Chapter 92 Contest

A detachment of knights marched across the plaza bearing massive, gleaming sheets of fresh steel plate. The preceding melee had left the original pavement utterly ravaged—dented, pockmarked, and in many places fractured into jagged shards.

With the unprecedented entry of Wisdom King, the devastation inflicted upon the arena far surpassed that of any previous year. By that same token, save for Richie himself, the combatants who ultimately secured podium finishes were far from the fiercest contenders; many of the tournament favorites favored by the various nations had been summarily eliminated in the opening moments of the chaotic brawl.

According to the private banter between Princess Mithra and her inner circle of confidantes, Richie had single-handedly ruined the entire competition. Yet from another perspective, it stood as the most sensational, indelible spectacle the festival had ever witnessed.

Following the conclusion of the battle, Wisdom King, as the champion magitech armor, was enshrined directly at the focal point of the grand plaza. Arrayed in a wide concentric ring around it were the cutting-edge prototypes from every participating nation, slated for that afternoon's grand armor exhibition.

Customarily, this central pedestal was mere ceremonial homage; foreign dignitaries rarely displayed genuine fascination toward whichever armor clinched the crown. This time, however, convention was shattered. Long before the exhibition was scheduled to commence, distinguished guests jostled impatiently for a closer vantage, and functionaries from the Norman Alliance repeatedly attempted to approach the machine. Yet the suffocating security enveloping Wisdom King was likewise unprecedented for a tournament victor.

A perimeter of velvet-roped iron stanchions cordoned off the dais, guarded at the cardinal points by four impassive knights whose ostensible mission of maintaining public order was, in truth, an ironclad directive to keep every probing hand away from its hull.

The armor exhibition following the Festival of Heaven served as a decennial showcase for every breakthrough in armor craftsmanship over the past decade. It featured not only standardized military models; numerous renowned masters had even brought forth their experimental, unclassified creations, though the overwhelming majority remained bespoke, custom-forged suits crafted exclusively for noble bloodlines and illustrious houses.

While the morning ceremony was thrown open to the general public, the afternoon exposition maintained far stricter protocols. The sprawling throngs that had packed the plaza perimeters had long since dispersed, though few had actually returned home. The true City of Heaven was strictly off-limits to commoners; only today and during a handful of major festivities were ordinary citizens granted passage into this elevated metropolis. Naturally, most seized the fleeting occasion to wander and marvel at its celestial boulevards.

Even with the multitude departed, the plaza remained far from deserted. Within the City of Heaven, the Royal Academy alone enrolled over fifty thousand cadets, to say nothing of the colossal knight legions stationed within the citadel.

Fully forty percent of the Parkington Holy Kingdom's standing military was garrisoned inside the City of Heaven and its ring of satellite fortresses. This arrangement served both to minimize logistical wear and tear, slashing fiscal expenditures to the bone, and to preempt internal insurrection—for nothing afforded greater peace of mind than keeping lethal power directly under the sovereign's gaze. So long as these forty percent remained unswervingly loyal to the imperial throne, the foundation of the Holy Kingdom remained solid as granite.

Indeed, that the Parkington Holy Kingdom had endured a millennium without suffering catastrophic civil war was largely indebted to the stabilizing efficacy of this overarching doctrine.

In a realm governed by such rigid feudal stratification, even the knights garrisoned within the bastion rarely enjoyed the freedom to stroll as they pleased; only on the day of the Festival of Heaven could they relax their posture and breathe a touch more freely.

Fortunately, the central plaza was immense enough to accommodate such vast numbers, yet even across this sea of paving stones, the crowd still pressed in with noticeable density.

Only one contingent remained entirely immune to the press. Encircled by a cordon of towering imperial palace knights, those afforded such rarefied deference were, naturally, the most eminent dignitaries.

Richie stood among this exalted group, gathered alongside the librarian uncle, Master Espol, and Madame Shar. They were all familiar acquaintances, and in their venerable company Richie felt not the slightest trace of constraint.

"Quite a performance you put on today. Poronov's complexion used to have a pale, sallow cast, but when I caught sight of him just now, his face had turned an exquisite shade of bruised purple. If you ask me, a blood vessel in that manic head of his is bound to burst before long."

Madame Shar was as sharp and unsparing as ever.

The formidable old doyenne cared nothing for decorum; she would have leveled the exact same barbs right to Poronov's face without blinking. Moreover, with the librarian uncle standing quietly at their side, an invisible dampening barrier enveloped them, ensuring no outside ear could possibly eavesdrop on their conversation.

In contrast to Madame Shar's buoyant malice, Manuel was in a decidedly foul humor. For months he had been laboring tirelessly to refine Richie's conceptual schematics, and until today he had felt thoroughly pleased with the fruit of his toil. Yet after beholding the upgraded Wisdom King that Richie had fielded, the old artificer's spirits had plummeted. The operational performance of Richie’s machine was so vastly superior to his own design that the old man had begun questioning whether he possessed any genuine talent as an armor artificer at all.

Fortunately, Manuel was genial and philosophical by nature. Hearing the others mercilessly roast Poronov had prompted him to unconsciously measure his own frustration against that of the Norman genius. That comparison instantly relieved his gloom—after all, Poronov was much younger than he was, and carried an incomparably greater reputation to uphold.

Yet even as his mood lightened, a twinge of pity stirred within him for Poronov. If a seasoned artisan like himself felt such crushing inadequacy, the psychological strain weighing upon Poronov had to be harrowing beyond words.

"I must admit, your collaboration with the Parkington artificers is beyond reproach—an absolute seamless synthesis."

Even Master Espol could not help but sigh in wonder.

"No denying that."

The old lady nodded beside them. "Your technical foundation is dreadfully crude, boy, but your mind is mercurial, constantly striking sparks of raw genius. Those Parkington artisans, on the other hand, possess impeccable orthodoxy and encyclopedic foundations, but they are rigid pedants who haven't the faintest inkling of how to adapt. The two sides complement each other remarkably. It's truly a pity that the rest of us can never seem to collaborate with them—one wonders what strange curse prevents it."

"Speaking of which, do you harbor no intention of continuing research into flight-capable armor?"

Yiluo interjected into the exchange. Having assumed direct stewardship of the flight armor initiative, he could not help but press for answers.

"You know me well enough, Yiluo—I've already exhausted my few meager tricks."

Richie shrugged helplessly. "The Wind-Control Art is essentially mature. Unless another sudden flash of inspiration strikes me out of the blue, my role in flight armor is pretty much concluded."

"What is your next objective, then?"

Yiluo inquired. Among their gathering, he was the most suited to pose the question.

Richie tilted his head in contemplation. Truth be told, he had not given the matter any systematic thought. "As you're well aware, whether it was the Dragon, the Flying Yaksha, or now the Wisdom King, none of them were premeditated designs on my part. They were all stumbled upon by blind luck. Who can say whether fortune will smile upon me in such fashion ever again?"

Reflecting upon his words, Master Espol and the others had to concede that the lad spoke the unvarnished truth.

"Only now do I realize how remarkably similar you are to Poronov," Madame Shar remarked dryly. "That fellow is entirely passion-driven: when the creative fever seizes him, inspirations surge like an artesian spring and he can churn out several major breakthroughs within a single year; yet when the passion wanes, he cannot properly draft even a third-rate auxiliary suit. You, however, are far more absurd—an absolute creature of pure serendipity, whose every creation hinges entirely on stumbling into dumb luck."

Madame Shar teased from the side.

As they bantered, the librarian uncle chimed in from the side: "Does none of you find this peculiar? Throughout our entire walk across the plaza, I haven't spotted a single armor from the Norman Alliance. Surely they wouldn't act with such petty spite? Even if they feared our uncovering their proprietary secrets, they should at least have wheeled out a few obsolete demonstration models."

Prompted by his remark, the surrounding artificers craned their necks to scan the plaza. Sure enough, just as the librarian had noted, the exhibition spaces reserved for the Norman Alliance stood conspicuously barren—not a single chassis was in sight.

"I happen to know why."

Richie chuckled. "The Alliance delegation had no intention of participating in the morning melee. But the moment they saw my name on the roster, they hurriedly registered over forty combatants. Because the thoroughfares had already been locked down by imperial guard cordons, fetching suits from their diplomatic compound was out of the question—so they commandeered the very prototype armors they had brought for the afternoon exposition and threw them straight into the fray."

This intelligence had been relayed to him just before he boarded his cockpit, whispered by an imperial attendant dispatched personally by Princess Mithra, whose intent was glaringly obvious: to warn him that lethal foul play was afoot.

"Despicable scoundrels!"

Madame Shar spat in furious condemnation, while the other artisans nodded in fervent agreement. Though everyone in their fraternity was aware that Richie was an active knight, they instinctively regarded him as one of their own—a master artificer in the making. For the Alliance to orchestrate an ambush of forty armored knights against an unarmored artisan was tantamount to state-sanctioned murder.

"Which is precisely why I intend to take a little vengeance of my own by rattling Poronov's cage. I wonder how that grand genius will react."

Richie had forged a pact with Princess Mithra beforehand: to heap unbearable psychological strain upon the Alliance's peerless Divine Artificer. If they could successfully break Poronov's fragile psyche, it would be an immense strategic coup for the Dante Coalition.

The artisans surrounding Richie were naturally oblivious to the clandestine plot. A gentle soul like Master Espol viewed the prospect as mere youthful impudence, completely blind to the ruthless geopolitical machination driving it; an eccentric contrarian like Madame Shar, meanwhile, clapped her hands in gleeful encouragement.

Locating Poronov was child's play.

At that very moment, Master Poronov stood riveted beside Wisdom King. His expression was one of feverish concentration, his piercing gaze drinking in every gouge, tear, and fracture marring the armored chassis.

For a craftsman of his transcendent caliber, even without laying a fingertip upon the hull or cracking open the cockpit hatch to inspect the internal circuitry, there remained countless ways to decipher the innermost secrets of any magitech suit.

During the morning clash, he had already deduced its baseline mechanical performance from its dynamic movements; now, he was methodically analyzing the battle damage to expose its structural vulnerabilities.

The vicious melee had left the chassis battered and scarred, with the frontal plating of both legs hammered into a cratered topography of dents.

Wisdom King bore no decorative paint. Given a combat style defined by bulldozing charges and rolling floor tumbles, applying lacquer was an exercise in futility; chipped and peeling paint would only have rendered it unsightly. Consequently, its outer carapace displayed the raw, unvarnished sheen of bare metal.

The material was an exotic composite known as Casmanium alloy, possessing physical resilience vastly superior to structural steel, accompanied by a price tag equally astronomical.

Between his two earlier hypotheses, Poronov had initially leaned toward the former: that the machine suffered from severe control penalties, requiring at least an Honor Knight's neural fortitude to operate. Yet gazing upon it now, he was forced to question his initial deduction. If the chassis strictly necessitated Casmanium alloy, it could never be mass-produced for standard line units; it could only exist as a bespoke, specialized machine.

A specialized armor incapable of mass production was substantially less menacing to grand strategic doctrine, though by no means devoid of peril. If the three great empires of the Dante Coalition deemed it worthwhile, they possessed the wealth to outfit an entire elite corps with such behemoths. Even among secondary states, certain wealthy principalities commanded sufficient treasury—within the Coalition, prosperous yet militarily vulnerable realms akin to the former Monstoke Republic numbered more than a few.

Fortunately, Poronov was not overly alarmed on that front. The metallurgical and fabrication techniques behind an armor of such devastating power would be guarded as the supreme state secret even among the Coalition's three imperial powers. At most, the triumvirate would forge an experimental division for their own crowns; they would never permit lesser allies to wield a weapon so monstrously potent.

The very same logic applied to the Norman Alliance, as evidenced by suicidal battle qi. Even as a Divine Artificer granted clearance to the Alliance's deepest state archives, he was strictly barred from accessing the mysteries surrounding suicidal battle qi—a testament to how jealously the Franza Empire guarded that lethal trump card.

Earlier, upon the grand reviewing pavilion, the Norman Alliance delegation had heatedly debated the geopolitical ramifications of this new weapon.

The consensus they had reached was chillingly bleak.

Even if the Coalition deployed a single corps outfitted with such armors, the Alliance would suffer excruciating agony on the frontlines. For decades, the Franza Empire’s suicidal battle qi had been revered as the supreme battlefield equalizer, the ultimate guarantee of an Alliance triumph over the Coalition. For that reason, even when the Coalition rolled out the Dragon, and even when word leaked that the Coalition had mastered airborne flight, the Alliance high command had remained unshaken in their ultimate victory.

Now, suicidal battle qi had met its nemesis.

"Well? Does my armor meet with your esteemed approval?"

Richie strolled up with an insolent swagger, trailed by his venerable entourage.

Poronov was likewise flanked by an imposing retinue: alongside the Alliance's Heavenly Knights stood a cadre of master armor artificers. Yet unlike the egalitarian warmth prevailing on the Coalition side, these artisans possessed zero standing before Poronov’s autocratic presence. The moment they saw Richie approach, they reflexively shrank back to the margins.

The Alliance delegation was similarly cordoned off by Parkington imperial palace guards, but not a single guard dared raise a halberd to impede Richie and his distinguished company.

As the two heavily shielded delegations converged, representing the supreme titans of the Norman Alliance and the Dante Coalition, their colliding gazes instantly struck sparks of invisible fire.

Poronov turned his head, casting a cold glare first at Richie, then at Master Espol and Madame Shar. Displeasure radiated from every pore—most of all from the way Richie looked at him, which rankled Poronov to the marrow of his bones. Yet beneath that fury stirred a haunting sense of familiarity: was that not the exact same insolent, hungry gaze he himself had cast upon Espol and Shar when he had first burst onto the continental stage?

A sudden wave of melancholy welled in Poronov's chest.

The rising tide inevitably sweeps away the old shore; such was the immutable tragedy of the armor artificer's realm. A newer, brighter prodigy would forever emerge from the shadows, mercilessly stripping the laurels from the master who came before.

Poronov was consumed by bitter grievance—a grievance born of the fact that he had never truly tasted the solitary glory of standing undisputed at the summit. The reputations of the Three Divine Artificers had always hovered in rough parity: Espol, specializing predominantly in weaponry, was deemed slightly inferior in pure chassis design, leaving Poronov and that venomous old witch locked in an eternal stalemate.

Judging purely by the sheer volume and operational excellence of deployed armors, he could have effortlessly suppressed both relics. Yet the foundations of those two elders were unnervingly deep: they dedicated their intellects to the most profound, esoteric frontiers, daring to challenge the ultimate enigmas of the artificer's art—domains where Poronov’s own talents fell short.

Driven by that burning ambition, he had thrown himself into identical research in recent years, even securing tangible breakthroughs. He stood on the precipice of triumph; he needed only to forge the final piece and publish his treatise to stand unchallenged at the pinnacle of the known world. Yet precisely at this crowning juncture, an upstart had burst forth to challenge his dominion. The festering bitterness inside him bled openly across his face.

"Can an uncontrollable machine even be dignified with the title of true magitech armor?"

Poronov was an unrepentant maverick among artificers, completely unbothered by specious reasoning so long as it served his argument.

"A weapon need only serve its purpose," Richie countered, utterly unruffled by the elder's blatant disdain. "To go a step further: so long as it proves lethal and effective for its wielder, any supplementary flaws are perfectly acceptable."

Richie pointed a casual finger toward the sky: "You witnessed those flight armors earlier. Beyond their ability to take to the air, they are virtually worthless in traditional combat..."

There was no need to belabor the point. Richie knew Poronov would never dare dismiss flight armor as worthless trash; to do so would instantly disqualify him from the title of Divine Artificer.

Poronov bristled with indignation. Artificers were an inherently contentious breed; Espol and his peers routinely argued theoretical mechanics until they were blue in the face. Within the Norman Alliance, Poronov enjoyed such unassailable reverence that no one dared cross swords with him verbally, but that hardly meant his tongue lacked venom.

"Absurd drivel! How can you draw such a comparison?" he barked. "Your flight armor, much like reconnaissance suits, belongs to an entirely specialized classification."

He stabbed a rigid finger toward Wisdom King: "And pray tell, under which category do you propose to file this monstrosity?"

In a rigorous academic debate, Richie would have been hopelessly outclassed, but rigorous debate was never his aim. His conspiracy with Princess Mithra was designed to drive Poronov into an apoplectic rage; provocative baiting was precisely what he intended.

When it came to verbal brawling, Richie yielded to no man; back in his academy days, street scuffles and vitriolic taunts had been his bread and butter.

His eyes went wide in theatrical astonishment. "Since when does Master Poronov care about the rigid taxonomies laid down by the Artificers Council? I always assumed you and I were kindred spirits—unfettered iconoclasts who scoffed at dogma. I certainly couldn't care less about their sterile classifications! Nor do I give a damn how outsiders judge the armors I forge."

Had such words been aimed at Master Espol or Madame Shar, they would have rolled off like water from a duck's back, and the rest of the Council would have laughed them off. Yet for Poronov, the barb struck a raw, agonizing nerve—for those exact concluding sentences were the very words he had proclaimed to the world upon his sensational debut decades ago!

Throughout his career, Poronov had paraded himself as the living avatar of radical innovation, looking down his nose at entrenched tradition. How could he have anticipated that a brat would one day seize his own sacred rhetoric and slap him across the face with it?

In truth, such cyclical reckoning was hardly unprecedented; it had played out across the continent since time immemorial. A thousand years ago, the armor artificers of the Parkington Holy Kingdom had been the most audacious innovators under heaven. Yet two centuries later, drunk on peerless glory, they had lost their creative soul: though their techniques grew ever more refined, their inventive daring atrophied into calcified orthodoxy. In their stead, artificers from foreign realms forged breakthrough upon breakthrough, ultimately joining forces in institutional rebellion to establish the Grand Guild of Artificers.

Over the ensuing century, the Grand Guild became synonymous with radical progress, while Parkington’s guild was branded as stagnant and obsolete. Then came the continental conflagration that brought an end to a hundred years of theological debate among artificers: though the Parkington Holy Kingdom emerged politically victorious, its domestic artificers were the definitive losers.

Following the armistice, Parkington’s artificers formally integrated into the Grand Guild. In that same postwar crucible, a wave of dynamic young nations arose—the Monstoke Republic among them. Having witnessed Parkington’s imperial decline and recognized how technological superiority in battle armor dictated modern warfare, these burgeoning states poured colossal fortunes into research and development.

Investment yielded inevitable fruit: every successive technological leap crowned a new regional hegemon, a relentless cycle that persisted to this very day.

Amidst this geopolitical churn arose the singular anomaly of the Free City of Capech. Renowned for its atmosphere of romantic liberation and intellectual freedom, Capech acted as a beacon for eccentric geniuses and unconstrained visionaries, ensuring the city never suffered a drought of revolutionary innovation.

The breakthroughs of yesterday were invariably eclipsed by the pioneers of tomorrow; such was the unrelenting march of history.

Poronov grasped this historical truth with flawless clarity—yet his pride refused to bow to its cruel reality. "Lies... damnable insolence!"

Thick, pulsing blue veins throbbed violently against his temples. To attend the Festival of Heaven without displaying his notorious instability, he had ingested potent sedative narcotics; yet the unrelenting barrage of humiliations he had suffered today had violently overwhelmed the pharmacological suppression.

Just as Poronov teetered on the brink of an explosive seizure, a withered hand reached smoothly from behind him, pressing two fingers with delicate precision against the nape of his neck.

The seething artificer went instantly limp, his crazed agitation melting into heavy, glassy-eyed drowsiness.

The warrior who had subdued him was an elder with fluttering white hair. Not only he, but every Heavenly Knight in the Alliance entourage wore a mask of barely suppressed fury; they understood with crystal clarity what Richie’s faction had set out to accomplish.

Just as they hungered to assassinate Richie, they knew the Coalition dreamed of eliminating Poronov. The crucial difference lay in the choice of weapons.

Poronov's severe psychiatric instability was an open secret, and his handlers had remained constantly vigilant against psychological sabotage. Had Richie uttered a single overtly slanderous or vulgar slur, the Heavenly Knights would have intervened instantly. The diabolical genius of the youth's banter lay in its mild, seemingly innocuous phrasing—outwardly harmless, yet laced with lethal venom.

The damage was already done, yet the Alliance's Heavenly Knights could not erupt in violence. Just as the Coalition dared not lay a hostile finger upon Poronov on holy sovereign ground, the Alliance was equally powerless to strike down the insolent youth before them.

Watching Poronov being supported away by his handlers, Richie let out a quiet sigh. "What a shame—foiled at the final hurdle, eh?"

Madame Shar murmured coldly from beside him. Yet her tone shifted almost instantly: "Truth be told, had you actually provoked that wretched Poronov into dropping dead on the spot, I would have clapped my hands in ecstatic celebration."

Such chilling candor caught the younger listeners entirely off guard, though neither the librarian uncle nor Master Espol betrayed the slightest flicker of surprise. "You two surely harbor the very same sentiment," the old woman remarked, noting the subtle shifts in their expressions.

Master Espol let out a wry, sorrowful sigh. "If he perished, the world would indeed lose a transcendent genius. Yet in exchange, tens of millions of souls might well preserve their lives."

To an outsider, the proclamation might have sounded cryptic, but every figure standing within their circle understood its terrible gravity. Were Poronov to die, it would deliver an irreparable, fatal blow to the Norman Alliance.

Poronov was, above all else, a pragmatist among Divine Artificers. His greatest strength lay not in foundational theory, but in reverse-engineering and iterative optimization. Any magitech armor that fell into his clutches would be dissected to its core within weeks, followed swiftly by an upgraded counter-model.

This uncanny talent forced the Coalition into paralyzing hesitation whenever deploying cutting-edge prototypes, terrified that a captured hull would allow the Alliance to rapidly reverse-engineer matching technology and overtake them in record time.

The librarian uncle, who had remained taciturn throughout the day, spoke with quiet melancholy: "I fear that once everyone returns from this festival, total war will erupt across the continent."

"That was likely Empress Annielia's true calculus in unveiling Wisdom King," Madame Shar continued, picking up the thread. She was far from the only one who grasped the geopolitical chessboard, but unlike the others, she saw no reason to swallow her words. Annielia’s grand maneuver was brutally calculated. "This chassis was forged from Casmanium alloy. Leaving aside the staggering cost, Casmanium is notoriously recalcitrant to machine, and smelting yields have remained abysmal. If the Alliance wishes to preserve its strategic edge before we solve production bottlenecks, they must launch their general offensive immediately—and they will unleash their suicide battalions from the opening salvo."

Madame Shar's reasoning was shared by the other masters, though only she possessed the audacity to give voice to it. Annielia’s machinations were unyielding.

Should the Alliance stake everything on an immediate, ferocious blitzkrieg, the initial brunt would inevitably crush the secondary border kingdoms and vassal protectorates, before hammering into the Omoer Empire and the Rosotto Empire.

This time, however, the Dante Coalition would not repeat its cynical abandonment of the Monstoke Republic—offering gold and materiel while withholding expeditionary legions. Bound by formal mutual-defense pacts, the great powers would mobilize colossal armies to the frontlines. Fighting upon foreign soil carried callous strategic advantages: even if the border territories were reduced to smoking ash, imperial homelands remained unscathed, and should the tide turn disastrous, legions could conduct fighting retreats without enduring domestic heartbreak.

A sudden blitzkrieg might strike with apocalyptic fury, yet it could never sustain momentum indefinitely. Once the sacrificial border buffer states absorbed the brunt of the onslaught, the conflict would inevitably devolve into a grinding war of attrition.

And with the colossal economic reserves of their three empires, protracted endurance was the one game the Coalition never feared playing.

Yet every human heart sheltered its own loyalties. What these Divine Artificers and Grandmasters truly grieved over was their shared sanctuary: the Free City of Capech.

Without question, Capech would become the bloodiest meat-grinder on the continent. The strategic reality was brutally straightforward: being an isolated city-state, grand flanking maneuvers and tactical encirclements were largely irrelevant. Moreover, boasting vast stockpiles of food and materiel, Capech could never be starved into capitulation through siege alone. It could only be conquered through a merciless, house-to-house attrition of annihilation.

"Should the Artificers Council relocate to Parkington or Rosotto? Both realms would offer far greater security," Richie suggested, genuine concern for the Free City evident in his voice.

Richie genuinely cared for the Free City of Capech and the independence it represented.

"If the ramparts truly become untenable, we shall evacuate," Master Espol answered softly. "Yet until that tragic hour arrives, every single soul among us will pour every ounce of strength into defending our home."

It was Master Espol who delivered the solemn pledge.

Richie did not press whether an evacuation would still be feasible once the city was under siege. Since these venerable elders had reached their resolve, they had undoubtedly weighed every grim permutation.

For a fleeting second, a reckless surge of blood had nearly spurred Richie to volunteer for the defense of Capech, eager to lend his blade to the beleaguered city. But the words withered on his tongue as cold reality checked him: he no longer fought as a lone wandering blade. Behind him marched an entire independent corps.

At this pivotal juncture, the paramount imperative for his independent corps was the accumulation of strength. At their current rate of progression, within a year or eighteen months, the vast majority of its personnel would attain the rank of Ace Knight, while core veterans of Squad 105—Lina, Dana, Merlin, and Nora—might well break through the bottleneck into the exalted ranks of Honor Knights.

In the storied history of the Monstoke Republic, no military unit had ever commanded such terrifying combat power. Yet even when that milestone was reached, an independent corps of that caliber could hardly dominate continental battlefields; among the venerable empires, elite formations of far greater pedigree were legion.

While the others could not fathom the calculations churning behind Richie’s brow, the librarian uncle sensed the youth’s internal struggle. He offered a comforting pat on Richie’s shoulder: "When the defense of Capech commences, every allied sovereign will dispatch massive relief armies alongside high-ranking military observation delegations. You may accompany one of those observer missions to the front."

Richie blinked in mild perplexity, unsure what purpose observing would serve. Military observation attachés fell into two distinct categories: warriors like Trisli, who embedded directly with local frontline units to engage in combat, and those who stood strictly upon the perimeter as passive witnesses. Given Richie's strategic value as an artificer, Coalition high command would never sanction his deployment to the meat-grinder; any assignment to an observation mission would strictly confine him to the latter.

"Hitherto, all you have witnessed are lower-tier skirmishes between ordinary knights," the librarian explained in a low, measured voice. "At Capech, however, you will have the rare privilege of beholding clashes between transcendent sovereigns. While it may be premature for your current stage of growth, such an opportunity is exceedingly scarce. Absorb whatever your comprehension allows. It may offer little immediate utility today, but when the day comes that you ascend to those celestial heights, the visions etched in your memory will save you from stumbling through countless blind alleys."

As the librarian uncle spoke, an unmistakable undertone of solemn stewardship laced his words. Though he seemed unaware of it himself, the surrounding elders felt the profound gravity of his bequeathal.

"Aren't you all exhausted yet? These dreary iron heaps aren't worth a second glance," Madame Shar grumbled loudly, rubbing her aching lower back. "In years past, the Alliance at least paraded a few novel curiosities to pique our curiosity, but this time they haven't wheeled out so much as a single frame..."

The old woman beat at her waist, complaining loudly.

Everyone present understood her intent: Madame Shar wished to steer them away from a topic too grim and suffocating to dwell upon. Yet her critique was indisputable—the majority of the armors displayed upon the plaza were their own handiwork, and while masterworks from the Coalition's three empires and allied realms stood among them, none offered truly revolutionary innovation.

"Why not descend below for a rest?"

Master Espol suggested, tapping the tip of his walking stick lightly against the stone pavement.

The subterranean Sanctuary did not possess a single entrance; tucked into the plaza corner adjoining the imperial palace lay another grand descent. Positioned directly opposite the palace gates, this portal was guarded around the clock by vigilant sentries.

The true ritual of the Festival of Heaven unfolded deep within the Sanctuary, conducted as an exclusive familial sacrament of the Parkington imperial house, closed to all outside eyes. Only after the solemn rites concluded was restricted visitation permitted. Even then, entry was fiercely circumscribed: beyond Heavenly Knights and accredited Grandmaster artificers, passage was granted solely to scions of the Holy Emperor's bloodline and the four guardian lineages, alongside the top three juvenile champions of the morning melee.

Yet on this occasion, the grand melee had been thoroughly derailed by Richie's rampage. Aside from Richie, the two surviving contestants were youngsters hailing from petty third-rate principalities. Well aware that they stood zero chance against Richie, they had simply feigned death and remained prostrate upon the steel plates throughout the butchery. While tournament rules contained no explicit prohibition against playing dead, for such shameless cowards to claim imperial podium honors was an affront so grotesque that ancestral Holy Emperors would have crawled from their crypts in roaring indignation.

As for Richie himself, his credentials as an artificer afforded him full clearance to enter, with privileges far exceeding a tournament champion—including permission to examine the sacred Spirit Armors and Divine Armors up close. No one with half a brain would deliberate over which status to invoke. Within the subterranean Sanctuary, chairs were strictly forbidden as a mark of profound veneration for the ancestral sovereigns; every visitor was obliged to stand. Buried deep within the earth, even the faintest whisper resonated with startling clarity, casting a reverent hush over the assembly. Yet even in silence, the collective scuffle of bootsteps echoed with intrusive resonance across the vaulted chambers.

The two Divine Artificers and their fellow masters quickly dispersed into different alcoves to inspect whatever relics caught their fascination, for even legendary craftsmen were rarely permitted entry into these sacred vaults.

Richie positioned himself before a suit of Spirit Armor, feigning rapt professional absorption. The Spirit Armors preserved here were identical in silhouette to the ancient relic, the *Destroyer*, that stood enthroned at the chamber's center. Their exterior appeared remarkably unassuming—a somber, matte grayish-black that resembled dull lead. Yet beneath that drab exterior lay a material of mythical wonder: the revered "God's Alloy." Deciphering the enigma of this substance had been Master Espol’s lifelong obsession. Indisputably a metallic element, it nonetheless exhibited biological attributes, possessing the miraculous property to self-heal following physical trauma.

Theories regarding this regenerative phenomenon diverged wildly. Madame Shar vehemently rejected any biological interpretation, positing instead that the metal shared physical characteristics with mercury. As for why it presented as rigid armor plating rather than a flowing fluid, she theorized the presence of an internal, quasi-magnetic force binding its atomic lattice into an unbreakable matrix.

Her hypothesis was bolstered by compelling evidence: whenever God's Alloy suffered damage, its self-restoration required immense thermodynamic energy consumption.

Richie had no inkling which Divine Artificer edged closer to the ultimate truth. If opportunity allowed, he yearned to don the Crown of Wisdom once more to seek a definitive answer from its ancient databanks.

The chemical formulation of God's Alloy was no closely guarded secret, yet possessing the formula alone was utterly useless: every gram of the alloy had to be processed by a singular, monolithic machine excavated from ancient ruins. Its manufacturing output was dishearteningly meager—a scant few dozen kilograms per annum. Even though Spirit Armors were considerably more compact than standard battle suits, forging a single chassis demanded hundreds of kilograms of the miraculous composite, meaning over a decade of continuous smelting was required to produce a single new Spirit Armor.

Richie was not entirely dissembling; if he wished to approach the Crown of Wisdom without arousing suspicion, examining these legendary armors provided his only plausible pretext.

With his junior reputation, the guardians would never permit him to touch the Divine Armors—should one suffer the slightest blemish, the catastrophe would be absolute, as no living artificer could guarantee its restoration. Spirit Armors, however, carried no such terror: since they could still be fabricated, they could likewise be repaired, and even catastrophic damage could be rectified by melting the recovered God's Alloy back into raw ingots for re-forging.

Naturally, that remained purely theoretical; throughout a thousand years of imperial history, not a single Spirit Armor had ever been melted down in a foundry. These war machines were hardly fragile eggshells; impervious to mundane assaults and endowed with self-regenerating kinetics, any minor fissure swiftly sealed itself back to perfection.

Having feigned absorption for a decent interval, Richie noticed that the area surrounding the Crown of Wisdom had cleared. He drifted casually across the floor.

Rather than heading directly toward his quarry, he took an indirect, meandering circuit, pausing to examine various displays along the way before finally coming to a halt before the pedestal holding the Crown of Wisdom.

Just as he had done on his previous visit, he gently cupped the metallic headpiece in his palms.

The gesture was undeniably brazen—none of the venerable masters would have dared handle the relic with such casual familiarity. Fortunately, his youth served as his shield; bystanders who noticed merely chalked it up to an ambitious apprentice's boyish curiosity.

At that precise moment, Empress Annielia stepped up beside him.

"Would you like to try it on?"

She murmured in a low, regal tone: "As today's champion, you have earned the privilege of trying it."

Richie certainly had no intention of declining. Offering a respectful, boyish bow to Her Majesty, he delicately lifted the Crown of Wisdom and settled it upon his brow.

Armed with his prior experience, the instant the circlet touched his temples, Richie plunged straight into that otherworldly, transcendental state of consciousness.

Time was of the essence; he had no desire to squander this opportunity as he had before. For the past month, he had spent countless quiet hours deliberating over what inquiries to pose should he ever don the Crown of Wisdom again.

Having marshaled his thoughts, the most pressing mystery he needed unraveling was how to revolutionize flight armor.

The moment the query materialized in his mind, a torrent of visual data flashed before his inner eye. To Richie’s surprise, what appeared was not an anatomical cutaway of battle armor, but a series of peculiar geometric curves resembling the cross-sectional airfoil of an aircraft wing.

The schematics were not static; dynamic tables and mathematical formulae continually cascaded alongside them, though their complex notation remained entirely incomprehensible to him.

The only recourse left to him was to burn these cross-sectional geometries indelibly into his memory. Since the Crown of Wisdom presented them first, they were undoubtedly of paramount significance.

As he watched, an uneasy dread crept over him. For all the imagery flickering before him, the projection remained mired in esoteric theoretical principles whose glyphs and formulas he could not decode. Worse still, he could not halt the stream—once activated, the Crown of Wisdom seemed compelled to run its pre-programmed demonstration to completion.

His paramount fear was not failing to comprehend the mathematics, but lingering too long under the relic and exposing his abnormal state to watchful imperial eyes.

In his mounting panic, Richie attempted to reach up and remove the circlet, only to discover with a jolt of terror that he had completely lost somatic control over his physical body.

The sensation mirrored the harrowing ordeal he had suffered in the marshes of Polmo when facing that hostile Honor Knight. Evidently, without attaining the transcendent realm of the Heavenly stage, maintaining neuro-somatic synchronization between hyper-accelerated cognition and physical flesh was an impossibility. Richie remained oblivious that, in that very fraction of a second, his physical frame had suffered a minuscule, lightning-fast twitch—a tremor so minute that no onlooker perceived it.

Unable to abort the trance, Richie had no choice but to brace himself and watch. Fortunately, after a few moments, the projected imagery shifted dramatically, manifesting actual mechanical apparatuses. In the beginning, these contraptions appeared crude and primitive, remarkably reminiscent of the hang-gliders he had first encountered, constructed of timber spars and stretched canvas. As the progression advanced, the mechanisms grew exponentially sophisticated, converging from chaotic experiments into a definitive, cross-like silhouette with fixed horizontal wings and an elongated fuselage. Pondering the geometry, Richie immediately grasped the profound wisdom behind it. In flight armor design, two chronic dilemmas had tormented him most: aerodynamic stability and directional control. When first learning to soar, the slightest misstep induced violent sideslips; even after extensive practice, sudden gusts inevitably triggered uncontrolled yawing or barrel rolls.

Control was inextricably bound to stability: hitherto, changes in aerial attitude could never be executed too abruptly—whether climbing, diving, or banking, any aggressive input risked catastrophic loss of control.

Beholding the Crown of Wisdom's demonstration was like a lightning bolt piercing his consciousness: the solution was shockingly elegant—one merely needed to mount a smaller pair of empennage wings at the tail!

Another revelation set his eyes blazing: the forward propulsion of this craft was driven by two spinning blades—the spitting image of the toy bamboo copters children spun between their palms!

Every peasant child knew how to whittle such a toy, yet who could have conceived that a child's trinket held the key to carrying men across the skies? His own flight had relied entirely upon the Wind-Control Art. Mastering Wind-Control was not impossible, but it demanded immense time; without dual training to accelerate cultivation, achieving meaningful proficiency took seven or eight grueling years. With this mechanical apparatus, however, the paradigm shifted entirely: every knight could take flight!

A chill of nervous excitement gripped Richie’s heart. This revelation had to remain buried forever in the deepest recesses of his soul, never to be breathed to another living being. Before his gaze, the holographic stream continued to evolve until, after an indeterminate span, the dual propeller blades vanished from the craft.

Richie breathed an inward sigh of relief. His own trajectory had not been fundamentally flawed; he had merely skipped an indispensable intermediate stage of technological evolution.

Beyond that milestone, the flying vessels took on bizarre and alien configurations, their hulls tapering into razor-sharp, streamlined needles until, in the final iterations, even lifting wings disappeared entirely.

After an unknowable expanse of time, total darkness washed over his vision. The simulation had ended.

Richie dared not waste a single heartbeat; a multitude of burning questions clamored in his mind.

He could not permit the Crown of Wisdom to rest upon his brow for more than a minute of physical time at most; any longer would inevitably trigger imperial suspicion. Yet that single physical minute translated into several subjective hours within the neural trance, and the flight simulation had already consumed the lion's share.

Richie resolved not to indulge in overly granular engineering queries. Having gleaned bitter experience from his first inquiry, he realized that had he phrased his prompt differently—asking merely which structural geometry was optimal for sustained flight—he would have bypassed the equations and jumped straight to the final iterations. A single glimpse was all he needed to spark practical inspiration.

Accordingly, for his second query, he asked: how could his independent corps maximize its combat strength in the shortest conceivable timeframe? The relic responded with lightning speed. Scenes of him engaged in intimate dual training with his female knights materialized before his eyes, shifting seamlessly into intense drills practicing collective battle arrays. These were the exact regimens he was already executing, bringing immense reassurance to Richie’s soul: his path was indeed the righteous one.

The visual stream blurred forward in rapid succession, bombarding Richie with an overwhelming catalog of training regimens. Many drills baffled his understanding, yet he was certain that no military academy or imperial knight order in the modern world utilized such doctrines; they were almost certainly the martial conditioning protocols employed by the warrior castes of antiquity.

True to what he had discovered on his previous immersion, the Crown of Wisdom never projected impossible fantasies: every training method demonstrated and every conditioning apparatus depicted could be fabricated with modest effort and standard materials.

Compared to the aerodynamic inquiry, this prompt was vastly simpler for the machine to resolve. In Richie's perception, barely a dozen subjective minutes elapsed before the demonstration concluded, yet the practical insights he reaped dwarfed his previous gains. Striking while the iron was hot, Richie formulated his third inquiry, seeking the Crown of Wisdom's guidance to optimize the Vajra discipline. Regrettably, the neural void remained dead and unresponsive.

Richie swiftly pivoted, asking what martial cultivation arts the ancient warriors had practiced. Still, absolute silence greeted his mind.

A scholarly hypothesis he had once read flashed through Richie’s recollection: that ancient warriors possessed no concept of martial cultivation whatsoever, needing only to achieve absolute mastery over physical techniques. This theory stemmed from archaeological excavations of primordial ruins; while the finer details eluded his memory, he recalled the central premise—that ancient soldiers possessed the capability to directly absorb ambient external energy and convert it into personal battle qi.

It was precisely that astonishing premise that had etched the passage into his mind.

After what felt like ages, Richie reached up and gently lifted the Crown of Wisdom from his head.

Glancing around the vaulted chamber, his heart finally settled. Empress Annielia was greeting a noble who had just entered, while the surrounding dignitaries still held the exact postures they had assumed when he first donned the circlet. External time had barely ticked forward.

Yet despite the brevity of physical passage, Richie was seized by profound mental exhaustion. He had felt a similar lethargy during his first experience, though he had paid it little heed at the time.

Now in retrospect, detaching conscious thought from somatic synchronization and accelerating mental processing to such staggering speeds extracted a brutal toll—namely, a devastating depletion of psychic energy.

He remembered all too clearly how, after departing the Sanctuary on that fateful day, he had remained in a daze for days on end, his cultivation temporarily regressing an entire sub-rank from mid-tier Ace back to early Ace.

Richie dared not linger near the Empress lest she perceive his mental exhaustion; with deferent care, he returned the Crown of Wisdom to its velvet pedestal.

Behaving as if nothing out of the ordinary had transpired, Richie resumed his leisurely stroll through the grand hall. Suddenly, his eye caught a lone suit of Spirit Armor resting in a quiet corner of the pavilion.

He had noticed it during his previous visit without paying it much mind, but today a subtle dissonance nagged at him.

The grand hall was reserved exclusively for enshrined Divine Armors; for a single Spirit Armor to sit among them was strikingly incongruous. Richie drifted toward the chassis, sensing that this particular suit differed fundamentally from those lining the perimeter galleries.

It was an intangible, almost spectral impression: outwardly, its silhouette and artisan detailing were virtually identical to the others, yet his instincts whispered that this chassis harbored an elusive, transcendent dimension.

Richie was oblivious that, as he approached the mysterious armor, Empress Annielia turned her head, her sharp, sovereign gaze locking intently onto his retreating figure.

This sacred Spirit Armor enshrined among the pantheon of Divine Armors was none other than the legendary *Thor*. Her enduring fascination with Richie stemmed precisely from the possibility that the boy might rise as a second Thunder Emperor, capable of forging a second *Thor*. Should that prophecy come to pass, this young knight would stand peerless under heaven—truly, unconquerably invincible.

There existed sacred lore known exclusively to the imperial house of Parkington, chief among them the ultimate taxonomy of martial ascension. The mortal world believed that the zenith of a knight's journey was the exalted title of "Sword Saint." That was an illusion; above the realm of Sword Saint lay a higher, mythical tier: "God."

It was anointed as "God" because a warrior who reached that realm wielded absolute sovereignty over life and death; neither Heavenly Knights, Sword Saints, nor even Holy Emperors possessed the power to offer the slightest resistance.

Before the emergence of a being of that magnitude, the supreme entity under heaven was never an individual mortal. Even a Sword Saint stood vulnerable before the organized might of an empire. To say nothing of the hegemonic powers leading the Dante Coalition or the Norman Alliance, even a second-tier sovereign state could execute a Sword Saint if it mobilized its full martial apparatus.

Yet against a "God," such state violence was utterly impotent. Confronted by legions numbering in the hundreds of thousands, a "God" walked where they willed, departed when they pleased, and harvested whatever lives they chose without impediment.

Mercifully, across the recorded millennia of human history, only one such sovereign had ever walked the earth. And by divine fortune, that peerless warrior had been the fiercely devoted follower of the First Holy Emperor—the bedrock upon which the enduring hegemony of the Parkington Holy Kingdom had been forged.

Yet that alone was not why Annielia had instructed her daughter to bind the youth to their cause with every feminine wile. By ruthless imperial calculation, an entity capable of growing into an uncontrollable harbinger of destruction ought to be snuffed out in its infancy.

But the First Holy Emperor had bequeathed a solemn prophecy to his bloodline: "The lineages that once knew radiant glory shall inevitably wither, fading into oblivion; only the blood of God can rekindle their ancient splendor and breathe fresh vitality into their veins."

For true scions of the Holy Emperor's bloodline like herself, nothing struck colder terror into their souls than watching the divine blood coursing through their veins thin into impotence with each passing generation.

Only sovereign descendants who had actually ascended the imperial throne knew the classified truth: of all who had worn the mantle, only the first seven monarchs truly deserved the sacred title of Holy Emperor. Beginning with the eighth sovereign, an indispensable divine capability had vanished from their blood; by the twelfth generation, yet another primordial grace was lost. And by the reign of Mary I, the Rose Empress, even the Saint Emperor's Blessing—the most foundational, sovereign gift of their lineage—threatened to fade into extinction.

The wider world remembered Empress Mary II as a sagacious yet scandalously wanton ruler who indulged in an endless procession of male consorts. Only her direct imperial scions understood the desperate calculation behind her lust: Mary II had pursued a ruthless strategy of prolific breeding to salvage the dying lineage. She bore three sons and seven daughters, leaving over a hundred grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren upon her death, among whom emerged a select few blessed with superior bloodline potency.

Subsequent generations were forced into repeated consanguineous marriages merely to stave off total dilution of the Holy Emperor's inheritance. Yet even under such desperate measures, the exhaustion of their ancestral grace was now painfully, terrifyingly apparent.