Chapter 75 75: Sealing
"Are you certain this layout will hold?" Lucia asked, his eyes tracking Ranni as she moved briskly across the stone floor, single-handedly assembling an immense, dizzyingly intricate geometric array around Malenia's resting form.
"If my records serve me correctly, your silver hair cleared the cradle less than six months past, and the capital ministries have yet to authorize a single watch of formal sorcery training across your schedule. Concurrently, Farum Azula's legacy has never been celebrated for its achievements under the stars," Ranni shot back, her delivery completely devoid of courtly mercy.
Lucia understood her subtext instantly: you are an entry-level novice who lacks the vocabulary of a scholar; keep your mouth sealed. He could only offer an awkward, self-deprecating nod, stepping back to patiently execute the role of an un-involved bystander.
The princess worked with meticulous focus, arraying high-purity moon-silver crystals and rare glintstone shards at precise coordinates around Malenia's petite frame. She wove a brush dipped in pure alabaster ink to map out a sequence of highly complex, mysterious runic circuits across the stone, before un-capping a vial filled with the dark, heavy blood of an uncharted beast, tracing crimson boundary lines to link dozens of critical nodes together.
Finally, she raised her slender palm above the geometric center of the floor, unleashing a dense, swirling cloud of liquid glintstone frost.
The exact microsecond the freezing mist made contact with the array, hundreds of crystals and glintstones ignited in perfect unison. The shimmering blue circuits linking the stones flared into a brilliant hum, throwing a soft, moonlit pale blue radiance across the chamber that completely enveloped Malenia's delicate torso in a hazy twilight.
Miquella, sitting directly opposite Lucia on the stones, tracked the alignment with burning, hyper-focused eyes. A soft exclamation of genuine academic awe escaped his lips. "Using pale moon crystals and raw starlight amber to anchor the absolute baseline of the frost-attribute reservoir... fusing that mass with white dove stone powder to construct a high-durability containment channel... and finally deploying the heart-blood of a Flame-Horned Earth Dragon to act as the primary communication node to completely absorb and digest the sheer thermodynamic force of the dragon flame... this comprises nothing short of a masterwork neutralizing matrix!"
Ranni lifted her silver eyelashes to survey the golden-haired boy, a rare flash of surprise flickering across her default icy mask. "Your house has extended its studies to encompass the laws of glintstone sorcery as well?"
Miquella offered a small, weary smile, his head shaking slightly against his silk collar. "My eyes have merely turned over a few forbidden volumes within the library basements. Because my physical marrow commands an entirely too massive an affinity for Erdtree grace, my nervous system is completely blind to the ambient currents of magic power. My hand lacks the capacity to cast a solitary spell on its own signature."
"Uh... while your intellects are cross-referencing the archives, my own steel requires an explanation regarding the definition of a neutralizing matrix," Lucia inserted cautiously, his hand scratching his neck. "Seeing as my breath is conformed to help anchor this seal in a few moments."
In truth, his mind was already logging a minor fraction of regret for entering the room to watch their preparations.
"The Neutralizing Array functions as a highly advanced liturgical structure engineered specifically to harmonize conflicting elemental laws," Miquella explained with an un-broken, patient warmth. "With the flawless precision Princess Ranni has executed across these flagstones, the three distinct forces our houses project will encounter zero structural friction down the timeline. The seal will naturally mature into its most stable, perfect configuration."
"Ah. Understood."
Lucia wisely chose to close his mouth, his mind suddenly tracking a bizarre sensation—feeling exactly like that green, un-optimized knight, Moongrum, standing amidst a council of high scholars. Concurrently, a fierce, silent resolution locked inside his center: the absolute next watch his consciousness entered the Memory Battlefield, his vanguard would aggressively target and dismantle a few high-level academy masters. This wasn't a choice driven strictly by his princely vanity; his heart simply harbored a genuine, burning interest in the mysteries of cosmic magic.
While their thoughts were turning over the math, Ranni finalized the collection of the surplus glintstone elements. She turned her chassis toward the heavy oak door, issuing a flat command to Blaidd to lead a detachment of house guards to enforce a strict quarantine over the thoroughfare, forbidding any entity from crossing the threshold without her explicit verbal summons.
The half-wolf youth, his broad chest swelling with a fierce lupine pride, accepted the mandate with a crisp nod. He backed out of the room, shutting the heavy door before driving the massive crossguard of his royal greatsword down against the flags with a thunderous, echoing clang. Judging by the sheer, un-yielding gravity of his physical posture outside the wood, the beast would dare to lock the line even if the Lord Consort Radagon himself cleared the stairs to demand entry.
"The parameters are aligned; let us initiate the sequence," Ranni spoke, her blue eyes scanning the two princes. "Our vanguard commands strictly a solitary operational window across this night. See to it that your ears archive every command my voice issues with absolute precision. Zero margins exist for an error."
Miquella and Lucia exchanged a rapid, resolute look, both drawing a deep, chest-expanding breath to force their internal energetic channels to their peak operational readiness.
The initial entity among the three divine children to lunge across the board was Miquella, his marrow having barely recovered a minor fraction of his golden faith. The tactical task Ranni had written into his ledger required zero complex calculations; his hands were conformed simply to deploy basic Erdtree incantations to construct the foundational architecture of the sealing ring.
This comprised entry-level work for an Empyrean mind who had spent his childhood immersed within the high texts of the Golden Order. He un-clasped his arms, releasing dozens of thin, shimmering wisps of golden grace that rapidly wove themselves across the space, compiling a series of incandescent liturgical runes directly over the boundaries of Ranni's neutralizing array.
The exact microsecond the golden seal finalized its geometry across the stones, Miquella's newly recovered faith reserves were instantly bankrupted down to absolute zero. His countenance turned a terrifyingly stark, deathly pale color, his physical chassis swaying violently as his balance collapsed. Fortunately, Lucia's massive gauntlet aggressively reached through the dark, catching the boy's shoulder plate to prevent his frame from striking the ashlar floorboards.
This specific vulnerability anchored the absolute reason why Ranni's tongue had cited a solitary operational window. Having manually fought to suppress the violent outbreaks of the scarlet rot non-stop from the dawn watch until the setting of the sun, Miquella's biological limits had reached an exceptionally dangerous bottleneck. His system could legally absorb zero further exhaustion across this night.
Ranni wove her slender hand through the air, streams of dense, dark blue glintstone mana pouring from her fingertips to link Miquella's golden sealing runes directly with the broader circuits of the neutralizing matrix surrounding the little girl.
A microsecond later, her fingers executed a series of complex, highly advanced gestures across the empty air, carving a sequence of mysterious astrological glyphs. As the glowing sigils dissolved into the atmosphere, the entire multi-factional sealing matrix—constructed from the joint parameters of Erdtree light and Carian frost—ignited with a freezing, incandescent moonlit brilliance!
Malenia's eyelids remained clamped shut, her delicate brow knitting into a sharp knot of agony as a soft, pained groan escaped her teeth. The precise watch the combined weight of the sealing energies penetrated her skin, the parasitic scarlet veins coiling across her torso reacted with an explosive, chaotic violence, launching a massive, hyper-velocity counter-assault against the intrusion!
Right at that cross of data, Ranni's frost magic triggered its secondary phase. Brilliant lines of dark blue glintstone frost erupted across Malenia's skin, coiling tightly around the scarlet patterns like a sequence of unbreakable, absolute iron chains.
Yet, the crimson mutations appeared entirely unwilling to concede their territory without a total attrition fight. The toxic veins churned and bubbled, launching wave after wave of corrosive pressure to smash head-on against the indigo restraints. The weeping scars tracking the margins of her golden prosthetic limbs even managed to execute a brief, accelerating outward expansion each watch a circuit node fractured under the strain. However, regardless of the curse's violence, it lacked the absolute voltage to shatter the frozen blockade enforced by the Carian frost. Following several consecutive watches of brutal, static gridlock, the active energetic velocity of the scarlet rot finally began to register a steady, downward decay.
Ranni kept an un-blinking, hyper-vigilant watch over every microsecond of the girl's biological shifts. The exact watch her tracking eyes isolated the data point proving the scarlet rot was entering a state of qualitative weakness, her features instantly cleared of their tension. Her right gauntlet swept through the air, manifesting a towering, ice-blue magic circle that hovered suspended within the space, her voice roaring through the chamber to strike Lucia's ears.
"Unleash the full mass of your draconic payload directly through this circle! Breathe the flame! NOW!"
Lucia's draconic transformation finalized its compliance in the span of a single heartbeat. Across this watch, his intellect consciously desisted from deploying the more agile, flexible parameters of his half-dragon humanoid morphology; he allowed his biological code to expand into a complete, full-fledged Ancient Dragon Sovereignty. His massive, silver-scaled draconic chassis erupted across the space, his immense volume almost completely saturating the high rafters of the cathedral hall within a fraction of a second.
He aligned the massive, bone-armored ridge of his maw directly with the center of the hovering ice-blue magic circle. The exact microsecond his jaws un-clasped, a blinding, solar-bright explosion of intense energy ignited deep within the basements of his throat. A moment later, his lungs violently discharged a magnificent, roaring torrent of crimson dragon flame across the dark!
Although his internal libraries had not yet formally compiled the advanced Ancient Dragon Incantations governing the element of fire, the baseline execution of the primitive elemental breaths functioned as a hard-wired, innate biological instinct clutched within the genome of every true Ancient Dragon. Naturally, his vanguard encountered zero structural difficulties across the execution.
The massive column of dragon fire, compressing a terrifying payload of pure civilizational destruction within its heat, was completely intercepted and arrested by the face of Ranni's sorcery circle. As the ice-blue glyphs flashed with high-frequency brilliance, the column of fire was systematically broken down, its raw thermal energy cleanly merging into the magic circle to transform on the opposite side into a surging, liquid stream of pure elemental light. Guided flawlessly by the pre-laid alchemical circuits mapping the floorboards, this purified light cascaded directly into the sealing magic circle anchoring the stones below, plunging straight past Malenia's skin to launch a direct, frontal annihilation strike against the absolute center of the scarlet rot!
The parasitic corruption, which was still desperately struggling to re-align its lines against the frost chains, sustained a catastrophic structural breakdown the exact watch it intersected the dragon flame. The churning, coiling scarlet patterns commanding the absolute vanguard of the infection were instantly vaporized into nothingness, their traces rapidly retreating deep into the marrow.
The horrific, toxic web that had previously claimed more than half of Malenia's young body vanished from her skin within an exceptionally brief watch of the clock, and the corrosive scars that had been aggressively spreading along the interface of her golden prosthetic limbs withered and dissolved like dead weeds caught within a sweeping forest fire!
Following roughly ten minutes of continuous, high-voltage channeling, the dragon fire finally exhausted its reserves, and Lucia's maw ceased its discharge. The newly erupted, systemic corruption tracking the little girl's chassis had been entirely liquidated from the ledger, and even the ancient, deep-seated scars that had eroded her limbs for winters displayed a visible, staggering qualitative improvement under the audit.
Ranni vented a soft, long-hidden sigh of absolute relief, her gloved fingers executing a fluid sweep to dismiss the hovering magic circle before injecting a final, regulatory strand of mana into the floor circuits. The immense sealing matrix below flickered three times before systematically dimming its indicators, sinking back into the silent quiet of the limestone flagstones.
"The seal has securely locked its parameters into the archive," she spoke, her voice dropping into a low, weary cadence that carried a heavy, undeniable layer of physical and spiritual exhaustion. "Now, our hands are conformed simply to wait for the child's internal vitals to stabilize, before migrating her mass to the nearest sleeping quarters to execute a rest watch."
"Your house has hand-delivered a world-class performance across this floor, Princess. My gratitude is absolute," Lucia said quickly, his massive form dissolving back into his silver-haired human morphology.
He bent his knees to the stones, carefully lifting Malenia's weight into his arms. Guided by the hushed, reverent pacing of the cathedral priests, he escorted her form into a quiet, heavily insulated adjoining bedroom belonging to a high-ranking senior maiden. He issued a flat executive order to Aegis, commanding an elite detachment of iron-clad knights to build an impenetrable defensive line outside her door, before arranging a separate, comfortable chamber to ensure the exhausted Miquella could safely recharge his batteries.
The exact watch his boots cleared the medical quadrants to return to the entrance of the meditation room, the layout inside had been completely dismantled by Ranni's sorceries, leaving zero traces of the glintstone crystals across the stone.
However, the half-wolf knight Blaidd remained anchored to his coordinates beside the archway, his massive clawed hand resting against the pommel of his greatsword. Catching the flash of the silver hair, the beast wove his massive chassis forward to intercept the prince, his deep, resonant growl filtering through the corridor wind.
"Your Royal Highness, Prince Lucia. Her Ladyship, Princess Ranni, has explicitly commanded my tongue to deposit a direct administrative brief across your station—her presence is currently holding a watch, awaiting your boots upon the open rooftop terrace of this cathedral dome."
"Is that the layout?" Lucia's silver eyes narrowed slightly, his analytical engine mapping the coordinates of the destination. He glanced toward the sweeping, golden-veined marble staircase winding toward the upper rafters of the temple, his head executing a slow nod. "My registry records the brief. Out of the way."
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