THE BLIND SOVEREIGN: King of The Underworld

CHAPTER 5: The Oracle’s First Echo

The night in the Tuscan countryside should have been quiet, filled only with the symphony of crickets and the whisper of olive leaves in the wind. But for Dante Moretti, that silence was a canvas stained with sound. As he sat in the dark corner of the room, his ears never stopped processing information. He heard the irregular rhythm of Elena’s heartbeat on the bed, a sharp cadence of unease. He heard Enzo’s heavy breathing as the man slept downstairs, punctuated by the faint murmur of a television broadcast.

Then he heard something that should not have existed.

The soft scrape of synthetic fabric against the rough exterior wall of the villa. About thirty meters away on the northern side. Extremely faint, almost impossible for ordinary humans to hear, yet to Dante it was like fingernails dragged across a chalkboard.

“Elena, don’t move,” Dante whispered suddenly.

Elena, who had been staring at the ceiling with her thoughts in turmoil, flinched. “What now, Dante? Do you want me to scream again to entertain your guards?”

“Quiet,” Dante said, his voice sharper this time, cold and commanding. “Take your dagger. Now.”

Elena rose at once, her survival instincts igniting. “What is it? Did you hear something?”

“Six men. Tactical boots with soft rubber soles. They’re not using the outer stairs, they’re climbing with ropes,” Dante stood without making a sound. He turned toward the nailed-shut window. “They’re not Lorenzo’s men. Lorenzo’s guards are too lazy to move this quietly.”

“You’re joking? I don’t hear anything,” Elena whispered urgently, her hand already gripping the dagger hidden in her stocking.

“That’s because you’re listening with your ears, Elena. I’m listening with the air,” Dante stepped toward the light switch near the door. “In thirty seconds, they’ll break a window in the corridor. When that happens, I want you to crawl under the bed and make no sound, no matter what you hear.”

“I’m not a coward, Moretti. I can fight.”

“This isn’t about courage. It’s about efficiency. You’ll be a liability if I have to protect you in the dark,” Dante switched off the light. Total darkness swallowed them, yet for Dante the room became clearer. He could sense every piece of furniture through the reflection of his own breathing.

“How do you know they’re not Lorenzo’s men?” Elena asked, her voice trembling despite her attempt at bravery.

“Because Lorenzo’s people don’t use SOCOM-type suppressors on their weapons. I heard metal brushing metal when they checked their trigger mechanisms outside,” Dante grabbed an old wooden chair and snapped it cleanly with a precise strike of his knee. He took one broken leg, its end jagged and sharp.

The sound of shattering glass echoed from the corridor, exactly as Dante had predicted, followed by the muted pop of a silenced gunshot.

“Enzo…” Elena hissed.

“He was dead before he could rise from his chair,” Dante said flatly. “Now get under the bed. Quickly.”

Elena had no choice but to obey. She crawled underneath, her heart pounding so hard it felt ready to burst from her chest. In the darkness, all she could see was Dante’s silhouette standing upright in the center of the room, holding the piece of wood as if it were a ceremonial sword.

The bedroom door was kicked open.

Bang.

Two men wearing night vision goggles on their helmets entered with weapons raised. They moved in flawless military formation.

“Target acquired. Blind male in the center of the room,” one of them spoke into the radio at his collar.

“Eliminate him. Leave no witnesses,” a cold voice replied through the device.

Dante smiled. A smile that made the assassins hesitate for a split second. “You’re using fourth-generation night vision, aren’t you? Very expensive. But you made one fatal mistake tonight.”

“And what’s that?” the attacker asked, his finger tightening on the trigger.

“You came into my world.”

With lightning speed, Dante threw a metal coin he had been holding toward the emergency light on the ceiling, equipped with a heat sensor. At the same time, he kicked the wooden table over, creating a deafening crash in the confined space.

The echo of the overturned table became Dante’s radar. He captured the precise positions of both men, not from sight, but from the way the sound waves distorted around their bodies.

Dante ducked as a burst of gunfire shredded the table in front of him. He moved not like a blind man, but like a shadow gliding across the floor. Before the first attacker could adjust his aim, Dante was already beneath the weapon’s line of fire.

The sharpened chair leg drove straight up beneath the attacker’s jaw, piercing through to the roof of his mouth. The man never screamed, his voice drowned by the blood filling his throat.

“One,” Dante whispered.

The second attacker panicked. He could not see Dante clearly, his night vision disrupted by the broken emergency light’s heat distortion and Dante’s rapid movement. He fired wildly.

“Where are you?!” he shouted.

“Behind you,” Dante’s voice appeared right at his ear.

Dante seized the man’s wrist and twisted. A sickening crack echoed as the bone snapped. The firearm fell. Dante then grabbed the man’s head and smashed it against the sharp corner of the stone wall with full force.

The body collapsed, lifeless.

“Dante?” Elena’s voice came faintly from beneath the bed. “Are… are they dead?”

“Stay there, Elena. There are four more in the corridor,” Dante picked up the fallen attacker’s weapon, an HK416 fitted with a suppressor. He felt along the rifle, identifying every button and lever through touch alone. “This weapon is too loud for my senses. But it will be useful.”

Dante stepped out into the pitch-black corridor. To the mercenaries outside, the darkness was an enemy. To Dante, it was home.

He heard the breathing of three men approaching from the staircase, and one more holding position at the far end of the hall. Dante fired a shot at the chandelier at the end of the corridor, not to kill, but to create the chaotic sound of shattering crystal.

As their attention shifted toward the noise, Dante moved in the opposite direction. He leapt, braced his feet against the wall, and landed directly between two attackers.

He did not use the rifle to shoot. He used it as a club. The rifle stock smashed into the third attacker’s temple, while Dante’s free left hand drove a folding knife, taken from the belt of the first corpse, into the neck of the fourth.

“Two. Three,” Dante counted coldly.

The fifth attacker tried to fire, but Dante had already predicted the bullet’s path from the sound of the trigger pull. He shifted one small step aside, letting the round pass, then answered with a single precise shot aimed at the sound of the rapidly pounding heart in front of him.

The man fell, a hole torn through his chest.

One left.

The final attacker, apparently the team leader, retreated in terror. He ripped off his night vision helmet, now filled with static, and activated the tactical flashlight on his weapon, sweeping it through the dark corridor.

The beam passed over Dante. Dante stood still, his clouded eyes staring straight ahead, seemingly unaffected by the blinding light.

“Who are you? You’re not human,” the man screamed, his voice breaking with fear. “Moretti was supposed to be blind.”

“I am blind,” Dante stepped forward slowly. Each footstep produced an echo he used to measure distance. “But in this room, I’m the only one who can see how afraid you are right now. I can hear your sweat dripping, Captain. I can hear your heart valve leaking under the stress.”

“Die!” The man unleashed a barrage of gunfire.

Dante dropped to the floor, rolling across the dusty corridor, and in one fluid motion hurled Elena’s dagger, which he had taken earlier from the bedroom floor.

Thud.

The blade buried itself directly in the center of the captain’s throat. The man choked, dropped his weapon, clutched at the blood spraying from his neck, then fell to his knees and collapsed.

Dante stood upright. He drew a deep breath, clearing his lungs of the stench of gunpowder and blood. He walked back toward his room, stepping calmly past the scattered corpses, as if he had just finished an evening stroll through a garden.

He entered the room. “You can come out now, Elena.”

Elena crawled out from beneath the bed, trembling violently. She switched on the flashlight of the phone she had hidden. The small beam illuminated a scene of horror, two bodies twisted unnaturally and Dante standing among them, his wedding clothes stained with other men’s blood.

“You… you killed all of them?” Elena asked in a barely audible voice. “In the dark? Without being able to see?”

Dante turned toward the sound of her voice. “Light only limits your perception, Elena. In this world, those who rely on their eyes are the easiest to deceive.”

Elena looked at Dante with new eyes. The man before her was no longer a helpless cripple to be hated or pitied, but an apex predator wearing the skin of a blind man.

“Who sent them?” Elena asked, trying to steady her breathing.

“Not Lorenzo. Lorenzo wants me to suffer slowly. These men were sent for a quick execution,” Dante searched one of the bodies, looking for an insignia or tattoo. He found something on the man’s wrist, a tattoo of a serpent coiled around a dagger. “The Valente family. It seems the old enemies of the Moretti are starting to smell blood.”

Dante walked toward the window. Though he could not see outside, he seemed to be staring into the distance. “The world thinks I’m already dead, or at least finished. Tonight, these messengers have delivered their answer.”

He turned back, facing Elena with his empty white eyes that somehow felt intensely focused. “Tomorrow, Lorenzo will hear about this attack. He’ll send more guards, or he’ll come himself to make sure of my ‘death.’”

Elena stepped closer, her feet crossing pools of blood. “Then what’s our plan? We’re trapped here.”

“We’re not trapped, Elena. We’re waiting,” Dante extended his bloodstained hand. “You said you wanted revenge on Lorenzo. You’ve seen what I can do in the dark.”

Elena hesitated, then placed her hand in Dante’s palm. Cold, yet solid, like stone. “Yes. I’ve seen it.”

“This is only the beginning,” Dante whispered. “Lorenzo gave me this darkness as a prison. He doesn’t realize he’s just given me a battlefield where I will never lose.”

Dante tightened his grip. Outside, the distant wail of sirens began to rise, perhaps local police or reinforcements from the Moretti family summoned by severed security sensors.

“Welcome to my world, Elena,” Dante said, his voice cold yet regal. “A world where sound is sight, and shadows are weapons. Prepare yourself, because starting tomorrow, we stop hiding. We begin hunting them from within the darkness.”

Elena stared at her husband’s face. Under the dim glow of her phone, Dante’s burn scars and pale eyes no longer seemed terrifying. They looked like the marks of an emperor risen from his ashes.

That night, Villa Para Hantu truly gained its ghost. Dante Moretti, the Oracle, had activated his superhuman senses for the first time in real combat. And for anyone foolish enough to step into his darkness, death was the only promise he intended to keep.