Chapter 91 Unchecked Ambition

A vast sea of humanity stretched in every direction as far as the eye could see.

The normally cavernous expanse of the City of Heaven was completely submerged in a roaring tide of spectators—a spectacle so staggering that anyone who had not witnessed it with their own eyes could scarcely begin to fathom it.

Standing at the perimeter of the Central Plaza, Richie gained, for the very first time, a tangible appreciation of the true scale of Parkington, the largest and mightiest empire in the known world.

Back during his childhood geography lessons, he had learned that Parkington boasted a population of two hundred and forty million souls, making it the most populous realm on the continent by a wide margin.

The City of Heaven, Nacamosdok, housed roughly an eighth of the Holy Kingdom's total population—nearly thirty million souls. When he had first read that figure in a textbook, he had experienced only mild astonishment, viewing it as an abstract cipher on a page. Now, standing amidst the throng, the terrifying reality of that number struck him like a physical blow.

Before the war, the entire population of the Monstoke Republic had numbered a mere thirty-five million.

That a single metropolis could hold nearly as many people as an entire sovereign nation was a truth bordering on the monstrous.

Reflecting on his recent reading of Parkington’s military annals, he could begin to grasp the strategic logic behind such immense urban concentration.

The empire was simply too vast. Had its subjects been scattered across its boundless frontier, defending them all upon the outbreak of war would have been an impossible logistical nightmare.

Furthermore, gathering the populace into gargantuan urban citadels made governance and civil mobilization far simpler. As a native son of Monstoke, Richie had seen the crippling systemic afflictions of his own homeland all too clearly.

Monstoke was the exact antithesis of Parkington. Steeped in republican ideals, Monstokians abhorred the idea of exalting a single metropolis above all others. Consequently, every municipality was governed by oligarchic cliques fiercely guarding their localized interests, and the same held true for every province. Each city clamored with its own selfish demands, and at the provincial level, governors and assemblies plotted their own independent political maneuvers.

Because of this decentralization, Monstoke was peppered with an endless constellation of small to mid-sized towns, their populations ranging from tens of thousands to just over a hundred thousand. His hometown of Glaslova, with a population of two hundred and fifty thousand, was already considered one of the three premier metropolises in Laval Province.

The republican army suffered from the very same disease. Prior to the war, Monstoke’s knightly rosters had not been meager by any means; in fact, the Republic had enjoyed a distinct numerical advantage over the Varedin Empire. The fatal flaw was that the nation had been partitioned into sixteen autonomous military districts, each operating as an insular fiefdom. When hostilities commenced, these districts transformed into theaters of war, yet each theater commander concerned himself solely with his immediate front, paying little heed to the desperate plight of neighboring sectors.

In the bygone era of static positional trench warfare, such regional defense might have sufficed. But the Varedins had dealt the Republic a brutal, bloody awakening from day one. Their doctrine of wide-ranging feints, deep encirclements, and blistering tactical penetrations had battered the Republic's disjointed armies into bloody ruins during the opening phases of the conflict.

Even then, it would not have been too late to mend the fence and reform their broken lines. Yet the ossified high command had refused to learn the bitter lesson. By the second phase of the war, the five consolidated war theaters continued to wage their own disjointed campaigns without mutual coordination.

Even more infuriating and pathetic was the high command's obstinate blindness: while the opening battles had clearly demonstrated that mixed formations of battle armor and conventional infantry were obsolete deathtraps against modern mobile tactics, the senile generals remained utterly unmoved.

On that failure alone, even without the treacherous surrender of Hershaw or the Norman Alliance’s subsequent continental offensive, the Monstoke Republic could never have survived.

"Hey! So you're hiding here! I’ve finally tracked you down!"

A crisp, melodious, yet imperious voice cut through Richie’s somber reflections.

Turning his head, he immediately spotted the highborn girl who had stirred up that minor storm in the library a month prior, marching toward him in high dudgeon. Trotting behind her was the haughty young noble who had previously challenged him to a duel.

"You've been dodging me for over an entire month! Day after day, I’ve had people scouring the city for you! You certainly have some tricks up your sleeve—no matter how many archives I had searched, I couldn't dig up a single scrap on your identity..."

The girl rambled on in a shrill reprimand. The youths trailing her remained silent this time; they had already realized that Richie was a foreigner who did not understand a word of the Parkington tongue. Since anything they said would fall on deaf ears, they did not bother wasting their breath.

Seeing this belligerent posse march up to confront him, Richie felt mildly amused and curious.

"Where are the two lads who brought me the tournament registration forms that day?" Richie asked with a look of feigned innocence. "They knew both my identity and my billet."

In truth, he asked only out of genuine curiosity—he wanted to understand how this connected clique had failed to discover who he was.

Richie’s response left the girl utterly bewildered; she had been kept entirely in the dark regarding the aftermath of that day.

She promptly spun around and rattled off a rapid volley of questions to the young nobles behind her. The boys chattered back in hasty, hushed whispers. A peculiar expression instantly flickered across the girl's face, and she turned back to scrutinize Richie from head to toe.

Only from their hurried replies did she learn that the two youths Richie mentioned had been mysteriously conscripted into military service the very next morning. What was more, not a single instructor or proctor in the entire academy knew where they had been transferred.

The young nobles all hailed from aristocratic lineages, but their families occupied the lower rungs of the nobility. In their naive minds, the sudden conscription of two classmates was merely a bizarre bureaucratic coincidence, utterly unrelated to this bumpkin foreigner who could not even speak their native language.

The girl, however, was cast from a different mold. She was a scion of an exalted grand ducal house, immersed since infancy in the topmost stratum of the Parkington Holy Kingdom. She knew with chilling certainty that within the Holy Kingdom, aside from the Imperial Family, the direct bloodline descendants of the Four Guardians, and a handful of paramount titans, everyone else was treated as mere ants beneath the boots of power.

Instinct warned her that something profoundly sinister lurked beneath the surface.

Yet as her gaze raked across Richie, she failed to spot a single detail that seemed out of the ordinary.

Richie was undoubtedly a continent-wide celebrity whose name resonated across royal courts, yet the intelligence surrounding his exploits was so politically volatile that the intelligence bureaus of every nation had tacitly imposed a total blackout on his profile.

In the past, Yarno’s sycophants had gleefully peddled slanderous rumors about Richie, yet their smears had focused exclusively on his alleged assassination of Yarno, ruthlessly suppressing any mention of his revolutionary engineering breakthroughs. And ever since the bloody shootout at the officers' restaurant, even that slanderous faction had been silenced under threat of the gallows.

"Which one is yours?"

The girl gestured with a dismissive wave toward the staging apron below the plaza.

Like the Road of Heaven, the Central Plaza was elevated high above the surrounding ground.

Adjacent to the foot of the plaza lay an open expanse where, aside from ceremonial guards holding ceremonial halberds, stood an immaculate row of battle armors moored to iron gallows.

These were the suits scheduled to participate in the grand melee following the ceremonies, and Richie’s Wisdom King stood proudly among them.

Richie turned and casually pointed a finger toward his armored rig.

Disappointment washed over the girl's face instantly.

Those qualified to enter the arena of the Festival of Heaven were, without exception, the cream of the young generation from across the continent. Barring Richie, every contestant was the pampered scion of an illustrious dynasty. The suits they piloted were bespoke masterpieces commissioned from legendary master artificers, beasts that standard mass-production units like the Cube or the Dragon could never hope to rival.

While a pinnacle mass-production model like the Cube might match these bespoke machines in raw baseline output, in overall combat resilience and tailored lethality, it fell leagues behind. Mass-production suits were shackled by compromises—logistical interchangeability, budget constraints, and ease of mass assembly—severely limiting the artisan’s creative freedom.

By contrast, these aristocratic suits were forged with zero regard for cost. Their armor plating, for instance, was cast from proprietary aerospace alloys whose tensile strength outstripped hardened crucible steel manifold. Some could even channel specific defensive disciplines through the hull, multiplying the plating’s resilience three- to fourfold under load.

The architectural blueprint for the Wisdom King was derived from the venerable Hercules. Because the Hercules was the quintessential mass-production heavy frame, the Wisdom King retained a brutally unmistakable mass-production silhouette.

The defining characteristic of the Hercules was unadorned utilitarianism: a blocky, ponderous, stolid silhouette engineered for sheer structural simplicity. To withstand the ferocious kinetic torque demanded by Richie's insane power output, the Wisdom King had been reinforced to an absurd degree, stripping away even the few decorative bevels and complex linkages found on a standard Hercules. It was the epitome of crude, brutal austerity.

Parked amid a glittering constellation of aristocratic, master-forged works of art, the Wisdom King stood out like a sore thumb—not with an aura that dazzled the eye, but with a repulsive hideousness that made connoisseurs want to avert their gaze in disgust.

"That piece of scrap iron?!"

The girl cried out, her wits spinning into complete confusion.

Just moments before, she had suspected that Richie was merely feigning incompetence to lull his rivals—some clandestine prince or archduke masquerading as an apprentice knight from a backwater realm like Monstoke. Eccentric grandmasters were not unheard of; since childhood, she had heard family elders whisper tales of the legendary Sword Saint, an eccentric titan of peerless power who obstinately dressed like an impoverished university tutor.

Yet looking at that hunk of metal, her conviction crumbled.

Rank and demeanor could be faked, but battle armor could never lie. That machine possessed the blocky chassis of a heavy defender, yet its external protective plating was practically nonexistent! Could his martial prowess be so astronomical that he could crush opponents in any dilapidated crate, deliberately selecting this monstrosity to flaunt his untouchable supremacy?

That was the only logical theory she could muster, though it strained credulity. Had she possessed such demigod power, she would have opted to pilot an exquisite, museum-grade antique from three centuries ago; the theatrical impact would have been vastly more poetic.

A long, resonant blast of brass bugles cut through the air, instantly subduing the clamoring ocean of people into hushed reverence.

The imperial brass orchestra struck up a majestic processional march. Two immaculate columns of polished battle armor advanced in thunderous synchronization, their metal sabatons striking the stone pavers along the Road of Heaven in a singular, solemn cadence.

Down the exact center of the Road of Heaven stretched a seamless crimson carpet that seemed to extend to the very edge of the horizon.

Flanked by the twin phalanxes of steel-clad guardians, the monarchs and luminaries of the known world processed along the crimson carpet. At the absolute vanguard strode Empress Annielia of the Parkington Holy Kingdom. Draped across her regal shoulders was a crimson velvet mantle of breathtaking proportions, measuring at least twenty meters in length; twelve royal pages marched in double-file behind her, each carrying a section of the embroidered train aloft in a gloved hand to prevent the velvet from grazing the stone.

Trailing behind the Empress, the visiting sovereigns and plenipotentiaries wore ceremonial mantles of varying lengths and rich heraldic dyes.

The crowned emperors of the Dante Coalition's leading empires had all arrived in person, their capes sweeping five to six meters across the pavers, supported by four pages each. The prime ministers and presidents of republican and federal states wore modest three-meter mantles attended by a pair of squires. Several monarchs from the Norman Alliance had also made the journey, though only the crowns of minor vassal kingdoms; the paramount empires of the rival bloc had dispatched only accredited plenipotentiary envoys.

When the solemn procession reached the heart of the Central Plaza and halted in designated formations, another prolonged clarion blast resonated across the sky. Instantly, the tens of thousands of knights and citizens standing both atop and below the plaza dropped onto one knee in unison.

It was the opening sacrament of the liturgy.

Yet not every soul genuflected. Across the vast plaza, a handful of figures remained upright.

Most of those who remained standing were gathered in the grand VIP pavilion.

Though housed beneath a single cavernous canopy, the pavilion was cleaved down the center by an invisible chasm of hostility: the envoys of the Dante Coalition clustered on the left, while the delegates of the Norman Alliance sat on the right.

Richie, too, remained standing. In his entire staging quadrant, he was the sole individual on his feet, making him glaringly, violently conspicuous.

In the space of a heartbeat, he felt thousands of pairs of eyes snapping onto his silhouette.

Most of the burning stares emanated from his kneeling peers surrounding him, but several intense, piercing gazes radiated from the elevated VIP grandstand.

Among the VIP ranks were numerous faces he recognized: the Librarian Uncle, Master Espol, Madam Shar, Yiluo, the old engineer Manuel, and several prominent master armorers with whom he shared warm camaraderie.

Richie was just raising his hand to offer a subtle wave when he felt a sharp tug at the cuff of his trousers.

"Did nobody ever brief you on the ceremonial liturgy?!"

Tugging frantically at his trousers was the highborn girl kneeling at his boot: "Even if you're a savage who doesn't know the rites, can't you at least copy what the rest of us are doing?!"

"Someone already instructed me on what to do," Richie whispered back, gazing down at her. "She explicitly told me to stand straight like this from beginning to end."

Looking down upon this spoiled noble maiden from such an exalted angle, Richie found himself immensely enjoying the vantage point.

"Which blundering idiot told you that?!"

The girl seethed in hushed fury. A breach of protocol during the sacred Festival of Heaven was no laughing matter; while an uncouth foreign apprentice might be dismissed without execution, his patrons and sponsors would be held ruthlessly accountable before the imperial court.

"Someone just a few years older than you," Richie replied serenely, referring, of course, to Her Royal Highness Princess Mithra.

While Richie was amusedly taunting the kneeling maiden at his feet, several distant gazes locked onto his frame from across the void.

Unlike the curious stares of the crowd, these gazes dripped with cold, razor-sharp murderous intent. Sensing the chill crawling over his flesh, Richie turned to trace the lethal gaze back to its source.

The gaze brimming with the most venomous hostility belonged to an emaciated, pale-faced man seated in the Alliance pavilion.

Richie had never met the man in person, but he had studied his classified portrait extensively. Compared to the illustration, the living figure looked even frailer, more gaunt and sickly—a textbook portrait of premature physical decay.

This man was none other than Poronov, the sole luminary among the continent's Three Great Craftsmen who served the Norman Alliance.

Status dictated privilege. A legendary titan like Poronov was not only exempt from genuflecting, but was free to move at will. At that moment, he clutched a brass telescope, staring intently through the lens at Richie's face.

"Could that be the whelp who engineered the 'Dragon'?" Poronov rasped to the entourage surrounding him.

"It is him," came a firm reply from a seat slightly ahead. The man who spoke was Korsak, the Supreme Commander and sole Heavenly Stage Knight of the Varedin Empire.

The other Alliance officers knew of Richie purely by his notorious reputation without knowing his physical appearance. Only Korsak, whose obsessive curiosity had been ignited by Major Anderson’s intelligence debriefings back in the borderlands, had requisitioned and examined Richie’s likeness.

"It appears he intends to participate in the grand melee following the benediction," another Heavenly Stage Knight of the Alliance remarked with chilling detachment.

"What an absolute tragedy..." an Alliance commander sighed, his voice laden with bitter regret.

Everyone present understood precisely what that bitter sigh implied. The Norman Alliance possessed no shortage of prodigies under twenty years of age, but recognizing that any Alliance entrant entering the ring would be mercilessly gang-assaulted by the Coalition's knights, the Alliance high command had opted not to field a single contestant in the brawl.

"Would it be too late to submit a registration right now?" someone murmured.

"Impossible. The perimeter boulevards are choked solid by tens of thousands of spectators. Even if we forced a registration through, our battle armor couldn't breach the human barricade to reach the staging area."

"Not necessarily an insurmountable obstacle," another officer whispered leanly. "Did we not transport several machines into the inner sanctum for the afternoon demonstration showcase?"

"How many units is that? A handful at best. Besides, the moment our colors enter the arena, every Coalition dog will swarm our pilot."

"Not necessarily. So long as we dangle a far more alluring prize before their greedy eyes, those young roosters will eagerly ignore our pilot. After all, selfish ambition and jealousy dwell in every human heart."

"A stroke of cunning," another concurred darkly. "And in the aftermath, the Coalition command will be left scrambling to explain how their own brawl spun out of control. If that whelp happened to perish in the crossfire of the melee, the diplomatic fallout would be positively exquisite."

"Regrettably, all armor chassis will be throttled by energy dampeners."

"That hardly rules out a fatal strike. The dampeners suppress only external aura projection; the raw mechanical torque and kinetic output of the chassis remain entirely unrestricted. In past melees, have there not been countless instances of severe maiming and fatal crushing?"

"The probability of assassination remains slim. That boy is a priceless strategic asset to the Coalition; the second he falls into dire peril, the Glorious referees will intervene to extract him."

"True enough. Still, even if the odds are long, testing the waters carries negligible cost."

"This requires explicit sanction from Their Excellencies, the Plenipotentiary Envoys. The machines earmarked for the demonstration contain classified tactical data."

"None of our core innovations are exposed in those demonstration units. Compared to the supreme prize of decapitating the enemy's master armorer, leaking minor telemetry is a bargain."

"Let the Envoys make the final determination. Our duty is merely to propose the strike."

Following their hushed consultation, a rough contingency was swiftly forged. For these Heavenly Stage Knights of the Alliance, the remaining hurdle was establishing clandestine communication with their senior envoys seated on the dais above.

While awaiting executive sanction, they had no intention of idling. The precious minutes could be leveraged to finalize logistical preparations—such as vetting the fiercest pilot from their retinue—so that the strike could be launched the instant the envoys signaled their blessing.

A ceremonial phalanx of Imperial Royal Guards strode into the sunlight. Clad in ornate archaic liturgical tunics, their visors crowned with scarlet plumes, sweeping capes trailing along the stones, they carried no weapons in their gauntlets. Instead, each held aloft a polished silver salver draped in crimson velvet, upon which rested a fragrant bouquet of blossoms.

At the sight of these warriors, Richie's heart hammered against his ribs, an inexplicable chill shooting from his soles straight to his temples.

His senses could not deceive him: every single knight in this ceremonial escort had attained the Glorious Realm! In the entire Monstoke Republic, there existed merely three Glorious Knights and two Pseudo-Glorious Knights. Had he witnessed this majestic display before those thirty female Honor Knights had been assigned to his command, he would have assumed in astonishment that this peerless vanguard had been cobbled together by pooling champions from across every Coalition state. Now, he harbored no such naive illusions; he had finally developed an authentic appreciation of the peerless, terrifying foundation of the Parkington Holy Kingdom.

If Parkington alone wielded such monstrous military might, and the other two empires of the Coalition were only slightly less formidable, the collective military power of the Dante Coalition was staggering beyond measure. Yet the faction that had boldly ignited this continental conflagration was the Norman Alliance; in the brutal mathematics of warfare, the aggressor who spearheaded an offensive was almost invariably stronger than the defender!

Richie dared not follow that train of logic to its conclusion. Only now did he truly comprehend that the Monstoke Republic’s ability to withstand the Varedin onslaught for two agonizing years had been nothing short of a miracle.

Before his thoughts could drift further into despair, the formation of Royal Guard Knights dispersed, each striding toward a designated honored guest. One of them was advancing directly toward his station.

This, too, was an integral rite of the Festival of Heaven. The myriad dignitaries invited from across the world were not present merely to serve as passive onlookers; those deemed worthy of an imperial summons were either heads of state, paramount knights, or master armor artificers. The festival existed to commemorate the birth of the world's very first operational battle armor; it was an imperial jubilee for the Holy Kingdom, yet equally a sacred pilgrimage for every knight and armorer across the continent.

The expanse between the center of the plaza and Richie’s position was densely packed with kneeling throngs, yet as the Royal Guard advanced, the kneeling knights instinctively parted like water before a prow, opening a seamless corridor. The circle of youths surrounding Richie was struck dumb with shock, and the highborn maiden beside his boots stared with mouth agape.

Richie felt not the slightest urge to gloat. His eyes were locked upon the Royal Guard. The warrior appeared to stroll at a leisurely pace, yet each casual step he took effortlessly crossed the distance of three or four ordinary strides.

It was not an ornate martial footwork technique, but pure, unadorned motion. Richie comprehended the profound mastery behind it—this was the elusive realm that Trisli constantly strived to attain: the return to absolute, effortless simplicity. In the span of a few heartbeats, the Royal Guard stood before Richie, presenting the fragrant bouquet into his hands with grave solemnity.

The moment Richie received the bouquet, the Royal Guard gave the crimson velvet lining the salver a sudden, crisp snap. The fabric unfurled through the air, revealing itself to be an exquisite ceremonial mantle.

Fastening such a cloak about one’s shoulders on an ordinary day carried no special weight, but today, beneath the blazing sun of the Festival of Heaven, it was an investiture of supreme honor.

Richie could feel thousands of gazes boring into his back, burning with an intensity hot enough to sear his flesh. Experiencing such grandeur for the first time, a flutter of vertigo rippled through his chest—a bizarre sensation as though he were perched atop a spire ten thousand feet in the sky, surrounded by yawning abysses, balanced upon a ledge no wider than a single paving brick. Perhaps this was the chilling loneliness of standing at the peak of the world.

The liturgical rites of the Festival of Heaven were notoriously convoluted, yet for an honored initiate like Richie, the required duties were sparse. Cradling the blossoms against his chest, he fell in behind the Royal Guard, marching in solemn procession toward the very epicenter of the Central Plaza.

Other illustrious guests stepped forward from their respective sections. Familiar acquaintances offered Richie discreet nods and warm glances, though the suffocating gravity of the ritual precluded casual conversation.

In single file, the luminaries stepped forward to deposit their bouquets upon the white marble altar at the plaza’s heart. This was the sole tribute required of every invited dignitary—an offering symbolizing profound reverence and eternal gratitude to the ancient pioneers who had forged the dawn of knightly chivalry and armor craft.

Having laid down his floral tribute, Richie returned to his original station. Yet the eyes of the young nobles around him had transformed completely, burning with covetous, predatory heat.

That heat was far from benevolent. Richie was certain that ninety percent of these well-born youths burned with the desperate craving to use his battered carcass as a stepping stone to glory. In the coming melee, he would undeniably be the prime target of every blade on the field.

The grand liturgy proceeded with imperial grandeur.

Richie had heard tavern tales describing the Festival of Heaven in the past, and he now realized that whoever had spun those yarns had been babbling fabricated nonsense.

Beyond the opening sacramental rites, the vast majority of the Festival of Heaven was, in essence, a colossal military review—with the singular distinction that, unlike the infantry parades of the Republic, only elite knights and battle armor were permitted to tread the sacred stones.

Leading the procession was a phalanx of heavy battle armor. In broad structural contours, they bore a striking resemblance to the Hercules, yet they stood far taller, broader, and more terrifyingly imposing.

Even without a herald whispering explanations at his ear, Richie instantly recognized them: these were the Titans. Foremost among the Five Imperial Guard Legions of the Holy Kingdom, the Titan Legion was hailed as the undisputed apex of destructive power, yet the sovereign rarely deployed them in open warfare. Consequently, most laymen remained utterly mystified as to why the realm’s mightiest legion was equipped with lumbering heavy armor.

Richie had once shared that same bafflement—until the day he uncovered the ancient archives locked within the Crown of Wisdom, discovering the horrific truth of what made the Titan so devastating.

Among the five guard legions and their five signature armor types, in terms of solitary single combat, the Titan ranked dead last. Yet once deployed in unified tactical battle array, no military formation on the continent could withstand their steamrolling charge.

Pilots of the Titan Legion drilled in only a single offensive strike—a technique virtually indistinguishable from Dana's signature Thunder Strike. When an entire legion unleashed that cataclysmic blow simultaneously, it was like ten thousand lightning bolts detonating upon a single point; no fortress wall or enemy phalanx could survive the shockwave.

That single strike drained every shred of the pilot's aura and mechanical power. Once unleashed, the knights possessed zero reserve energy to defend themselves, forced to rely entirely upon the unyielding bulk of their thick armor plating to weather the counter-barrage. That was why the Titan was engineered as a mountain of steel, and why the Holy Kingdom refrained from deploying this ultimate deterrent except in moments of apocalyptic need.

Trailing behind the Titan phalanx came another variant of heavy armor—grotesque, savage machines bristling with barbed spines from head to heel. A pair of colossal wheel-axes was secured across each machine’s dorsal chassis, arching outward like jagged iron wings.

This was the Great Dragon.

If the Titan was king of collective battle formations, the Great Dragon was the undisputed sovereign of individual melee duel. The suit was a walking armory of razor blades; while its chassis appeared ponderous, its actual agility was terrifying, not only outstripping the majority of medium-weight suits, but capable of trading maneuvers with agile light armor.

Immense lethality brought crippling drawbacks. Yiluo had confided in him that the fabrication cost of a single Great Dragon exceeded the other four guard armor types combined; furthermore, its delicate tolerances rendered it prone to breakdown, demanding ceaseless maintenance and diagnostic overhauls. In that regard, these iron beasts shared two striking traits with the legendary dragons of mythology: they represented an unfathomable hoard of gold, and they spent the vast majority of their existence slumbering in dark armories, rarely stirred into motion.

Among the Five Imperial Guard Legions, the workhorses tasked with active frontline duty were the trailing three. Marching in the wake of the Great Dragons came a company of blazing crimson battle armor. The high noon sun struck their polished carapaces, refracting into a shimmering crimson halo that made each machine look as though it were engulfed in living flame.

Richie had to admit that the Phoenix was breathtakingly beautiful. Its elegance was of the same regal, aristocratic grandeur embodied in his own Dragon.

The Phoenix was classified as a medium-weight suit, yet calibrated toward the lighter end of the spectrum. Such designs typically excelled in aggressive flanking while suffering in defensive durability. Yet Richie knew that in active warfare, each forearm was equipped with a slender, elongated heater shield collectively termed "The Wings of the Phoenix." Richie had long suspected that the pilots chosen to command the Phoenix were all Light Defenders.

In contrast to the resplendent majesty of the Phoenix, the Medusa cohort that followed was grotesque and menacing. Overlapping serpent-scale breastplates and segmented, serpentine limb linkages mirrored the mythical gorgon’s dreadful visage. The writhing nest of steel vipers crowning the helm possessed no practical defensive utility, yet served as the suit’s most chilling psychological hallmark; on the battlefield, the mere emergence of that serpentine helm drained a third of the enemy's martial morale before a single blow was struck.

The final formation in the imperial guard review was the Unicorn Legion, a sight thoroughly familiar to Richie. Compared to the provisional detachment left behind to garrison Stein, the company parading before him represented the premier, unadulterated heart of the Unicorn Legion.

Following directly behind the Five Imperial Guard Legions was the Dragon, designed by Richie himself. As the flagship main battle suit destined for continental mass-production by the Dante Coalition, its placement in this prestigious vanguard was only natural. Yet the moment the phalanx of Dragons crested the edge of the plaza, Richie felt a barrage of burning eyes locking onto him from every corner of the grandstand; clearly, the number of powerbrokers who knew he was the mastermind behind the blueprint was far from small.

Trailing the Dragons marched the standard frontline models currently deployed across Coalition armies, but at that moment, every neck in the crowd craned upward toward the heavens.

Cruising in tight three-ship formations, ten aerial echelons soared several hundred meters above the plaza. Richie was the first to pull his gaze away from the clouds, swiveling his head toward the VIP grandstand—straight toward Poronov.

Poronov clutched a brass telescope with white-knuckled intensity, his sallow face tinged with a sickly green, his lips twitching as though muttering feverish calculations.

He was far from the only spectator transfixed by the sky; every dignitary in the Norman Alliance delegation stared upward with leaden solemnity. With the terrifying ocular acuity of Heavenly Stage Knights, they could discern objects hundreds of meters away with naked eyes, yet every one of them pressed high-magnification binoculars to their faces, desperate to capture every micro-joint and aerodynamic fairing.

In stark contrast, the Coalition dignitaries appeared relaxed and triumphant, many stealing amused glances at the crestfallen expressions across the aisle. Flight was vastly swifter than terrestrial marching; furthermore, to safeguard technical secrets, the thirty flight suits had no intention of touching down, sweeping over the altar in a thunderous low-altitude pass and vanishing over the city skyline, leaving the Alliance observers bathed in undisguised gloom.

The Heavenly Knights clustered around Poronov leaned in close, their jaws working rapidly as they conversed in hushed, sound-damped murmurs.

"How does their operational envelope look? Does it align with the telemetry gathered by our intelligence networks?" whispered the Heavenly Knight closest to Poronov.

"To hell with the intelligence bureau!" Poronov spat, a sickly flush rising across his sallow cheeks—not the glow of health, but the feverish blotch of consumption. "Are you blind, or can you not calculate simple velocity?! Their airspeed easily exceeds two hundred kilometers per hour!"

The knight who had posed the question was already well aware of the disparity. The classified data their covert networks had managed to smuggle regarding flight technology had been meager, and theoretical analysis yielded even less. Their tactical analysts had estimated an operational speed of eighty to a hundred kilometers per hour—a figure already alarming enough to give their general staff nightmares. None had anticipated that the reality would be more than double their worst fears.

"Perhaps this is not entirely the fault of our agents," the Heavenly Knight offered placatingly. "It is plausible that the Coalition made a recent breakthrough in propulsion, upgrading their operational velocity."

Poronov rolled his eyes, his expression turning downright venomous: "Are you attempting to console me, or mock my intelligence?" He sneered through gritted teeth.

The surrounding officers fell into grim silence, their spirits sinking. As Poronov indicated, they would have far preferred to believe this was a blunder by their spies; if the Coalition had indeed mastered flight iteration and scaled up propulsion efficiency, the tactical balance of the war was in mortal peril.

Everyone in the inner circle knew that Poronov had driven himself to the brink of coughing blood attempting to reverse-engineer flight mechanics, yet remained stymied by theoretical dead ends. For the enemy to already be rolling out second-generation performance enhancements represented a terrifying developmental chasm.

"Those arrogant Parkington bastards are utterly loathsome! Parading it before our eyes while keeping the technical details just out of reach—what is this?! A blatant show of force?!" another Heavenly Knight hissed in impotent fury.

Everyone knew that was precisely what the Coalition intended, yet venting the bile remained irresistible.

Phalanx after phalanx of battle armor marched past the review stand. In years past, this ceremonial parade had been the crown jewel of the Festival of Heaven; every military observer glued their eyes to each joint and linkage, desperate to divine the slightest technological evolution, for the review laid bare Parkington's strategic armor doctrine for the coming decade.

Today, however, the grandstand was plagued by distraction. The minds of every high commander and master armorer were still soaring in the wake of those thirty fleeting aerial shadows.

Before anyone realized, the clarion brass sounded once more—a prolonged, mournful blast signaling the conclusion of the morning liturgy.

The ceremonial liturgy concluded just as the high noon sun reached its zenith. Traditionally at this hour, honored dignitaries were escorted to lavish banquets and private salons for an afternoon siesta, returning only when the afternoon armor exhibition commenced. The vacant midday hours were traditionally filled by staging a grand melee among the youth knights—a colorful, diverting interlude during the festival.

In previous years, genuine titans of state paid little heed to this spectacle. While history showed that the victors of the melee almost invariably ascended to the Heavenly Stage in their prime, the addition of one or two new Heavenly Knights across a span of decades did little to tilt the grand geopolitical balance of continental empires.

Today, however, the script was overturned. Whether Coalition or Alliance, every monarch, general, and plenipotentiary ascended the grand viewing pavilion overlooking the arena.

The observation grandstand had long stood as an ornamental pavilion, rarely occupied; never before had its tiers been packed to capacity like this.

With a sharp clarion horn call, the young contestants boarded their respective battle armors, and the staging apron erupted into a deafening clamor of cycling power plants and closing cockpit hatches.

The Central Plaza was elevated above ground level. Its perimeter slopes had been fitted with massive staircases welded from heavy steel girders and thick plating, built to withstand immense tonnage.

The lavish expenditure of the Parkington Holy Kingdom did not stop there: exclusively for this melee, the entire stone expanse of the plaza had been paved with solid steel armor plates, underlaid with thick damping materials to absorb kinetic shocks.

While this lavish engineering shielded the historic stonework from devastation, every step taken by the heavy battle armors echoed with jarring, metallic clatter across the city.

Amid the multitude of sleek machines, Richie’s Wisdom King became painfully conspicuous once again. The Wisdom King moved at a deliberate crawl, far slower than its agile peers. Yet its colossal, broad-shouldered silhouette transformed that sluggish pace into an aura of crushing, monolithic intimidation—a terrifying display of stolid mass.

"What kind of armor is that?"

"Why isn't he piloting the Dragon?!"

A flurry of incredulous whispers broke out across the viewing pavilion.

"Quiet, all of you!" Poronov barked, craning his neck forward like a vulture. He held a brass telescope with high magnification to his eye, glaring unblinkingly at the Wisdom King as it mounted the steel steps.

No one dared cross the volatile Great Craftsman at such a juncture; even the imperial plenipotentiaries seated on the tier above held their tongues, their eyes fixed on this neurotic genius.

"That machine appears to be an overhaul of the Hercules... The core chassis frame is largely intact, limb articulation joints unaltered, merely heavily reinforced..." Poronov proved why he was hailed as a Great Craftsman, piercing through the Wisdom King’s exterior to divine its fundamental architecture in a single glance.

"A Hercules? Ha!" one of the monarchs of the secondary kingdoms chuckled softly, and several adjoining dignitaries smiled in amusement.

Poronov’s next words, however, doused their mirth like a bucket of freezing slurry. "What in the hell are you laughing at, you fools?! When someone can extract revolutionary power from a machine as elementary as the Hercules, that is when you should be trembling in terror! The Hercules is renowned continent-wide for its brutal durability. Every other idiot who customizes a Hercules tries to graft on agility and speed; this kid did the exact opposite—he braced the skeleton to the extreme and installed an ultra-rare dorsal cockpit pod! What does that tell your bird-brains?!"

Poronov's bloodshot eyes burned as though spitting flame.

Every warrior seated in this pavilion was an elite knight; they understood Poronov’s implication instantly.

Elementary designs were easy to master, yet notoriously difficult to elevate. But once a master truly penetrated an elementary form, distilling the primordial essence from absolute simplicity, the result was terrifying.

This truth held equally in martial arts and engineering. Upon reaching the pinnacle of the craft, grandmasters abandoned baroque flourishes; their strikes became sparse, direct, and devastatingly effortless.

By that very metric, if one classified battle armor according to philosophy, was this crude behemoth not a manifestation of the Heavenly Stage?!

The Wisdom King climbed slowly, yet however deliberate its tread, there were only so many steel steps; its massive sabatons planted firmly upon the arena deck. Several hundred battle armors stood deployed across the expanse, piloted by young champions hailing from dozens of sovereign states. Those deemed worthy to step onto these steel plates were the undisputed prodigies of their respective realms.

To ensure impartial fairness and force each pilot to showcase their individual mastery, contestants from the same nations were thoroughly scattered across the grid.

Another clarion horn shrieked across the heavens.

The grand melee had begun!

Before the reverberations of the horn had died away, the space surrounding the Wisdom King detonated like a powder keg! Amid a violent shudder that rattled the steel decking, every single battle armor within Richie's immediate radius was blasted through the air like discarded toys!

Having cleared a wide perimeter of open deck, the Wisdom King took two thunderous preparatory strides, lowering its broad shoulder before charging forward like an enraged iron bull!

In the opening seconds, several proud young knights attempted to brace their shields and contest the charging juggernaut head-on; without exception, every challenger was blasted into the air like leaves before a hurricane.

Such devastating, unstoppable kinetic fury not only paralyzed the surviving contestants in the arena, but left the grandstand spectators gasping in horror. It was not merely the Norman Alliance who were struck dumb; even the envoys of smaller Coalition nations were frozen in dread.

"What in God's name is that...?"

"Franca's Suicidal Aura?!"

"Impossible! The energy signature is completely different. Besides, with that boy's strategic value, the Coalition would never permit him to incinerate his own life force!"

"It's the chassis! That whelp's genius lies in armor engineering!"

A flurry of frantic murmurs rippled across the viewing pavilion.

Those whispering in panic were almost entirely Alliance officers. On the opposite side of the aisle, Coalition delegates stole sidelong glances at one another, noticing that a select few among their ranks had clearly anticipated this spectacle.

Those privy to the existence of the Wisdom King were restricted to the supreme monarchs of the Three Empires, the two Great Craftsmen (Espol and Madam Shar), Yiluo, Manuel, and two grandmasters on the council who leaned toward the Coalition. Aside from that inner sanctum, even master armorers who enjoyed personal friendships with Richie had been kept completely in the dark.

Observing the stunned expressions on their peers' faces, the representatives of the secondary Coalition states felt somewhat mollified—at least they had not been the only ones left in the cold.

"There is a fundamental anomaly in that machine's kinetic transmission and pilot control interface," Poronov rasped, once again the first to diagnose the anomaly. Among the Three Great Craftsmen, when it came to classical erudition and theoretical foundations, he lagged behind Espol and Madam Shar; his supreme gift lay in monstrous analytical computation, an unrivaled talent universally acknowledged within the Artificers' Council. His brain raced at dizzying speed: "Did any of you assign recording crews to capture this footage?!"

Poronov whipped around to glare at his entourage. Those flanking him were either Heavenly Stage Knights or master artificers second only to himself, while seated behind him were imperial plenipotentiaries and crowned monarchs. None of these lords had ever handled such mundane menial chores; for a few awkward seconds, they traded blank, bewildered stares. Yet in the blink of an eye, the terrifying implications dawned upon them.

The Heavenly Knights discarded all aristocratic poise. Several senior commanders bolted from their seats, among them Korsak, the sole Heavenly Knight of the Varedin Empire.

A moment later, they returned, their faces darkened with rage.

"No recording team was deployed?" an emperor seated in the highest tier rumbled in an ominous baritone.

A Heavenly Knight nodded stiffly in silent disgrace.

Far below, near the edge of the arena, several low-ranking Alliance aides scrambled frantically toward an empty observation platform, dragging heavy recording apparatuses. They had slipped away for an early lunch; by long-standing tradition, the youth brawl held zero intelligence value, so across decades of festivals, technical staff had routinely used this intermission to wolf down their rations before returning early for the afternoon armor showcase. Decades of flawless precedent had lulled them into complacency, only for disaster to strike today.

When Lord Beredu, a terrifying Heavenly Knight, had materialized in person to drag them from the mess hall, the technicians knew their lives hung by a thread. When several other Heavenly Knights converged upon them, sheer terror consumed their souls. Even more paralyzing than the reprimand was the suffocating murderous aura radiating from these peerless warriors.

While the Alliance technicians fumbled in frantic haste to assemble their optical lenses and crystals, the battlefield dynamic across the arena underwent a radical transformation.

Richie’s brutal dominance had ignited the collective hostility of every surviving contestant. Furthermore, having already earmarked him as their prime target before the match, the young knights instinctively coalesced into an ad-hoc alliance.

Coordinated battle formations materialized across Richie’s flanks. Having witnessed the monstrous lethality of the Wisdom King, these young scions spaced out widely, denying Richie the opportunity to sweep multiple targets in a single charge.

Those holding the inner perimeter clearly recognized that they stood no chance of claiming podium honors; they adopted a mindset of mutual destruction. Naturally, in an exhibition brawl, literal death was out of the question; their plan was merely to sacrifice their armor to grapple one of Richie’s limbs the moment he charged, pinning him long enough for their comrades to rain hell upon him.

The core offensive battery was assigned to the outer perimeter. Having tasted the terror of the Wisdom King, no one dared let the iron brute close the distance; long-range aura bombardments were their only viable recourse.

Under tournament regulations, once an armor chassis absorbed a predetermined threshold of cumulative kinetic strikes and aura impacts, the monitoring arrays would rule the machine destroyed and sever its power core.

Virtually in the same heartbeat, the arena erupted with blinding flashes of battle aura, streaking through the air like a volley of ten thousand flaming arrows! Such a dazzling, cinematic spectacle drew thunderous cheers from the spectators surrounding the plaza. Yet in the viewing pavilion above, seasoned veterans could be heard muttering venomous curses like "Idiots!" and "Brainless fools!"

For these grandmasters knew full well that Richie possessed a notorious, lethal trump card: the ability to reflect incoming aura bombardments!

On a genuine battlefield, sustaining such a concentrated barrage would have pulverized even a Glorious Knight's shields into scrap iron, but here, every aura discharge was throttled by the mandatory limiter crystals.

With a deep, resonant harmonic hum, the colossal tower shield mounted to the Wisdom King’s left shoulder flared with blinding luminance. In an eye-searing flash, the torrential bombardment slamming against the shield was deflected back into the arena, ricocheting in completely wild, unpredictable trajectories!

In the span of a single breath, the entire inner ring of grappling armors collapsed like severed marionettes. It was an automated safety mechanism: the moment monitoring sensors registered impacts exceeding the damage threshold, the chassis was judged compromised, instantly cutting engine output.

The newly forged encirclement shattered wide open. Richie seized the breach, bursting through like a vengeful gale! Piloting the Wisdom King, he moved like a greased steel bead tumbling across the deck, or a billiard ball banking furiously off the cushions.

The esoteric martial disciplines he had drilled day and night over the past month with the aid of his female knights finally bore deadly fruit. His speed accelerated with every maneuver—a lethal breakthrough uncovered during those grueling sparring sessions. Because this ancient martial art chained strikes in seamless succession, it did not brake or waste momentum; instead, the inertia of each blow flowed directly into the windup of the next. Consequently, a portion of the preceding strike's kinetic energy and velocity compounded into the subsequent motion.

Though the increment gained with each strike was marginal, the Wisdom King’s operational baseline was already blistering; compounded over dozens of rapid-fire strikes, it snowballed into an astronomical kinetic engine.

Its power grew heavier, its velocity wilder! As it rolled and slammed across the steel decking, the shrieking grinding of metal against metal swelled into a deafening roar, echoing like thunder rolling down from the ninth heaven to shatter human souls.

Even the thunder possessed distinct rhythms: at times it was a low, rumbling continuous roar that vibrated the ribcage; at others, it was a sharp, crackling thunderclap so sudden and violent it struck onlookers momentarily deaf.

Every time that whip-crack thunderclap sounded, one or two battle armors were hurled violently through the air. Fortunately, the Central Plaza was colossal in scale; had the arena been narrower, these flying wrecks would have plunged over the perimeter into the dense crowd below, crushing hundreds of innocent spectators to pulp.

"Are any of our covert operatives among the contestants?" Poronov asked in an icy rasp. Unlike the other two Great Craftsmen—and indeed, unlike the majority of master armorers on the Council—he harbored none of the sentimental chivalry or artisan's honor. For him, if an existential threat could be eliminated outright, that was the supreme victory.

"I fear it would be entirely futile," the Heavenly Knight beside him sighed, shaking his head with a grimace. "That armor's structural integrity is too monstrous, and when paired with that inhuman martial art... even if we threw a full detachment of Honor Knights into the ring, they couldn't bring that boy down. In all honesty... even an explosive suicide overload wouldn't breach that fortress."

"How utterly bizarre... A weapon of such terrifying lethality ought to have been guarded as a supreme strategic secret, hoarded until the continental war ground into a bloody stalemate before being unleashed in an ambush. Why parade it before our eyes today?" another Heavenly Knight muttered to himself in bewilderment.

He was far from the only commander plagued by that riddle.

"As I deduced earlier, that chassis possesses severe control transmission anomalies; it is likely an impossible beast for any ordinary knight to pilot..." Poronov began, then suddenly cut himself off. He coughed hoarsely into a handkerchief, his eyes narrowing: "Do any of you possess accurate intelligence on that whelp's true martial rank?!"

Not a single soul among the officers could offer an answer. Richie’s true combat tier had always remained an impenetrable enigma to the Norman Alliance.

His official military dossier had been easy enough to acquire; it clearly registered him as a mere apprentice knight, accompanied by a disciplinary reprimand.

Yet everyone knew that paper was a joke.

The public duel Richie had fought against Gerold over Margaret in Peines was well-known intelligence; at the time, Gerold had already been a fully ordained Knight, proving Richie was at least on par with an ordained Knight. Yet in subsequent battles, Richie had slain two full Honor Knights—one of them in single unarmored duel! Thus, his true martial tier remained a baffling mystery.

"He might possess the prowess of an Ace Knight," an anonymous voice ventured.

"Merely an Ace?" Poronov frowned deeply. He was an armorer, not a martial knight, lacking the refined combat senses to deduce an aura practitioner's exact tier from movement alone; he merely sensed from the Wisdom King’s extreme kinetic output that the answer felt flawed. Yet he hesitated to proclaim that Richie stood higher than an Ace—an Honor Knight, for instance. That would have been a grotesque joke; a seventeen-year-old Honor Knight was an absurdity too monstrous to swallow. Yet if Richie were merely an Ace, Poronov’s theoretical deduction fell apart: Ace Knights were far from rare. If an ordinary Ace could command this machine, it retained immense, terrifying strategic value.

Franca’s Suicidal Aura extracted the pilot's life as its fuel—a strictly one-use consumable. Consequently, while the Franca Empire fielded several elite cohorts trained in the forbidden discipline, the imperial high command dared not expend them lightly, reserving them solely for critical breakthrough operations as sacrificial suicide squads.

This armor, however, was fundamentally different. The Dante Coalition could easily muster a dozen legions of Ace Knights. A reusable battle armor of this caliber possessed strategic advantages that eclipsed Suicidal Aura manifold!

If that were not the case, there remained only one other plausible explanation: the fabrication cost of the machine was astronomical.

That, at least, was easy enough to comprehend; Parkington’s Great Dragon suffered from the exact same logistical curse.

"Perhaps this is a psychological gambit by the Coalition—feigning weakness to deceive us into believing this armor cannot be mass-produced?" another staff officer proposed, though his own tone lacked conviction. Had that been their aim, keeping the project entirely cloaked in shadow to deliver a fatal ambush would have been far more devastating.

After a long, suffocating silence, Korsak seemed to recall a crucial detail.

"Perhaps... the Coalition command is uncertain whether our intelligence networks have already caught wind of this machine's development..."

Weighing the strategic stakes, Korsak decided to disclose a recent, humiliating intelligence debacle suffered by his empire: "Several months ago, our intelligence division infiltrated a reconnaissance detachment into Stein. Their primary objective was to map Monstoke's border defenses, but they stumbled upon a clandestine armor assembly facility and discovered that the Monstokians were conducting radical field-testing on an experimental chassis. Regrettably, the scout team was compromised while gathering data; not a single man made it back alive."

Hearing this revelation, scores of Alliance officers silently cursed the Varedins as blundering swine. For an imperial intelligence bureau to conceal an intelligence breakthrough of such seismic magnitude from the Allied Supreme Command was sheer incompetence!

While these Heavenly Knights and sovereign envoys racked their brains seeking a strategic countermeasure, the grand melee across the Central Plaza was spiraling toward its bloody finale.

Not a single soul could withstand Richie’s torrential onslaught. As the ranks of contestants thinned, the survivors could not even slow the Wisdom King's advance by a fraction of a second. By this point, the Wisdom King’s operational speed had accelerated to a blinding threshold; the vast majority of onlookers could no longer track its physical silhouette, discerning only a streak of silver-white lightning darting and rebounding across the steel decking.

Driven by despair and the bitter realization that the championship crown was hopelessly out of reach, the fragile ad-hoc alliance among the remaining contestants disintegrated. The youth knights turned upon one another in a chaotic, free-for-all brawl, scrambling desperately to secure the runner-up positions on the podium.

In an elimination tournament, achieving a prestigious standing did not require defeating the most foes, but merely avoiding premature elimination; consequently, every surviving pilot tacitly fled as far from Richie as their engines could carry them.

The center of the arena, once the most congested slaughterhouse, stood completely vacated. Instead, dozens of machines crowded the perimeter ledge. This sudden migration sent shockwaves of panic through the spectators crowding below; the throngs began shoving backward in dread, terrified that a multi-ton battle armor might be hurled over the balustrade to crush them.

Fortunately, the catastrophe everyone dreaded did not materialize.

No one wished for fatalities on such a sacred imperial jubilee, and Richie shared that sentiment. In his current state of mastery, he possessed a myriad of methods to neutralize opponents without spilling blood; furthermore, close-quarters grappling lent itself far better to kinetic control than wanton aura strikes.

With the terrifying speed of the Wisdom King, escaping his clutches was an exercise in futility. Richie would run down a fleeing contestant in two bounds, followed instantly by a devastating sweeping kick.

During his grueling drills with the female knights, he had discovered that for a low-slung, heavily armored beast like the Wisdom King, the "Whirlwind Kick Chain" was a lethal signature strike: it could be chained infinitely without interruption, the machine’s center of gravity remained clamped to the deck, and with the massive pauldron shield guarding its flank, countering the maneuver was virtually impossible.

Best of all, dispatching opponents with sweeping leg sweeps eliminated the risk of a cornered rival attempting a desperate mutual-destruction grapple. Time blurred as clashing steel rang out across the plaza. Fewer and fewer machines remained upright, until at last, Richie stood as the lone warrior in the arena.

Surveying the vast steel expanse littered with dozens of "fallen corpses," a savage, intoxicating surge of adrenaline erupted from the deepest recesses of Richie's soul. He threw back his head and roared into the heavens!

A thunderous roar overflowing with irrepressible exhilaration and raw, untamed fury!