Chapter 102 Race Against Time

Torrential river waters surged forward in a roaring torrent, along whose banks a desperate group of men sprinted at breakneck speed. Faintly audible behind them came rhythmic, metallic clangs—the unmistakable ring of steel jarring against hard ground.

The Ironblood Knights who had plummeted into the river had ultimately clawed their way onto the bank, their ranks reduced to a mere score or so. The remainder had either been crushed to death by the shockwaves of the explosions, or had found themselves entombed in crippled magitech armor, unable to move until the churning waters drowned them alive within their own cockpits.

Furthermore, these surviving twenty-odd knights had scrambled ashore on opposing banks, squandering precious minutes simply regrouping. It was this fleeting margin—scarcely a handful of minutes—that offered the fleeing Omore Knights a glimmer of hope. For men of their caliber, stamina notwithstanding, devouring two or three kilometers within a single minute was well within their reach, and the relief force rushing to rendezvous with them was closing the gap with equal haste.

"Faster! I see them!"

The knight at the spearhead of the flight bellowed at the top of his lungs. Directly ahead, flickering beams of light pierced the gloom—the brilliant headlights of approaching equipment transport vehicles.

The knights behind the wheels of those transports were pushing their engines to the brink of ruin. The lead hauler was mounted with a heavy snowplow blade, though its purpose here had nothing to do with snow; it served as a brutal battering ram to carve a swath through dense brush and timber.

Trees along the path were sheared off and plowed under, crashing down before an unstoppable momentum that rivaled the devastating charge of the Wisdom King itself.

Suddenly, another concussive blast echoed from the far distance.

For the shockwave to travel this far, the detonation's yield had to have been staggering.

A chill of bitter sorrow clenched the hearts of the Omore Knights. They knew with grim certainty that their staff officer had made the ultimate sacrifice.

The overhead scanning web vanished in an instant. The bearded officer hurled a palm-sized metallic disc into the river. The gadget had maintained a continuous link with their base scanning array, providing him real-time readouts of enemy troop movements up to this very moment—and it had been one of the primary reasons the staff officer had stayed behind rather than flee with them.

From this moment forth, they were entirely on their own.

Fortunately, the relief convoy had arrived right before their eyes.

The haulers screeched to a halt, side doors kicked open with violent thuds. The interior of every vehicle was packed solid with magitech armor. The drivers leaped down, swiftly mounting their own suits before moving at once to clear a perimeter. Armor after armor was hauled down onto the turf, their chest hatches hissing open automatically.

Every motion was calculated to shave seconds off the clock; in their present predicament, every heartbeat was priceless. The two groups finally merged, and the winded Omore Knights slipped into their waiting suits without a moment's hesitation. "Squad One holds the line! Squad Two acts as decoys! Bring the salvage over—split it among yourselves!" the bearded commander bellowed, waving toward the knights clutching the sacks.

The sacks were dumped onto the dirt. Untying them revealed a heap composed mostly of severed arms and legs, alongside a meager four or five larger torso fragments and half a shattered helm. Evidently, the Francans had rigged every newly minted suit with self-destruct charges, centered along the upper chest plate.

The bearded officer redistributed the components with practiced efficiency, packing a varied assortment of critical fragments into each sack before handing one to each of the knights designated for the breakout vanguard.

The suits piloted by these vanguard knights were singularly bizarre, resembling giant mechanical fleas with twin wheels affixed to their forequarters. Clasping the sacks, the suits crouched forward until their wheels touched ground, and with a thunderous kick from their thick, hydraulic rear limbs, they launched forward like arrows loosed from a bowstring—vastly faster than gliding on roller skates.

Earlier phases of the war had demonstrated beyond dispute that rapid mobility was the future of warfare. Every power had naturally poured immense resources into maximizing ground speed, and this specialized frame was the Omore Empire's innovative answer.

The suits wove through the forest with uncanny agility and blistering velocity, outpacing even equipment transports running flat-out on paved highways.

Watching the vanguard frames vanish into the treeline, the bearded officer exhaled a quiet breath of relief. So long as these salvaged components safely reached friendly lines, the sacrifice of every last man among them would have been worth the price.

"Move, move, move! Turn the vehicles around!"

He signaled frantically with an armored arm, though his subordinates had already sprung into action.

Trees were chopped down in wide swaths, clearing a turnaround clearing twenty feet across. The rearmost two haulers began grinding their wheels to reverse direction, while the remaining transports formed a tight barricade to serve as a makeshift defensive wall. A squad of knights took up positions behind this barricade, tasked with stalling the pursuers to the bitter end.

Another detachment of knights boarded the two reversed transports and sped away down the corridor cleared through the wilderness.

As the dust of the departing trucks settled, the bearded officer nodded toward the occupant of an armored cab. The man inside was an auxiliary staff officer who promptly energized their localized scanning web. Signatures of the Alliance pursuers flared across the scanning display—the closest being the dozen or so Ironblood Knights clinging stubbornly to their wake.

"Ralph, Capton, you two hold the center! Paul, Klosso, Jakob, cover the flanks—don't let a single bastard slip past!"

Having issued his final command, the bearded officer severed the comm channel and initiated the memory wipe on their recording console. If they were prepared to stake their lives, their adversaries were no less ferocious.

A dozen eerie black shadows streaked between the trees, hurtling toward the improvised perimeter with terrifying momentum.

Those dozen-odd Ironblood Knights had unmistakably ignited their Suicide Combat Aura.

"Fire at will!"

The bearded officer roared through his armor's external loudspeakers. Instantly, the twilight forest erupted in a dazzling fury of multi-colored brilliance. Mature trees snapped like twigs and the earth itself was gouged open by sweeping arcs of Combat Aura, reducing the foremost Ironblood Knights to airborne shreds in the blink of an eye.

The Ironblood Corps remained one of the Alliance's most dreaded adversaries; the Three Great Empires of the Dante Alliance had dedicated colossal effort toward finding counters, and concentrated saturation fire was one of the few viable solutions they had discovered.

Regrettably, saturation fire was far from foolproof. Though the lead shock-troopers had been annihilated, the trailing Ironblood Knights exploited the brief lull in the barrage to breach the defensive line.

The doctrine of the Ironblood Corps was pure savagery, but this covert detachment of the Omore Empire had similarly abandoned all thought of returning alive.

In the span of a breath, an unbroken chain of detonations shook the earth.

The fallen timber from the initial clash was blasted into thousands of whizzing splinters by the secondary explosions.

Every man under the bearded officer's command was a seasoned elite, the least among them boasting the rank of Ace Knight; occupying the defensive ground gave them an additional edge, allowing them to gain the upper hand in the brutal clash of attrition.

The two knights singled out earlier held off six foes simultaneously, which, combined with those pulverized in the opening salvo, accounted for the bulk of the pursuers. By the time the dozen-odd Ironblood Knights were entirely wiped out, the defenders had suffered only three fatalities.

Before they could even mourn their fallen comrades, the staff officer inside the transport shouted through the speaker: "Hostile column closing fast from our ten o'clock!"

The warning stirred little panic among the survivors; a ruckus of that magnitude was bound to draw every garrison within earshot, and serving as a lightning rod to pull in as many pursuers as possible was their exact mission.

Yet while the Ironblood Corps cast its net far and wide to trap the bearded officer's unit, they were completely oblivious to the fact that another predator had locked onto them.

By now, the rail depot adjacent to the Ironblood Corps' garrison had descended into utter chaos. Newly loaded experimental suits were being frantically dragged from freight cars, while company after company of Ironblood Knights boarded locomotives. A train departed the station every seven or eight minutes, some steaming toward the blast site, others racing ahead to forward depots to lay ambushes.

Yet beneath the pandemonium lay an ironclad defense: every hidden outpost along the tracks had doubled its sentries, and numerous temporary checkpoints had been thrown up in plain view.

And yet, a ghostlike silhouette prowled the perimeter of this heavily fortified depot.

With predatory eyes, the specter tracked the Ironblood Knights hurrying back and forth across the tracks, stalking any who became separated from the herd and gliding soundlessly closer.

His strides were neither exaggerated nor hurried, giving the casual illusion of a leisurely stroll, yet his ground-eating speed was terrifyingly swift. More unsettling still, even as he traversed waterlogged mire, his boots left not a single footprint behind.

This proud hunter wore no magitech armor—partly out of supreme confidence that he had no need for it, and partly to evade the oppressive scanning web overhead. Aside from that unconventional contraption Richie possessed, which scarcely qualified as battle armor at all, any conventional suit would shine like a flare beneath the scanning grid.

This hunter was, of course, Korsak.

Aside from His Imperial Majesty, not a soul knew he had journeyed here; even his own adjutant believed he had merely departed to deliver an audience report to the Emperor.

Korsak had been circling the depot's shadows for quite some time, hesitating to strike only because a certain locomotive remained parked on the siding—a train bearing an individual who commanded his utmost wariness.

The only beings capable of giving pause to a Heavenly stage Knight like Korsak were other Heavenly stage Knights. The rank-and-file of the Ironblood Corps consisted entirely of low-tier knights whose loss cost high command little grief, but the commander of the Ironblood Corps was unquestionably a Heavenly stage master, flanked by two vice-commanders of Glorious rank.

Though Korsak held the advantage in pure martial prowess against that Francan Heavenly Knight, he was completely unarmored at present; if an open brawl erupted, he would not even have the luxury of retreat. Thus, he had no choice but to bide his time.

After roughly twenty minutes of waiting, several couriers dashed out from that specific carriage, their panicked expressions suggesting the Ironblood Corps had run into serious trouble. Sure enough, moments later, the remaining trains stationed along the platforms fired up their steam boilers in unison.

Watching the train carrying his formidable adversary chug into the distance, Korsak cast an appraising glance over the garrison left behind. At the far end of the platform stood a bulky, dark-brown magitech suit—a grotesque, neckless monstrosity whose segment-jointed torso made it look from afar like an upright beetle. This was one of the two Glorious vice-commanders, an opponent who caused Korsak no concern whatsoever. Leaping silently onto the eaves, he sprinted along the rooftops toward a secluded corner of the depot where two Ironblood Knights were posted.

Several Recon Knights were stationed on the rooftops, but Korsak paid them no heed. While a Glorious Knight could perceive the thoughts of others, a Heavenly stage Knight could discern the exact direction of any gaze; before the scouts could sweep their eyes in his direction, he had already slipped clear of their line of sight.

Nor did he fear the scouts' acoustic senses detecting his presence. Amidst the clamor and turmoil of the marshaling yard, picking out his ghostlike footfalls was an utter impossibility—though matters would have been vastly different on a quiet night when the world lay asleep.

Down below, the two Ironblood sentries were maintaining rigorous discipline, standing face-to-face while fixing their vigilant gazes upon each other's blind spot. Such a defensive posture sacrificed peripheral vision but virtually guaranteed immunity to surprise ambush—provided, of course, that the assailant shared a comparable realm of power.

Korsak descended vertically down the sheer brick wall as though sprinting on flat asphalt, gravity seemingly pivoting ninety degrees for his convenience. His movements were ethereal and bizarre, his descent faster by far than freefall, yet despite this staggering velocity, he produced not the faintest rustle—not even the whispering hiss of displaced air.

One of the Ironblood sentries caught sight of Korsak's blur, but before his reflexes could fire, a pale fingertip tapped firmly against the collarbone plating of his armor.

This point corresponded to the cockpit's upper bulkhead, directly aligning with the pilot's forehead within. In the same fraction of a second, Korsak's other index finger tapped the companion suit, plunging both men into instant unconsciousness.

Korsak did not immediately extricate the pilots from their hulls; instead, he bounded back onto the roof, vanishing toward a secluded recess of the yard. Moments later he returned bearing two corpses—charred, naked cadavers whose faces had been roasted over an open flame until unrecognizably blistered and ghastly to behold.

With clinical speed, Korsak extracted the unconscious knights, stripped them bare, dressed the charred corpses in their uniforms, and stuffed the dead men into the cockpits. He then affixed a small metallic disc to the front plating of each chassis, directly over the power cores nestled behind the breastplates.

Shouldering his two comatose captives, Korsak leaped back onto the rooftops. A few minutes later, two deafening booms detonated from the forgotten corner, the concussive blasts reducing a dozen paces of platform and adjacent brickwork to smoking rubble and throwing the entire depot into fresh pandemonium.

"What? The rail depot was attacked again?"

Within the imperial palace of the Franca Empire, a square-faced, middle-aged monarch slammed his palm down, instantly shattering a massive hardwood desk into kindling.

Flanking attendants stood frozen like winter cicadas, while even the reporting generals hardly dared draw breath.

"Why were only two sentries killed?"

George V was every inch the calculating warlord; having vented his wrath, his mind snapped back to frigid clarity. To incur such immense risk merely to eliminate two faceless sentries defied reason. Snatching the scattered dispatch from among the splinters, he leafed through the attached intelligence appraisals.

After reading for some time, George V tossed the parchment back to the floor in disgust. Every deduction held surface merit, yet considered collectively they produced only utter bewilderment—contradicting one another at every turn, yielding equally contradictory countermeasures.

Regarding whether to allow the Varedin military to participate in the dragnet, for instance, the analysts offered no fewer than eight opposing stances. "How progresses the search operation?"

George V demanded, turning to his staff. Much like his baffled strategists, he could only feel his way forward one step at a time.

"Your Majesty, the enemy made meticulous preparations. One contingent remains behind to delay our pursuers, while another flees at full tilt. Yet judging by their maneuvers, the fleeing group may well be a decoy intended to divert our gaze," a grizzled veteran general reported from the side. "Such elaborate orchestration proves beyond doubt that they obtained something vital."

"You mean to say Grey Feather has fallen into their hands?"

George V's eyes turned bloodshot. The Grey Feather was one of the few trump cards remaining in his arsenal, and its acquisition had been largely a stroke of fortune.

Truth be told, he had never envisioned aerial technology truly materializing on the battlefield; Grey Feather had originally been a whimsical plaything conceived by Master Poronov, completely dismissed by high command when first forged.

In truth, Grey Feather belonged to the broader Yaksha lineage. Like many armor craftsmen seeking to validate their genius, Poronov had once designed a custom Yaksha of his own.

Over the past decade, inspired by sporadic bursts of insight, the grandmaster had continually modified the frame, grafting on countless experimental innovations.

Because the Yaksha line had historically been deemed impractical for line warfare, the project had gathered dust—until Richie unveiled the Flying Yaksha. Only then had the nations of the Norman Alliance awakened to its potential, dusting off Poronov's playful experiment. Now, what His Majesty feared above all was that the Dante Alliance might leverage Grey Feather to leapfrog their flight performance even further ahead.

"Our inspectors have completed their tally, Sire. Of the fifty-two suits, fifty-one underwent total self-destruction and one was severely mangled. The enemy could not have secured an intact chassis; they have likely escaped with nothing more than fractured wreckage."

The old general offered consolingly, attempting to soften the blow.

"Even mere wreckage reveals far too many secrets."

The Emperor's countenance remained taut with dread; this was hardly good news, merely a disaster stopped short of total catastrophe.

"Could the Varedins have played some deceitful trick in this affair?"

George V shared the pervasive paranoia of his officers garrisoning Casmolina, his heart steeped in suspicion toward the Varedin Empire.

"It cannot be ruled out."

The veteran general had no intention of exonerating their ally; someone had to shoulder the blame, and since the incident transpired on Varedin soil, their hosts could hardly wash their hands clean. "And what are they doing at present?"

George V queried.

"Korsak is personally raiding a private club, and reports describe him as exceptionally agitated."

The old general answered, having thoroughly briefed himself on every development prior to seeking audience. "A private club?"

George V muttered under his breath, wondering what madness was afoot. "That notorious den of debauchery."

The general hastily clarified. George V was familiar with the establishment; in fact, he had once entertained a fleeting curiosity to inspect it himself, though considerations of imperial prestige and reputation had ultimately deterred him.

"What game is he playing? Deliberately dodging us?"

The monarch was thoroughly perplexed, refusing to believe Korsak could be so obtuse.

"The Varedins appear convinced that Trisli has been hiding there all along, accompanied by that elusive 'big fish' our intelligence failed to uncover. Several telltale clues indicate that this 'big fish' is none other than Richie Robert."

The general stated somberly.

"Richie Robert? That prodigy?"

The Emperor stiffened, acutely sensitive to the name.

"And what bloody good does knowing it now do us?"

The monarch cursed in a fit of bitter fury.

Had he learned this a mere two days earlier, he would have overturned every flagstone in Casmolina to drag the youth into chains.

"Could the Varedins have deliberately concealed their discovery? Just as they did the previous two times?"

A surge of venomous suspicion toward the Varedins gripped his heart once more.

This marked the third offense: first had been the intelligence that the Dante Alliance possessed flight technology, followed by the existence of the Wisdom King. The former had been deliberate concealment, the latter gross negligence, yet both were equally unforgivable.

"It is unlikely to be deliberate, Sire."

The veteran general felt compelled to speak with measured candor; while happy to saddle Varedin with petty blame, sowing suspicions that might fracture the Norman Alliance required extreme caution. "I believe that whether it be Fat Barni or Korsak himself, they desire nothing more in this world than to capture that boy."

George V conceded the point with a sullen nod. "What do you judge our odds of capturing him to be?"

He clung stubbornly to hope. "The boy has sprouted wings; he flies wherever he pleases."

The old general gave a helpless shrug. "What worries me far more is the wreckage falling into Alliance hands. If the Varedins exert themselves, they can still intercept those infiltrators on the ground—stringing a wider cordon is hardly impossible. But while one may seal the earth, one cannot seal the sky."

Night fell in absolute darkness, yet the pursuit raged on unabated.

Despite their private squabbles, the Varedin Empire and the Franca Empire maintained strategic unity when confronted with pivotal crises.

Within these few brief hours, an immense cordon had encircled the incident zone. Establishing such a containment net was remarkably straightforward: rather than stringing infantry shoulder to shoulder, one needed only station a Psion every ten-odd kilometers, interlacing their vast scanning webs until not a sparrow could slip through unseen. By now, the Francans had abandoned their stubborn exclusion of Varedin forces, especially upon discovering an enemy suit fleeing toward the frontier at breathtaking speed.

The Ironblood Knights were renowned for speed, yet they were sovereigns only of short-range bursts, traversing twenty or thirty paces in the blink of an eye; sustained long-distance cross-country sprints were beyond their endurance.

By contrast, the Omore Empire's bizarre flea-suits had been engineered expressly for rapid evasion. On paved highways they could easily exceed one hundred and sixty kilometers per hour; even when picking through roadless timberlands where terrain sapped their momentum, they still maintained a blistering pace between eighty and one hundred kilometers an hour.

The pursuers could only gawk in helpless fury.

Their sole viable recourse was to establish forward blocking positions.

Roughly half an hour later, as additional Psions deployed and ever-larger sectors were blanketed by the scanning network, the remaining high-speed Omore frames were pinpointed one after another.

High command and the Ironblood Corps had no counter-arguments left; relying on Varedin strength had become an unavoidable necessity. Beneath the mantle of night, a vast web slowly tightened around the wilderness.

The Omore pilots had long anticipated this development. The moment the telltale pulse of a scanning web flared above their heads, they knew their final hour had struck.

They had no intention of detouring, knowing it was futile; no ground suit could outrun the spreading reach of a Psion network, and once the mesh locked into place, all avenues of retreat would be severed.

Hardening their resolve, the Omore knights drove their throttles forward in a desperate, headlong charge.

Charging headlong did not imply traveling in a straight line; they constantly weaved left and right through the brush, seeking to bedevil the interceptors. Every slight shift in their trajectory forced the closing containment units to cover far wider distances to adjust their cordon.

The first interception line loomed into view before long.

The Varedins had spared no expense, their concentrated searchlights weaving an impenetrable lattice of luminescence across the horizon.

The first Omore knight to hit the perimeter had barely cleared a forest glade when dozens of blinding beams converged on his frame, making him the initial target illuminated.

Far more dreadful than the horizontal beams was a descending pillar of light cast from the heavens—emanating from a tethered reconnaissance balloon deployed aloft.

This aerial searchlight spanned over a dozen paces in diameter, washing a massive clearing in stark, daylight clarity.

Bathed in that glaring brilliance, every intercepting Varedin knight locked onto the target's exact coordinates.

Trapped in the glare, the Omore knight slalomed between ancient trunks, continuously shifting his vector.

Simultaneously, twin shield plates snapped out from his prow, forming a wedge-shaped prow like the barbed head of an arrow.

A sword light slashed across his path, followed immediately by an overwhelming flurry of blades and polearms. Crisscrossing arcs of Combat Aura sheared through massive trunks in the blink of an eye.

The spectacle mirrored the earlier ambush against the Ironblood pursuers, though spaced slightly wider.

Whereas the Omore rearguard had held a single choke-point into which the enemy had blindly rushed, the Varedin interceptors had fanned out over a broad front with layered depth to prevent breakthroughs, making their perimeter formidable in density.

Amidst a cascade of metallic ringing, sparks showered from the wedge shields. Fast as the peculiar frame was, its turning agility was severely restricted; the pilot could manage only limited evasive maneuvers, forcing his forward plating to absorb the brunt of the onslaught.

At first, the Omore knight managed to squeeze through sparse gaps in the defensive line, but the surrounding net tightened with inexorable speed.

Suddenly, a storm of spear thrusts descended with blinding rapidity, leaving the pilot no room to react.

A screech of shearing alloy rang out as the left shield plate fractured clean in two.

In the very next instant, crisscrossing attacks ripped the Omore knight and his machine to pieces, culminating in an ear-splitting roar as the chassis detonated into an expanding fireball. Identical tragedies unfolded across the surrounding sectors.

Only two pilots succeeded in slipping past the primary interception ring. One had achieved it purely through fortune, punching through at the frayed boundary between two converging units. The second had relied on raw cunning and skill.

Possessing a sharper tactical mind, upon realizing he had been spotted, he refrained from a suicidal forward charge and instead turned parallel to the perimeter, racing along its outer rim.

The Varedins had no hope of matching his lateral velocity, and no single legion possessed the numbers to stretch indefinitely, allowing him to loop around their flank.

Yet despite bypassing the first containment line, the knight took no joy in his feat, acutely aware that the frontier lay leagues away.

Two choices remained before him.

The first was to abandon his suit, which would instantly erase his signature from the scanning web above. Yet the moment the thought surfaced, he ruthlessly snuffed it out.

Marching thousands of kilometers back to the homeland on foot was a fantasy; even should he survive, the agonizing delay would render the mission utterly pointless. Thus, only the second path remained.

Reaching forward, he depressed a solitary switch upon his cockpit control console.

The instant the toggle clicked, every scanning array within a radius of two hundred kilometers registered a piercing emergency beacon.

Because the target fell outside their direct field of view, the majority of the Psions could only discern the general vector from which the signal propagated.

The only mentalist who pinpointed the exact location was the Psion overseeing that immediate sector. Grasping the dire implications instantly, he shrieked at his messengers to summon the local interception commander without a second's delay.

"The target is broadcasting a distress signal to summon allies! The Dante Alliance has reinforcements in the area! We cannot permit this rogue to continue—crush him immediately!"

The Psion screamed the moment the legion commander entered the command tent.

"You expect me to advance my perimeter prematurely?"

The commander hesitated, terrified of overstepping his mandate. "Out of the question. Not without direct orders from General Staff."

"You demand orders? Very well!"

The Psion snapped in exasperation; overseeing the scanning network made him the direct conduit to High Command.

A full quarter of an hour was squandered in bureaucratic transmission before the Psion barked at the officer: "You have your authorization—move!"

With that, he slapped the dispatch parchment directly onto the commander's face.

Nor was this legion alone; units throughout adjacent sectors received identical directives.

In truth, Varedin high command had already deduced the true nature of the Alliance's incoming relief.

The officer assigned to investigate the private club was none other than Anderson. Upon conducting a cursory interrogation, he had verified beyond doubt that the mysterious figure behind Trisli was Richie, and had extracted Richie's general heading from the club's staff.

By the time Anderson rushed an escort company to the outlying town, Richie and Trisli had long vanished into the wind, leaving the pampered noble fops utterly clueless as to their quarry's direction.

The hounds accompanying the manhunt had caught the lingering scent of Richie and Trisli in the graveyard outside the settlement, uncovering the desecrated crypt where they had taken shelter.

The oilcloth once used to wrap the glider lay discarded within the tomb; beholding it, any investigator could readily deduce what had been concealed within.

Just as the grizzled Francan general had warned, Richie possessed wings and could soar across the heavens at whim—and the Norman Alliance possessed no foolproof counter to ground him.

For this very reason, Alliance high command could only pin their hopes on winning the race against time, desperately seeking to bag the remaining escapees before Richie could arrive.

For both sides, it was a breathless race against time.

Within the cordon, the Varedin regiments contracted their perimeter, their crisscrossing searchlight beams visible in the distance while four cumbersome observation balloons drifted sluggishly in their wake, towed along by winch trucks crawling over the rough terrain.

The encircled Omore knight offered a bitter chuckle, revving his engine as he surged toward the gap between two converging columns.

As he neared the opening, another dense lattice of searchlights flared hundreds of paces ahead. Beholding the layered defenses, he hauled on his controls to reverse course; forcing a path through multiple echelons was suicide.

Just then, a pillar of light locked onto him from above—cast from afar by an aerial balloon, its beam faint yet unmistakable.

Having witnessed its deadly efficacy before, he dared not linger, swerving hard in the opposite direction.

The primary function of the balloon searchlight was target designation. The instant it locked on, the plodding interception columns fanned out, converging on his position in a rabid charge. Suddenly, a score of searchlight beams snapped toward the sky in unison. A surge of wild exhilaration seized the Omore knight—the savior he had been waiting for had arrived! Snatching a foot-long metal tube from beneath his seat, he thrust it skyward, unleashing a brilliant pillar of crimson flame into the night.

The dazzling flare blazed vividly against the pitch-black sky, serving as a beacon to friend and foe alike. The methodical advance of the interception columns fractured in an instant; casting discipline aside and caring nothing for defensive spacing, the troops surged forward in a frenzied rush. Simultaneously, an overhead searchlight cut through the clouds, pinning its blinding glare directly upon the point of the flare's eruption.

At the apex of the beam loomed a dark silhouette resembling a hunting falcon.

The Omore knight hoisted his other arm, holding aloft the salvage sack.

The airborne silhouette suddenly split in two: one half maintained its soaring flight across the clouds, while the other plunged diagonally toward the earth.

As it neared, the falling shape resolved into sharp focus—a human figure.

Like an eagle swooping upon a hare, the diving figure dropped with pinpoint accuracy directly above the knight, snatching the parcel in an iron grip.

Seeing Trisli secure the package, Richie hauled back on the flight controls to gain altitude while engaging the winch rope that tethered them together. Trisli scrambled upward along the cord with desperate urgency.

Seeing their trajectory drifting dangerously close over the heads of the advancing columns, Richie banked sharply; with Trisli dangling below, he dared not court disaster.

Though confident the Varedins could not have improvised anti-air measures on such short notice, caution remained paramount in hostile skies.

The cable reeled in with astonishing speed, driven by a motorized winch connected directly to the glider's powerplant; within five or six minutes, Trisli was hauled safely onto the frame. Below, the lone Omore knight wore an expression of serene peace—his duty was fulfilled.

Wheeling his flea-suit around, he charged headlong into the teeth of the Varedin ranks.

At an altitude of over two thousand feet, the night air was freezing, far more biting than during daylight hours. Richie fared reasonably well, but Trisli was shivering violently. She wore only the wispy, transparent attire pilfered from the private club—scanty silk that bore the unmistakable hallmarks of that decadent establishment.

Burdened with Trisli, Richie dared not expose the secret of his rotary blades, relying solely on his Wind-Control Art to ride the air currents. To his annoyance, the scanning network below had coalesced into an unbroken blanket.

Fortunately, his airspeed was formidable, far outstripping the plodding mobility of the Varedin ground units; after thirty grueling minutes, he finally slipped beyond the perimeter of their intertwined scanning webs. The moment he broke clear of their sensory domain, he altered his flight vector.

Fingering the power bay with delicate care, Richie pried loose the spent energy crystals, opened the ventral hatch, and cast them into the abyss.

The glider lost all propulsion in an instant, truly reduced to pure unpowered gliding.

He did this specifically to evade the Psions' scanning nets, which detected the distinctive energy fluctuations emitted by charged energy crystals.

This was the exact reason Korsak had been able to stalk the rail depot and abduct two Ironblood Knights beneath their commander's nose undetected.

Yet to Richie's chagrin, while the redesigned glider boasted vastly superior speed and maneuverability under power, its dead-stick gliding ratio had deteriorated markedly; he could feel their altitude bleeding away with alarming rapidity.

Suddenly, several dazzling sparks of electricity flared from the forest floor beneath them, cutting through the pitch-black night like brilliant flares.

Richie could not be certain whether the flashes would draw Varedin scouts, but destroying the discarded crystals was an unavoidable necessity; had the enemy recovered them intact, they would have pieced together the puzzle in an instant. Tilting his ailerons, Richie veered toward a solitary mountain looming in the distance.

By the time they reached the mountain slopes, their altitude had dissipated almost entirely, allowing him to set down upon a sheltered clearing on the mountainside.

He had chosen a mountain landing because hillside timber was generally sparser and stunted, the rocky soil unable to support the towering canopy found in the lowlands.

Sound as his reasoning was, the touchdown still suffered a mishap—a snapping crack echoed as one of the empennage tail fins sheared against an outcrop.

"Can it be repaired?"

Trisli asked with genuine concern.

"I'll have to see. But even if it can't be fixed, it won't matter much—we can simply snap off the other half. It's not like the original frame ever had tail fins anyway."

Richie remarked with feigned nonchalance.

Pulling a camouflage net from his pack, Richie draped it securely over the glider before slipping beneath the fabric, with Trisli crawling in closely behind him.

Richie could feel Trisli shivering violently; laying a hand against her flesh, he found her skin as frigid as ice.

Heart aching with tenderness, he pulled her shivering form into a fierce embrace.

Trisli's slender frame stiffened in a sudden jolt. Though she had already surrendered her entire body to Richie and indulged in every manner of shameful degradation, all of it had been forced by sheer circumstance.

Her mind wrestled with tortuous ambivalence, uncertain whether she ought to let this intimacy persist.

If she yielded, resentment gnawed at her pride, knowing she would remain nothing more than this brat's compliant plaything.

Trisli instinctively shrank back, attempting to pull away.

Yet before she could pull free, Richie's finger stroked lightly across the swollen slit between her thighs. A jolt of electric, agonizing itch shot straight up from her core, turning her limbs to water; a wave of lust flared instantly in her lower abdomen, setting off a chain reaction that left her womanhood dripping and slick with warm moisture.

The humiliating betrayal of her own flesh filled Trisli with mingled shame and fury, leaving her with nowhere to hide. Before she could mount the slightest resistance, Richie parted her thighs and drove his rigid length forcibly into her body. Yet once buried within her depths, his assault abruptly softened into unexpected tenderness. Having bedded scores of women, he understood precisely how to handle different temperaments; an aloof prodigy like Trisli, accustomed to endless adulation, had to be conquered with measured tenderness.

Naturally, tenderness alone was insufficient without sharper leverage. Back in the private club, he had injected her relentlessly—administering potent hormonal tinctures every three hours until her most private, intoxicating crevices were peppered with needle pricks.

Such ruthless measures had been essential to bind Trisli irrevocably to him, ensuring she could never discard him once she crossed the river.

Trisli saw through his calculations with crystal clarity. Letting out a soft sigh, she collapsed against his chest, her lips brushing directly against his ear: "I want three pacts between us. First, you shall not curtail my freedom. You know full well that Robin and I are lovers; I loved her in the past, I love her now, and I will love her for all eternity."

"Agreed. I have no objection."

Richie consented with cheerful ease.

"Thank you for your understanding. In return, I shall deliver Robin into your bed."

Trisli whispered softly into his ear.

This time, Richie was momentarily at a loss whether to accept or decline.

"Second, I am a daughter of Omore; I must place the interests of my homeland first..."

Trisli continued her terms.

"No problem at all. I have never withheld my technical contributions."

To Richie's mind, collaborating with one power was no different from another; the Three Great Empires had coexisted in peace for seven or eight centuries without existential enmity, and favoring one carried little danger of alienating the others.

"Third, you must help me elevate my martial power. I refer not merely to Dual Training; I demand that you help me master the Vajra." Trisli clamped down with her inner walls, delivering a fierce, rhythmic contraction around his shaft.

The sudden clamp sent a wave of exquisite ecstasy coursing through Richie's loins, yet inwardly he groaned in dismay. The Vajra was no trivial discipline to master—not to mention someone else had already laid claim to that exact promise long before Trisli.

"Relax, I won't force you to fulfill it this very instant."

Trisli's voice softened with seductive sweetness. "For now, help me break through my bottleneck first."

She had languished at the Ace Knight rank for far too long. When she first met Richie she was already an intermediate Ace; though she feigned indifference when Lina briefly eclipsed her, she had secretly driven herself through grueling cultivation until reaching the pinnacle of late Ace rank prior to arriving in Varedin.

During their confinement in the club, she and Richie had spent at least eighteen hours of every day locked in copulation; even while slumbering, his hateful shaft had remained buried deep inside her womb. Naturally, whenever they were unobserved, they secretly engaged in Dual Cultivation. She could easily have shattered her bottleneck then to ascend into the next realm, yet because breakthroughs triggered noticeable energetic disturbances, she had prudently held back.

Taking the plunge here carried comparable perils, given that they remained deep within enemy territory. Yet attaining the rank of Honorary Knight would cause her martial prowess to explode, vastly multiplying their odds of a successful escape—a gamble well worth the risk. Having shared Dual Training countless times, the two moved into the familiar rhythm with seamless precision.

Richie felt the tight cervix deep within Trisli's passage part like a hungry mouth, widening until an irresistible suction gripped the crown of his member, drawing his hardness into the innermost sanctuary of her womb.

Rarely had any woman welcomed his advances with such voracious, uninhibited greed, which was precisely why Richie cherished Trisli with such burning passion.

Unlike Lina, Trisli placed no embargo on forbidden techniques; consequently, she was driven to the verge of death with each encounter, leading Richie to wonder at times whether she harbored the same masochistic cravings as Velia.

Hooking his fingers around Trisli's coccyx, Richie condensed his Combat Aura into fine needles and plunged them into her acupoints. This technique temporarily dissolved her instinctual defenses; otherwise, her body's reflex combat aura would retaliate automatically. In the early days, ignorance of such esoteric methods had prevented him from unleashing his full repertoire upon her.

Trisli's wrists were pinned behind her back, cinched tightly with a leather belt, while her shapely legs were bound back in a deep spread by another strap—all to restrain her violent involuntary thrashing.

Richie began to thrust, unleashing his most devastating sexual arts upon her helpless form. Trisli was overwhelmed instantly, writhing in frantic contortions with a visage twisted in exquisite agony; had she not been bound fast, her convulsions would have shaken the entire hillside.

As their Dual Cultivation deepened, Trisli's plight grew increasingly harrowing. Her fair skin flushed a vivid roseate red, every muscle cord trembling in helpless spastic tremors. She was drenched in sweat that poured from every pore, while her voluptuous core became a flooded riverbed, streams of milky, translucent secretions gushing from the point of union to slide down her rounded buttocks onto the ground.

A violent convulsion seized her without warning; Trisli's body jerked frantically, threatening to snap the leather bindings as a torrent of hot juices erupted from below, her tight passage pulsing and milking his shaft in wild spasms. This ferocious orgasm gripped her for nearly ten uninterrupted minutes before she abruptly went limp, lying as lifeless as a corpse. Only after a protracted silence did a breath of life return to her chest, her hips gradually resuming their wanton writhing... Wave upon wave of shattering climaxes followed by absolute prostration; with each ascent to the peak, Trisli was convinced her soul would be torn from her flesh, and each time she plunged from the heights, she prayed she would not have to endure another. Yet she was entirely powerless to halt it.

Equally beyond her control was the raging torrent of Combat Aura coursing through her meridians.

The aura circulated along the esoteric pathways of Heavenly Hearing; this specialized reconnaissance discipline magnified her somatic sensitivity a hundredfold, rendering the sensations and the sheer torment incomparably sharper.

Choosing to break through via Heavenly Hearing rather than her ancestral martial method was a decision she had weighed for months.

Her primary discipline was formidable; had she broken through using it, she would have reigned supreme among Honorary Knights, striking by pure instinct rather than rigid forms, divining the flaws in an opponent's guard in a microsecond, among numerous other advantages.

Yet this unconventional path would carry her vastly further in the long run.

Her ultimate ambition was to attain the legendary realm of Sword Saint. In the past, such an aspiration had seemed a distant, unattainable dream—a hollow slogan to spur herself on—yet now, the path lay illuminated before her eyes. The silver moon reached its zenith and began its slow descent into the western sky.

In high summer, the valley mists gathered early; while the sky remained dark, a dense blanket of fog rolled over the earth, rendering their position undetectable even without the camouflage netting.

At some point, a scanning web flared overhead, but it flickered offline after scarcely a quarter of an hour; mobilize as many Psions as they might, the Varedins could never blanket the entire frontier continuously, forced to ration their finite mentalists.

Once this sector had been swept clean, it signified that Richie and Trisli were utterly safe. Over an hour later, the camouflage netting rippled violently as an invisible pressure rolled outward, blasting the surrounding mists aside.

Beneath the netting, Trisli trembled in agonizing ecstasy, her porcelain skin suffused with a soft, iridescent luminescence that seemed to radiate from every pore.

With a sharp tear, the fabric of the net ripped open. Pure moonlight cascaded through the breach, washing across Trisli's naked form. In that very instant, both Richie and Trisli felt an uncanny phenomenon: the moonbeams seemed to burrow into her open pores, dissolving seamlessly into every living cell of her body.

Richie rolled over immediately, placing Trisli on top.

The crisp, silvery moonlight illuminated Trisli's bare spine and the voluptuous curve of her rounded buttocks, creating a tableau of breathtaking beauty.

Yet even more magnificent was the sensation surging between them; both felt a primal energy awakening and circulating through their flesh.

Their spent bodies were instantly replenished with explosive power, accompanied by boundless, inexhaustible vitality.

Richie felt that he could ravish her like this throughout the entire night—and ravish her in earnest, free from the restrained, measured pace he had practiced for so long.