Before Dex could launch his direct and seismic military assault in broad daylight, which would overturn the balance of power in the city of Seiron from its very foundations, he knew with absolute certainty, as a seasoned strategist, that he must first secure the night.
He had to cut off Sylvester's hidden eyes and ears, tear his intelligence network out by its roots, render him blind and stumbling in the darkness, and deaf to the footsteps of death crawling toward his gate, before striking him the decisive blow.
Sylvester did not rely solely on the official regional guard to control the city. He had planted throughout the arteries of Seiron, in its winding alleys and its dark taverns, a complex and venomous spider-web network of spies known as The Shadow Cells.
They were a lethal mixture of mercenaries, informants, and hired killers from the notorious Shadow Organization. They wore the guise of ordinary civilians: street vendors, beggars, tavern workers, and even minor priests. They monitored every whisper, analyzed every suspicious movement, recorded every grievance, then submitted their encrypted reports directly to Sylvester's chamber in the ducal palace.
"Tonight's objective is complete and total blindness," Dex said in a low and cold voice, standing in a dark alley, tying a black leather mask over the lower half of his face, leaving only his blue eyes gleaming like two embers in the darkness.
Beside him, Lumia stood in her customary calm, wearing a dark cloak that merged with the night. With her new black hair cascading like a waterfall of silk, and her clear blue eyes, she appeared to have been born from the darkness itself.
The pair moved across rooftops and through the city's alleys like true ghosts that had just left the world of the dead. They produced not a single sound, did not shift a pebble, and left no trace of their passing. Their synchrony was terrifying, as though their minds were connected by an invisible thread.
The first target on the Harvest list was an old and dilapidated house in the city's impoverished northern outskirts. From the outside it appeared abandoned, reeking of mold and dampness, its windows covered with rotting wooden planks. But Dex knew well, through his intensive investigation and violent interrogations over the previous days, that this ruin was in reality a secret communications center and a primary gathering point for the Organization.
"Lumia, seal the place magically, completely. Leave no gap the size of a needle," Dex whispered, pressing himself against the shadow beside the solid back door. "I do not want a single cry of pain to pass through these crumbling walls and wake the neighbors, and I do not want a single magical message or carrier bird to leave this place and warn the palace."
Lumia nodded in silence and raised her slender white hand with fluid grace. In a fraction of a second, a transparent and invisible wave of pure void energy spread, launching as a silent dome that enveloped the house from its foundations to its chimney.
This dome severed the place entirely from the outer reality of the city: sound ceased to pass, mana currents were cut, and even the air inside the dome became isolated.
The moment the isolation was complete, Dex wasted no time trying to open the lock. He kicked the back door with force augmented by mana, shattering it into wooden splinters, and stormed the place like a black tempest.
He had no intention of threatening, or delivering speeches of intimidation, or displaying power. With the coldness of the prisoner forged in the hell of Falus Forest, who knows that a fraction of a second of hesitation can mean certain death, he moved at a speed surpassing the human eye's ability to follow.
Inside, gathered around a circular table lit by a single solitary candle, five professional spies were reviewing their daily encrypted reports. Before their minds could even register that the door had opened and death had entered, Dex's dagger, blazing with a faint, concentrated blue fire like a laser blade, had pierced the first spy's throat with surgical precision, converting his scream into a silent, bloody gurgling.
"Attack! An intruder!" shouted the second spy, the quickest-witted of them, attempting to back away and activate a red alert enchantment that had been drawn in advance on the wall.
But Lumia was faster than sound itself. "Spatial fold," she whispered, a single word, cold as polar frost. She waved her hand in a slight motion, and the physical distance between the fleeing spy and the stone wall contracted in a fraction of a second, he found himself pulled by an invisible force and pressed against the cold stone as though a massive magnetic gravity were dragging him violently, unable to move a fingertip.
Dex used his daggers with surgical, merciless precision. He moved among the three remaining spies like a skilled dancer at a bloody recital. He severed the vocal cords first, to prevent any spoken magical incantations, then cut the tendons of their hands and feet to paralyze their movement entirely, and finally drove his blades into their hearts in a single swift motion.
He danced among them like doom incarnate, every strike geometrically calculated, every movement aimed at immediate, silent killing, without wasting a single drop of mana.
In the corner of the room, the fifth spy, who understood that fighting was impossible, attempted to escape through the only window, shattering the wooden planks with his body.
But the moment he leaped outside into the night air, he found himself falling from the very ceiling of the same room to crash with force onto the wooden floor inside once more, his leg breaking audibly. Lumia had created a closed and sealed spatial loop around the room, no exit, neither above nor below.
"No escape," said Dex in a voice cold as death's ice, approaching slowly the spy sprawled on the floor, his blue eyes gleaming beneath the mask. "You were Sylvester's eyes searching for the vulnerabilities of my city. And today, Sylvester will lose his sight forever." With a single swift motion, he ended the man's suffering.
By dawn, Dex and Lumia had visited seven different locations representing the primary nodes of the spy network in Seiron. At every location, the same scene repeated itself precisely: an impenetrable silence, then swift and decisive death, then disappearance into the shadows, leaving behind motionless bodies.
When the sun of Coronation Day rose, with its pale rays struggling to pierce the clouds, Sylvester was sitting in his lavish wing in the palace, sipping his morning coffee, waiting for the usual reports from his spies to confirm that the city's streets were safe and prepared for the celebration. But the reports never arrived. Not a single message, and not a single carrier bird alighted on his balcony.
Sylvester had lost his sight and his hearing throughout the city entirely, yet at the peak of his arrogance and his power-blindness, he assumed the interruption of reports meant "complete security", and that fear had silenced everyone, without feeling for even a moment the cold crawling toward his gates, or the catastrophe waiting for its starting signal.
"The harvest is complete," said Dex, wiping his dagger on a piece of black cloth and returning it slowly to its scabbard, standing on a hill overlooking the distant ducal palace while the first threads of morning lit its rooftops. He turned to Lumia and said with a terrifying confidence: "The stage is set, Lumia, and the audience is in their seats. Now, let the real performance begin."