I AM A MAGE BUT WITH MILF SYSTEM

He paused.

“About you.”

Julian held his expression still and said nothing.

“Your behavior before I sent you away.” The Duke’s eyes remained on him, steady and without accusation, simply delivering information. “What you were doing. The obsession you had developed.” Another pause. “With your mother. With your sister.”

The words landed without decoration, and the Duke let them sit in the air between them without rushing past them.

Julian looked at him and waited.

“Liam found out,” the Duke continued. “He gathered what he needed. Evidence, accounts, enough to make the case irrefutable.” His voice remained flat throughout. “And then he kept it. He has been using it since.”

The carriage moved through the intersection as the delivery cart cleared the road, and the street sounds dropped back to a murmur. The cluster of people on the corner turned to watch them go.

Julian absorbed this without changing anything on Kraven’s face.

He thought about it carefully. Liam had found the most damaging weapon against the Astran family and had chosen not to detonate it. Public exposure would have destroyed the family’s standing permanently.

It would have been catastrophic.

Which meant Liam didn’t want the family destroyed.

He thought about his uncle.

The image that surfaced from Kraven’s memories was incomplete: a man roughly a decade younger than the Duke. He appeared sharp, talented, and a genius beyond belief—the kind they claimed was born only once every hundred years. He had been taken in as a royal commander when Kraven was young and had spent most of his time away from the duchy.

Those absences explained why the memories were sparse.

Kraven had barely interacted with him growing up. A handful of visits. A face across a table at formal occasions. No real conversation, no lasting impression beyond the general sense of a man who paid attention to everything and gave very little away in return.

He had no real sense of who Liam actually was beneath that image.

But the picture forming now was readable enough.

Liam was not a man who had been waiting patiently for circumstances to change in his favor.

He was a man who had decided to change the circumstances himself.

Julian looked out the window again.

After few silent minutes, he looked back at the duke.

“How did he have the right to do any of this.”

It was a genuine question, framed the way Kraven might have framed it.

The Duke settled back slightly in his seat. Outside, the carriage continued moving through the city, and the whispers of the people on the street faded as they left the busier intersection behind.

“He didn’t,” he said. “Not by any legitimate measure.”

Then the Duke went ahead and explained it, the way he always did—without a trace of emotion.

Liam was the more talented of the two brothers.

That was simply true and had always been true. It wasn’t a secret within the family, and it wasn’t a wound the Duke carried with any visible bitterness. People who knew both men acknowledged it the way they acknowledged weather.

Liam had been born with sharper instincts, a faster cultivation pace, and a natural aptitude for power that only continued to grow.

But talent did not determine succession in a duchy.

Age did. And the crown’s recognition did.

The title of duke was not inherited automatically upon a father’s death in the way some lesser titles were. It was assigned by the king through formal ceremony and acknowledgment of the royal family. Once assigned, that title could not be claimed by another, transferred voluntarily, or stripped from its holder except under two conditions — a direct royal decree ordering it, or the death of the sitting duke.

By birth order, by law, and by the King’s own ceremony, the duchy belonged to Kraven’s father.

Liam had no legitimate path to it.

He had understood that for his entire adult life. And for most of it, he directed his ambitions elsewhere—into his career as a royal commander of the Hermes Kingdom, a position of genuine prestige that kept him away from the duchy for long stretches and offered a stage for his talents that the duchy could never have provided.

Kraven had known this version of his uncle, distantly.

“So he found another path,” Julian said.

“Yes.” The Duke’s voice remained even. “He came to me after you left for Ezakael. He gathered the information carefully before approaching me. He knew exactly what he had and exactly what it was worth.”

He paused for a moment, looking at a point somewhere between himself and Julian rather than at either of them directly.

“He presented it as a choice. If I refused him, he would take everything he knew to the royal court. To the king. To every noble family of the kingdom.”

Another pause.

“The damage would have been absolute. The Astran name would not have recovered from it. My position, the family’s alliances, the duchy’s standing with the crown — all of it would have collapsed.”

Julian said nothing.

“Or,” the Duke continued, “I could agree to his terms. Keep the information contained. Preserve what remained of the family’s dignity.”

“And you agreed,” Julian said.

The Duke looked at him directly.

“I agreed,” he confirmed. No defensiveness in it. No apology.

Julian respected that.

The Duke then went ahead and laid those terms out.

The duchy’s military forces were divided equally between the two brothers. One half remained under the Duke’s direct command — his officers, his loyalists, the men who had served the Astran family through his tenure. The other half passed to Liam, along with full authority to command, restructure, and deploy it according to his own judgment.

Liam did not waste a single day.

He had immediately restructured his half into something distinct. Not a subdivision of the Astran military. A separate identity. He redesigned the armor, established a new command hierarchy, and introduced a new symbol to replace the original Astran crest on everything under his control.

Crossed swords over a shield.