The really unfortunate part about Adrastia’s assassination of Ianus is that it turns him into a martyr.
Make no mistake, Ianus Basilius is a power hungry, reprehensible man. An admittedly good father, yes, but the good does not cancel out all the bad. And, my god, there’s so much bad.
This is the man that ordered Adrastia’s kidnapping in the first place. Who ordered her to be trained as little more than his perfect weapon.
By the time of his assassination, Ianus Basilius was the de facto dictator of Mistral. The Mistrali Council and the Mistral Self Defense Force (MSDF) were packed with his supporters.
His only real opponents were, ironically enough, the Mistrali Black Market and Leonardo Lionheart. The Black Market and the various factions within were trying to stop any one man from having all the power in Mistral. And Lionheart, well... was doing anything to weaken Mistral from within.
And no one knew about this. Or, at least, the general public was completely unaware how the reins of governance had been completely consolidated into the hands of one man. As far as they were concerned, everything was business as usual.
Lionheart’s very public betrayal of Mistral gave Ianus the perfect opportunity to do away with his longtime opponent. Frankly, not even the Black Market could stop him at that point. Were he not assassinated, Ianus was absolutely going to declare himself as Mistral’s Shōgun.
But that’s the thing.
He never reached that point. Because Adrastia killed him. That’s a truth that never gets to come out. And the fact that he was killed so gruesomely and so publicly just served to martyr him.
