Chapter 73 73: Omen
Commander Ordovis and Knight Moongrum rushed to the edge of the granite banqueting platform at the exact same moment, their eyes locked in a tense, unblinking stare on the dust-choked lake below. The sheer, world-shattering intensity of this demigod duel had completely shattered any expectations the royal officials had held before the match.
Rykard rushed to the railing beside the two veteran knights, straining his eyes to pierce the thick curtain of boiling white mist rolling off the water. Behind him, Ranni and Miquella could no longer suppress the cold spike of anxiety gripping their hearts. Beside them, little Malenia stared with wide, bloodshot eyes, her snowy face frozen in absolute, rigid tension. She held her breath, completely paralyzed by the suffocating weight of her fear and worry for her friend.
Every patch of wild vegetation and ancient rock lining the shores of the lake had been ground into fine powder by the sheer force of the shockwaves. After what felt like an eternity to the spectators, the towering columns of vapor finally began to thin. The surging waves gradually calmed into a smooth sheen, exposing two blood-drenched figures bobbing within the central wake.
"His Highness Radahn!"
A vanguard of Carian Knights clad in silver plate frantically dragged a long wooden boat from its shoreline cradle, throwing their weight into the oars as they rowed toward the center of the lake. A fraction of a second behind them, the golden-clad Tree Sentinels and Leyndell Knights rushed in a chaotic pack to converge on Lucia's coordinates.
The moment the rescue teams cleared the fog and saw the horrific trauma sustained by the two combatants, a collective, sharp gasp escaped the throat of every knight present.
Radahn's massive chest was mapped with dozens of ragged lacerations. Most horrifying, however, were ten jagged claw marks carved deep into his armor—wounds raw enough to lay bare the white of his bone, with fine, thread-like arcs of black-and-red electricity still violently crackling within the exposed flesh. With every labored breath, a thick trickle of dark blood overflowed from the corner of his mouth; his internal organs had clearly suffered massive damage from the ruinous red lightning of the dragon claw.
Yet, Lucia's condition appeared even worse. His brilliant silver-white scale armor had been mostly shattered into jagged shards, exposing the mangled, shredded muscle tissue beneath. Crimson demigod blood thoroughly saturated more than half of his body, and a terrifying track of starlight sword energy had physically sliced his torso open from his left shoulder down to his right rib cage—so deeply that the rhythmic, frantic beating of his heart inside his chest was nearly visible to the naked eye.
Both young titans had fundamentally miscalculated the catastrophic power of the other's ultimate attack. The error had left them completely out of control during the terminal collision; neither had held back a single ounce of power. The final meeting had delivered nothing short of mutually assured ruin.
Up on the platform, the young demigods had no time to calculate who had actually won. They rose from their benches in a single, chaotic movement, rushing toward the steps. In his absolute haste, Miquella bypassed the protocol of summoning the handmaids; his small, frail arms strained with everything he could muster as he struggled to lift Malenia from the cushions and settle her into her iron wheelchair.
Ranni caught the movement. Reaching out a pale hand, her fingers locked around the velvet cloak of Rykard, who was on the verge of sprinting down the granite steps. She pointed a silent, unyielding finger toward the twins.
Rykard's brow furrowed into a sharp, indignant knot as he looked at the pair of siblings who could barely move. He turned back to meet his sister's expression, seeing the absolute, non-negotiable ice written across her blue eyes. Finally, a low, irritated snort escaped his nostrils. He strode forward, brushing Miquella away from the iron handles, and pushed Malenia's wheelchair toward the lower path at maximum speed.
The two master paladins, Ordovis and Moongrum, remained entirely at a loss at the base of the platform. They exchanged a brief, complicated look, both tracking the absolute diplomatic deadlock of the situation. With the Dragon Prince and the Starscourge having broken each other to this extent, whose throne could legally claim the rights of the day, and would the three children of Caria choose to break camp or maintain their seats?
"Remove your hands from my armor!"
A voice, thick with a shocking amount of vital energy, suddenly boomed from the center of the Leyndell medical cluster. "And you—drop that liturgical scroll this instant! You are forbidden from casting a single healing miracle without my explicit permission!"
"But Your Grace, your internal injuries—" the monk who had just received the verbal lashing attempted to argue, but his words froze mid-sentence as he saw Lucia execute a sequence of violent, jerky movements, forcing his shattered spine completely upright upon the water!
The next second, a phenomenon that completely defied the standard laws of mortal logic unfolded before their eyes.
A monumental, surging wave of raw divine power suddenly welled up from the absolute center of Lucia's core. A massive, peerless Sacred Seal of the Erdtree manifested as a glowing gold geometric wheel across the water beneath his boots. Following the alignment of the runes, a magnificent, towering pillar of brilliant golden light roared straight into the high heavens, enveloping the surrounding waters in a radiant, shimmering golden aura that descended across the lake like falling autumn leaves.
Erdtree Heal!
"The... Erdtree Heal miracle..." the monk breathed, his voice cracking in absolute, unmitigated shock.
Witnessing this ancient dragon demigod easily execute one of the highest, most heavily restricted mysteries of the Erdtree's internal liturgy—while possessing a fundamentally broken body and nearly exhausted divine reservoirs—left every Leyndell knight present locked in a state of absolute cognitive paralysis. This was a legendary miracle that even the high-ranking patriarchs who preached across the continent spent lifetimes failing to master; by what logic was an outsider dragon so proficient in its execution?
Simultaneously, the deep properties of the Cradle Blessing hidden within the basements of Lucia's anatomy entered their active cycle. The horrific, cavernous lacerations mapped across his flesh began to systematically heal. The rivers of blood that had pooled across his waist suddenly reversed their trajectory, streaming backward into his open veins like twitching silver threads, while the mangled muscle groups closed and smoothed over without a single scar. Fresh, silver-white dragon scales wove across the surface before sinking smoothly back beneath the skin, leaving his flesh as smooth as polished jade.
Lucia panted for a few seconds within the ring of rowboats, re-establishing precise, absolute control over his breathing before the other demigods could even clear the shoreline. Pressing his palm against the water, he forced himself to stand, walking with slightly uneven, swaying steps toward Radahn's coordinates.
"Vanguards of Caria, part your line. Grant me passage."
He pushed his way through the dense cluster of bodies surrounding the fallen prince. A dozen Carian Knights clad in silver-and-blue armor turned impatient, defensive visors toward the intruder, only to turn completely pale with shock the moment they verified Lucia's face. They glanced backward at the tail of Leyndell knights following in his wake, looking exactly like men who had just watched a ghost step out of a fresh grave.
Having finally cleared a path to the absolute center of the perimeter, Lucia pushed aside two Carian alchemists who were frantically debating how to treat their master's trauma. Lucia's internal reserves were similarly on the absolute verge of bankruptcy; his left boot accidentally caught his right heel, causing his entire mass to plop down unceremoniously right beside Radahn's head.
The water splashed by his sudden drop landed squarely across the face of the Carian prince, who was resting with his eyes clamped shut. Radahn's massive eyelids flickered, forcing his gaze open. The moment his focus locked onto Lucia—whose catastrophic injuries had been almost completely erased from his frame—his resolute, heroic features instantly froze into a state of petrified, unvarnished bewilderment.
Seeing that his opponent was entirely unable to formulate a single syllable, Lucia let out a soft chuckle. He extended his right palm, forcefully retracting the residual strands of red lightning that were still violently torturing Radahn's flesh, before gritting his teeth to squeeze the absolute final drops of divine grace from his marrow, constructing the sacred runes for a secondary Erdtree Heal.
The solemn, monumental golden seal unfolded between their chests. Bathed within the warm, liquid light of the high miracle, Radahn felt an immediate, soothing heat wash through his lacerations. He struggled to look down his chest, watching his minor wounds return to their original, unmarked state while the deep gashes torn by Lucia's claws barely managed to knit their edges together.
At this exact moment, the red-haired prince profoundly felt the absolute, disgusting disparity of the universe.
Following that final, cataclysmic collision, this dragon youth had clearly sustained vastly more structural damage than his own frame. Why was the boy currently alive, kicking, and possessed of enough mana to cast a high-level capital miracle on his opponent, while Radahn remained floating like a broken log, completely unable to shift his weight?
Even more absurdly, under the exact same healing spell, why had the dragon's injuries experienced a hundred percent recovery, while he still felt like a priceless piece of porcelain that had been poorly glued back together after being shattered against a stone floor?
"You..." He mobilized his vocal cords with everything his strength could muster, a long moment passing before a single sentence was squeezed past his teeth. "Are you even human?"
"What kind of question is that?" Lucia countered, glaring back at him with mock offense. "Of course I'm not human!"
Seeing that both demigods' internal vitals had cleared the critical danger zone, the attendant knights hurriedly hoisted them onto the boat, rowing with frantic speed toward the shoreline.
The moment the hull ground against the pebbles, Rykard had already cleared the distance, pushing Malenia's iron wheelchair to the absolute front of the line, with Ranni and Miquella trailing a few steps behind. Though Ordovis and Moongrum maintained a respectful pocket of space for the royal children, their eyes remained locked on the circle.
Seeing that the primary directors of the crisis had all assembled, Lucia reached out to pat Radahn's uninjured shoulder plate, his tone light. "By the way... my blade claimed the victory today, correct?"
Radahn closed his eyes, his massive chest heaving with violent, ragged breaths as the frantic sequences of the duel continued to loop within his memory.
If one deleted the monumental stat multiplier provided by the Golden Vow at the absolute opening of the match, Lucia's baseline physical parameters were indeed half a notch weaker than his own. However... his strength possessed zero answers for this boy's absolutely perverse, logic-breaking recovery. If this exchange had transpired across a true, unsanctioned battlefield, what would have greeted his neck following that explosion wouldn't have been a capital healing miracle—it would have been a cold blade separating his head from his spine.
Finally, under the collective, heavy gaze of his four siblings, the Starscourge drew a deep breath into his lungs, his voice emerging in a raspy, quiet rumble. "You won."
Up on the platform, Knight Ordovis let out a sudden, long-hidden sigh of absolute relief. Beside him, Knight Moongrum's posture stiffened for a microsecond before his head dropped into a silent, accepting sigh.
As the personal mentor who had guided Radahn through every stage of his martial development, he understood the boy's underlying character perfectly. Just as he had calmly accepted the initial challenge without a single drop of princely vanity, Radahn would never stoop to the lowly, uncourtly behavior of refusing to validate an honest defeat.
Rykard, still holding the iron handles of the wheelchair, looked entirely dazed, his thoughts spinning. His massive body swayed twice before he simply plopped down onto the lake pebbles. When he had briefly brushed against that ancient, crushing dragon pressure upon his arrival at the lakeside, he had realized that Lucia's strength far out-scoped his own—but he had never anticipated that even his invincible elder brother would have his line broken by this outsider.
Princess Ranni's reaction appeared vastly flatter. Lucia had noted the anomaly the moment he had entered the venue; though she was actually not much older than Malenia's current age, she consistently carried herself like a block of silent, primordial ice, emitting a freezing detachment that kept the world at a safe distance, as if zero occurrences under the stars could ever stir a single ripple across her inner sea.
"Our house offers its deepest gratitude for your labor," Miquella murmured, squatting down to support the weight of Lucia's shoulder, a flash of genuine, heartfelt joy breaking across his pale, aristocratic features. "Malenia insisted on maintaining her vigil until you cleared the water."
"Is that the truth?"
Lucia leaned his upper body in front of the iron wheelchair, only to find Malenia pouting her small mouth into a tight, trembling line. Her large, bright eyes were repeatedly scanning the dark crimson bloodstains drying across his silk robes, looking exactly like a child who was on the absolute verge of bursting into tears.
He let out a soft smile, reaching out a finger to gently hook the tip of the young girl's nose. "What is the source of the displeasure, little one? Are you still unhappy even though my steel claimed the match?"
Unexpectedly, that single, playful interaction appeared to instantly shatter the defensive wall she had spent the entire time constructing. Malenia could no longer hold back the torrent of tears she had held back during the bloody melee. With a sharp, broken sob, her small frame lunged forward from the cushions, her arms locking around Lucia's neck as she buried her pale face deep into the silk of his shoulder, weeping with absolute, unchecked violence.
Lucia felt the soft, kitten-like heat of her body shivering against his chest. He raised a hand, gently patting her shoulder to soothe her breathing. After a long moment, the little girl's crying finally began to slow, the violent trembling of her frame calming back into a steady rhythm; she appeared to have completely fallen asleep from absolute emotional and physical exhaustion.
Lucia carefully lifted her weight, settling her back into the leather of the wheelchair. Just as his fingers prepared to release her, a sudden, burning sensation erupted across his palms.
His focus snapped upward, his pupils violently contracting.
Strange, toxic, scarlet floral patterns were actively burning their way through Malenia's delicate, white skin. The ancient, blackened scars eroded by the rot at the interface of her golden prosthetic limbs were suddenly expanding at an accelerating speed visible to the naked eye, spreading like a plague toward her entire torso—the absolute, undeniable omen of a total, systemic outbreak of the Scarlet Rot!