience than her earlier investigation had required — every intermediary, every carefully laundered transaction, every deliberate layer of misdirection someone had built to keep their own hands looking clean.

　The trail led her, eventually, to a modest estate on Myrath's own former border — modest by design, she suspected, precisely because modesty drew considerably less attention than the alternative.

　The demon inside didn't sense her arrival until it was already too late to matter. He was strong, she knew immediately, genuinely strong — a power level that would have matched her own, once, before Kai's naming had rewritten what she was capable of becoming entirely.

You would have been a genuine threat to me, a year ago. Now you're barely worth the effort of drawing this out.

　He tried to run the moment he understood what he was actually facing. She didn't let him get far.

　"I don't have time for negotiation," she told him, calm, entirely without malice in the assessment. "I need information. I intend to take it directly, rather than waste either of our time asking questions you'd only lie about anyway."

　He fought back, genuinely, everything he had thrown into a desperate, doomed resistance that might once have been a real contest between equals.

　It wasn't one now.

　The gap between them had grown too vast, too completely, for his own considerable strength to matter against what she'd become.

　She ended the fight quickly, rather than been cruel, and reached into what remained of his mind — extracting rather than asking, taking exactly what she needed without the delay or unreliability of interrogation.

There it is. Belial's own hand, confirmed. Every piece of it.

　The information settled into her own understanding with cold, methodical clarity — orders given directly from Belial himself, funding routed specifically to manipulate Myrath's dissatisfied faction, a king placed under something considerably more deliberate than simple persuasion.

Mind control. Not manipulation through argument. Actual, direct control over the king's own decisions.

　She finished what needed finishing, quick and clean, no more violence than the moment strictly required.

　She stood a while afterward, alone in the quiet estate, turning over everything she'd just learned.

Kai needs to know this. All of it. Including the part he's not going to want to hear.

　She gathered herself properly, settling back into place, and began the journey back toward Horizoncrest — the information she carried heavier, somehow, than any physical burden could have been.

Belial didn't just manipulate Myrath into a war. He specifically, deliberately, engineered a confrontation designed to provoke exactly the reaction Enzo actually gave. This wasn't incidental cruelty. This was calculated, from the very beginning.

Kai deserves to know exactly how deliberately he's been played.

　She teleported back within the hour, the trail fully traced, the truth fully extracted, ready to deliver news that was going to change, considerably, how this entire conflict actually needed to be understood.