Chapter 118: The Agreement
"The house of Osarion is keeping the operational score exceptionally close," Carlyle spoke, his eyes tracking the scrolling battlefield summaries displayed across the smooth surface of the scrying crystal sphere, his enchanted plate armor clinking as his fingers tightened around the grips of his twin long and short blades. "Rolo acting as a solitary unit has already liquidated an entire three-man mercenary warband and twenty-five rabid Mountain Trolls, while the remaining three units of his stable have concurrently taken down seventeen independent targets across the perimeter."
"The tournament has barely initiated its countdown in the absolute dead of night, so there manifests zero requirement for our front to execute a rushed deployment," the heavy vanguard warrior Fichel stated calmly from behind the rim of his massive tower shield, his greatsword resting against his iron shoulder. "Commanding that specific artifact within our ledger, even if our strategy drags the execution down to the terminal minute before the tournament valves are sealed, our banner remains mathematically guaranteed to harvest the final victory."
"Uncle Fichel's strategic analysis is precise. This shadow duel has only just begun to un-roll its phases. Our hand should manually avoid unleashing the raw payload of that artifact unless the absolute survival of the line demands the activation," Carlyle murmured, his hand pressing flat against the center of his chest, where the intense, pulsing heat radiating from the Sovereign Flame Sigil bestowed by Archbishop Pilak could be keenly felt beneath his breastplate.
He turned his visor to instruct the middle-aged captain clad in lightweight scout leathers, who held a pair of curved steel blades. "Uncle Lagrun... advance your boots to execute a rapid reconnaissance sweep across the perimeters of Districts Twenty-Six and Twenty-Seven. Systematically locating alternate participating squads to accumulate hunting points remains the single most critical mandate governing our current sub-phase."
Lagrun offered a silent, disciplined nod of his chin, before taking a solitary step forward. His physical silhouette instantly dissolved into a fluid, shifting shadow, vanishing from the field of vision as he sprinted with ghostly velocity into the twisting maze of the brick-laid culverts and dark vaulted aqueduct passageways.
"Young Master, Fichel... your calculations have completely over-registered the martial altitude of that pathetic Court Perfumer," a deep, booming voice rumbled from the shadows of the floorboards. The vocabulary belonged to a burly, mountain-sized lance knight whose raw physical chassis, even while resting casually against the stone, rose nearly parallel to the standing height of Fichel's heavy vanguard plate.
"Instead of painstakingly burning our daylight tracking down those minor mercenary warbands scattered like rats across the drainage slots, our focus should be locked onto isolating the precise geographic coordinates of Osarion's personal retainers to execute an immediate execution sweep—the exact watch Rolo's life readouts hit absolute zero, this entire high-court wager terminates ahead of schedule."
"Maxwell, your tongue has thoroughly under-registered the lethal capacity of your opponent!" Fichel hissed coldly, the narrow slits of his helmet flashing with an internal fury.
"If your vessel had successfully finalized the protocols formatting the secondary Dragon Communion Ritual, your mouth would possess the leverage to project that arrogance across the sand. But according to the diagnoses compiled by those foreign alchemical sorcerers, your persistent alcoholism and un-bracketed physical indulgence have completely castrated your biological stability, preventing your flesh from meeting the structural standards required to survive the secondary organ transplantation surgery. Consequently, the magnificent Greater Drake that His Excellency the Duke expended an immense reservoir of gold and legion lives to capture alive for your feeding remains securely locked inside the mountain iron cages of the Secret Vault. Operating under your current degraded parameters, our steel might possess the capacity to defeat Rolo across an extended melee, but our blades would mathematically never liquidate his line with the elementary simplicity your tongue claims!"
"Nominal, nominal, nominal," Sir Maxwell muttered, tossing his massive leather-clad gauntlets through the air in a gesture of profound irritation. "My ears lack the stomach to absorb your incessant, multi-generational lecturing. My intellect fails to parse how a veteran border soldier can broadcast a vocabulary that scores as vastly more long-winded than the complaints of an old marketplace widow!"
"Your mouth has updated the logs regarding the mechanics of the Dragon Communion un-counted times past. If your own shield harbors such a burning fascination for that stolen divinity, my hand will gladly transfer the ownership deeds of that live dragon straight into your stable—simply simulate the absolute, stomach-churning disgust formatting the hour when those black-robed sorcerers completely disembowel your thoracic cavity, manually sewing sheets of raw dragon meat and pulsing alien organs directly into your shivering muscle groups. Does your mind truly calculate that my consciousness records a single drop of desire to execute that horrific surgery a secondary time?"
Releasing the complaint, he let out a heavy, regretful sigh, a loose, thoroughly lewd grin breaking across his scarred features. "The solitary tragedy formatting the file is that the little captive female dragon is verified by the archives to define a high-purity Greater Drake, yet her years have failed to unlock the arcane capacity to morph her chassis into a beautiful human maid. Otherwise... my hand would have genuinely lacked the heart to dispatch her flesh to the butcher's block."
"Arrest your vulgar, defiled fantasies this instant!" Fichel's eyes flared with an un-mitigated disgust behind his visor. "Pull your boots backward to lock your focus onto restoring your physical parameters to their absolute peak before the brackets close. The sacred rituals of the Dragon Communion were engineered explicitly to fortify champion vessels of your specific tier; my own steel records absolute zero interest regarding that parasitic, un-natural method of harvesting power from the sky!"
"You—!!!"
"Enough of the friction. Uncle Fichel, Sir Maxwell," Carlyle interjected smoothly, stepping between the two veteran retainers at the precise watch to freeze the rising argument, his voice dropping into a firm, commanding aristocratic frequency. "Confronted by a hyper-lethal variable like Rolo patrolling the dark, our vanguard cannot afford to drop its internal composure over domestic grievances. Your tongues have been executing this identical argument for more than two cycles of the sun. If your centers preserve any novel insights to log across the ledger, pray, reserve the performance for the watch our boots clear the gates to return home, agreed?"
Sensing the young heir had wove his explicit house authority into the space, neither warrior possessed the leverage to maintain the dispute. Fichel directed a final, freezing stare toward Maxwell's massive chest plate before locking his jaw into absolute silence, while the lance knight simply shrugged his heavy shoulders with total indifference.
Meanwhile, across a parallel drainage tunnel positioned less than five leagues removed from their location, Lucia suddenly hoisted his silver-clad gauntlet to signal an immediate halt to the column. He smoothly channeled a secondary wisp of internal mana straight into the Carian Dark Moon Talisman, initial deploying its anti-magic matrix to completely blind and format every scrying crystal sphere floating within their immediate quadrant that might capture their physical alignment, before forcefully intercepting the master communications loop to un-roll the visual projections compiled by the Gladiator Association's scrying feed.
Moments down the clock, a lithe, hyper-agile silhouette encased in dark, un-crested scout leathers, a pair of curved short-swords clutched within his palms, wove into their field of vision across the projection screen. Evaluating the architectural environmental data shifting through the glass, the opposing scout had already cleared the distance to arrive at a tactical perimeter less than three leagues removed from their slippers. As Lucia flipped the command tracks to trace the deeper streams, the scrying glass quickly un-veiled the static silhouettes of Carlyle, Fichel, and Maxwell standing clustered together within a wider stone junction.
If the ambient density of the primordial Crucible currents undulating through these subterranean waterways had not been logging such an exceptionally high, disruptive voltage, both Lucia and Radahn would have effortlessly decoded each other's geographical coordinates and muscular movements hours prior through their natural spiritual perception. Fortunately, their vanguard now commanded the absolute mastery over the Dark Moon Talisman scrying override matrix—an asset class that effectively hand-delivered an extra pair of sovereign, heavenly eyes to steer their movements while their opponents remained completely blind to the layout.
"My tongue explicitly directed your eyes to audit the strategic movements formatting the projection screen, big brother. By what specific calculus do your pupils continuously execute these rapid, resentful glances to monitor the badge pinned to my doublet?" Lucia asked, turning his silver visor to face the red-haired prince, his voice projecting a completely bewildered, deadpan cadence.
Radahn glared intensely at the pulsing indigo glintstones decorating the cold iron talisman a final time, before snapping his head away, his baritone dropping into a flat, thoroughly un-fused frequency. "The exact watch our warband cleared the bulkhead valve, my sight failed to cleanly parse the technical parameters driving its activation. My intellect simulated the asset defined some ancient, hidden relic harvested from the high vaults of Farum Azula... did Princess Ranni manually forge that specific matrix to safeguard your silver hair?"
Auditing the pouting, deeply resentful expression mapping the face of the Starscourge, Lucia nodded his head with a minor, slightly guilty twitch of his brow, his voice casual. "An absolute certainty. What specific error does your mind archive regarding the gift?"
Radahn drew a long, chest-heaving breath, his dark eyes executing a slow, highly critical scan that tracked Lucia's plate armor from skull to spur thrice across the dark, before grumbling through his beard. "Her star wove its absolute authority to reinforce your matrix during that sudden Primal Magic Power awakening incident weeks past within the academy chambers, did it not?"
"Did my own mouth not hand-deliver the absolute totality of those details to your ear the literal morning after the event?" Lucia reached his gauntlet out, casually tapping the flat metal plate protecting Radahn's forehead. "Does your center sustain a structural failure? Have your processing pathways developed an absolute amnesia across the span of a mere forty-eight hours?"
Radahn aggressively slapped the dragon prince's gauntlet clear of his helmet line, letting out a sharp, aristocratic snort. "The calculation registers zero failure! My tongue simply wove the reminder into the space to guarantee your memory permanently archives the depth of her contribution!"
Lucia: "..."
"Your Royal Highnesses, the elite scout tracking the forward quadrant has cleared the one-kilometer boundary line dividing our positions. If our steel desists from executing an immediate counter-maneuver across the next watches of the clock, his senses will mathematically register our signatures," Knight Kristoff interjected weakly, his voice vibrating with a pained fatigue as his focus parsed the deeply subtle, flustered diplomatic atmosphere undulating through the dark tunnel.
"Our warband will execute an immediate tactical detour," Lucia commanded decisively, his silver blades clicking inside their scabbards as he pivoted his torso. "This specific watch does not define the optimized checkpoint to force a head-on collision against their front. Otherwise, if our steel sustains a prolonged delay across these side loops, Rolo's un-monitored, drug-crazed intrusion into the primary Omen settlements anchoring the core sectors will explode into an uncontrollable catastrophe. Our line will weave a roundabout trajectory spanning three leagues removed from their scout patterns, advancing our boots straight to meet the Omen host at our agreed rendezvous point."
The exact microsecond the terminal syllable cleared his teeth, the three iron-clad demigod champions launched their frames into an explosive, synchronized sprint—fluidly navigating the dark blind spots and broken masonry sectors that Carlyle's long-distance scrying lines failed to parse across the map, driving their heels directly toward the hidden fortresses commanded by the Morgott and Mohg brotherhood.
"My soul will permanently desist from erasing the memory of those variables..." Lucia spoke softly into the freezing winter wind rushing past his helmet, his silver eyes remaining locked with an un-blinking, absolute focus onto the unbroken darkness fronting his stride as their rhythmic steps bounced against the wet stone. "Permanently."
Parallel to his slipstream, Prince Radahn, maintaining an identical, hyper-accelerated sprinting velocity that caused his heavy mantle to snap through the air like a war-banner, remained completely silent across a vast watch of the tunnels, before his deep baritone emerged with an absolute, un-bending Carian gravity.
"If your memory ever dares to drop a single drop of that ledger from its files... my own hand will forcefully smash your silver skull wide open with the flat edge of my Starscourge blade, strictly to force your marrow to re-download the script."
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