It was a win. The Maxtons had lost their witch.

Unambiguous if not glorious, even.

But it wasn’t his win.

It was Chaos’s. Sienna’s. Dravenna’s.

And the fact that those three women were now coordinating behind his back—scheming, moving pieces, withholding information—sat in the back of his mind like a small, cold stone he had accidentally swallowed and couldn’t quite cough up.

He trusted Sienna. He trusted Melissa, who trusted Chaos.

Strange... why don’t I trust grandma at all, after all, she taught me everything I know now, well, the harem part of everything I know at least.

Then again, how could he trust someone he wants to cuck.

He was even, against every survival instinct screaming in his head, beginning to trust Dravenna.

But trust was not the same as being included, and Phei had spent ten long years in a house where being left out of certain rooms usually meant you were the next sacrifice on the altar.

The Ryujin Tiamat women had relocated a lesser god across international borders without so much as a heads-up. He would sit with that. Quietly. For now.

Half a win, then. A very generous half, grandma.

And the other half of the ledger—

The other half was deliciously, undeniably his.

One of the Maxton conspiring patriarchs was currently kowtowing in his own bedroom with a Slave Mark seared into his forehead and explicit instructions to keep playing the role of cold, neglectful husband while quietly restructuring every penny of his ill-gotten empire into trusts that now belonged to the daughter he had once planned to murder in cold blood.

Better still—and this was the quiet, savage satisfaction that had been humming beneath every other thought for the entire flight—that single Mark meant Cassiopeia no longer had to dance on the razor’s edge of this war.

He hadn’t planned it consciously. Hadn’t sat down and thought, I will brand Jonathan specifically so my female slave doesn’t have to spy for me alone anymore.

But the consequence was pure poetry.

If the Maxtons ever caught the faintest whiff that their inner circle had been compromised, the first throat they would reach for would be the woman who had been closest to Phei while still technically wearing their colors.

Cassiopeia would have been the first interrogation. The first test. The first disposable piece the family would happily burn to smoke out the traitor.

Now she didn’t have to be.

Now she could simply be—his, completely, in his bed, at his side. On her knees in lounges whenever the mood struck, if she wasn’t accomplishing something for him if her family didn’t come calling her back.

Jonathan would take the interrogations. Jonathan would pass every test with flying, broken colors and would burn if the family ever needed a scapegoat to throw on the pyre.

And Cassiopeia would get to sleep in.

That mattered to him. More than he had expected it to.

Eira, for her part, had done something delightfully ominous to the Montgomery house before they left—something she had refused to explain with anything more helpful than a mischievous wink and the cryptic promise that "the walls now have better taste in owners."

She had described it in passing — something about sealing the aura of the estate, blanking its spiritual signature, and surgically severing the house from any sensory scrying a progenitor-level entity might dare attempt.

Phei had only half-heard the explanation at the time, because Jonathan had been in the middle of crawling forward on his elbows to press devout, trembling kisses against the toe of his shoe, and multitasking the exquisite absurdity of a Legacy patriarch performing boot worship while receiving a casual dissertation on fairy-grade metaphysical espionage had rather monopolized the lion’s share of his attention.

Which meant, no one knew what had happened in there...

Maybe Consort and her Master did? He wasn’t sure. But Eira knew he didn’t want to hide aything from those two, lest they make their move to. We can’t have that for now, it would be too much to handle.

Gods below, Phei thought, fighting the twitch at the corner of his mouth, I’ve turned a man who once made billionaires sweat into a very enthusiastic foot fetishist. This is my life now.

The upshot, as Phei now understood it, was deliciously, ruthlessly thorough.

Should a certain irritatingly-grinning Jörmungandr Prince decide — in the hours or days to come — to probe for disturbances in the psychic web around his fellow conspirators, he would reach for the Montgomery estate and encounter nothing but a perfect, velvet dead zone.

A quiet house where a patriarch ate his breakfast with mechanical precision, attended his meetings, and ran his firm... while absolutely nothing of interest ever happened behind those tastefully expensive walls.

Brilliant, Phei mused darkly. Eira just turned the man’s entire mansion into a spiritual Faraday cage. I should probably give her a raise. Or at least another lollipop.

That was the sort of casual, god-tier sorcery a fairy only admitted to after she had already been using it for weeks without bothering to mention it.

He would have to ask Eira later what else she could seal. Later. Everything was later tonight.

Everything was in place.

Everything was functioning with the cold, elegant precision of a freshly sharpened guillotine.

And Phei was nowhere near done for the day.

The Legacies were going to lose far more than one pawn before the sun rose again tomorrow.

He did not yet fully comprehend how the Cosmic Dragon Face Manifest operated — only Jonathan knew what unspeakable and inescapable nightmares he had witnessed behind his eyelids when those ancient words left Phei’s lips, and Jonathan, now thoroughly broken, devoted, and happily kowtowing, had not volunteered a single description.

But Phei knew enough.

He had watched the ability work. He had seen what it had done to a man already tenderized by hours of Eira’s patient, artistic handiwork.

If Cosmic Dragon Face alone could collapse Jonathan’s centuries-hardened resistance into a screaming, drooling puddle, then it would be more than sufficient for the next target.

No tenderizing required. No preamble, neither an elaborate twenty-two-swing golf-club ritual.

Jonathan, Phei thought with a flicker of dark amusement. Was the training wheels and reward-unlock sequence in one delightful package. The tutorial boss of soul domination. I almost feel bad. Almost.

Lies, he did not!

If Phei had unlocked the ability before he probably could have enslaved the man in under two minutes. No golf club. No void-ice balls. Just the words, the Mark, and the soft, final click of a collar snapping shut around a once-proud neck.

That would’ve been boring and a way too gentle escape he doesn’t deserve.

He wasn’t sorry.

Not even a little.

Night had fallen somewhere over the black the world, and by the time the cabin crew finished their ritual of opening doors and the familiar bright hiss of pressurized air met the salt-heavy island dark, Phei wanted exactly one thing.

Sleep.

Not because exhaustion had finally caught him — his stats had long since rendered such mortal inconveniences obsolete — but because he craved the small, pathetic comfort of a dark room, a soft bed, and the quiet ritual of pretending, for a few precious hours, that he was still an ordinary seventeen-year-old boy.

He wanted to open his Mystery Boxes in private.

He wanted to discover what horrors and wonders a Super Abilities Mystery Box might actually yield.

He wanted to lie on his back beneath an indifferent ceiling and let his brain quietly digest the mountain of atrocities it had committed today.

Just one night of pretending I’m normal, he thought, almost wistfully. Maybe the boxes will give me something wholesome. Like the ability to bake cookies. Or world peace. Ha. Who am I kidding.

Unfortunately.

There would be no rest for the wicked tonight.

Because it was time for another name to be crossed off the Legacy side of the ledger — slowly, deliberately, and with the same dark, elegant finality that had already claimed one patriarch and one deadly aunt.