Scarlet’s mansion garden.
It is now destroyed: the garden... well, what’s left of it now looks like a battlefield.
Amidst the devastation, Lucien gazes at the two moons with a mixture of exhaustion and satisfaction. He hadn’t expected Scarlet to use him as her training toy, but, though exhausting, it was a magnificent experience.
’I’m still too weak,’ he thinks, letting out a sigh. ’If I faced a general of the Inquisition, I would die immediately.’
Even so, a smile breaks out on his face.
He stretches his body calmly, feeling the blood vibrate with a new understanding.
After the fight... if you can call it that, because he only received a one-sided beating from his wife, Scarlet told him that she would prepare a suitable place to train him.
However, when he was facing Scarlet, he felt a strange sense of pride, as if something inside him would not let him give in, even if it meant death.
"Luna," he calls her.
His shadow lengthens, and a maid appears from it.
"Lord Lucien called me." Luna looks at him with a neutral expression.
"Where is Selene? I thought she would be here by now." Lucien knows his wife’s personality; she was unique, and he loves that about her... but he finds it strange that she hasn’t arrived yet.
He expected her to appear, shouting, "DARLING~!" jumping toward him like an ice rocket, and then BOOOOOM! Flying away as he received his wife’s love. ᴜᴘᴅᴀᴛᴇ ꜰʀᴏᴍ novelꞁire.net
"Lady Selene is at her parents’ house... but Lord Luan is quite special," Luna tells her, in a neutral tone.
"Umu, I understand what you mean," Lucien nods. Selene has told him about her loving father, and he can sense the problems from miles away.
"And all I can say to you is... Don’t die." Luna looked at him, amused, as if she had been expecting the encounter between those two.
"You seem to be enjoying this situation, don’t you?"
Luna quickly denies it, "You are mistaken, Lord Lucien, that is not proper for a maid," she said, but without daring to look him in the face.
"..." Lucien lowers his eyes, but sighs: "Oh, really? Where are Mayla and Vanessa?" he asks, remembering those two women.
"They are still in the human world, finishing up some loose ends that Lady Selene didn’t take care of... because, well..." Luna didn’t finish her sentence before sighing. "But they’ll be here in a few days."
"Hmm, I see, thank you for telling me." He thanks her because she is not his servant.
"It’s nothing, Lord Lucien." She smiles slightly.
"Oh, right, by the way, before I forget, what is the structure of vampire society like? Because I heard before that Selene is from a family of counts and Scarlet is a countess."
Luna nods and explains:
"Vampiric society is divided into two types: clans and families. The main difference is the title of nobility. For example, Lady Scarlet herself is a noble family, while a common clan lacks that recognition.
Anyone can form a clan, but only the Vampire King can grant official titles. Holding a noble title confers status, influence, and certain privileges within our society.
"Hmm, I see," Lucien nodded at Luna’s brief but effective explanation.
"Darling~!" A woman’s honeyed voice echoed throughout the ravaged garden, bouncing off the ruins and broken trees.
Lucien, still lying on the floor, blinked a couple of times before smiling. Hearing that voice, his fatigue vanished. He slowly sat up and stretched out his arms, already knowing what was coming.
A dark blue flash streaked through the air. In an instant, a female figure lunged at him with such force that they both ended up falling to the ground amid dust.
"Welcome back, darling," Lucien murmured with a crooked smile as he looked up at Sesha’s face.
She didn’t respond with words. She kissed him. Slowly, deeply, as if time had stopped around them. Ten seconds... maybe more.
When they finally parted, Sesha stroked his hair tenderly and smiled with satisfaction. "I missed you," she whispered in that sing-song voice.
"Me too~!" Lucien replied, laughing softly. He wrapped his arms around her waist and stood up with her still in his arms, as if afraid to let her go.
Then he looked at Luna and nodded. "Thank you for the explanation."
The vampire bowed elegantly before vanishing back into her shadow, as if the ground had swallowed her up.
Sesha, still clinging to Lucien like a koala, glanced around. What had once been a garden was now little more than a battlefield: deep cracks marked the earth, the walls were stained with traces of dried blood, and the air smelled of metal and ash.
"What happened here?" she asked with genuine curiosity, her eyes sparkling with a mixture of fascination and concern.
"Hmm?" Lucien said with a stifled laugh. "I was just testing my skills... and ended up getting beaten up courtesy of Scarlet. If it weren’t for my vampiric regeneration, I would have been dust long ago."
"And why were you ’testing’ your powers?" she asked, raising an eyebrow, half amused, half inquisitive.
Lucien shrugged and flashed a mischievous smile.
"Scarlet wanted to assess my abilities so she could design a customized training program for me," he replied. "She wanted to see how far I could go and what my weaknesses are. Plus..."
He added, his eyes sparkling with curiosity,
"I’m eager to see what kind of challenge she’s going to give me. Judging by the smile on my wife’s face, it promises to be very interesting."
He looked up for a second, fixing his eyes on the clouds passing between the two moons, and added in a lower tone, almost to himself: "I don’t mind if they tear me to pieces if it makes me stronger in the end."
"It seems like you’re becoming a masochist," Sesha remarked with amusement. For her, training to the point of exhaustion made no sense; suffering unnecessarily had never seemed appealing to her. Still, seeing her husband so motivated, she began to think that maybe it wasn’t so terrible after all.
"Masochist? Pff... ha ha ha!" Lucien let out a hearty laugh. Maybe his wife wasn’t entirely wrong; after all, who in their right mind would enjoy the pain of training so much?
’Maybe I am a training masochist,’ he thought, with a satisfied smile on his lips.