Imperator: Resurrection of an Empire-Chapter 402 - 397 -

I rose to meet them.

My boots scraped softly against the stone, the sound sharp in the heavy quiet of the cell.

The lantern’s flame trembled as if it could feel the tension pressing into the room.

The iron door rattled once.

Then the lock slid aside.

A single hinge groaned.

And two figures in dark, layered cloaks slipped inside.

The Root agents never moved like soldiers.

Soldiers had weight—footsteps, presence, breath you could measure.

Root moved like smoke that learned how to walk like men.

The first one—a woman, judging by her frame—paused just inside the doorway, letting her eyes adjust.

Her hood remained low, shadow cutting her face in half so only the faint glint of one eye was visible.

The second agent followed, closing the door behind them with a soft metallic click.

His gloved hand lingered a moment on the handle, as if sealing the room was as ritualistic as a prayer.

Neither spoke.

Neither saluted.

Root didn’t bother with ceremony.

The training Julius had them go through would make them an autonomous branch of the military that was entirely loyal to himself, without the need for showy signs of respect.

I took a breath and forced myself to remain still.

The woman’s gaze slid toward the cot—toward Yuri’s motionless form, the restraints, the faint residual shimmer of White Nova still clinging like dying embers at the edges of the room.

Her shoulders tightened almost imperceptibly.

"...So this is the vessel," she murmured.

Her voice was smooth but edged—like a scalpel that only pretended to be metal.

The male agent stepped closer to Yuri, but not too close—Leaves and branches might be extensions of the great tree, but they were like the common man in comparison to the Emperor before them, or princess on the bed.

He crouched beside the cot, head tilted, studying every twitch in her fingers, every line in her face.

His voice was soft, clinical. "Judging by numerous bodily twitches even whilst unconcious, she has gone under severe conditioning, possibly mulitple layers to supress her primary personality." He looked up at me. "Whoever did this did not want the mind beneath all these retraints to breathe."

"Then suffocating it ends today," I said quietly.

The woman turned her head slightly toward me.

Not fully—She was speaking to me but also not, more adressing everyone present rather than me directly.

"Your aura skills reaction tells us much," she said. "Indeed is a strong technique, though not strictly an aura technique, and in doing so as it seems you found out, it resists atttempts to remove what was done. A cage with teeth."

Her gloved fingers brushed the air above Yuri’s forehead, never quite touching.

The agents were chosen specifically since they just like me were aura users though their powers were much more clandestine than my own.

"There will be scars," he said softly. "Mental ones. Awareness of actions that were not hers, yet done with her hands. The saint’s memories will not vanish—they will recoil, compress, harden."

He tapped the center of his forehead.

"When we peel the lattice apart, we are not merely severing a rope. We are opening a lock that will close again."

"So open it," I said.

His brows lowered.

"She may end with two minds," he said. "The original and the imposed. Not merged. Not erased. Both present. Both alive."

A split.

A fracture.

I felt something in my chest tighten, a slow squeeze like a fist closing around my lungs.

"And if that’s the only way she survives," I murmured, "then I’ll take it."

The woman studied me for a long, silent moment.

Then she stepped closer, the hem of her cloak whispering against the ground.

"Very well," she said.

As the agents moved to being their proceedure, Julius decided not to stick around to watch feeling the ’treatment’ they were about to undertake was not something he would want to sit through. 𝐟𝐫𝕖𝗲𝘄𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝕧𝐞𝚕.𝕔𝕠𝐦

Getting up from his seat, Julius didnt even look back as he opened the cage door before resealing it, before walking briskly up the stairs leaving the dungeon behind, and returning to the main floor.

But not choosing to stay there, he headed up to the 2nd floor where the former owners office was located and had been turned into his own personal war office.

When he entered a number of working tactical scribes rose to salute him but he just waved them off.

Letting them get back to work, as he took up his seat in the room.

Seeing a stack of scrolls piled up and waiting for him to review them.

The number had risen in the last few hours, the conquest of the castle was complete, the capital had fallen fully and now came the work of the victors.

Compiling the lists of the dead, reporting how many were injured, those that survived and how to adjust the cohorts and legions to restructure the current deployed military.

Then came reports of the collected loot, numerous sums of treasure, artwork, even relics claimed from the defeated generals and nobility.

In the end most of the treasure would just be absorbed into the Romanus treasury to continue to growth of the nation, whilst looted and recovered relics would be awarded to those bearing achievements.

Mounting relics on a wall or deep within a vault never to be used is a waste.

Weapons of war are meant to be on the battlefield to serve the nation in which they belong.

One war had just ended, but with it Julius and his empire now had command over roughly a third of the continent, and aside from increasing their borders further north or east, their only other avenue of growth would be to declare war against the Visigoth Empire who currently held greater than one third of the continent in their grasp.

But rather than looking external, Julius instead gazed at the world map of his system looking internally.

Visigoth was still on the warpath mopping up the free nations of the East while the larger nations in the north prepared for a possible allied assualt against the Empire.

But for Julius, dealing with the conquered Francian lands, the possible integration of Germania, and Dacia into his empire as vassal states and provinces along with dealing with the rising unrest within the Greecian penninsula were the first things on his list to get solved once he and Yuri, once she was back to being Yuri, returned to the Eternal City and the awaiting Imperial Palace.