I Died and Became a Noble's Heir

Marcus Thorne stumbled behind, dragged by Loryn’s clawed hand gripping the slave collar around his neck.

The once-proud clan leader was unrecognizable from the man who’d tried to kill Jack’s family months ago in Elysium’s timeline.

He was missing his right leg below the knee; the wound healed, but left him permanently crippled.

His body was skeletal, skin stretched tight over bones that jutted at sharp angles, showing his malnutrition that bordered on starvation.

His eyes were sunken deep into his skull, haunted, holding the thousand-yard stare of someone who’d been broken long before capture.

Two years and nine months had passed for Marcus Thorne in the tower’s accelerated time.

The slave collar around his neck pulsed with dark energy. A binding that prevented speech, prevented escape, and prevented everything except obedience to whoever held the control token.

Loryn held that token, his purple eyes studying Marcus with clinical disinterest, as if the broken man were nothing more than equipment being transported.

The man’s face showed no emotion as he took in the scene. Rhys’s exhausted form, the bound Marcus Thorne, and Jack’s transformed appearance.

Rhys’s expression shifted from confusion to recognition to horror in the span of seconds as he processed who the crippled prisoner was.

”That’s... that’s Marcus Thorne. From the Thorne Clan. He’s the one who...”

”Tried to kill my family,” Jack confirmed, his voice carrying the temperature of a winter grave that had been frozen for centuries.

”Yes. He tried to start a war. Thought the Kaiser family would be easy targets with my father deployed to the king.”

His golden eyes fixed on Marcus’s broken form for a short second.

He was cataloging every detail of the man’s suffering. ”I made him watch as I forced his men to slaughter each other. Made them choose between killing their brothers or dying themselves.”

Jack’s tone didn’t change.

Still cold, controlled, but carrying fury that had been honed to a needle point over months of patience and systematic planning.

”Then I kept him alive. Fed him just enough to survive. Let him watch as I grew stronger while he rotted in a cell, waiting for this moment.”

”What moment?” Rhys asked, though his voice suggested he already knew the answer wouldn’t be pleasant.

”The moment I show him what he accomplished by attacking my family,” Jack replied with cold precision that made each word feel like a surgical incision.

”When we return to Elysium, the Thorne Clan will be wiped off the map. Every trace of their existence will be erased as if they never were. Their lands will be claimed. Their wealth is redistributed. Their name will become a cautionary tale about what happens when you make enemies of the Kaiser Clan.”

He looked at Marcus Thorne, whose eyes showed recognition and absolute despair in equal measure.

The broken man understood every word despite his inability to speak, and the knowledge of his clan’s coming destruction was visible in the way his remaining strength seemed to drain away.

”But first,” Jack continued, his smile visible despite the cold fury underlying every syllable, ”he gets to watch what I’ve become. Gets to see the power he helped create by forcing me to treat threats seriously instead of showing mercy.”

His golden eyes gleamed. ”Then he gets to carry that knowledge back to whatever afterlife accepts the souls of men who make enemies of those they should have feared.”

Rhys swallowed hard, processing the casual declaration of genocide Jack had just delivered. The young tempest mage looked at Brutus, at Pho, at Slyph, searching for some reaction that matched his own unease at hearing an entire clan’s extinction discussed like routine business.

But the minotaur’s expression was neutral, accepting his master’s declaration without judgment.

Pho’s blank white eyes showed nothing, the demon having long since accepted that Jack Kaiser’s vengeance was absolute. Even Slyph pulsed with her green aura, offering no moral commentary.

Because they all understood something Rhys was still learning through harsh lessons.

Jack Kaiser didn’t make idle threats.

And when someone came for his family, when they threatened those under his protection, the consequences were absolute and inevitable as the sunrise.