Chapter 18 : Chapter 18
Chapter 18.
A faint scent of blood still lingered in the conference hall.
After the words “The meeting is adjourned” fell, not a single one of the surviving nobles dared to move.
Each of them remained frozen in place like statues trapped in ice.
Sylvia did not spare them another glance.
She turned, and her silver-gray eyes met Akash, who had long been waiting nearby.
“Akash.”
“Your Highness.”
Akash stepped forward.
“Take your squad and immediately confiscate the property of those seven families.”
Sylvia’s voice did not waver in the slightest.
“All assets are to be seized.”
“Anyone who resists is to be killed on the spot.”
Akash’s breathing grew heavier by a fraction.
“Yes, Your Highness.”
“Which family do we start with?”
Sylvia spoke a single name.
“Marcus.”
A few faint gasps sounded inside the conference hall.
Among the seven people who had just been dragged out, Count Marcus was the most powerful.
His family possessed the greatest influence, the largest number of private soldiers, and the deepest roots in the Northern Territory.
Everyone had assumed that the princess would start by crushing the weakest target, killing a chicken to scare the monkeys.
No one had expected her to go straight for the hardest bone the moment she moved.
“Yes!”
Akash did not hesitate in the slightest.
He gave a military salute, then turned and strode away.
The heavy clang of metal boots pounded against every noble’s heart.
Only then did they finally snap out of their numbness and realize that this was not merely an act of intimidation.
A purge had begun.
A true purge, carried out with blood and steel, had begun beneath the night sky of Winter City.
…
Count Marcus' manor was brightly lit, yet the atmosphere was suffocatingly oppressive.
The butler, Hector, was pacing back and forth anxiously.
His weathered face was full of unease.
He had served the Marcus family for forty years, rising from a mere attendant to the position of head steward.
He himself was also a genuine peak fourth-tier knight.
Just moments earlier, a servant had come scrambling back in panic and reported everything that had happened in the conference hall of the Duke’s residence.
The master had been arrested, and he was to be executed.
The princess' guard was already on the way to confiscate the estate.
“Gather everyone!”
“Now!”
Hector roared, his voice echoing through the vast courtyard.
Very quickly, more than three hundred well-equipped private soldiers assembled in the square before the manor.
Under the torchlight, their cold armor reflected a grim metallic gleam.
Hector drew the knight’s longsword at his waist.
A blazing aura flowed across the blade, producing a low, humming vibration.
“The Marcus family has fed you for all these years.”
“Now it is time for you to repay the family!”
He shouted at the soldiers.
“The princess is lawless and slaughtering nobles at will!”
“We cannot sit here and wait for death!”
“As long as we hold this place, once the other noble lords react, they will surely come to our aid!”
“When that time comes, that wet-behind-the-ears princess will learn that the Northern Territory is not a place where she can run wild!”
The morale of the private soldiers was stirred.
They tightened their grips on their weapons, fierce light surfacing in their eyes.
In their view, Butler Hector was a peak fourth-tier powerhouse.
He was only a single step away from crossing into the fifth tier.
He was a true great figure.
With him here, forget ten members of the princess' guard.
Even if a hundred came, they would still never set foot inside the count’s manor.
They possessed an almost blind faith in the power of traditional knights.
At that moment, heavy footsteps sounded from the end of the street.
Thud.
Thud.
Thud.
The sound was perfectly uniform.
Each step seemed to land directly on the beat of a person’s heart.
Heavy.
Oppressive.
Carrying an inhuman mechanical quality.
Hector and all the private soldiers turned toward the source of the sound.
Ten metal giants, each three meters tall, emerged from the darkness in a single line.
Their entire bodies were covered in thick black armor.
Complex blue patterns were engraved across the surface.
Their joints were made of precise mechanical structures, without so much as a single visible gap.
Their heads had no facial features.
There was only a smooth dark-red crystal visor, flickering with a ghostly glow in the night.
So these were Sylvia’s personal guards?
An invisible pressure rushed toward them head-on.
The morale the private soldiers had just worked up was instantly cut in half.
Quite a few of them had already started sweating in the palms of the hands gripping their weapons.
“Cheap tricks!”
Hector shouted to bolster his courage, forcibly suppressing the unease in his heart.
He pushed his aura to the limit.
Golden flames covered his entire body, and he radiated overwhelming pressure.
“They are nothing but a pile of iron cans!”
“Charge with me!”
“Tear them apart!”
Hector took the lead, rushing straight toward Akash at the front like a cannonball fired from a barrel.
He had absolute confidence.
As long as he got in close, the longsword in his hand would easily slice apart those cumbersome metal shells.
When the private soldiers saw their pillar charging ahead, they also let out a roar and surged forward like a tide.
Yet in the face of a charge by several hundred men, those ten steel giants merely stood there in silence.
Akash and the other nine members under his command raised their weapons in perfect unison.
They were firearms of peculiar design, long and slender in shape, likewise covered in Mana runes.
Their muzzles were dark and hollow, carrying a distinctly ominous air.
These were the Burst Guns that Logaris had specifically equipped for the fourth-generation Magitech Armor.
“Open fire.”
Akash’s cold voice came from the armor’s amplification spellwork, utterly devoid of emotion.
In the next second, there was no deafening roar.
Instead, only a dense series of soft thudding sounds rang out, so concentrated that it made the scalp go numb.
Thin red beams shot from the muzzles of the ten Burst Guns, weaving together into a net of death.
The private soldiers charging in front did not even have time to scream before their bodies were instantly pierced through by the beams.
Their shields and leather armor were as thin as paper before the Alchemical Bullets.
One body after another was blasted into the air by the terrifying kinetic force, exploding into clouds of blood before they even hit the ground.
In just a single exchange, the charging line collapsed.
Bodies fell in heaps.
Blood stained the stone road in front of the count’s manor red.
Hector’s pupils contracted violently.
He watched the soldiers behind him drop one after another like wheat being harvested, and his mind went completely blank.
What kind of weapon was this?
How could this be possible?
With a furious roar, he gathered all of his aura into the shield before him.
The golden shield was thick and solid.
It was the strongest defense of a peak fourth-tier knight like him.
He believed that this shield was enough to block any attack.
At that very moment, three red beams struck his shield with perfect precision.
The first shot made the golden shield tremble violently, and half its light dimmed at once.
The second shot covered the surface of the shield in spiderweb-like cracks.
With the third shot, the shield shattered with a sharp crack.
The expression on Hector’s face froze.
His pride.
His confidence.
The knightly path to which he had devoted forty years of his life.
All of it was effortlessly shattered by three Alchemical Bullets in a single instant.
Before he could recover from that overwhelming shock, seven more beams followed close behind, precisely covering every part of his body.
His body, together with the finely crafted armor he wore, was torn into pieces by the continuing barrage.
From the moment Hector charged forward to the moment he was reduced to scattered chunks of flesh, less than ten seconds had passed.
From the start of the battle to the complete slaughter of more than three hundred private soldiers, the entire fight lasted less than three minutes.
By the time Chief of Staff Victor arrived, panting heavily with Winter City’s garrison troops, this was the hellish scene that greeted him.
Severed limbs and broken corpses covered the ground.
The thick stench of blood rose into the sky.
The ten black steel war gods stood silently amid the mountain of corpses and sea of blood, yet not even a single drop of blood stained their bodies.
The dark-red crystal visors swept across Victor and the soldiers behind him.
Everyone felt a chill shoot from the soles of their feet straight to the crown of their heads.
Their hands and feet turned ice-cold.
Victor was an old general who had fought bloody battles against the orcs on the frontier for twenty years, yet at this moment, even he could not speak a single word.
His throat felt dry.
He looked at those sets of Magitech Armor, then glanced at the mangled flesh on the ground.
He recognized the fragments of Hector’s armor among them.
A peak fourth-tier knight… was simply gone like that?
He had not even been given the chance to approach his enemy before being shot to death in a hail of gunfire.
A terrifying thought rose in Victor’s heart.
The way wars were fought in the Northern Territory—
No, across the entire continent—
was probably about to change.