Chapter 85: Domain
"Does Your Royal Highness command any recent ledger entries regarding the clinical status of the great Dragon Lord Placidusax?" the Moongrum knight asked, his baritone sliding through the quiet, amber-lit interior of the private salon—an isolated chamber reserved strictly for the un-monitored consultations of distinguished guests flanking the grand banquet hall.
"Our Father?" Lucia answered, his silver eyelashes lifting in a flash of genuine surprise that the Carian champion would initiate their dialogue from this specific, ancient coordinate. Following a brief watch of internal calculation, he smoothed his gown. "The watch my carriage initial cleared the Farum Azula harbor, our Father remained locked within his deep, multi-millennial comatose sleep inside the temporal rifts of the space-time fracture. The perimeter of his resting stage was continuously insulated by an exceptionally terrifying volume of sealing miracles, which routinely refuse to permit even the high priests to approach his scales."
Moongrum rose from the velvet cushion of his sofa, his long, measured strides carrying his frame toward the high stone window. He leaned his arms against the marble safety rail in absolute silence for a vast watch, his eyes tracking the capital lanterns before a soft, nostalgic sigh escaped his teeth. "Nearly thirty winters."
"It has logged a full twenty-six winters since Her Majesty Rennala and my own steel escorted the former Sovereign, Queen Celia, to clear the sky highways to enter Farum Azula. Across that specific season of the calendar, Queen Rennala counted a mere fourteen winters of development, her fingers having barely grasped the foundational rudiments of the Full Moon Sorceries, while my own title was nothing more than a fledgling, undisciplined young knight of the guard."
He turned his torso back into the room, a light, highly amused fraction of aristocratic embarrassment breaking through his features as his memory traced his green years. A soft laugh escaped his mustache. "Across that watch, my system counted a ridiculous sixteen winters. My intellect was entirely bankrupt of worldly data, yet my vanity loudly proclaimed my steel to comprise the single greatest martial prodigy birthed across the cosmos since the War of the Gods. The exact microsecond my boots touched the flagstones of Farum Azula, my sword-hand desired nothing less than to challenge every single operator who cleared the corridors—desperately attempting to secure my reputation by breaking the lines of the legendary Ancient Dragon vanguard. My ego failed to anticipate that my mass would be systematically, effortlessly pulverized by High Priestess Lansseax and Lord Fortissax in consecutive runs, leaving my broken body bedridden within the guest cloisters for an entire week!"
"Yet, following that display, the great High Priest Gransax—who at that watch administered the entire internal and external executive ministries of the Ancient Dragon Dynasty—desisted from launching a formal state complaint against my diplomatic offense. He chose instead to allocate several watches of his private schedule to patiently, systematically hone the baseline parameters of my muscle memory."
"The High Priest's abyssal treasury of martial logic and extensive combat experience were things that completely shattered my comprehension of the world. Within the span of a tight three to five suns, his calculations smoothly resolved every single structural doubt and cognitive bottleneck that had jammed my swordsmanship tracks for years, single-handedly engineering the un-yielding baseline foundation that governs my active fighting style to this watch. My soul has permanently refused to misplace the memory of that sovereign kindness, prince. The exact microsecond my visors audited your performance across the lake that day... my engine calculated that my steel had finally encountered a legitimate window to liquidate the moral debt I carry to his line."
Lucia's physical frame went momentarily stone-still, his silver eyes widening as his processors aligned the data. "Your statement implies... your office intends to hand-deliver a master curriculum to hone my personal martial arts?"
"An absolute affirmation—but our steel will not clear its leather within these walls," the First Carian Knight smiled, extending a silver-plated gauntlet across the parquet. "If Your Royal Highness can validate my intent with a fraction of your trust... you might as well relax the defensive parameters of your consciousness completely, and allow your spirit to migrate alongside my own to an alternate coordinate."
Turning the variables over within his strategic matrix for a brief watch, Lucia delivered a slow, calculated nod of compliance. "My system accepts the transit."
He closed his silver eyelids, systematically winding down the active alert barriers safeguarding his inner focus. A heartbeat later, a gentle, monumental wave of pure, condensed spiritual voltage surged inward from the ambient cosmos, wrapping around his consciousness like a warm, liquid tide rolling beneath a midsummer sun, completely swallowing his presence.
The exact microsecond his eyelids blinked open, the architectural geometry of the capital salon had completely vanished from his tracking network, the scenery before his eyes having undergone a total, absolute transformation.
He was standing firmly upon the shifting pebbles of a vast, boundless lake whose margins stretched outward until they intersected the horizon like an un-mapped inland sea. A magnificent, breathtakingly colossal Full Moon hung suspended at the absolute zenith of the dark sky, its cool, pale silver light cascading down through the broken clouds to outline a delicate, shimmering white glow across the liquid surface. Lush, sweet fields of fragrant night-grass rolled backward from his boots to meet the dark parameters of a misty, ancient forest, and occasionally, the clear, melodious chirping of nocturnal avians vibrated through the breeze.
"This specific coordinate..."
"The reflection of the Liurnia Basin... or more precisely calculated: my private Starlight Magic Domain," Moongrum's gentle, resonant explanation filtered through the air from his rear flank.
Lucia spun his torso, his visors logging that the First Carian Knight standing across the turf had completely discarded his court evening wear; he was encased once more within his ancestral, moon-silver Carian Knight Plate. The exquisite, highly polished silver plates reflected a sharp, freezing gleam beneath the direct focus of the moon. Reaching his gauntlets behind his back, Lucia's fingers verified that the wire-wrapped hilts of the Dragon-Scale Blade and the Godskin Stitcher had re-materialized across his harness at some un-noted point of the transit.
"Your Highness's archives likely command the data files regarding Queen Rennala's legendary Full Moon Realm—the sovereign domain where her glintstone and starlight sorceries are multiplied to their absolute maximum threshold, deploying a structural voltage that directly rivals the cataclysmic output of Queen Marika's highest Erdtree miracles. This pocket macrocosm operates on an identical alchemical principle, forged through the simultaneous deployment, compression, and perfect fusion of advanced mental focus and internal magic power," Moongrum explained calmly.
"Under the absolute governance of my will, the flow of chronological time inside these parameters scores a mere one-thousandth of the baseline clock operating across the material world outside. So long as Your Highness's active stats have failed to over-register my own operational tier, this domain guarantees our spirits can execute full-voltage combat drills without risking an iota of permanent structural trauma to our physical bodies in reality, let alone risking the closure of your life ledger."
The Full Moon Realm... Lucia pondered, his modern gamer consciousness rapidly extraction the memory files from the second phase of the classic Rennala, Queen of the Full Moon boss engagement from his past life behind the screen. So that specific starlight ocean had comprised the Queen's sovereign Magic Domain?
Auditing the parameters of this reflection space—which achieved a near one-to-one fidelity with the physical world—his processors finalized an immense evaluation regarding the absolute, terrifying tier of strength clutched by the First Carian Knight. It was twice as easy to compute how this single paladin had possessed the mechanical leverage to force a full-power, Erdtree-empowered Radagon to an absolute state of strategic stalemate during the Unification Wars.
He drew a long, heavy breath into his chest, his right gauntlet striking the silver scales of his left breastplate to execute a flawless, disciplined knightly salutation from Farum Azula. "Inside these coordinates, I petition that your blade desists from withholding a single fraction of its insights, Knight Moongrum. Teach my steel."
Moongrum returned the salutation with an identical, crisp military gesture, before his right hand executed a fluid wave through the moonlight. A stream of condensed azure light particles materialized within his palm, crystallizing into a magnificent Carian Knight's Sword, its masterwork crossguard inlaid with a flawless royal glintstone conduit.
He swung the steel downward in a diagonal line, the pristine edge whistling through the wind with a sharp, clear resonance that echoed across the lake. He fixed his calm eyes onto Lucia's visor. "My office commands zero expertise in the sector of Faith miracles, Prince, and your development is already actively administered by the intellect of High Priestess Lansseax; there exists zero requirement for my sword to presume to instruct your liturgies. My purpose in drawing this steel today is to hand-deliver the absolute, core insights governing my swordsmanship tracks to your muscle memory. I demand that Your Royal Highness unleashes the absolute maximum percentage of his capabilities. Hold nothing back."
"Understood," Lucia said, his voice dropping into a deep, predatory baritone.
BOOM—!
Before the syllables had fully cleared the lip of his bone mask, his silhouette transformed into a white-hot streak of hyper-velocity silver light, his boots pressurizing the lake pebbles to instantly close the gap, dropping his mass directly into Moongrum's guard. His right hand whipped the Dragon-Scale Blade through a vicious diagonal arc, unleashing a full-voltage Dragon Thunder Slash that hissed with vacuum lines, while his left hand drove the needle-point of the Godskin Stitcher forward in a synchronized, blinding thrust wrapped in crackling, dark red electricity!
Conformed precisely to the Carian Knight's demand for an unrestricted offensive, Lucia had forced his physical parameters to their absolute operational peak. The raw kinetic payload and elemental data packed into this initial cross completely out-scoped the combinations he had deployed to break Radahn's line at the capital basin.
Even flying across the turf at breakneck velocity, his tracking networks remained a hundred percent locked onto observing Moongrum's initial reaction loop. Even if the First Knight deployed the Carian Retaliation matrix at the terminal microsecond of the trajectory—as Radahn had executed—his muscle memory had already pre-calculated a secondary transition, prepared to use the vacuum streams of his Storm Style to blow the starlight phantoms off-course.
Yet, the exact millisecond the three lines of steel prepared to bite, Moongrum executed a logic-breaking movement. His knight's sword didn't rise to execute a parry; it traced a violent, sweeping circle around his center, and a ferocious, domineering hurricane gale suddenly erupted outward from his plates!
Lucia's pupils violently contracted to pinpricks.
His analytical processors read the data of Moongrum's counter-strike instantly—the First Knight had systematically reduced his active physical attributes down to match Lucia's exact developmental level to keep the trial balanced. Yet, the high-level methodology he had deployed to absorb and redirect the kinetic energy wasn't a single recognized form of the Carian Blade Arts... it comprised the absolute, un-yielding architecture of the Storm Swordsmanship, the exact style Lucia clutched as his primary baseline!
The velocity of the Moongrum knight's sword-play completely shattered Lucia's imagination, out-registering even the ancestral phantoms who had hand-delivered the Dragon Bloodline Inheritances inside his nightly void drills. The sudden, explosive eruption of the localized sword storm created an absolute vacuum shield around the paladin's armor, acting like an impenetrable, chaotic chasm that effortlessly wiped the momentum of Lucia's dual-blade combination from the ledger.
At what watch along the chronicles did the Storm Swordsmanship—a style universally celebrated for its ferocious, bloodthirsty offensive characteristics—evolve the capacity to project such an impenetrable, absolute defense?
Although his consciousness was entirely saturated with astonishment, his muscle memory dared not log a single microsecond of deceleration. The combat instincts forged across hundreds of simulation watches delivered a hard warning stating that if his boots executed even a minor strategic retreat across the pebbles, the First Knight's steel would undeniably lunge forward to unleash a vastly more cataclysmic counter-offensive.
He violently threw the mass of his weight into his stance, the Dragon-Scale Blade and the Godskin Stitcher crossing their steel to unleash an explosive, high-purity cross slash. The dual edges, wreathed in a blinding coat of red dragon lightning, cleaved directly through the dying remnants of the vacuum storm, targeting the center of the Moongrum knight's chest plates in a terminal trajectory!
The next microsecond, a sequence that completely rewrote his comprehension of martial physics unfolded before his visor—
The Moongrum knight had initial opened the exchange utilizing the vacuum tracks of the Storm Style, his steel sweeping up to cover his sternum, yet his blade desisted from rising to collide with Lucia's twin swords. Instead, his boots locked against the lake pebbles as his center of gravity dropped into a heavy, mountain-like, un-yielding stance. His entire physical mass transmuted within a microsecond from a state of hyper-velocity kinetic movement into a state of absolute, dead-still stillness.
Leyndell Counter-Stance: Towering Crag!
CRACK—!!!!!
The precise millisecond the three blades locked their steel, Lucia registered the psychological sensation of an un-bracketed artillery train crashing head-on into a vertical mountain peak towering ten thousand feet into the sky. The entire volume of kinetic force his muscles had expended to flatten his opponent was instantaneously reflected and turned back against his own skeleton, completely shattering his sword momentum and freezing his nervous system in a total recoil lock!
Right within that microsecond of paralysis, the Moongrum knight's chassis violently stepped forward, his gauntlets executing a massive, rising two-handed arc with the knight's sword that forcefully sent Lucia's entire body flying backward into the empty air, his defense completely liquidated.
Before his mass could track the descent, Moongrum's left gauntlet shot through the starlight like a strike of red lightning, locking a vice-like grip around Lucia's throat, while his right hand drove the masterwork Carian steel straight through the center of the dragon youth's heart plates!
SHATTER—
The simulated neural trauma calibrated by the Magic Domain surged across his brain cells like a localized tidal wave. Lucia's consciousness was violently hurled down against the shifting lake pebbles amidst a dizzying, nauseating spin, his mental focus and physical frame locked in a state of absolute, petrified bewilderment and profound shock.
My baseline combos were entirely read... his mind replayed the microsecond transition in a loop of pure horror. My defense was shattered... and his hand executed an absolute Critical Riposte before my boots could even touch the turf?
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