Around the sa ti, roughly 6 kiloters away from where Sophia’s army stood, a single princess clicked her tongue within a large palanquin—no, a house—carried by a hundred n.
"Hey, Crow. What’s taking your n so long?"
The woman, with cerulean blue hair tied into a bun and dressed in a deep blue gown adorned with a fox fur stole, was none other than Tiffany Alcott, Sophia’s sister and the Second Princess of the Alcott Empire.
However, unlike her usual composed deanor, she wore a deep frown.
The reason for her distress was clear.
The Shadows she dispatched to eliminate Sophia had not yet returned.
Given the distance, it would not have been unusual for the Shadows to have returned several minutes ago. Yet, there was still no sign of them.
"No way, did your n get caught?" she whispered, her brows furrowed. "With their abilities, that shouldn’t be the case..."
The man she addressed, Crow, remained silent beside her throne.
He, too, was perplexed by the delay of his subordinates.
As the one who had trained them from the ground up, he was aware of their inhuman strength. They weren’t human in the first place, but thralls.
Nothing should be able to stop them, even if they boldly marched into Sophia’s encampnt.
Thus, this situation was entirely unexpected.
"...!"
A second later, Crow sensed familiar presences approaching—six of them.
"They’re back, my princess," he said in a deep, resonant voice.
However, before he finished his sentence, he realized sothing was off.
It wasn’t sothing he could articulate with logic; it felt as if an instinct deep within him was screaming warnings. His assassin’s intuition urged him to act.
Crow drew his dagger and positioned himself protectively in front of Tiffany. He then conjured a barrier around her, preventing the six from advancing any closer than six ters.
With no other choice, they erged from the shadows, forming two lines in battle formation before Crow. They moved without hesitation, filled with purpose.
"My princess, stay put!" Crow commanded as he prepared to engage.
He instinctively understood that the six before him were intent on eliminating the one to whom they supposedly had sworn loyalty.
As trained, the three frontliners charged at Crow, while the three behind them began their incantations.
But weirdly enough, although they should have been aiming for his life, Crow felt no killing intent. Instead, he noticed their expressions were filled with reluctance.
"You guys..."
Crow found the situation perplexing.
There was no logical reason for them to betray Princess Tiffany. More importantly, they wouldn’t dare engage him, knowing the outco would be inevitable.
CLANG!
With a swift motion, Crow swung his dagger, deflecting the flying needles. But he didn’t just send them away randomly; he redirected them back at their source.
The three needles flew with precision. One struck the forehead of the dagger user, while the other two pierced the heart and carotid artery of the two wielding curved blades. In a single move, three of them fell. Then, their bodies quickly turned to ashes, disappearing into the wind.
A swift, anticlimactic end!
Of course, before their bodies fell to the floor, Crow was already moving.
His figure blended into the shadows, and a mont later, he appeared before the three who were chanting their spells. Unlike before, they had chosen to chant a short spell, so Crow was cutting it close—no, he was actually late in stopping one of them.
A spell was completed just as he cut the throats of the other two.
A fla lance ignited in the air, shooting toward the back of the palanquin, where a single figure sat on a simple throne.
"...!"
Crow didn’t delay and moved quickly.
After cutting off the throat of the last mage, his figure vanished once more, reappearing right in front of Tiffany. He stood in the path of the flaming spear, dagger poised to deflect it.
The speed of the projectile was impressive, but it wasn’t so fast that Crow would miss.
His dagger sliced through the spell, sending both halves flying away from them.
But...
As they landed, striking the walls of the palanquin, the entire structure began to burn.
The encroaching flas moved slowly, but more than the danger or the damage, it was the disgrace of allowing such a thing to happen that weighed heavily on his mind.
"My princess, I’m so sorry!" Crow quickly apologized. "I let them damage your palanquin! I’ll accept any punishnt!"
Tiffany, staring at the six piles of ashes that had appeared in re seconds and the two flas burning behind her, sighed.
"Enough of that, Crow. You know I wouldn’t punish you anyway. First, extinguish the flas. I like this little palace of mine, and I wouldn’t want it to turn to ashes like your subordinates did."
"As you wish!" The man bowed deeply before standing up.
In the next mont, his hands moved with incredible speed, creating various intricate signs with his fingers. The complicated gestures seed to convey aning when perford in succession.
A second later, two giant water serpents materialized behind him.
As if they had lives of their own, they slithered toward the burning sections of the palanquin. Their water-ford bodies quickly extinguished the flas without actually "wetting" anything inside!
Such a remarkable level of technique and control!
Tiffany glanced behind her, then to both sides, and nodded. "Good. It’s slightly burnt, but nothing that can’t be fixed." She sighed. "But now, the problem is..."
Her gaze shot forward.
Her vision was sharper than an eagle’s.
There, in the distance, she could see small dots—Sophia’s army that had co to a standstill.
"Sophia..." she whispered. "What kind of monsters have you recruited to support your cause this ti?"
Tiffany recognized that none of Sophia’s n stood a chance against the Shadows, let alone controlled them and sent them to kill her.
However, she had been attacked, which indicated one crucial fact: there was soone else involved—soone powerful—who was present at that mont.
And this person had now beco her enemy.
The princess frowned but soon shook her head.
"Regardless, it’s likely just one or two individuals at most," she sighed. "No matter how strong they are, they can’t change my advantage in numbers. They’ll surely fall to my blade in the end, just like always."
She felt confident.
Not only because she commanded 3,000 foot soldiers and 500 mages, but also because...
CLAP!
With her clap as the signal, figures began to erge from the shadows, both within the palanquin and outside. They moved swiftly, positioning themselves strategically across the entire marching army.
Initially few in number, they quickly multiplied, and Tiffany’s grin widened with triumph.
"I brought all 10,000 Shadows from across the Empire for this day..." she declared. "Sophia, tell ... how will you overco this absolute difference in numbers?"
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