Night Raid

Late that night, inside the royal tent, a candle lamp burned on the desk, while a calming incense burner quietly smoldered beside it, giving off the faint, clean scent of herbs. Lucia sat at the edge of the bed, carefully reading a book in his hands, The Origins of Faith in the Ude Dynasty.

As one of the oldest civilizations in human history, the Ude Dynasty had risen in the early Era of Stars and Moons roughly three thousand years ago, and the time when it became a unified, centralized kingdom could almost be traced back to the years when Sky City was first built. The Ude forebears who worshiped the "God of Craftsmen," Valestok, had once been active alongside the Ancestral Spirit Folk who worshiped the "ancestral spirits" in the central Lands Between, the region now known as the wealthiest land of Altus, and there they had established a civilization whose splendor was in no way inferior to the Storm Dynasty in the south of the continent.

However, around a thousand years ago, just as the Ude Dynasty reached the peak of its history, a great war that the history books described only in vague terms destroyed almost every civilization centered around Altus during the Era of Stars and Moons virtually overnight. The Ude Dynasty and the ancestral-spirit tribes were wiped out completely, Sky City, which had originally stood at the center of the continent as part of the Ancient Dragon Dynasty, collapsed by more than half and drifted away to the far eastern seas, and even Stormveil and Caelid, separated by tens of thousands of miles, suffered large-scale civilizational decline during the same period.

According to the oral traditions passed down among the ancient dragons, this great war was known as the "Forbidden War."

"The cause of the war, the participants, and the course of events all went unrecorded..." Lucia flipped through the scant two pages in the book that glossed over the matter with evasive wording. This phenomenon did not appear only in histories compiled by later scholars like this one; even many firsthand records passed down from centuries earlier were the same.

For some unknown reason, every person who survived that Forbidden War had chosen to keep it deeply taboo, so much so that when later generations looked back on that stretch of history, all they could feel was an eerie sensation, as if the world had been wiped clean and restarted.

Lucia tried to combine it with the game plot from his previous life to crack the mystery within, but after thinking for a long while, he still had no clue. He could only put down the book in his hands, loosen his neck and shoulders, and rise to walk out of the tent. It was now close to midnight, and the patrolling knights had already changed to the second shift. The entire camp lay still and quiet, with only the clink and scrape of the patrols' armor and the soft, soothing sound of the night wind in his ears.

Feeling the refreshing cool of the evening breeze brushing across his cheeks, he closed his eyes and took a deep breath, letting the slightly chilly air of early autumn pour into his lungs. His spiritual power spread in all directions like an enormous spiderweb, soon covering the entire camp, then expanding several hundred meters farther into the wilderness before stopping.

As an ancient-dragon demigod of pure bloodline, Lucia had discovered very early on that in terms of "focus"—or rather, "spiritual power"—he possessed a talent in no way inferior to his physical body. Although reality had no red, blue, and green bars representing HP, FP, and stamina, the attribute of focus still represented the strength of spiritual power. Once spiritual power was tempered into divine power or magic power used to cast incantations and sorceries, this attribute also directly determined how many spells an individual could cast.

Compared with those among the Storm Knights whose combat power was similar to his, Lucia's spiritual power was clearly a cut above theirs. Even without systematic training, he could now easily detect the slightest movement within a radius of one kilometer. After the dragon elders learned of this, they unanimously believed the prince would one day achieve considerable accomplishments in ancient-dragon incantations.

He calmed his mind and deliberately tried to catch the movements of the various nocturnal animals around him, using this to train his control over his spiritual power. Soon, faint movements from every direction fed information back into his mind like prey touching "spider silk"—a night falcon preparing to pounce on a hare, several fish swimming upstream, and two crickets locked in fierce battle... Wait, what was that?

Lucia's spirit jolted. In his "spiritual vision," three hundred meters due south of the camp, a restless speck of noise suddenly appeared, as if space itself had split open with a crack, constantly giving off a cold, eerie aura. Yet when he opened his eyes and looked in that direction, all he could see was a night curtain as calm as water.

Immediately afterward, more specks of noise appeared in every direction, forming an encirclement around the camp. Wisps of strange and terrifying aura spread through the air. The knights on night patrol sensed that something was wrong, but before they could determine the cause, they heard Lucia's bellow come from the direction of the royal tent: "Enemy attack!"

The instant the shout left his mouth, more than twenty layered crest patterns shaped like pupils appeared out of thin air at the locations of the noise. They burned with flames interlaced in black and white, and a bone-chilling cold spread like a tide, coating the nearby grass blades in a thin layer of frost. Figures clad in ghastly white skin robes and wearing hoods stepped out from the crests. A massive gloam-colored gemstone hung before each of their chests, and they gripped twinblades made of a material resembling white bone. Every one of them radiated the pressure of a powerful warrior that was almost tangible!

"Godskin Apostles!" Ekzykes, who had rushed out of his tent with a spear in hand, froze at first, then shouted in astonishment.

For thousands of years, the Godskin Apostles had always been a mysterious group no less enigmatic than the Black Knife Assassins. Compared with the latter, of whom occasional rumors had still circulated in recent years, they had already vanished without a trace for over a hundred years. Even the well-informed dragons knew only that they had once served the mysterious and unfathomable "Gloam-Eyed Queen," then disappeared together with her into the depths of history.

The instant he saw these people, Lucia had already darted swiftly back into the royal tent. As he gripped his blade, he released a stream of spiritual power, triggering the divine-power barrier the two elders had arranged inside the tent. In the blink of an eye, a spherical barrier wreathed in lightning and dragonflame rose from the ground in a ring outside, enclosing the entire royal tent within it.

As for going out and fighting them or anything like that, it was completely outside Lucia's considerations. In the three months after he broke out of his shell, he had already determined his own limits through repeated testing. The current him would struggle against more than two Storm Knights, let alone this group of Godskin Apostles whose average strength was that of bosses. Right now, the only thing he could do was keep himself safe and avoid adding trouble for Ekzykes and the others.

On the nameless hill to the west of the camp, Guerel noticed the abnormality almost at the same moment Lucia shouted his warning. When the Godskin Apostles appeared, she immediately chose the direction with the most enemies, preparing to launch an attack from behind. Just as she was about to leap down from the summit, a chill suddenly ran through her entire body, and at the same time a shrill howl of a sharp blade tearing through the air rang beside her ear!

The combat experience Guerel had built up over many years made her instinctively tilt her head aside, avoiding the slender sword thrusting at her from behind. At the same time, under that extreme condition, she twisted her body and slashed back with an arc of blade light!

The Dragonscale Katana collided with that slender sword with a clang, throwing off firelight like drifting fireflies. Beneath the moonlight, Guerel saw clearly the enormous figure behind her radiating terrifying pressure. It was a Godskin Noble—and the narrow-bladed slender sword in his hand, gleaming with a cold and eerie light, was the legendary, most vicious and evil sword that had slain gods and made their skin into war robes: the Godskin Stitcher!

Guerel bent her legs slightly, and her fair wrist holding the Dragonscale Katana turned. Her tall, agile figure blurred into an afterimage and shot forward in an instant! In the cold moonlight, white dragon scales covered her body like flowing water, cold and hard bone armor concealed her face, the hair at her temples transformed into fearsome dragon horns, and the arm with which she swung her blade became a dragon claw bulging with muscle!

Clang— the Dragonscale Katana struck the Godskin Stitcher that the Godskin Noble had raised horizontally to block, and vast, mountain-and-sea-like force poured down along blade and sword. Even with the Godskin Noble's huge, powerful body, he could not help staggering backward!

"Hmph," the noble sneered. "The dragon race truly deserves to be called the strongest living beings in the mortal world. Even a mere upper flying dragon can possess this level of strength after half-dragonification?"

At the same time, a similar situation was playing out in the camp below the hill. Although the sudden assault by the Godskin Apostles had inflicted a certain degree of damage on the Storm Knights, after a brief moment of shock, the flying dragon warriors immediately took the lead and launched a powerful counterattack. Even though most of them were lower flying dragons with bloodlines far inferior to Ekzykes and Guerel, after half-dragonification, they were still enough to suppress an apostle in a three-on-one or even two-on-one fight.

And in the directions where the two elders and Ekzykes were, the apostles were being beaten back step by step. In the short two or three minutes since the ambush began, nearly ten of their corpses had already been left scattered throughout the camp.

"Since you know you're no match for us, who gave you the nerve to invade the royal seat?" Guerel said coldly, while ceaselessly cutting out a tide-like sheet of blade light.

Amid this violent offensive, that Godskin Noble held his sword in one hand, his arm stretching and shrinking like rubber, always managing to block or avoid Guerel's slashes by a hair's breadth. After dodging yet another heavy chop powerful enough to split mountains and crack stone, he tapped his foot down, and his bloated body drifted lightly onto a boulder behind him. He chuckled. "Miss, you seem to have misunderstood one thing—"

"You are indeed the strongest living beings in the 'mortal world,'" he said fanatically, spreading his arms. "But we are beings who follow the Queen of Death and slay gods!"

Before his voice had faded, endless black flame surged up from beneath his feet, turning the entire mountaintop into a burning torch in an instant. Dozens of raging pillars of fire were like an impassable cage, trapping both him and Guerel here.

"I played around with you for so long in this harmless little scuffle only because my mission was merely to delay you here," the firelight reflected on the human-faced hood atop the noble's head, revealing a mocking and eerie smile. "We were born to slay gods, and only gods are worthy of us giving everything we have, without regard for life or death."

Guerel's expression changed at his words. She abruptly turned to look down the mountain. The remaining apostles had launched suicidal charges toward the two elders and Ekzykes without warning, tying down the three powerhouses, while another black-flame crest appeared outside the camp wall closest to the royal tent. Amid the blazing firelight, a second Godskin Noble killed two caught-off-guard flying dragon warriors in a flash and charged straight toward Lucia!