Chapter : 881
Lloyd, playing his part to perfection, looked up at the knight, his eyes wide with a beautifully feigned, innocent confusion. “Arrest?” he said, his voice the soft, gentle tone of the doctor, a sound that was now laced with a note of pure, bewildered hurt. “Sir Knight, I do not understand. I have won the Challenge. I have defeated the Demon. What crime have I committed?”
“The crime of fraud,” the knight replied, his voice a flat, dead thing. “You have used a forbidden artifact to channel a power that is not your own. You have made a mockery of this sacred contest. The power you displayed… it is not the power of a man of your apparent age. It is an impossibility. You are a cheat.”
The accusation, spoken with such calm, official finality, hung in the air between them. Lloyd looked from the knight’s hard, unforgiving face to the sea of accusatory faces in the stands, and then to the sneering, triumphant face of Gias. He allowed a look of profound, dawning, and heartbreaking despair to cross his features. He was a man who had done the impossible, and his reward was to be branded a liar and a criminal. He was a hero, being condemned by the very people he had, in a way, just saved.
He opened his mouth to protest, to offer his defense, to begin the next, intricate phase of his verbal, psychological manipulation.
But he never got the chance.
For in that moment, from the high, shadowed, and almost forgotten Royal Box, a new voice entered the drama.
It was a woman’s voice. And it was a voice of absolute, unquestionable, and chilling authority. It was not loud, but it was as clear and as pure as a crystal bell, and it cut through the tense, heavy atmosphere of the arena like a blade of light, silencing every whisper, capturing every ear.
The veiled Princess Amina was standing at the balustrade, a solitary, slender figure of sky-blue silk. Her face was still hidden, but there was no mistaking the regal, commanding power in her posture.
“The power he wields is his own,” her clear, melodic voice continued, each word a perfectly enunciated, and utterly irrefutable, decree. “And his age does not violate the rules of the Challenge. He is a legitimate victor.”
A new, and even more profound, wave of shocked, disbelieving silence fell over the arena. The Princess herself had intervened. She had spoken. And she had not just defended the challenger; she had stated, as a matter of absolute, unequivocal fact, that his age was legitimate.
The one-eyed knight was frozen, his hand still on his sword, his mind a complete and utter blank. He was a man of the law, a man of rules. And the word of a member of the royal family was a law that superseded all others. But… how? How could she possibly know? How could she speak with such impossible, absolute certainty?
Gias, whose triumphant, righteous fury had been the catalyst for this entire confrontation, could only stare, his mouth hanging open, his mind a sputtering, short-circuited mess.
And Lloyd, the man at the center of it all, was, genuinely, profoundly, and completely… surprised.
He stared up at the veiled, enigmatic figure in the Royal Box, and his mind, the great, strategic engine that had anticipated every possibility, that had planned for every contingency, was a complete and utter blank.
This was not part of the plan. This was an anomaly. A new, beautiful, and utterly terrifying variable that he had not, and could not, have possibly foreseen.
How in the name of all the gods and demons did she know he wasn't a young man? The secret of his true, eighty-year-old soul, the one, single, foundational truth of his existence that was his most guarded secret… she had just announced it to the entire world, as casually as if she were commenting on the weather.
The game, which he had been so certain he was controlling, had just been taken over by a new, and far more mysterious, player.
Chapter : 882
High in the upper tiers of the arena, nestled in a shadowed alcove that offered a perfect, unobstructed view of the carnage below, the two assassins, Jager and Kael, had watched the entire, impossible spectacle unfold. They were far enough from the roaring crowd that they were in their own, private pocket of silence, a silence that was now filled with the thick, heavy weight of their own profound and furious disbelief.
Kael, the brutish man of action, was a statue of pure, uncomprehending rage. His hand, which had been resting on the reassuringly solid haft of his battle axe, was now gripping it so tightly that his knuckles were white. The hand-crossbow he had been so meticulously cleaning the day before lay forgotten on the stone bench beside him, a child’s toy in the face of the cosmic, overwhelming power he had just witnessed.
His mind was a roaring forge of frustration. He had come to Zakaria to hunt a man. A lordling. A clever, slippery, and surprisingly powerful lightning user, yes. But a man nonetheless. A mortal, killable thing of flesh and blood, protected by a single, formidable bodyguard.
The being he had just watched, the four-meter-tall titan of solar fire who had unmade a Transcendent-level Demon with the casual, artistic grace of a master sculptor… that was not the target they had been briefed on. That was not a simple man.
“This… this is the target?” Kael finally managed to hiss, his voice a low, gravelly growl of pure, venomous anger. The words were not a plea; they were an accusation. “The soap-merchant? The lightning-user from the intelligence reports? Was our benefactor trying to get us killed?”
Jager, who was always so cool, so composed, so serenely and condescendingly in control, was silent. For the first time since Kael had known him, the elegant, aristocratic mask had cracked. His pale, handsome face was ashen, his grey eyes wide with a look of profound, analytical shock. He was a master of a game whose rules had just been taken, torn to shreds, and set on fire before his very eyes.
Their intelligence, the foundation upon which their entire, carefully planned operation had been built, was not just flawed; it was a catastrophic, laughable, and suicidally incompetent work of fiction.
“They told us he was a lightning user,” Kael continued, his voice rising in a tone of furious, indignant disbelief. “They said his spirit was a wolf! They said his primary weakness was his arrogance! They did not say… they did not say he could become a mountain of fire!”
The sheer, breathtaking scale of the intelligence failure was a thing of almost beautiful, perfect horror. They had been sent to hunt a lion, armed with a net designed to catch a rabbit, while being told to watch out for a particularly nasty badger.
Jager finally found his voice. It was not his usual, silken, confident purr. It was a low, strained, and slightly shaky rasp. “The reports… were clearly incomplete.”
“Incomplete?” Kael let out a harsh, bitter laugh. “Incomplete? Jager, a report that fails to mention that the target is a walking cataclysm is not ‘incomplete’! It is a betrayal! Our benefactor either lied to us, or his own spies are fools. This changes nothing about the mission, but it changes everything about our methods.”
He surged to his feet, his massive frame radiating an aura of pure, frustrated energy. He was not panicked. He was angry. He was a warrior who had been sent into battle with a faulty map. “This waiting is over. The time for subtlety and traps is done. He has shown his hand. Now we show him ours. We know where he is. We strike now, hard and fast, before he has a chance to recover from that display. We hit him before he can vanish again.”
Jager did not move. He remained seated, his long, slender fingers steepled before his lips, his gaze still fixed on the arena below, on the small, unassuming, and now once-again human form of the man who had just shattered his entire universe.
The initial shock, the intellectual vertigo, was already beginning to recede in his mind, replaced by the cold, familiar, and comforting logic of the professional. He was a master assassin, a strategist, a man who saw the world not as a place of mythic beings, but as a series of complex, and ultimately solvable, problems. And this… this was the most complex, most beautiful, and most interesting problem he had ever encountered.
“Sit down, Kael,” he said, his voice quiet, but imbued with a new, cold, and unshakeable authority.