"Your Majesty, working here means I get to watch a different free performance every single day!"
Bardess wailed.
The laughter of Red Maple Valley scattered along the night breeze of the summer evening, while a hundred li away, within the Hall of State Affairs, candlelight stretched several slender silhouettes to enormous lengths.
Upon the long table, the great sandtable of the Northern border gave off a cold, hard, physical texture in the faint firelight.
The mountain ranges were heaped from gray-black earth, the rivers pieced together from shards of deep-blue glazed crystal, and the miniature war-banners representing each faction's power were aligned in dense rows along the complicated borderlines.
Sophia sat upright in the seat of honor, the elaborate and heavy black Gothic skirts pooling limply across the dark carpet, her long silver hair refracting a cold, unstartled luster in the candlelight.
Her fair, delicate fingertips pinched a deep-blue chess piece representing the Mason Black Rose, hovering it in midair for a tenth of a second before pushing it forward, with utter steadiness, the distance of two squares.
"By the early morning, Delilah's marching speed had already outpaced the defensive response time of the Olan border."
Sophia's red lips parted lightly, her tone cold and clear as a flurry of broken snow sweeping across a winter wasteland, without the faintest ripple of emotion:
"The Second Army Group has now stripped away Sachi City and White Sand City in succession. Judging by the flow-trajectory of the deserters from Black Dawn Fortress, Delilah is following the breach in Olan's retreat, attempting to forcibly storm the third stronghold, Iron Wall Pass."
"Clack."
The piece settled, giving off an exceedingly crisp ring.
That faint sound made the several figures gathered on both sides of the long table simultaneously stiffen their expressions.
Irene had habitually rested her chin on the edge of the long table, idly twirling a charcoal pencil in her hand, her sapphire-like eyes fixed dead on the piece Sophia had moved.
Although within the model of her modern knowledge she understood the power of this sort of blitzkrieg, the moment she thought of Delilah's door-plank of a greatsword sweeping across Olan's defensive line, her heartbeat couldn't help but overclock a little.
"My goodness… Delilah is being far too impatient. Your Majesty, Iron Wall Pass is the last fortified gateway with high-tier defensive logic outside the Olan Royal City. There's no inside collaborator there like in the Kingdom of Sachi. If she storms it by force, Irene's stockpile of fire bottles is going to drop below the safety warning line. Had I known, I'd have made a few more for her to take along."
"She doesn't need to storm it."
Sophia swept Irene a faint glance, her pale-golden pupils brimming with the coldness of one who had seen straight through a balance sheet:
"After Tina suffered her setback at the Black Stone Fortress, she has already withdrawn seventy percent of the outer-ring survival supplies back into the royal city's core. Iron Wall Pass looks solid, but the soldiers inside have gone three days without a basic grain ration. Delilah need only aim the muzzles of the black muskets at their watchtowers, and the garrison inside will, out of hunger and panic, settle the old kingdom's pride down to the very last penny themselves."
Hearing this, Willow, standing on the other side, gently pressed up the corners of her lips.
She wore a sharp purple administrative skirt-suit, her hands folded before her abdomen, her eyes glittering with a fervent, meticulous light.
As the steward who had accompanied Sophia the longest, she understood the methods of this silver-haired queen all too well.
Her Majesty was not merely deploying troops. She was using irreplaceable material resources to strip the survival-power of the entire Olan empire, inch by inch, out of Tina's hands.
So long as Iron Wall Pass's garrison were not fools, the moment they saw the Black Bread and the notes that could be exchanged for refined salt, they themselves would dismantle the pass's physical defenses utterly clean.
"Your Majesty is entirely right."
Willow bowed slightly, her tone exceedingly soft, as though carrying a magic that could set one's heart at ease:
"According to the ledger results delivered from the black market this evening, the deputy commander of Iron Wall Pass has already, in secret, used his wife's ruby necklace through a smuggler from Iron Hammer Town to exchange for thirty Black Rose universal notes. The moment General Delilah's banner appears beneath the pass, this deputy commander will be the first to help us crank open the windlass."
"Heh… that confident creature Tina is probably staring blankly right now in the royal city's National Treasury at all those gold coins she can't carry away."
At the other end of the soft couch, Victoria, wrapped in a thick Black Rose cloak, elegantly spread open her ivory fan, hiding the faint smile at the corner of her mouth.
Granted, gold coins are always of some use whenever, but now every nation is at war, and all of them face the risk of being effortlessly wiped out. Therefore, everyone wants to obtain the more convenient, more liquid notes.
The Third Princess's golden eyes seemed exceedingly bright beneath the rustling, swaying candlelight.
She tilted her head slightly, looking at the somewhat nervous Irene and the gentle-faced Saint Daphne, and shook her head, somewhat amused, in her heart.
These two little girls—did they truly believe Her Majesty moved this piece merely to watch Delilah fight a war?
Just look at that face of Sophia's, calm to the point of being almost divine. The fifteen dependent points Olan had spent decades cultivating along its periphery were, upon Her Majesty's sandtable, nothing more than a string of numbers about to be erased.
What Her Majesty was pondering now was likely how, after Delilah shattered Iron Wall Pass's defensive logic, to gather these forty-some still-wavering neutral minor states wholesale into the Mason system at the optimal purchasing power.
This method of strangling a centuries-old empire to death with just a few scraps of paper, without expending a single soldier… it was simply more cruel, and more elegant, than the most top-tier art of war.
My dear little sister, you always walk so fast—even I am nearly unable to keep up with the frequency at which you cleanse the old era.
The Second Army Group, personally led by Delilah, after stripping away several of Olan's peripheral dependent cities one after another with the force of crushing dry rot, finally crossed the last stretch of plain and, with exceeding smoothness, pushed the front line forward to the very core of the Olan Duchy—the Olan Royal City.
When those ten thousand well-fed, fully spirited Mason heavy infantry trampled the last trace of green grass on the plain and drew up their formation a thousand paces outside the royal city, Delilah, walking at the very front, felt an unprecedented gravity flit quietly across those dark-red eyes of hers.
This colossal thing before her was entirely different from the Sachi City and White Sand City that had crumbled at a touch.
As the ruling core handed down over centuries from the old kingdom, the walls of the Olan Royal City towered to an almost exaggerated height. It was an entire face of steel defensive line, layer upon layer stacked and joined from tens of thousands of armspan-thick obsidian blocks, giving off, under the blazing sun's scorching, a cold, hard, almost suffocating physical pressure.
And atop that wall, several zhang high, behind the densely packed fine-steel crenellations, flickered a hair-raising sharpness.
"This… this isn't right, General."
The Mason adjutant beside her, while somewhat nervously calibrating the firing sight of the black musket in his hands, swallowed a mouthful of saliva, his voice carrying an incomprehensible astonishment:
"Red Maple Valley has clearly been choked off by Commander Bardess for a whole week. According to the feedback from the notes on the black market, this royal city can't even buy horse-fodder right now. So why… why do those soldiers on the wall not look like soft-legged shrimps who've starved for many days?"
Delilah pressed the heavy greatsword wide as a door-plank at her waist and did not answer at once.
Those beast-keen eyes of hers swept dead across the wall-top.
Just as the adjutant had said, the inner side of that towering obsidian wall, far from showing the anticipated signs of chaotic collapse, was instead orderly as a precision-meshed machine of the old era.
Thousands upon thousands of Olan reserve archers and crossbowmen, clad in fine-steel full-body armor, stood packed seamlessly along every arrow-crenel. Their faces taut, the giant composite bows in their hands long since drawn to half-saturated physical tension, the cold arrowheads refracting a ghostly blue venomous glint in the sunlight.
Though their faces still bore the sallow pallor of a long deprivation of fresh meat, those pairs of eyes glaring at the Mason army below the wall were filled with an almost despairing, yet utterly violent, will to die.
This was simply not the city defense an old empire on the verge of being strangled by hunger and internal strife should have.
Delilah clenched her thick palm hard, a fine layer of sweat beading in her hand.
It seemed that Tina—the queen capable of stirring up such an enormous commotion here in the Northern border—did indeed possess means of self-rescue that ordinary mortals could not imagine.
Delilah calculated silently in her heart, keenly sensing the cruel truth behind this dying flare of life atop the wall.
There was only one reason capable of making the already-fleeing, already-betraying Olan army grip their weapons anew overnight and stand upon the wall, prepared to wage the most brutal physical collision against Mason.
That woman seated upon the throne in the deepest recess had completely thrown open to these soldiers the great royal granary she had spent over a decade hoarding in secret from everyone.
On this secular battlefield without magic or divine miracle, grain and gold coin—so long as their quantity reached the terrifying degree of forming a material overflow within a single city—could indeed forcibly re-cement the cohesion that was about to collapse.
"Sister gave the gemstones to me so that Olan's bloodline might continue in the Imperial Capital."
At this moment, within the west gate-tower of the royal city, Princess Una, having just emerged from the underground crypt, was staring in terror through a thick wooden-plank window at the ten thousand Mason heavy infantry cloaked in Black Rose banners outside the city.
Her eye sockets were red. Although the carriage had already set off beside the mountain secret-path to the east, looking at those dragon-knights atop the wall—who had once again erupted with the will of a cornered beast after Queen Tina personally distributed the royal aged rice and pure-gold coins—her hands still couldn't help but tremble violently.
Sister hasn't lost… Olan hasn't lost yet!
That slut Sophia thinks that with those few scraps of spiritual paper, too stiff even to wipe one's backside, she can drain the very foundation of our Olan utterly dry on the black market. But she miscalculated Sister's boldness!
Sister has handed out all the royal barley sealed away in the crypt for ten years! Those soldiers each hold ten pure-gold old coins in their hands. Even if they can't buy refined salt at the market, so long as they follow Sister in tearing apart those Mason witches outside the city, once the war is over, the grain of the entire Northern border will be realigned into Olan's ledgers!
That traitor Delilah actually means to shatter the obsidian wall with a mere ten thousand men? This is simply throwing her life away!
So long as Sister's material overload bursts the credit of Sophia's notes, the Tribunal of the Imperial Capital will see Mason's threat. By then, that silver-haired slut sitting blankly in her Temporary Palace in Yurilland will, together with her fire-stoking stick, be utterly settled by the laws of the old era!!
Una wiped away her tears, gazing reluctantly at this royal city in which she had lived for over a decade.
Although Sister was unwilling to let her seek revenge, she absolutely had to contribute her share of effort for Olan!
Beneath the wall, within the Mason battle formation.
"General, what do we do? The fire bottles and black muskets Miss Irene provided—against an obsidian wall of this height, the output ratio of trajectory and kinetic energy drops a full two energy-tiers."
The adjutant wiped the cold sweat from his forehead, somewhat anxiously seeking Delilah's instruction.
Delilah drew a deep breath and slammed the greatsword hard into the ground.
She looked at that figure on the wall—the one concealed behind the spies, yet faintly radiating a heaven-toppling hatred, a pitch-black armored silhouette—that was Queen Tina, glaring dead at her.
The two women, across a void of several hundred paces, two gazes representing the utmost battle-strength and unwillingness of the old era, fiercely interwove in midair.
"No need to panic."
Delilah's voice was cold and hard as iron. Looking at that towering royal city, the fire of brutality deep in her eyes, far from being extinguished, burned all the more fervently.
"Her Majesty foresaw this earlier—Tina is no weakling who would lightly write the symbol of surrender on her ledger. Since she's emptied out even her last retirement reserve, that means Olan's core liquidity has already completely dried up. Pass down the order: the Second Army Group is to establish a defensive boundary on the spot, pull the black musket positions back two hundred paces, and choke off every exit route from the city in full!"
Delilah turned her head, looking at the refined-iron defensive fortifications being transported up in a continuous stream from the rear, reworked by Irene, and tugged a cruel smile from the corner of her mouth.
"She's got aged rice she can't finish eating; we've got countless wheat rice and salted meat. Since she wants to guard her mountains of gold and silver in the city and wait for death, then we'll just keep her company and wear it out. Let's see whose stomach can hold out longer within Her Majesty's precision-calculation model!!"
They had grain transported in a continuous stream from Yurilland, and could even purchase nearby from other nations. But the people of the Olan Royal City were different—they couldn't get out.
Beneath the blazing midsummer sun, the obsidian colossus-wall of the Olan Royal City, solid to the point of despair, and the all-pervading Black Rose banner of Mason that represented an epoch-transcending civilization, formally opened the final-stage deadlock standoff upon this blood-colored wasteland.
Atop the obsidian wall of the Olan Royal City, like a silent giant beast, Queen Tina stared dead at the Mason battle formation below, which had suddenly begun an orderly withdrawal and was swiftly pitching camp two hundred paces away. Her left hand resting on the crenel abruptly clenched, her fingernails nearly gouging white marks into the hard stone bricks.
She had envisioned countless matches. She thought Delilah would, relying on those fire-spewing black tubes, grow blindly arrogant and, on the momentum of consecutive victories, directly drive her troops into a forced assault. She thought Sophia would be eager to settle Olan's account and issue the most aggressive city-breaking command.
So long as the enemy dared to charge beneath a sky full of arrow-rain, she could rely on the physical height of the obsidian wall and the death-will of the National Treasury deathsworn to deal Mason a head-on heavy blow.
But she never imagined Delilah wouldn't even mount a probing attack—instead pitching camp right on the spot, striking the posture of one meaning to lock the Olan Royal City utterly inside a pen.
"Damn it… that red-haired woman—when did she become so good at keeping accounts?!"
Tina seethed inwardly with hatred.
The trump card of the royal granary was indeed useful; handing out the pure-gold coins and aged wheat had indeed forcibly cemented the soldiers' scattered souls back into place. But as Olan's supreme power-holder, Tina understood her own assets and liabilities better than anyone.
The aged rice and oats hoarded in the royal granary were indeed plentiful to a degree that could make Olan's upper echelons dizzy. But the royal city now gathered a full fifty thousand cavalry and tens of thousands of garrison infantry, plus those nobles and their families who hadn't yet starved—the supplies these tens of thousands of mouths consumed each day were an unimaginable bottomless pit.
Half a month. This was the longest survival span the royal granary could sustain under full overclocked supply.
If within half a month she could not break Mason's steel encirclement, could not reopen the supply channel through Red Maple Valley, then once these last rations were exhausted, the Olan Royal City would, overnight, become the largest and most despairing mass grave of ten thousand in the Northern border.
Delilah wanted to drag it out, but she, Tina, simply could not afford to drag it out!
"Go and summon to the Council Hall every minister who hasn't yet died off—all of them, before This Queen!"
Queen Tina whirled around abruptly, raising a cold clatter of iron armor, and pressed the hysteria of one driven to a dead end deep within her eyes hard beneath that cold, haughty mask.
Half a watch later, the black-iron great doors of the field headquarters' Council Hall were once again sealed tight.
The firelight of the eternal lamps wavered, stretching the figure of Queen Tina seated in the seat of honor, and the dozen-odd trembling Olan high ministers below, like a flock of vultures circling cold leftover scraps.
Each of the ministers now clutched heavy pure-gold coins to their breasts, the corners of their mouths even still bearing the fragrance of royal aged rice boiled into thick broth. But facing Tina's red, sinister eyes, the atmosphere within the great hall remained oppressive as the surface of a sea before a storm.
"This Queen threw open the royal granary not so that you could sit here savoring the sweetness of rice broth."
Queen Tina's right hand was wrapped in a bandage seeping threads of blood; her intact left hand slammed down upon the tabletop with exceeding weight, her tone carrying a hair-raising rationality:
"The Mason army outside the city has retreated two hundred paces away. That traitor Delilah intends to use the basest method to starve us alive within this obsidian cage. The royal granary's circulation limit is only half a month. This Queen needs you, within twelve watches, to produce a plan capable of thoroughly enraging Delilah—forcing those ten thousand Mason rabble to launch a direct physical assault upon the wall!"
The ministers exchanged a glance. The Minister of the Interior swallowed a mouthful of saliva and, trembling, stepped forward:
"Your Majesty… if you wish to enrage Delilah, this humble minister believes we could use the most primitive military-honor humiliation. Delilah spent so long in the Olan dungeon before; we could have someone hang the discarded documents stripping her of her general's status, all of them, on a windlass at the highest point of the west city gate! Then have the crossbowmen on the wall shout in unison, humiliating her as a broken-spined dog adopted by the Mason queen. With that red-haired woman's brutal temper, she will surely be unable to restrain herself and charge straight over, sword in hand!"
"Childish."
Queen Tina gave a cold snort, indifferently cutting off the Minister of the Interior's words:
"Since Delilah could be appointed by Sophia as the supreme commander of the Second Army Group, her rationality-frequency has already aligned completely with—rather than that brute of the past who knew only how to charge. If a few verbal humiliations could make her lose her precision-calculation logic, she would have died yesterday amid the chaotic ranks of the Kingdom of Sachi."
Tina's gaze swept slowly across the great hall, that fathomless stagnant water flickering with the cruelty and ruthlessness peculiar to an old-era ruler:
"Humiliating her personally is useless. To make a beast lose its reason, you must drive the knife into the core asset she cares about most."
Having heard Queen Tina set the tone, a hereditary duke standing at the lower ranks hardened his gaze and, somewhat neurotically, straightened his slightly slackened noble formal robes.
These past few days, his wild imaginings about Mason's paper hex-curse had already tormented his spirit to the brink of collapse. Now, seeing the queen prepared to take real action, those terrifying precision-calculation models of Sophia in his mind instantly overclocked into motion.
"Your Majesty is wise! Ordinary humiliation, in the eyes of that silver-haired witch, likely doesn't even count as a string of ineffective interference. The reason Delilah and Bardess can hold their composure out there is entirely because behind them, in the Temporary Palace at Yurilland, sits Queen Sophia—madly running her mind, reshaping the Order!
In the eyes of those Mason soldiers, that sixteen-year-old little girl is no longer a mortal, but the Rose True God who bestows upon them Black Bread and refined salt! Since they treat that silver-haired slut as the cornerstone of their faith, then we must, in the most brutal, most loss-be-damned manner, settle Mason's faith completely at the wall-top!
In Iron Hammer Town and the surrounding minor states, there is now no shortage of those traitors and smugglers who serve Mason with all their hearts. We can have the cavalry sally out under cover of night, go to the mountain road to the east and seize several hundred of those mud-legged peasants who've exchanged for Mason's official identity cards—even drag over the guides who transport the Black Bread in the border black market!
Bind them all to the crenellations of the obsidian wall, and before the face of the ten thousand-strong army below the city, shatter their bones inch by inch, stuff their Black Rose paper scraps into their mouths and burn them to ash!
So long as the Mason soldiers see that the price of loyalty to Sophia is such terrifying destruction, so long as Delilah sees Your Majesty using the most primitive material annihilation to trample upon Sophia's credit-promise… that red-haired woman, in order to keep Your Majesty's godhood from collapsing, will absolutely, like one gone mad, charge recklessly into the range of our heavy crossbows with those few black tubes!
This is the old era's most ruthless counterstrike against the new Order—a dimensional-reduction retaliation!!"
The moment the Duke of Tulan's voice fell, a string of sharp inhalations of cold air immediately sounded throughout the Council Hall.
Several generals who still retained a shred of knightly honor turned pale, looking somewhat tremulously at this duke—ordinarily refined and courteous, yet at this moment ferocious of face.
To bind unarmed refugees and guides to the wall-top and slaughter them—such a method had indeed completely fallen below the original baseline of warfare in the Northern border.
However, the Queen Tina seated upon the throne, upon hearing those few words about destroying Sophia's credit-promise, tugged an eerily satisfied arc across that bloodless, cold, and cruel face.
"This account the Grand Duke has reckoned suits This Queen's heart very well."
Queen Tina slowly rose to her feet, looking down from on high upon the ministers below.
The moonlight spilled through the air-vent onto her pitch-black armor, setting off that face of hers—somewhat distorted from the wound's infection—like a demon walked straight out of hell:
"Sophia likes to use Order and good days to buy people's hearts. This Queen will deliberately let the mortals of this Northern border see just how impotent and fragile those few scraps of paper that can be exchanged for sugar-bread are, in the face of Olan's absolute force of arms.
Pass the order to the cavalry centurion guarding the east gate: deep tonight, have them take two thousand light cavalry through the mountain secret-path."
Tina's intact left hand abruptly swept out, her voice shrill and mad, tearing to shreds the old empire's last hypocritical decorum:
"Go to Iron Hammer Town, go to the fringes of Yurilland! Anyone with Black Rose notes hidden in their pockets, anyone with Mason barley planted at home—seize them all back for This Queen! Tomorrow at high noon, This Queen will, upon the obsidian wall, personally give that silver-haired little queen… a most magnificent bad-debt settlement!!"
"Yes!! We will serve Your Majesty with all our loyalty!!"
The duke and the throng of ministers, driven mad by terror, cried out fervently in unison.
Throughout the Council Hall, the hysterical, fervent cries of the Duke of Tulan and the throng of ministers still hummed and echoed beneath the black-iron dome; the cruel and mad smile on Queen Tina's face had not even had time to gather itself in.
"BOOM——!!"
The tightly sealed black-iron great doors were suddenly shoved violently open from outside, the heavy iron doors slamming fiercely into the stone walls on either side, erupting in a deafening crash.
"Damned Lexi! Who gave you the gall to come barging in so recklessly at a time like this, without being summoned?!"
A thread of killing intent burst abruptly into Queen Tina's red eyes, her intact left hand slamming down upon the long desk.
Because the motion was too great, it once again tugged at the bone-cracked spear-wound in her right arm, and the pain instantly twisted her entire face for a moment.
The duke below was even more livid of face—having had his dimensional-reduction-retaliation train of thought interrupted, he wished he could draw his sword at once and settle this courier who knew not whether he lived or died on the spot.
However, that Olan Royal Guard centurion who had burst in could not even hold the minimal kneeling posture at this moment.
His whole person collapsed into the cold marble debris, his helmet askew to one side, his face ghastly pale without a trace of blood, his throat letting out an extremely terrified, almost cracking physical scream:
"Your Majesty… Your Majesty! It's bad! There's… there's movement outside!!"
"What is there to panic about! Has that red-haired demon Delilah begun assaulting the city?!"
Queen Tina clenched her teeth dead-tight, forcibly enduring the searing pain as she coldly berated him.
"No… it's not an assault on the city!"
The centurion knocked his head dead against the floor, his voice carrying a despair as if completely disintegrating, trembling violently:
"It's… it's Mason's General Delilah! She has neither set up those fire-spewing black tubes, nor advanced those ten thousand heavy infantry! She merely rode a black horse alone, single-handed, up to a distance of five hundred paces before the city, lifting a royal gemstone hunting-garment on the tip of her greatsword… She—she shouted toward the wall-top in that great booming voice of hers, saying… saying that in the mountain secret-path to the east, they caught… they caught Her Highness Princess Una, who was about to flee to the Empire!!"
"What——?!!!"
This single sentence, like an invisible specially-made lead bullet, struck the central nerve of Queen Tina's brain with precision in one ten-thousandth of a second, blasting all her madness and reason to powder at once.
"Crack!"
Queen Tina's intact left hand, from excessive force, actually gouged a hideous crack into the armrest of her throne, carved from a single block of marble.
Her whole body, like a rigid dried corpse, slowly and somewhat mechanically straightened up.
Those eyes, originally brimming with sinister stagnant water, in this instant—from extreme shock and disbelief—were suddenly filled with dense threads of blood.
Una was captured?! How could this be possible?!
She had clearly, just two watches ago, personally emptied the crypt treasury, deployed the most core royal deathsworn, and taken the desolate, remote mountain road to the east that not even Olan's mid-tier generals knew of—the carriage even hung with the camouflaged hidden insignia of the Imperial Capital's merchant guild!
In her precision-calculation model, even if the perceptual sensitivity of those ten thousand Mason heavy infantry outside the city were even higher, even if their troop density were even greater, it should have been impossible for them to extend their tentacles into a cliffside secret-path so remote that not even rabbits would relieve themselves there.
But now… that little sister upon whom she had pinned the hope of Olan's last bloodline reviving, that Una who carried a third of the National Treasury's gemstones as the capital to live on—had actually, before even crossing the critical threshold of Olan's national border, been intercepted alive and in full by Delilah?!
"Pffft…"
The extreme rush of blood reversing upward made Queen Tina's already weak shell unable to bear this spiritual heavy blow any longer; a thread of black-red fresh blood slid smoothly out from the corner of her mouth.
Within the great hall, the ministers who had originally been fervently crying out along with the Duke of Tulan, prepared to deal Mason a bad-debt settlement tomorrow at high noon, now froze stiff on the spot, each one as though struck by an immobilization spell.
Everyone looked at one another. That last shred of psychological defense, so painstakingly cemented together with aged-rice broth and old gold coins, in the face of the news of Princess Una's capture, met a wholesale collapse in an extremely short time, like a shoddy tofu-dreg project meeting a force-twelve storm.
It's over. It's all over.
This is a trap… this is an absolute, closed-loop ultimate strangulation ring covering every physical dimension of the entire Northern border!
We thought that the seizing of refugees and trampling of credit we plotted here in the Council Hall was an epoch-transcending dimensional-reduction retaliation. But in truth, that silver-haired witch sitting in the Temporary Palace at Yurilland had long since reckoned every one of our escape smuggling-routes and secret-path frequencies down to the last detail!
Princess Una took away a third of the gemstones—those were Olan's last liquid assets that could be exchanged for resources in the Imperial Capital. Now both person and goods have entirely become captured surplus on Sophia's ledger.
Her Majesty Tina still wants to use material overload to burst Mason's paper credit? Don't make me laugh! Now that even the royal house's most secret seed of fire has been treated as a plaything, called out by name beneath the city—we nobles who haven't yet died off, in the eyes of Her Majesty Sophia, are probably not even worth as much as a heap of trash to be cleared away step by step!!
"Move… follow This Queen to the wall-top!!"
Queen Tina couldn't even spare the effort to wipe the blood from the corner of her mouth; like one gone mad, she overturned the long desk before her.
Dragging that right arm, already numb and insensate, giving off a purple-black foul stench, she staggered, deep step and shallow step, toward the outside of the great hall.
When this Queen of Olan, amid the throng of ashen-faced ministers, wretchedly climbed up onto the crenellations of that towering, cold obsidian wall, the midsummer night breeze happened just then to scatter the last trace of thin mist upon the wasteland.
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