Chapter 112: Wrath
On the twentieth of December, following the conclusion of the final formal lecture before the turn of the winter season at the Royal Private School, the high scions of the capital officially initiated their month-long recess.
Lucia cleared the gates of Valeria Hall, having just returned from the Seventh National Academy—the massive limestone compound reserved for the administrative and historical studies of the aristocracy. He had barely completed his analysis of several ancient glintstone sorcery scrolls when Aegis hurriedly returned from the outer districts, hand-delivering the precise intelligence folders the dragon prince had been eagerly awaiting.
"Your Royal Highness, of the sixty-four elite combatants registered to contest this winter's Battle Festival, thirty-nine operate as high-ranking champions harvested by the various arena guilds according to the default tournament regulations. Fourteen are established Night Fighters whose contracts clearly bind their steel to alternate noble houses, and the remaining eleven operators—omitting your own signature, His Highness Prince Radahn, and Knight Kristoff—function explicitly as proxy agents representing the private interests of Duke Duolis and Marquis Osarion."
Aegis systematically arrayed eight leather-bound dossiers across the mahogany desk, every folder enclosing verified names, personal portraits, and localized spy reports. He adjusted his stance to brief the prince. "The tactical composition of Marquis Osarion's detachment scores as exceptionally straightforward. Omitting the master Court Perfumer, Rolo, two of the remaining three blades define veteran Night Fighters drawn directly from the Marquis's personal garrison, while the final operator is a newly blooded Gold-tier fighter harvested from the Oriel Arena brackets this cycle. This specific cohort constitutes the Marquis's single most lethal asset line for the high-court wagers."
"Concurrently, the layout surrounding Duke Duolis registers as a vastly more complicated grid." Aegis reached out his gauntlet, pointing directly to the topmost sheet of Carlyle's file. "Sir Carlyle remains the undisputed legitimate heir to the Duolis lineage and your direct classmate within the Private School ranks, yet his personal physical output has mathematically not yet crossed the baseline threshold required to claim a Hero-level ranking. Nevertheless, for some un-mapped reason, the files verify he has chosen to personally drive his boots onto the sand of this upcoming hunt."
"Evaluating the highly anomalous activities your voice identified regarding the massive volume of Icefield Trolls trapped within the subterranean waterways, my mind hypothesizes that the Duke has entrusted Sir Carlyle with a supreme, hidden trump card—a volatile asset his house refuses to expose to the eyes of un-vouched outsiders. This could manifest as a restricted divine incantation, a forbidden alchemical compound, or an alternate paradigm engineered explicitly to steal an absolute advantage across the sewer brackets. Naturally, this remains a basic strategic deduction from my station."
"The deduction suffices; your outriders have balanced the tallies with immense skill," Lucia spoke, offering a slow nod of approval. "Duke Caven Duolis may lack the brilliance of a world-class battlefield commander, but his intellect is by no means that of a fool. Choosing to invest a literal legion-sized host of rabid Icefield Trolls into an arena hunt whose terminal dividend could be decided across a single afternoon watch implies there manifest a deep, treacherous conspiracy driving the machinery behind the curtain."
He retrieved Carlyle's personal dossier, his silver eyes scanning the tracking logs with meticulous focus. As the solitary son born to the Guardian of the North, a youth who had actively accompanied his father's banners through years of border pacification campaigns, his classmate undeniably functioned as a premier leader among the younger generation of Leyndell's aristocracy. His flawless performance across the Private School benches throughout the past month had fully demonstrated the weight of his character.
On the parallel flank of the equation, Carlyle did not belong to the divine tier of demigod heirs like himself or Radahn—sovereigns whose raw physical parameters could never be calculated according to common mortal math. Having logged a mere fifteen winters across his life cycle, the boy's natural physical capacity was mathematically destined to suffer a total deficit if matched against veteran heroes who had commanded the capital arenas for decades. At the absolute baseline of his capability, he scored merely as a top-tier elite among the standard knightly orders of the continent, registering a lower combat value than those specialized Night Fighters whose entire existence was dedicated to the art of the melee.
His physical presence within the brackets of the Battle Festival implicitly verified that he clutched a secret weapon upon which the entire Duolis lineage was relying to secure their survival. However, evaluating the immediate layout, even if Lucia authorized the Ancient Dragon Temple's shadow networks to empty their treasuries, it remained a structural impossibility to un-veil the exact nature of that weapon before the tournament gates dropped.
"My office will maintain a hyper-vigilant watch over his perimeter. For the current watch, un-roll the logs governing the remaining three operators."
"Lagrun and Fichel," Aegis stated, sliding two parallel folders into the light. "These two long-serving captains functioned as Duke Duolis's personal shield-guards when his vanguard tracked the banners of His Majesty the Lord Consort Radagon during the historic Western Expedition. Their individual combat forms specialize in dual-blade mastery and the heavy shield-and-sword disciplines respectively, and their raw physical output has long cleared the heroic thresholds. They have actively anchored multiple high-stakes shadow wagers separating the Duke and rival ministers across the early seasons, so their inclusion on the roster triggers zero surprise. What truly demands the absolute focus of our strategy is this entity—Sir Maxwell."
Aegis hoisted the terminal dossier, solemnly depositing its weight directly fronting Lucia's palms. "Your Royal Highness... pray, scrutinize the contents of this ledger with extreme caution."
Lucia accepted the thin, coarse parchment. Beyond registering his masculine gender and his martial name, the absolute entirety of Maxwell's historical data nodes was recorded under the status of "unknown." Even the enclosed portrait offered nothing more than the silhouette of a burly, mountain-sized warrior encased from skull to spur in thick, un-crested plate armor, his facial symmetry entirely hidden behind a heavy iron visor.
Tracking his eyes further down the margins, Lucia discovered that this operator was a veteran Night Fighter drawn from the registries of the Caelid Colosseum, and his personal timeline prior to claiming that contract was surprisingly clear. His signature initial materialized across the Solstice Arena Brackets in the thirty-seventh winter of the Golden Calendar, a watch when his physical output scored as exceptionally weak and un-refined. He had barely managed to claw his way into the Purple-Steel competitive ranking when an opposing blade hand-delivered a near-fatal trauma to his torso, forcing his name to temporarily withdraw from the gladiatorial circuit.
Yet, a brief two winters down the timeline, Maxwell had suddenly re-materialized within the capital pits. By that watch, his raw martial output had undergone a total, law-breaking transformation. He had commanded an un-broken line of absolute victory throughout the entire summer brackets of the thirty-ninth winter, cleanly capturing the championship title of the Battle Festival that exact season. Immediately following his coronation, his pen had signed a lifetime covenant with Duke Duolis, transforming his steel into the premier Night Fighter of their house stable.
Beyond those sparse benchmarks, the archive possessed absolute zero data regarding the man's identity. He permanently maintained his helmet across his skull, refusing to expose his true face to a single soul while operating within the Caelid rings. Following his formal enlistment into the Duke's private vanguard, his boots had essentially never cleared the inner arches of the family palace.
The solitary absolute certainty clutched by the guild logs was that seven winters past, Maxwell's mastery over the heavy spear had achieved its absolute apex, earning his name the legendary moniker of the Dragon Spear across the hyper-violent arenas of Leyndell.
"The Dragon Spear?" Lucia's silver brow knit into a strange, dangerous frown. "Does his lineage command a direct administrative connection to the spires of Farum Azula? By what authority does a mortal scavenger hoist that specific title?"
Across this current epoch of the realm, the legendary Knight Vyke had yet to even clear his cradle. It was one thing for a prospective Lord of the Round Table—a potential king who stood a mere solitary step removed from claiming the absolute throne of Elden and commanded a verified communion with the ancient skies—to be celebrated across the chronicles as the Dragon Spear. But what tier of creature was a common, face-hiding Night Fighter who skulked within the shadow of a corrupt duke's parlor? By what mad hubris did his tongue dare to apply an identical heraldry to mark his name?
"Your Highness, this specific anomaly constitutes the exact coordinate my intellect evaluated as a critical threat," Aegis spoke, his countenance turning profoundly grim as his voice dropped an octave. "Although our spies cannot locate the primary birth registries tracking his lineage, our networks successfully isolated several high-ranking champions who personally crossed steel against his spear seven winters past."
"Every single veteran interviewed cited an identical phenomenon—during the execution of their match against Maxwell, their nervous systems simultaneously registered an overwhelmingly powerful, soul-crushing spiritual pressure. They swore that specific majesty stood entirely apart from the standard martial aura broadcasted by common human heroes; it felt exactly like facing the un-mitigated presence of a humanoid Dragon."
Following the closure of that sentence, the absolute entirety of the study fell into a dead, freezing silence.
"Dragon's Might?" Lucia narrowed his silver eyes to razor slits, the ambient temperature inside the stone room seeming to plummet toward absolute zero within a single tick of the clock.
"A mid-tier gladiator whose vitals scored as weak, fragile, and thoroughly defeated in the thirty-seventh winter of the Golden Calendar undergoes a total biological transformation in the span of less than two cycles of the sun, inexplicably harvesting the exclusive, genetic spiritual majesty that belongs solely to the dragon race? Heh... whether our focus settles onto this Sir Maxwell or the arrogant duke who wove his shield into his private service, their houses have genuinely wove an un-mitigated tier of boldness!"
Aegis offered a grim, heavy nod of agreement. "Beyond the execution of the forbidden Dragon Communion Ritual, the archives of medicine enclose absolute zero rational hypotheses to account for the physical mutations manifesting across Maxwell's biology. Regardless of whether Duke Duolis provided the direct financial logistics to back the crime, their vanguard has undeniably crossed the absolute red line of the ancient treaties."
Lucia clamped his eyelids shut, slowly exhaling a long, heavy breath of turbid air that still carried microscopic traces of golden thunder and crackling crimson flame. A mere microsecond prior, the ancient blood circulating through his heart had ignited to match the thermal output of boiling magma, rendering it an almost impossible task for his will to manually suppress the cataclysmic, primordial rage exploding from the deepest basements of his genetic lineage.
Across his past life behind the digital grid, his eyes had intersected the mechanics of the Dragon Communion numerous times within the program. However, when matched against that simple, symbolic interface—where an operator merely offered a cold item asset to a stone altar in exchange for a spell download—the structural reality of a living Dragon Communion across this actual world was infinitely more bloody, cruel, and monstrous.
To forcefully extract a still-beating, radiating heart straight from the living chest of an un-broken dragon and manually implant its mass into the thoracic cavity of a mortal human constituted merely the opening movement of the butcher's knife. Next, those master surgeons skilled in this dark, forbidden alchemy would utilize advanced surgical knives to graft immense sheets of raw dragon flesh and living scales directly onto the muscles and surface tissue of the Dragon Feeder, ensuring his fragile, human frame possessed the structural density required to support the extreme energetic output of the transplanted organ.
What followed was a horrific sequence of complex, heretical rituals and continuous blood sacrifices, wherein the remaining bloodline power clutched within the dying dragon's pinned body was steadily, systematically forced to drain into the venous channels of the human parasite. The failing mortal vessel was gradually revived and reinforced by the stolen divinity, while the living, majestic dragon frame slowly perished across days and nights of un-mitigated, agonizing torment.
To conclude the abomination, the dark casters would drag the soon-to-awaken Dragon Feeder directly beneath the hanging torso of the beast, before completely severing the primary arteries—concluding the ritual with an absolute, thorough baptism in the boiling torrent of the dragon's life-blood. Following the closure of the bath, the ancient beast expired entirely, and the parasite awakened with his stolen power securely locked into his marrow, transmuting his mortal frame into a powerhouse capable of rivaling the sovereigns of the sky.
This defined a heinous, civilization-crushing sacrilege that no dragon drawing breath across the cosmos could ever tolerate!
For over a millennium since the initial, dark birth of the Dragon Communion heresies, the Ancient Dragon Dynasty of Farum Azula had never been able to ascertain the exact geographic origin of this evil art. Yet, the sovereign lords commanding the dragon race preserved an absolute consensus regarding one non-negotiable mandate—to systematically hunt down and execute every solitary caster and Dragon Feeder using every ruthless, high-fatality strategy clutched within their claws.
Their wings lacked the capacity to save every brother who had perished across the altars of the Communion, but their lightning would permanently ensure that every mortal who wove his hand into the ritual paid the blood debt in full before the stars.
"Aegis... dispatch an immediate page to the estate of Prince Miquella. Request his presence across my study," Lucia spoke, his eyelids snapping open to reveal two burning pools of pure, untamed silver light.
"There manifest certain structural variables across this capital... that my hand can no longer tolerate to wait for the calendar to resolve."
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