Chapter 125: Trial
Rolo lowered his bulging, bloodshot eyes to monitor his dark, razor-sharp claws, his massive chest freezing for a brief watch before he exhaled a long, foul-smelling breath into the stagnant air.
In order to harvest an overwhelming, law-breaking advantage when preparing to cross lines against Carlyle and his veteran shield-guards, the toxic formulation he had consumed for the second time scored as vastly more dangerous and volatile than his initial dose. The absolute essence of the Defiled Aromatic, refined from the raw bloodlines of hundreds of sacrificed Omen children, had completely, systematically rewritten his baseline biological structure while concurrently endowing his veins with the volatile currents of the Crucible's primordial fire.
Correspondingly, his vessel had permanently forfeited the capacity to ever naturally retrace its tracks to inhabit a normal human body. Only by deploying rare, highly restricted alchemical countermeasures could his fingers temporarily suppress the mutations to force a human guise across a brief watch of the clock. However, across more than eighty percent of his remaining timeline under the stars, his soul was conformed to live locked inside this terrifying flesh—a visage that scored as vastly more repulsive and monstrous than the countenance of the native Shunning-Grounds outcasts.
With less than forty-eight hours of runway remaining before the tournament valves were legally sealed by the ministries, his strategy was bound to locate the Duolis warband's defensive sanctuary within that strict chronological margin—completely eliminating the possibility of their line deploying the controlled giant host to stabilize the leaderboard scores.
Anchoring his mind to that singular calculation, he dropped every secondary hesitation from his thoughts, launching his massive frame into a high-velocity sprint to hurtle through the darkness toward the boundaries of District Fourteen.
Since the intelligence files verified two primary members of their vanguard had sustained a catastrophic erosion to their life readouts, the private Secret Vault fortifications nesting beneath the Duke's capital manor constituted the single most mathematically probable coordinate their boots would seek across this watch.
As his heels slammed against the stones, the freezing, damp air undulating through the aqueduct channels transformed into nothing short of a raging gale that whipped relentlessly across Rolo's scaled skin. The echoing thud of wild beasts running wove continuously from the open mouths of the dark tunnels and vaulted culverts flanking his path, yet entirely without variance, the absolute totality of those primitive sounds was frantically, desperately moving away from his trajectory.
The subterranean predators that had actively hunted the waters parallel to the Omen tribes across the decades had long since engineered a hyper-acute sensory perception regarding the presence of apex monsters. The terrifying aura Rolo's vessel was currently broadcasting scored as un-stoppable and immense as a bursting mountain torrent. Whether their sights turned to the ravenous giant shrimp, the armored alpha crabs, or the massive sewer lizards whose expanded lengths wove into the likeness of terrestrial land dragons, every single entity ruthlessly altered its course to clear his slipstream. Even those wandering Icefield Trolls who had not yet been subjugated by the energies of the Sovereign Flame Sigil were subconsciously anchoring their steps to maintain a vast distance from this exceptionally hazardous entity.
In the span of less than twenty minutes of relentless transit, his boots cleared the outer valves to penetrate the central aqueduct junction of District Sixteen, a sector that sat directly adjacent to the Duke's holdings in District Fourteen. Rolo's intellect had long since perfectly memorized the geographic mapping of this quadrant. So long as his frame successfully traversed this monumental, completely enclosed stone waterway spanning a length of three kilometers, his steel could rapidly breach the outer thresholds of the Secret Vault.
Consequently, he accelerated his pacing to its absolute zenith, intent on catching the retainers of Duolis completely off-guard before their physicians could finalize the stabilization of their wounds. Perhaps the secondary dose of the forbidden aromatic had wove a deeper, irreversible layer of distortion across his cognitive pathways, for across this watch, his mind comfortably indulged in dark, vivid fantasies—picturing the exact angles his Omen cleavers would execute to tear his enemies into jagged ribbons of meat, and the supreme, intoxicating thrill of bathing his scaled torso within a fresh fountain of aristocratic blood.
Those violent, blood-drenched delusions wrapped his consciousness like thick layers of pale red gauze. Just as his spirit was completely losing its focus to the euphoria of the slaughter, a profound, preternatural wave of pure combat vigilance—honed across decades of high-fatality gladiatorial mastery—suddenly pierced straight through the center of his heart like a needle of cold northern steel!
Rolo's bloodshot eyeballs violently contracted, his dilated pupils shrinking to tight razor slits within a single tick of the clock. Operating entirely on raw, hard-wired primitive reflex, he twisted his heavy neck masonry to one side, forcing his massive, muscle-swollen torso to execute a wild, frantic barrel-roll across the wet flagstones.
WHACK-CRUNCH—!
A massive, twisted greatsword, accompanied by a violent screech of displaced air, whistled past the bronze plates of his horn mask to drive its steel deep into the solid limestone retaining wall. Following the blade's slipstream a microsecond later, a sequence of powerful, hyper-lethal thrusts from a heavy iron trident aggressively punched a row of deep craters straight into the high-purity floor tiles, tracking parallel to his rolling trajectory with terrifying accuracy!
Having barely managed to dodge the absolute totality of the opening execution sweep, Rolo scrambled back onto his fan-shaped feet in a highly disheveled, mud-choked posture, his twin horn cleavers clicking as they cleared their harnesses, his red eyes locking onto the colossal weapon embedded within the masonry—it defined an exceptionally bizarre, reality-warping greatsword, its black iron face covered in a shifting, multi-colored network of cursed patterns, a tool that scored as grotesque, yet radiated an unusual, un-yielding aura of absolute sovereign majesty.
His memory archived the entry instantly; the steel belonged explicitly to the defiled demigod heir whom the ministries labeled the Accursed Prince. Morgott's sword concurrently functioned across the underworld as nothing less than the supreme symbol of the "King" followed fanatically by tens of thousands of the Omen outcasts dwelling behind the grates.
"Ah... the visual feed verifies the signature of Your Royal Highness, Lord Morgott," Rolo spoke, forcing his hoarse, saw-like baritone into a relaxed, near-contemptuous cadence the moment his intellect balanced the variables fronting his line. "The calendar logs a vast season since our steel initial crossed tracks across the low warrens. It appears the structural injuries your vessel sustained across that watch have successfully finalized their restoration."
As if executing a direct, synchronized response to his courtly provocation, two massive, heavily muscled silhouettes of identical geometric height emerged slowly from the absolute darkness anchoring the forward quadrant of the tunnel. The entity leading the vanguard was draped in a tattered, mold-choked traveling cloak, his broad shoulders entirely covered in gray-black, ridged Omen horns. The sovereign who maintained a station half a step behind his flank broadcasted an even darker, slate-colored complexion, a heavy, cold iron trident resting diagonally across his massive shoulder plates like a scepter of blood.
Rolo placed his palm flat against his scaled sternum, executing a slow, disciplined bow that perfectly replicated the elite courtesy a high-born nobleman would broadcast to a superior peer, a malicious sneer baring his deformed gums. "My intellect had failed to simulate the data point proving Prince Mohg's boots would concurrently occupy the identical mud on this night—nevertheless, my strategic purpose across this sector records absolute zero intentions to introduce a layer of friction targeting your household lines. Pray, would your royal shields preserve the diplomatic wisdom to clear my tracking path?"
"Brother... audit the primitive vocabulary escaping the maw of this oversized swine—the creature appears to possess absolute zero mathematical awareness proving his frame has already entered the execution box!" Mohg articulated, his massive arm shifting his stance to level the jagged tines of his iron trident directly toward Rolo's chest from a hundred paces removed, his features mapping an expression of pure, incredulous amusement as he checked Morgott's face.
"A swine...?"
Rolo felt his cognitive tracks freeze for a sequence of silent ticks down the clock. Even though his life logs had mathematically never intersected Mohg's signature prior to this watch, his pride sustained a sudden shockwave upon listening to such un-vouched, foul, and thoroughly un-courtly language directed at his station. If his internal records balanced the equations accurately, even the baseline strength his forge commanded two moons past possessed the capability to comfortably manage the combined shields of these two outcasts. By what right did their tongues dare release such arrogance across his perimeter!
On the parallel flank of the aqueduct, Morgott declined to hand-deliver a verbal response to the insult. He simply un-clamped his calloused palm from a distance, his fingers spreading across the dark. Instantly, the magnificent, cursed greatsword embedded within the limestone violently ignited with a dark golden, incandescent light, transmuting its mass into a fluid stream of shifting energy that swept backward through the void to cleanly re-materialize within his waiting grasp.
"The primordial vitality of the Crucible...?" Rolo's brow wove into a minor, deeply suspicious frown.
Across the terminal watch his steel had monitored Morgott's movements seasons past, the outcast prince had deployed exclusively the high-purity golden martial arts and standard liturgical incantations authorized by the crown, and his own alchemical journals had secretly mocked the concept of a horn-choked beast attempting to drive a golden prayer as an exercise in absolute comedy. Yet, across this immediate microsecond, a distinct, intensely heavy aura of pure, un-diluted Crucible energy wove from the face of that iron—a power paradigm that manually forced a minor drop of threat awareness to flash through his own nervous system.
"My intellect decodes the calculus—" He let out a sequence of dry, eerie, and rattling laughs from beneath the contours of his horn visors. "Your Royal Highness has finally resolved to cast out your clumsy, pathetic imitation of human knighthood... choosing at long last to comfortably embrace the raw, corrupting power of your own defiled bloodlines, eh? Hahaha... if Her Majesty Queen Marika's eyes could parse this visual layout across her mirrors, her grace would undoubtedly broadcast an exceptional satisfaction regarding her lineage!"
Having released those insidious, razor-sharp courtly barbs, Rolo unleashed a loud, raucous burst of laughter through his teeth, confidently awaiting the explosive, rage-fueled counter-strikes of the two brothers. From any analytical perspective ruling the peerage, it constituted an absolute, un-mitigated disgrace to the golden bloodlines circulating within their veins that two demigods of supreme dynastic status had been reduced to executing a low-tier street brawl with a common physician inside the filth of the capital sewers.
"By what specific baseline does your hubris determine... that her majesty lacks the capacity to monitor your execution?"
Right at that precise cross of data, a light, completely casual, and thoroughly un-fused voice suddenly resonated from the absolute dark directly behind the Omen Hunter's spine, abruptly choking his hoarse, unpleasant laughter straight back into his throat.
Rolo violently spun his heavy chassis around across the silt, his eyes widening to audit the arriving variables. Strolling gracefully out from the weak amber starlight mana filtering from the rear tunnel section were two additional tall, proud, and monumentally built silhouettes. The warrior anchoring the left flank clutched a pair of massive, dark iron Starscourge greatswords, his vibrant, fiery-red hair cascading across his pauldrons like a volcanic wave. The sovereign who occupied the leading track was smoothly removing the heavy silver helmet that had cloaked his features, his baritone emerging with a flat, chillingly detached cadence. "My processing centers genuinely struggle to parse why a common laboratory scavenger like your name—an entity who lacks even the baseline letters patent to claim a proper aristocratic title within the assemblies—harbors such a desperate fascination with releasing commentary targeting the domestic arrangements of the royal household. But analyzing the layout according to my own dataset, His Majesty the Lord Consort might actually register an immense pleasure regarding this harvest."
"Your identity defines—!!!"
Beneath the retracted silver lines of the enchanted helmet wove long, shimmering tresses of silver hair that caught the dark like pristine frost and winter snow, framing a pair of icy, incandescent silver-blue eyes that scored as flawless and clear as a deep arctic lake.
The newcomer calmly reached his gauntlets toward the dual scaffolds crossed behind his spine, drawing a pale, starlight-forged longsword and a celadon-tinted rapier from their sheaths with a resounding, high-frequency ring that sounded exactly like the roar of a waking dragon cutting through the stone vault. With an un-perturbed, monumentally absolute expression mapping his features, the prince declared:
"Chief Court Perfumer... Rolo. Operating under the sovereign authority of my name as Luciassax, the Empyrean Divine, my scepter hereby issues the non-negotiable decree: effective immediately, your vessel is stripped of every legal authority, property deed, and institutional title clutched within the Golden Temple. Concurrently... your life record is formally sentenced to face an absolute, retributive death across this watch—for the verified high crimes of heretical bloodline contamination and the attempted assassination of a Demigod of the Realm."