***
Time synchronization reset.
Trial iteration: 4.
***
The familiar silence of the study returned, but this time it was laced with a strange, giddy desperation in Lucid's mind. After the horrors of vassalage and the axe, a new, absurd idea took root. If he couldn't fight her, and he couldn't join her, and he couldn't out-logic her... what if he disarmed her completely?
When Ivy entered, gliding in with her veil and her poisonous grace, Lucid didn't wait for the script. He seized control the moment the door opened.
Karmen's body stood, but the posture was different. Less stiff, more relaxed. A warm, charming smile spread across Karmen's face, a smile Lucid had never seen on him, one he cobbled together from half-remembered Earth rom-coms.
"Ivy," he said, Karmen's voice infused with a soft, appreciative warmth. "You look... radiant. Even veiled, your presence lights this dreary room."
Ivy stopped dead. The rehearsed opening line about his grandfather died on her lips. Her violet eyes blinked, completely thrown. "Young Master Karmen, I... that is to say, your grandfather—"
"Has passed, I know," Lucid-as-Karmen said, waving a hand with a sigh that conveyed sorrow but was undercut by his intense focus on her. "A great loss. But seeing you here, the one person of true substance in this sea of grief... it offers a strange comfort."
He took a step closer. "Tell me, does the Empire of Materna appreciate you? Truly? A woman of your obvious talent, reduced to delivering grim news in backwater estates? It seems a waste."
'Lucid, what in the seven scattered realms are you DOING?' Alice's mental voice was a screech of pure, unadulterated horror. A deep, hot blush of secondhand embarrassment flooded the back of Lucid's consciousness, Alice's reaction.
Ivy was speechless. Her fan, usually a weapon of poise, hung limply at her side. "I... serve the Empress's will. There is no higher appreciation," she managed, but her voice lacked its usual conviction.
"Nonsense," Lucid said, chuckling. It was Karmen's laugh, but lighter, flirtatious. "Will is cold. A person like you deserves to be seen. To be... valued."
The plan, in Lucid's mind, was idiotic but simple: make her feel seen, make her question her loyalty, maybe even fall for him, and derail the entire assassination plot through the power of terribly awkward romance.
And against all odds, it kind of... worked.
Ivy, so used to fear, grief, and cold calculation, was utterly disarmed by relentless, sappy appreciation. Over the next few blurred weeks of accelerated time, Lucid kept it up. He complimented her knowledge, brought her "gifts" of books from the library (on non-threatening topics), and listened to her talk about obscure Fate Essence theory with rapt, admiring attention.
She started calling him "little caramel," her voice fond. She began to touch him, adjusting his collar, letting her hand linger on his arm. Her violet eyes, once hard as gems, softened when they looked at him.
Lucid felt a deep, cold unease settle inside him. It was like he had been drugged, watching a strange play where he was both the main character and a sickened viewer. He couldn't find the will to truly fight or to run. All his energy was spent just keeping up this awful, hollow act.
He walked next to Ivy in her garden. She glanced at him and said, "Can you feel it? I put something in your tea earlier. It's a prescription. Meant to help with stress."
"What? No, let me—"
"Shhhhh," she soothed, cutting him off. She brushed her hand against his arm and leaned into him, hugging at his side. "It's good for you."
'This is not a path! This is a farce!' Alice moaned, her presence a constant cringe.
But the memory-stream rolled on.
And then, the other shoe dropped.
He came home one day to find his father dead in his study, a look of peaceful surrender on his face. The next week, his mother simply didn't wake up. The "curse" had proceeded exactly on schedule. Ivy, now a constant, affectionate presence in the mansion, held him as he "grieved."
"My poor caramel," she whispered, stroking his hair. "It was inevitable. But you have me now. I will never leave you."
The horror dawned on Lucid. His flirting hadn't stopped her mission. It had just made her want to keep the prize, him... after the destruction was complete.
Tyriana fell to Materna, not through his vassalage, but through subtle manipulation and political pressure from within, orchestrated by Ivy with Karmen as her puppet. He became the governor in name, but every decision was hers. She was his advisor, his protector, his jailer. His concubine in all but official title, controlling his every move with a loving, iron grip.
He was caged. Groomed and polished, the perfect pet for a powerful Maternan agent. He lived in gilded luxury, with Ivy always at his side, calling him her "precious toy," her "magnificent obsession." The cough never came. The obsession never formed. He was just... empty, and owned.
The years of his gilded imprisonment blurred together, sped along by the court's cold machinery. Then, the summons came. Empress Crepuscula had finally turned her full attention to the settled matter of Tyriana. Upon review, she found the continued existence of its former heir, even as a hollow puppet, a figurehead of polished obedience, to be an unacceptable flaw. He was a living reminder of the old blood, a symbol that, however muted, could still whisper of a past different from her own. Keeping him was a sentimental risk. A clean, public removal, however, would serve a dual purpose: it would erase that final echo of the old dynasty and, through the spectacle of his death, cauterize any lingering thoughts of rebellion in the other conquered territories. It would be a lesson, written in blood, of the Empire's absolute and unforgiving will.
In their lavish chambers, Ivy received the order. She turned to Karmen, her eyes filled with real, tragic tears.
"My sweet caramel," she said, her voice breaking. "The world is too cruel for you. I cannot let them have you. I cannot live in a world where you are not mine."
Before Lucid could even process it, she pulled him into a deep, passionate kiss. It tasted of perfume and something bitter.
Poison.
As the fire spread through Karmen's veins, he saw Ivy smiling through her tears, then choking as the same poison took her. They died entwined on the floor, a twisted parody of a romance for the ages.
***
Trial iteration concluded.
Conclusion path: Gilded Cage.
Penalty: nullified
***
The black void returned.
For a long moment, there was only silence. Then, a sound.
Karmen was laughing. Not the raspy, pained laugh from before, but a genuine, full-bodied laugh of pure, shocked amusement.
"Well!" his voice echoed, brimming with mirth. "That was... *entertaining!* I must admit, I never considered that approach. Perhaps... perhaps Ivy would have made a more worthy bride than anyone could have thought! Hah!"
Alice's presence in the void was a silent, deep, mortified crimson. Lucid could feel the heat of her blush like a sunburn on his soul.
Lucid, however, felt nothing but a yawning, hollow despair. He had turned a tragedy into a grotesque romantic melodrama, and the ending was still death. He had been a plaything, a pet, and then a poisoned prize. It was pathetic.
'It doesn't matter what I do,' Lucid's thought was a flat, dead thing. 'I just find new, spectacular ways to lose. I'm a coward playing dress-up in a brave man's life.'
"Stop that," Karmen's voice cut in, the laughter gone, replaced by a firm, warm sincerity. "Something is different now, Lucid. Can't you feel it?"
'Feel what? The embarrassment?' Lucid shot back.
"No," Karmen insisted. "The *knowledge.* You have seen three hells now. The hell of obsession. The hell of complicity. The hell of... well, whatever that was." He chuckled again, but it was kind. "You asked questions. You learned about Materna. You saw how Ivy operates, not just as an agent, but as a person. You learned her vanity, her capacity for... affection, twisted as it was. You have more pieces of the board than I ever did at this moment."
Lucid floated in the darkness, the memories of the axe, the poisoned kiss, the hollow praise, swirling around him.
"I couldn't save your family," Lucid thought, the truth aching. "Not from the curse, not from the empire, not from her."
"You are trying to save them from *death*," Karmen said, his voice gentle. "Maybe that is the wrong thing to save them from."
The words hung in the void, cryptic and heavy.
"All I know," Karmen continued, his tone brimming with a hope that felt alien in this place of repeated failure, "is that you haven't given up. You are still looking for a way. A way for *me* that I could never see. So... try again. You got this, Lucid."
The encouragement, coming from the ghost of the man whose life he kept ruining, was almost worse than the laughter.
But as the void began to shift once more, preparing to spit him back into the study for a fourth, unimaginable attempt, Lucid clung to one thing.
Karmen believed in him.
Even after everything, the charade, the sedation, the hollow years, some stubborn part of the man Lucid was failing to be still believed he could find a way. And as he walked that grim path toward his own execution, the bitter resentment he'd carried for the young noble Karmen began to wither. In its place came a slow, dawning understanding. He was starting to see him. Not just a name or a title, but the trapped, desperate weight behind the blue eyes, the quiet cough in the candlelit study, the fading hope in a room full of ghosts. He understood him… a little better.
And that understanding made the need to act burn all the brighter. He had to make it right. Karmen needed to be helped, just as Rebecca had helped him, just as he had been helped ever since stumbling into this town.
A quiet resolve settled over him, cutting through the fog of the drug and the fear.
'Don't fret, Karmen,' he thought, the words a firm promise in the silence of his own mind. 'I've got you.'
***
Time synchronization reset.
Trial iteration: 5.
***