Guardsman Mori Fushimi tries to hold in a small laugh at what should be a joke, not only at the immense breach in protocol but also at the incredibly out of character order from her charge.

But there's something contorting right beneath that composed look on his thin form. A membrane pulled over jagged edges within the Crown Prince, his breathing shallow and body stiff as if preparing for a firing squad.

Or… a discarded, breathing corpse who'd already faced one.

"You want me to protect Sophia Elise?" She asks him, lowering her voice. "She already has that Ceramic Demon with her."

"That thing is not equipped to deal with the threats she'll face in this place." Zai doesn't even move, barely breathing, staring at his hand currently resting on the table. "But you are."

"Yeah I am." Mori agrees, that ice cold gaze trying to meet the Prince's. "And I'll remind you that you'll be facing these threats as well. And those individuals who will be threatening you will be much more… persistent in trying to end your life."

He sighs. "I've survived them. It's…"

"Survived them with me. This ain't a game, Sire." That Guardsman interrupts him, cuts into him. "How many years have I served you?"

"Nine years, eight months."

"Mmmm." Mori nods, that count of time agreeing with her own. There's a long pause as she thinks about it, considering her next words carefully. "So many Guardsmen have died since then. Pretty high turnover rate in your service, for what?"

There's too many names for that question, Zai trying to summit this mountain of death in service to a crown not even his yet.

And you remember each one. Something gnaws at him, drowning this oceanic soul in its implication. You remember Rao's bad jokes and Lanya's spice collection. You remember how Kinh would eat anything remotely organic, and after him the savory fill of Tsubaki's ramen.

Each one gave their lives, for what?

What could make a human being, souls selfish and violent, sprint across fields of bullets in an ambush, swallow the poisoned foods meant for another mouth?

A few more Yin in their pockets? A few more meals to save themselves from starvation?

No… they did it for something else.

"They died for me." Zai answers himself aloud.

"Yeah, you have that effect on us." Mori smiles, but returns to this subject at hand. "Well… all of 'em died except for one."

She stands there, in front of him. A uniform slightly unkept in its flayed edges of black silk and worn holsters, short hair cut hastily with the edge of a sharpened blade—a lethal weapon of the Dominion under his beck and call.

But more than that.

"Except for you." Zai adds onto his Guardsman's point.

She nods along. "Ten years next to you I've seen everything these bastards could throw at you. From a good old fashioned Hong-er poisoning to even an Axial kill team. I've killed, I've almost been killed by the lot of them."

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The Crown Prince takes an impatient breath. "Is there a point to this?"

"This is a mistake." Mori tells him outright. "The moment I'm no longer at your side is the moment they'll come for you. And Wei, Ruoxian, or even Norbu are good and all… but between those three combined they're still a good four years short of me. If the Axials decide it's a good idea to send another kill-team over the border, or some Sanji noble decides it's time to hire someone to pop your head off from a quarter mile away, do you think they could stop them?"

She lets the silence rot for a long time, to hurt him in the next words out of her mouth. "Can they stop an Impericutta, a ceramic demon of the Ensolian Imperium, if it were to come and kill you?"

The Crown Prince doesn't even take a full second to answer her, undermining these questions with his cold, reckless counterpoint. "It's my mistake to make, Guardsman."

She tries to object, an edge of gentleness to this blade. "Zai…"

And he dismisses her. "I understand the risks."

"Do you?"

Something clicks on the belt of Mori Fushimi, the sound of machined metal snapping open resounding through the ambient noise within the armored train carriage.

Zai's heard it before: its singing octave found behind motor carriages in the midst of ambushes, in the motes of silence before lethal violence: someone has a live, unsheathed blade in the open.

The Guardsman stares at this young man with a lifeless pause. "I'm a southerner, Sire. Five hundred years ago your people came to our home from the north. Your people said that our god was a heresy to yours, and used that as an excuse to pillage and rape us. And at the end of it all, you northerners exiled us to that black mountain to die. You sent us to Xiaoshan, the cursed land."

He can see the edge of the short blade as she drags it out of its holster: black deeper than night, swallowing light like an ocean trench. Mined from the dead bodies of the ancient gods, forged in the cleanroom labs of Honger—made for violence on a molecular scale.

Zai Tianci has seen it before, seen her use it before.

And he freezes at the sight of it.

"Your ancestors did awful things to mine, Zai." She leans down towards him. "But you've been kind to me, which is why I will give you a choice."

There's nothing between them except for two meters of air, Mori finishing this threat. "Today, I will kill either you, or that Imperial girl. But you, you have to make that choice."

The Crown Prince of the Tianci Dominion stares back at her eyes, and she sees that oceanic abyss within him: swirling, churning, destroying itself in its infinite ebb and flow.

And she knows that expression.

The Guardsman remembers the look on the faces of those either tossed into mass graves or bodies so eviscerated they simply left them to rot on the roadsides.

It's the look of staring down the barrel of a gunline alongside their children, of the cold chill of a mono-knife slowly sinking into the necks of their dearest friends.

It's the terror of facing something worse than death.

And this Crown Prince, for the first time in his life, shows it upon his hesitation.

The Guardsman scoffs as she reads him, Mori breaking the tension with a laugh of shock. "Oh my… and you don't even know, Sire~"

That Guardsman moves from her place, to the small pantry tucked in the corner of this train carriage as she looks for some sustenance. One apple taken from a small cardboard box, polished with a brush of her silken uniform's cuffs.

She carves through this item of fruit, that ice cold, black blade moving through flesh like clean air. Molecules severed in the nanoscopic level, seven slices creating seven separate, bite sized pieces within this still seemingly intact apple that she places gently on the table.

Zai watches as the small, waxy sphere slowly loses cohesion, falling apart from its nigh invisible cuts.

"You care far too much about the people of the Dominion, Zai." Mori watches it too, smiling as she does so. "But this is the first time you've cared so much about someone."

The apple slowly disintegrates into its pieces, each small bit of fruity mass falling softly onto the table cloth.

"Sire." Guardsman Mori Fushimi bows—both to obey, but to sign off on the Prince's execution with her own silence. "The life of Sophia Elise the Eighth is my life. No harm shall befall her for as long as I live."

She watches as he makes no response, forcing herself to confirm this order. "Is that acceptable?"

Zai looks at that apple, the chunks now incoherently in a pile, spilling its blood onto the cloth of the table.

And he doesn't answer her.

Can't answer her.

So he simply speaks to the world instead:

"She deserves better than Tianci."

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