Chapter : 257

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Hera's perfect smile froze on her face. Her green eyes widened by a fraction. She was not accustomed to being yawned at. She was not accustomed to being ignored. She was especially not accustomed to being treated like background noise by a commoner in an untucked shirt.

"I was making you an offer," Hera said, her voice dropping several degrees in temperature. "A very generous offer, I might add."

"Oh, right, right," Ken said, waving his toast dismissively. "The joining-your-team thing. Yeah, I heard that part."

He hopped off the stone pillar with a lazy, graceless movement, landing on his feet with a soft thud. He shoved his free hand into his pocket and looked at Hera with an expression of such profound, genuine lack of interest that it bordered on performance art.

"I cannot do that," he said.

Hera blinked. "You... cannot?"

"Nope," Ken said, popping the p sound with exaggerated casualness. "I already signed a contract with Princess Iris. A really important, super official, totally unbreakable contract. Cannot break it. Impossible. The paperwork is insane."

He said this with such absolute, unwavering confidence that for a brief, disorienting moment, it almost sounded true. The way he said contract carried the weight of a legal scholar citing an ironclad clause. The way he emphasized unbreakable suggested he had consulted the finest attorneys in the Empire.

The way he nodded solemnly implied that this was a matter of deep personal principle.

None of it was true.

There was no contract. There was no paperwork. There was no binding agreement of any kind.

Ken had invented the entire concept of a magical contract on the spot, purely because the thought of packing up his belongings and moving to a new mansion sounded like a tremendous amount of work, and he would rather eat stale toast in a dusty courtyard than fill out transfer forms.

But the sheer, brazen confidence of his delivery made it sound unassailable.

Hera stared at him. Her green eyes searched his face for any sign of a bluff, any crack in his certainty. She found nothing. Ken's expression was as lazy and unbothered as ever, but his dark eyes met hers without a flicker of doubt.

"A contract," Hera repeated slowly. Her voice was carefully controlled, but a muscle twitched in her jaw. "What kind of contract?"

"The binding kind," Ken said, as if this explained everything. "You know. The kind you sign. With the words and the signatures and the magic seals. Very official. Very permanent. I read the whole thing before I signed it. Well, most of it. Okay, some of it. The important parts."

He scratched his nose. "The point is, I am committed. Like a knight who swore an oath. Except instead of a sword, I have a piece of toast. Same energy, though."

He held up his stale toast as evidence. A small crumb fell off and landed on his shoe.

Hera's composure cracked. Not dramatically. Not visibly, to anyone who did not know what to look for. But her nostrils flared slightly, and her perfect posture stiffened by a barely perceptible degree. She was not used to this.

She was not used to being rejected, especially not by someone who looked like they had just rolled out of bed and could not be bothered to tuck in their shirt.

"You are making a mistake," Hera said, her voice dropping to a cold, precise warning. She stepped closer to Ken, her sharp green eyes boring into his lazy dark ones. "A foolish, short-sighted mistake. Loyalty to a losing faction is not noble, commoner. It is just stupidity dressed up in pretty words."

Ken looked at her. For just a moment, just a flicker, the lazy mask slipped. Not completely. Not enough for most people to notice. But his dark eyes, which had been half-closed and disinterested, opened just a little wider. And in that brief, quiet moment, there was something in them that was not lazy at all.

It was not anger. It was not defiance. It was something simpler and far more unshakable than either. It was the calm, bone-deep certainty of someone who had already made their choice and did not need to explain it to anyone.

"Yeah, well," Ken said, the lazy grin returning to his face. "Stupid is kind of my thing. You should ask around. Everyone says so."

He took another bite of toast and shrugged. "Besides, the 13th Unit has the best snacks. Do you guys have snacks at your place? I bet you do not have snacks. I bet you have those tiny fancy crackers with the weird cheese that nobody actually likes."

Hera's left eye twitched. A tiny, involuntary spasm that betrayed the volcano of fury simmering beneath her polished exterior. She took a slow, measured breath through her nose, visibly composing herself.

"You will regret this," she said, her voice clipped and sharp like the snap of a whip. "Carefully reconsider your loyalties, commoner. The offers I make do not come twice."

She turned on her heel, her white and gold gown swirling around her like a banner of aristocratic fury. She strode back toward her carriage with long, furious steps, her attendants scrambling to keep up.

The parasol holders practically jogged to stay ahead of her, their white-gloved hands shaking as they tried to shield her from the sun she was clearly too angry to notice.

The carriage door was held open for her. She stepped inside without looking back. The door closed. The mana horses shimmered and reared. And the gravity-defying carriage rose smoothly into the air, ascending through the afternoon sky like a pearl dissolving into the clouds.

The courtyard fell silent.

The girls of the 13th Unit stood frozen, processing what had just happened. The 2nd Princess of the Belmontia Empire had personally come to their dusty estate to poach their laziest member, and that laziest member had rejected her with a piece of stale toast and a made-up contract.

Naomi was the first to break the silence. She turned to Ken, her green eyes wide with a mixture of disbelief and something that might have been reluctant admiration. "Did you just... turn down a Princess?" she asked, her voice strangled.

"Technically, I turned down her offer," Ken corrected, licking a crumb of toast off his thumb. "There is a difference. I am sure she is a lovely person. Just not my boss. My boss is shorter and has messy hair and works too hard."

He glanced at Iris, who was standing a few feet away, her violet eyes fixed on him with an expression he could not quite read. It was something between confusion and gratitude and a quiet, bewildered warmth that made her look younger than her years.

"Ken," Iris said softly. "That contract you mentioned... there is no contract, is there?"

"Nope," Ken said cheerfully. "I made the whole thing up."

Iris blinked. "Then why did you..."

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