Chapter 98 98: Pseudonyms
"Lucia, does your archive genuinely command every single scrap of starlight sorcery Professor Ophelia lectured across our notebooks last week?"
"Affirmative."
"Have your processors completely memorized every solitary branch of the noble heraldic lineages Professor Mentor conformed our schedules to print into our brains?"
"Affirmative."
"But my own memory banks have logged absolute zero retention! The Chancellery is legally conformed to execute a mandatory dictation evaluation across the very next watch!" Radahn growled, his massive gauntlets violently locking around Lucia's silk collar to shake his chassis across the carriage bench. "Disclose the blueprint across my station—what specific tactical outcome is your mind chasing by dragging our mantles into the outer ring, forcing our bodies to be encased inside the rusted iron of these pathetic, low-tier mercenary guards?"
"Your vision will decode the parameters the exact microsecond our wheels drop anchor, big brother. Banish the cognitive anxiety; my engine hand-delivers an absolute guarantee that your center will register zero regret for aligning your boots to my column today," Lucia replied, his tone perfectly level.
"Pshaw! An operator would have to record an absolute intelligence deficit to validate a guarantee of that size!"
"Your Royal Highness, Prince Radahn," Kristoff murmured softly from the opposite cushion, attempting to inject a fraction of knightly comfort into the space. "The structural matrices governing imperial heraldry and noble family lineages do not comprise an overly complex database. Armed with the immense processing velocity of your intellect, my shield is confident your muscle memory can effortlessly archive the full sequence when your saddle returns to Triumph Hall tonight. Since Princess Lucia has Aggressively directed our mantles to clear the Upper District checkpoints, her calculations have undeniably isolated an asset class of extreme importance to our interest."
Across this specific watch of November, conformed precisely to the explicit executive request formulated by Lucia's station, the young paladin had systematically stripped his frame of the majestic, gold-etched Ancient Dragon Knight Plate that anchored his public identity across the court. His physical mass was encased within a heavily weathered, rusted chainmail harness commonly deployed by the lowest-tier mercenary blades across the outer wards, his facial symmetry entirely hidden behind a blank iron visage mask.
Following his fortuitous, low-stakes intersection with Lucia across the clinic wards of the lower district moons past, his processors had long ago logged the data point revealing that the Dragon Prince had been secretly maintaining a hidden persona, honing his close-quarters combat metrics inside the gladitorial pits for several winters. Consequently, his mind commanded a sufficiently accurate simulation regarding what specific coordinate their carriage was tracking today.
On the parallel flank, Radahn's massive, hyper-dense physical frame was completely jammed inside a thick, iron-bound steel plate harness that was thoroughly mapped with jagged weapon gouges and deep rust scars. While an armament of this specific density would historically register as a highly valuable piece of operational equipment for a common mercenary captain drifting through the provinces, its generic alloy baseline and complete lack of active alchemical enchantments rendered the iron an absolute piece of un-vouched garbage in the eyes of the high nobility—an asset class entirely too shameful for a Count to hand-deliver to a low-built stable guard.
"The Harvey Lineage... heraldic sigil: the Three-Eyed Obsidian Wolf. The Duolis Lineage... heraldic sigil: the Bastion of Iron. The Kelly Lineage..." Radahn recited through his visor without a single watch of cessation, his thick fingers tracing the complex geometric configurations of the crests across the empty air, occasionally pausing the loop to vent a series of aggressive curses against the roof.
"My intellect genuinely fails to compute why my calendar is conformed to archive this collection of administrative nonsense!" he snapped, his jaw resting heavily against his iron gauntlet in a state of profound, courtly annoyance. "The direct heirs representing every single one of these founding lineages are currently massed inside the private academy blocks, correct? If your hand aggregated their entire collective vanguard into a single training square, they wouldn't possess the combined physical statistics to absorb a solitary, full-voltage strike from my cleaver—yet my mind is legally required to memorize their broken insignias?"
"The data does not score as entirely worthless across a grander calculation... evaluate this specific variable, for example—" Lucia wove his torso out from the carriage window, his index finger jabbing toward a massive, soot-stained stone architecture rising across the commercial sector of the avenue. "Do your optical sensors track the ancient coat of arms deeply engraved beneath the primary commercial signbord?"
Radahn cast a rapid, indifferent glance across the stone perspective, his shoulders shifting. "My database contains zero registry for that marker."
"The Caelid Colosseum—one of the seven monolithic gladitorial amphitheaters administering the entertainment logs across the entirety of Leyndell," Lucia explained calmly, his silver eyes narrowing as he tracked the masonry. "That specific heraldic crest comprises the official signature of the Duran Family. But if your intellect cross-references the historical lineage files governing the Golden Dynasty with a master-level precision, your memory will isolate the data entry stating that Count Duran's paternal grandfather functioned as the legitimate blood-uncle to Duke Caven Duolis himself. The Duran House comprises nothing more than a close collateral branch that systematically separated its estate from the primary Duolis balance sheet exactly seventeen winters past. Fusing that genealogical connection with the physical volume of this colosseum and the sheer capacity of its nightly spectator metrics, your strategic engine can lock an absolute conclusion: the true sovereign supporter anchoring the financial basements of this entire arena network is none other than the Guardian of the North."
"A gladitorial colosseum?"
The single keyword was more than sufficient to violently ignite Radahn's dormant combat indicators, his red brow lifting behind his rusted helm. "My archives state that the capital coloseums enforce a massive, continent-wide Battle Festival at the absolute closing watches of every material winter. The opening matches of the schedule should be on the literal precipice of clearing their gates, correct?"
A soft, genuine shard of martial regret wove across his deep baritone. "Regrettably, given the rigid diplomatic constraints currently formatting our public titles, even if our steel harbored a fanatical desire to clear the tunnels to execute a handful of full-power matches across the sand, the master managers of the arena guild would mathematically never possess the aristocratic courage to validate our entry scrolls."
"And that exact bottleneck comprises the precise logical reason why my hand conformed your muscles to this rusted iron!" Lucia reached out his gauntlet, forcefully grabbing the rim of Radahn's massive mercenary helm to slam the iron visor straight down over his eyes, his voice emerging in an exasperated hiss. "From this watch forward across the ledger, my registry reads as Lucifer. Your tag is conformed to Tarn. And your shield—your name is Chris. Desist from permitting your tongues to dump a single drop of counter-data across the public floorboards. Do your processors command the alignment?"
"Ah! The calculus is translucent!" a muffled, immensely cheerful roar boomed out from the depths of Radahn's dark visor. His heavy backhand delivered a thunderous, friendly strike against Lucia's shoulder plates. "My own lips explicitly stated across the transit that aligning our boots to your column would never manifest as a strategic error, yet Chris maintained a completely non-responsive heart!"
Kristoff: "..."
Arriving at their coordinated destination, the three incognito demigods executed a fluid drop to clear the frame of the dilapidated wooden coach they had temporarily rented from a commercial stable yard.
Lucia stood motionless across the cobblestones, his vision tracking the towering, majestic bowl-shaped architecture of the Caelid Colosseum rising into the winter clouds. But in absolute contrast to Radahn's hyper-excited kinetic posture, the expression safely insulated beneath his dark iron mercenary visor carried zero traces of juvenile enthusiasm; his features had settled into an exceptionally deep, cold, and calculated composure.
Clearing the distance to return to his old training pits after a vast season of absence, the superficial objective of executing a handful of "practical training matches" scored as a minor, entry-level dividend across his matrix; the deeper strategic considerations animating his boots emerged from two highly restricted pieces of intelligence his networks had recently gathered.
The initial dataset comprised the commercial logistics Aegis had compiled across the past week, after his Storm Knights had spent several watches systematically mining the back-end financial operations governing the various capital coloseums.
The empirical data revealed an permanent paradox: deleting the Caelid Colosseum—which was securely backed by the bottomless treasury of Duke Duolis's northern ministries—every single large-scale gladitorial infrastructure inside the capital rings was tightly controlled by a powerful, high-ranking aristocrat representing the core factions, while the remaining minor arenas were administered by wealthy merchant syndicates who operated as direct financial dependents of the ministries.
Naturally, that commercial alignment scored perfectly consistent with Lucia's baseline simulations. What had violently caught his strategic attention, however, was the hidden accounting readout proving that the true, primary source of revenue funding these massive coloseums did not emerge from the standard gladitorial events that ran continuously across the annual calendar. The grand Battle Festival executed at the terminal closing of the winter was actually documented to permanently operate at a massive, multi-million rune deficit. There undeniably existed a completely hidden, un-monitored channel of absolute capital generation that continuously pumped wealth into the nobles' private ledgers, aggressively incentivizing their offices to dump massive volumes of state resources into maintaining these pits.
The secondary variable comprised a deep state secret Kristoff had hand-delivered from the inner chambers of the Ancient Dragon Temple shortly following the conclusion of the State Banquet.
Ever since the terminal resolution of that apocalyptic cloud duel across the Rodel Basin, the young dragon knight had smoothly matured into the primary, un-monitored communication link bridging Lucia's estate directly with the High Court of the Sky Temple. Sovereign Sister Lansseax had explicitly authorized this track, intending for Lucia's intellect to completely bypass the standard capital channels, drawing all necessary alchemical, intelligence, and military resources directly from the ancient dragon repositories.
The secret clutched within the knight's parchment stated that Duke Caven Duolis, who had just cleared the capital gates under a magnificent cloud of triumphal return, had secretly, illegally escorted a massive, un-cataloged cohort of living biological entities back from the northern frost wastes. The shipment was calculated to enclose an elite cadre of Icefield Trolls—beasts who preserved the primitive, terrifying vital density of the ancient Fire Giants, out-sizing ordinary Mountain Trolls by an immense statistical premium.
Yet, the exact watch their transport cages had cleared the inner capital rings, the entire monolithic cargo had instantaneously vanished from every public tracking registry across the plateau. Zero trace of the giant-blooded beasts could be isolated across the standard slave markets, the private training grounds of the upper baronies, or the open arenas where non-human species were most frequently deployed to execute matches.
Duke Duolis... the colosseum registries... the un-cataloged Icefield Trolls... and the Winter Battle Festival. Lucia's analytical engine rapidly extracted the cryptic, long-past warning Old Gladiator Hart had dropped into his ear winters ago—the flat statement asserting that there manifested a completely alternate, terrifying reality hidden behind the public face of the Battle Festival, an event universally celebrated by the masses as the absolute grandest spectacle of the imperial capital.
Before his gauntlet had finalized its unspoken contract with the King Consort Radagon, his personal philosophy would have mathematically forbidden his boots from lunging into a systemic conspiracy of this density. Safeguarding his own life-readouts, avoiding every single drop of multi-factional friction, and scaling his raw physical attributes past his adolescent limitations at maximum velocity comprised the absolute limits of his daily ledger back then.
But the parameters governing his current position had suffered a massive horizontal expansion. His hand now clutched a vastly grander volume of structural power and real political capital across the court ministries. Rather than passively decomposing across a few uneventful winters of decorative academic training inside the Private School yards, his strategy dictated that his shield must aggressively test alternate vectors—even if these experimental thrusts involved a massive, visible index of personal risk, whether overt or hidden beneath the sand. In the final accounting, some of the absolute highest-yield opportunities hidden inside these dark parameters would remain permanently unavailable once this specific historical window cleared the calendar.
"Align your boots to my stride; we breach the gate," Lucia commanded through his iron visor, his hand dropping to steady the hilt of his weapon. "My office has already commanded Sister Lansseax's network to compile a complete, airtight matrix of false mercenary credentials to insulate your real-world signatures. See to it that your tongues preserve your aliases perfectly. Zero margins exist for an administrative error."
"Your servant understands the layout!" Radahn laughed, his massive gauntlet slamming against his rusted breastplate.
The three disguised demigods cleared the outer checkpoints, navigating the stone corridors to settle their mass inside the gladiators' secure resting quadrant. They had held their station for less than ten minutes of the clock when a highly polished, impeccably dressed arena steward came to a rapid trot before their bench, his spine dropping into a deep, fawning court bow as his voice emerged in an obsequious purr. "Master Lucifer... Chief Steward Hart respectfully petitions your presence to clear the floor to join an un-monitored consultation inside his private office. Your companions are authorized to track my retinue to execute a rest watch inside the high VIP galleries."
"My outriders were initial escorted across these gates explicitly to intersect the tracking grid of Chief Steward Hart," Lucia countered, his iron visage remaining locked onto the steward's face. "Direct the full column to his chambers immediately."
"But... the administrative protocol governing the inner ring—"
"Banish the protocol," Lucia cut through the line with a flat, crushing finality, the raw, terrifying spiritual pressure of an ascended Purple-Steel Rank gladiator violently flaring from his leather mantles to saturate the small room. "Direct our boots to his desk. My hand hand-delivers an absolute guarantee that the Chief Steward will write zero deficits into your ledger when his eyes register our signatures."
Sustaining the immense, bone-chilling physical pressure radiating from the iron-clad fighter standing across his path, the arena steward's linguistic processors hit a total lock. He delivered a rapid, frantic nod of compliance. "The... the logic is clear. All three operators, align your boots to my retinue; follow the line."
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