Chapter 129: Evidence
"Has the absolute totality of our couriers cleared the outer peribles by this watch?"
"An absolute certainty, Your Grace. My office commanded three independent detachment squads to navigate entirely separate routing lines toward the borders of the Secret Vault to deliver the emergency directive. Assuming their transit wove zero friction, Sir Maxwell and those alchemical sorcerers serving the True Faith Sect should have already initiated their evacuation maneuvers, yet..."
"Your tongue intends to suggest that Prince Miquella's heavy lances have already successfully locked down every single subterranean road linking the sectors?"
"Evaluating the terrain loops, mathematically no. Only the outriders of our own house stable command a text-perfect comprehension of the structural pathways and hidden crawlspaces bypassing the Secret Vault. Furthermore, there manifest those rabid Mountain Demons controlled beneath the young master's sigil actively generating a high-casualty chaos across the outer channels. Prince Miquella possesses the nominal authority to direct merely a finite census of capital knights past midnight... yet, our center remains frozen in anxiety regarding what anomalous variables might fracture the layout."
Duke Caven Duolis placed his heavy bronze pipe flat against the mahogany table, exhaling a thick, slow puff of pungent gray tobacco smoke as his chiseled features hardened into a solemn, hyper-vigilant mask. Following a dense watch of absolute silence across the dark chamber, he spoke. "The variables have compressed our vanguard into a narrow bottleneck. If an unexpected parameter shatters our containment loops across this night... our lineage can do nothing more than quietly accept the judgment of fate."
The old house butler serving the Duolis capital manor, who stood anchored parallel to the master's chair, maintained his chin deeply buried against his chest plate, remaining completely motionless and silent like a stiff stone statue draped in silk.
Both master and servant possessed a flawless comprehension of the reality proving that the genuine, un-mitigated threat dictating this night watch did not reside within the thousands of imperial lances executing a tactical encirclement around their surface walls, but tracking explicitly back to the figures of Lucia and Radahn—sovereigns who had suddenly, violently dismantled the brackets of the Battle Festival to descend into the mud below. Under any standard judicial format ruling the peerage, deleting the existence of substantial, physical evidence from the equation, even their divine Majesties would never easily lay an iron hand to break a sovereign Duke of the realm; yet, the monument of the Secret Vault, engineered deep within the uncharted basements of the earth, operated under an entirely separate set of calculations.
The Sovereign Flame Sigil wove to manually manipulate the cognitive loops of the Icefield Trolls, the illegally smuggled Greater Drake caged inside the iron bars, the forbidden operations preparing the secondary Dragon Communion Ritual, and most catastrophic of all, the faceless alchemical sorcerers of unknown origin whose rituals suggested an absolute devotion to a heretical wild god—any solitary one of these data nodes, if successfully captured alive by the crown, constituted a grave capital crime engineered to utterly, systematically dissolve the entire multi-generational foundation backing the Duoris Family.
From the exact microsecond the three demigod titans cleared the tournament gates without warning, Caven Duolis and Osarion Ofnir, who had been sitting comfortably at opposite ends of the high-stakes gambling table, had been granted zero options beyond an immediate, undignified tumble down from their high perches—scrambling franticly to secure cover while desperately, violently deploying every house asset to salvage their own life readouts from the impending purge.
If the Duke's retainers can successfully execute a total destruction protocol to wipe the files clean of evidence before Miquella's heavy lances forcefully break the subterranean valve bulkheads, his scepter still preserves a minor margin of tactical runway to maneuver before the assemblies; otherwise, following the closure of this night, one of the few surviving ancient ducal branches validating the history of Leyndell will be ruthlessly, permanently eliminated from the imperial rolls.
Concurrently, deep within the absolute basements of the Secret Vault, inside the dark stone theater consecrated to conduct the bloody surgeries of the Dragon Communion, the heretical high priestess Cassia had just finalized the chanting velocity of her aria-like liturgies, her fingers smoothly accepting a razor-sharp sacrificial dagger that looked as if its iron had been forged from congealed, rotting blood from the palm of an assistant. She advanced her light boots toward the pinned form of Freya, a fanatical, dreaming smile baring her teeth across the dim light.
The First Embrace of the Holy Blood—that defined the precise nomenclature her circle deployed to archive this opening ritual phase.
Regardless of whether their knives intersected the anatomy of high dragons, giant-blooded Mountain Demons, human knights, or alternate powerful creature classes drawing breath across the Land of the Erdtree, their practice demanded driving a short, jagged dagger entirely covered in fine, flesh-ripping serrations straight into the center of the target's heart cavity before the primary alchemical bone saws initial cleared their cases. This specialized dagger, deeply engraved with powerful, blood-magic runes, commanded the capacity to not merely mobilize the absolute zenith of the latent bloodline power circulating within the beast's marrow to amplify the surgical yields, but systematically extracted a fraction of the target's vital essence to nourish the physical chassis of the priests and sorcerers directing the mass—thus perfectly preserving their long lifespan and un-natural youth across the cycles.
"Rest your wings, my beautiful little darling, my hand hand-delivers a pair of exceptionally good updates to balance your ledger on this night," Cassia murmured softly, her fingers running a slow, rhythmic path along the raw silver scales mapping Freya's cheek as a gentle, mock-maternal smile parted her lips.
"The initial update verifies the reality proving that your spirit will soon clear the brackets of this dark, hopeless imprisonment, systematically terminating the absolute totality of your physical suffering—" She licked her upper lip with the wet tip of her scarlet tongue, leaning her cowl close to whisper straight into Freya's ear hole, "and the secondary, infinitely superior asset class is this: your internal organs, your arterial blood, your striated muscles, your skeletal bones, and your beautiful silver scales will all simultaneously mutate to serve as the baseline nourishment to fortify a powerful hero, transforming his steel into a new, world-shattering legend across the history of The Lands Between. Your vital essence and your immortal soul will cleanly return to populate the boundless embrace of the Great Mother, achieving an absolute, un-capped eternity across the stars!"
Freya strained every nerve to feebly lift her heavy, translucent eyelids across the amber candlelight. The excruciating agony radiating from the enchanted iron spikes driven deep into her wing joints and structural spine had initial begun to numb into a dull, freezing paralysis, yet the massive, un-monitored doses of weakening toxins and alchemical anesthetics circulating through her tracts still left her cognitive centers trapped inside a hazy, floating dream state. Cassia's demonic, whispering vocabulary re-echoed with a rhythmic, distorted velocity throughout the basements of her mind, yet navigating a nearly destroyed consciousness, her intellect had completely lost the capacity to decode the semantic meaning backing the threat. Her eyes lacked the sharpness required to clearly parse the contours of the woman's face, and as her focus wavered, many more illusory, magnificent visuals continuously flashed before her dying sight.
Those defined the towering stone castles and magnificent sky-bridging towers validating the peak of Stormveil. Flocks of ancient, sky-splitting dragons born to the Storm Dynasty flew with fluid majesty between the stone battlements and the high aqueducts. The magnificent, long-lost Warlord Queen stood tall beneath the snapping silk of the Storm King's banner, her gauntlets leaning heavily against the pommel of her greatsword as her eyes proudly reviewed the dynasty's legion army operating at the absolute zenith of its historical power. At her feet, thousands of heavily armored knights swept across the green plains like a roaring iron torrent of pure martial dominance.
Concurrently, her visions un-rolled to map the vast, fertile expanses of the undivided Limgrave Plain, the crystal-clear, sun-dappled surface of Lake Varan, and the bountiful, mist-choked forests dividing the Weeping Peninsula. Minutes down the dream, she even felt as if her own immature wings were soaring side-by-side parallel to her adoptive father's massive shadow far above the highest clouds, and nesting directly across the alternate flank of that churning, magnificent sea of clouds wove the golden spires of the Sky City that had historically existed strictly within the boundaries of her childhood dreams—Farum Azula.
"So... this configuration... defines the liberation?"
Freya quietly clamped her massive dragon eyes shut in a drowsy, peaceful surrender, her hyper-extended, pained muscle groups relaxing entirely for the absolute first time since her capture, a silent whisper echoing within the basements of her heart. The layout... does not appear so terrible.
BOOM—!!!
The heavy oak door guarding the inner laboratory chamber was violently, brutally kicked entirely off its iron hinges, the wood splintering across the flags. Cassia went momentarily rigid with shock, turning her spine around with an explosive, rage-fueled fury to audit the intrusion—only for her red eyes to lock onto the frantic, mud-splattered form of Sir Fichel rushing into the light, his throat unleashing an urgent, desperate military shout.
"Terminate the surgical protocols this microsecond, Priestess! Marshal your acolytes and haul Maxwell's chassis out from these vaults via transit Passage Three this instant watch! The master command seat has officially authorized the absolute execution of the Destruction Blueprint across this entire sector!"
"The contingency blueprint for total structural destruction? This..." Cassia's furious, aristocratic mask instantaneously froze across her features, her jaw dropping. "What specific cataclysmic failure has broken our front?"
If Sir Fichel's tongue had desisted from driving the emergency title into the space, her consciousness would have almost entirely deleted the conceptual meaning validating the Destruction Blueprint. Backed by the immense institutional assets and private coin of the Duke of Duolis, her order had safely operated this subterranean sanctuary as their permanent, un-monitored research base across the past cycles, and it was precisely because of her high-yield contributions to transforming this vault into an evolutionary center that her rank inside the inner chapters of the heretical church had been steadily, aggressively rising.
However, long before the Duke initial resolved to link his family name to cooperate parallel to the secret networks of the heretical church, his private engineers had already wove a cold, transactional safety protocol designed to cleanly erase his administrative signature in the event of an emergency purge—exactly conformed to the current destruction blueprint. The exact watch their boots cleared the exit tracks, Sir Fichel's vanguard would immediately detonate a massive array of alchemical charges packed into the load-bearing masonry; the specially reinforced limestone walls would subsequently collapse inward with immense pressure, systematically destroying every solitary trace of the heretical church and completely pulverizing the anatomical evidence of the Dragon Communion Ritual into absolute zero.
"High Priestess, if your center records a minor desire to desist from ensuring our collective lines perish beneath this mountain tonight, seal your damn maw and accelerate the movement of your outriders!" Fichel cursed violently, his heavy gauntlets lunging forward to aggressively hack through the enchanted iron constraints pinning Maxwell's massive torso to the operating table.
"My steel records absolute zero care regarding whether the entity your altars title the 'Mother' commands a majesty as reality-warping as your liturgies claim—but my tactical engine archives an absolute certainty proving her scepter lacks the capacity to salvage a single drop of your life readouts across this watch! Prince Miquella has already completely, systematically surrounded the parameters of the Duke's capital manor with his personal household legions, and Prince Lucia commanding his hyper-elite Ancient Dragon Knights is actively breaking through the lower valves as we speak! To format the ledger with an un-courtly bluntness... when measured against you wretched, un-vouched stepchildren who have been adopted by some lawless wild god of the wastes, those two demigods define the true, authentic children of the living God!"
"You heretical dog—!!!" Cassia strained to unleash a volcanic torrent of theological arguments, but the spatial variables governing the laboratory had completely out-paced her leverage; she could do nothing more than swallow her frantic rage, turning her cowl to rapidly command her panicked acolytes to abandon the scrolls and execute their flight.
Meanwhile, Fichel's secondary sapper retainers were rapidly piling up heavy oak barrels packed to the brim with alchemical blasting powders across every quadrant of the central operating theater—preparing to violently detonate the absolute totality of the sector within a hundred-meter radius, ensuring the white dragon and the machinery were cleanly turned to ash.
Just as the aggregated column of cultists and wounded knights prepared to clear the inner threshold to reach the escape hatch, the absolute, monumental foundations of the entire Duolis Secret Vault suddenly wove into a terrifying, high-magnitude tremor, the violent kinetic energy rolling through the stone flags causing several low-tier warlords whose physical endurance parameters scored below the baseline to stumble and crash ignominiously onto the tiles.
Following the closure of the earth-shattering concussive vibration, every solitary soul drawing breath inside the vault vaults processed the arrival of a sound—a primal, world-shattering, and thoroughly apocalyptic Dragon Roar that tore through the limestone masonry like thunder.
Sir Fichel, manually anchoring Maxwell's immense weight against his shoulder plates, strained every muscle to stabilize his footing against the violently shaking retaining wall. His chapped, bleeding lips moved silently a few times across the dust, the absolute color draining from his face to leave his features an ashen sheet of pure dread as his voice dropped into a whisper.
"The Empyrean... has broken the valves. He is here."