Cheng Shi was dumbstruck.
Before Delvo spoke, he'd been the only one stunned. But the mont Delvo roared the war prayer, Sun Miao's jaw dropped too.
He might not have known which of the two similar bows was the real one, but that voice...
The last shred of shock in Sun Miao's heart made him whip his head toward Cheng Shi, disbelief written on his face: "He's..."
Cheng Shi nodded, still reeling: "Keinlaur!"
In that instant, the two witnesses to history's truth finally linked every thread together and understood why the battlefield was rife with impossibilities.
There was no century-long vision of the Shared Law Faction. There was no creation of a new order. Nobody had told them that the "new order" Keinlaur spoke of was...
[War]!
One of the Grand Tribunal's supre rulers had, at this pivotal mont, defected to [War]!
No!
He hadn't just switch sides now. He'd been a [War] believer all along!
"We were wrong. So-called 'history' blinded us. The resources the Shared Law Faction funneled into the Tower of Logic were probably never ant to achieve so universal shared law. They were most likely kindling [War]'s flas!
What the Shared Law Faction nurtured over all these years wasn't devotion to [Order]. It was a hunger for [War]!"
Sun Miao's eyes blazed. He counted off on his fingers, piecing together Keinlaur's plan point by point.
"This is a scorched-earth extermination strategy! I always wondered why Keinlaur had been so tireless in recruiting soldiers along the border. Look at what happened: every trooper he recruited who revered [Order] is going to die in this teor fire rain feast!
He's trying to shove the entire Grand Tribunal into the abyss in one stroke, leaving it without the strength to ever climb out!
Sa for the Tower of Logic. War has ravaged it for years, and its interior is already riddled with holes. The Erudition Presidium had finally scraped together a battle line to purge the heretical scholars, and now what?
Not just the front line — the entire nation is about to be gone!
Ha! The self-proclaid geniuses of the Erudition Presidium, prideful for millennia, outplayed by a Supre Inquisitor from the Grand Tribunal!
No wonder all three nations' histories say nothing about this battle's truth. Heh. Who would record sothing this humiliating?
History is the victor's anthem and the ambitious villain's twisted slander. The one thing it never is, is an honest record of one's own disgrace.
And Keinlaur would never write it down either. The mont he killed his own slice and chose to establish the na Delvo... he was no longer an [Order] believer. He was the first War Monarch who had made a clean break with his 'old employer.' [War]'s most devout champion!
As for the title of Supre Inquisitor... the Shared Law Faction's blunder. What does that have to do with the War Monarch?
What a masterful swap of heaven and earth! What brilliant diplomacy! Turns out, the one who lost the battle was never Keinlaur. It was us, the ones reading history!"
Sun Miao was beside himself with admiration. He kept replaying everything he knew, gradually stringing together the full narrative, his eyes filled with growing awe.
"Who says [War] believers are brainless? They know patience all too well.
Co to think of it, the War Legion's 'night raid' yesterday probably wasn't a raid at all. The Keinlaurs... were using the pretext of a night raid to exchange intelligence, weren't they?
Heh. We were the real clowns, running back and forth."
"?"
'Alert! Elent detected!'
'What did clowns ever do to you!'
Cheng Shi silently rolled his eyes at Sun Miao.
He was equally stunned, but his shock extended beyond the present — it reached into "the past."
Consider: if Keinlaur was a [War] believer, then the one who killed the [Order] believer beside the Sea of Desire was actually...
!!??"
At this mont, even with the [Corruption] container in hand, nothing could suppress the shock erupting in Cheng Shi's chest.
He felt he'd stumbled upon an enormous secret. One even more terrifying than [Order]'s schism or [Chaos]'s impersonation.
If the conflicts between faiths truly had reflections in the mortal world, then the answer... was self-evident, wasn't it?
Cheng Shi shuddered. On this danger-laden battlefield, there was no ti to delve deeper. Now that he'd witnessed history's truth, it was ti to extricate himself from a battlefield about to be cratered into a basin.
But before that, there was one more matter to handle.
Cheng Shi's gaze abruptly turned toward where the Grand Tribunal's central army had been. Since that was the area blanketed by teor fire rain, where was Xiao Qi — who had been controlling the command post — right now?
Speak of the devil.
Xiao Qi was no fool. After losing a dozen-plus tad beasts to the teors, his wits and faculties had returned. His true body was more volatile than ever, but on a battlefield painted in blood and fire, volatility was actually an asset.
And so, to survive, to dodge the relentless teor barrage, Xiao Qi had sprinted toward the front line where impacts were sparse.
At first he hadn't noticed Cheng Shi or Sun Miao, nor had he witnessed Keinlaur killing his own slice. All he saw was the Supre Inquisitor lying dead amid the War Legion's formation, and his eye fell imdiately on the blood-red great bow Keinlaur had discarded on the ground.
The Startled Bow!
Du Qiyu's eyes lit up instantly.
"Son of a bitch, so the bow was in your hands all along! I should have killed you earlier! No, I should have found every last one of your doubles, tad them all into slave dogs, broken your legs, and used the bones to make a bow rack!"
Seeing his prize, he let out a cold laugh and moved to claim the bow. But at that precise mont, a thrown blade embedded itself in his path, stopping him dead.
Du Qiyu's face flushed with rage. He spun around to find the horse-faced [Folly] believer smirking at him from the distance, making a throat-slitting gesture. The ssage was crystal clear: You're dead.
This detonated the last of Du Qiyu's restraint. Or rather, the volcano of suppressed emotion he'd been sitting on finally erupted.
"Son of a bitch, I spared your life and you dare co back! Perfect! I'll rip your dog bones out for my bow rack!
And while I'm at it, I'll grind that stray dog Xiao Shi's bones to dust too! Keep smiling at , will you? You can all go to hell and cry there!"
Du Qiyu knew that engaging players now instead of grabbing the bow was unwise. But at this point, fury had consud him entirely. Heedless of consequence, he charged like a madman toward Sun Miao and Cheng Shi.
Watching this decidedly unclever scene, Cheng Shi frowned slightly.
He could tell the Du Qiyu charging at him wasn't the real Xiao Qi, just a tad beast with seventy percent resemblance. But its attitude made clear this was going to be a fight to the death.
Fine. That saved him the trouble of going to look.
...
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