While tactical plans were being laid and blades sharpened in the main hall of the secret hideout, a heated and volatile debate, closer to a suppressed storm, raged in the narrow back room between Dex and his father Lord Marcus. The clay walls reinforced with timber were literally trembling from the immense pressure within.
Marcus, who had regained his health completely thanks to his new body's awakening, felt the impatience of a warrior whose hands had been bound for far too long.
His massive muscles yearned for action, for tearing and engaging, and the legendary SS+ rank mana was boiling beneath his golden skin, demanding release and eruption to discipline the rebels. He felt capable of tearing the sky apart with his bare hands, and saw no justification for waiting and hiding in sewers like thieves while the traitor sat comfortably on his throne.
"Dex, hear me well," Marcus said in a powerful, resonant voice that shook the clay walls, trying to restrain his aura to avoid crushing his son without meaning to.
"I see absolutely no logical necessity for all this complex planning, dividing into groups, cutting the mana, and hiding in the dark like terrified rats. I am now at the peak of my power, no, I am stronger by far than I was in the days of my glory and youth. My body feels no fatigue, and the mana within me is inexhaustible."
Marcus stepped a pace toward his son, his eyes blazing with raw fury. "I can simply, in broad daylight, walk from here to the palace's main gate. No full army can stop me.
I will shatter their reinforced gates with a single blow of my fist, and I will crush Sylvester and his personal guard, his mercenaries, and his traitorous council before they even grasp what has happened or manage to draw their swords from their scabbards.
Absolute power requires no maneuvering, my son. Why do we wait until tomorrow? Why maneuver and risk our loyal men when I can end this rebellion in five minutes?"
Dex looked at his father with a glacial calm, a calm that stood in complete contrast to the room's heat and the pressure of the golden mana. Dex was not affected for a single moment by the terrifying aura of power his father radiated.
He had faced death eye to eye and plunged into phoenix flames, what was a human warrior's aura compared to the pressure of a legendary entity?
Dex understood that his father was thinking with the mindset of a Lion, a king who depends on his roar and brute force to crush threats, the customary way he had always governed. But the current situation and the current enemy required the thinking of the cunning Fox, or more precisely, the thinking of a venomous serpent biding its time for the right moment to strike at the vital point.
"I do not doubt your power and your capabilities, Father, not for a fraction of a second. You are quite literally a Natural Disaster walking on two legs, and if you were to unleash yourself, Sylvester and a thousand like him could not scratch your armor," Dex replied in a voice carrying all the respect due his father, yet with a firmness and rigidity that admitted no argument.
"But the problem is not in your power, the problem is in the nature of our enemy. Sylvester is not foolish enough to face you head-on, and above all else, he is a coward. And cowards, Father, are the most dangerous type of enemies in existence, because when cornered, they do not fight with honor, they do not play by the chivalric rules you know, but they smash the entire board."
Dex approached a small table in the corner, picked up a detailed map of the palace's ancient magical defense system, and pointed his finger at a red dot drawn with precision directly in the heart of the palace, beneath the throne hall itself.
"Sylvester currently wears an ancient magical necklace that never leaves his chest even in his sleep, a large crimson jewel considered a symbol of power," Dex resumed his explanation, his eyes fixed on the map. "You know this necklace and believe it to be nothing more than a precious stone bearing a powerful protection enchantment. But in reality it is far more than that.
I discovered through the family's forgotten records that that necklace is the Central Control Key, encoded with blood and linked directly to the ancient defense array of the entire city. That complex array our earliest ancestors built centuries ago to protect the city of Seiron from the incursions of great armies and their ambitions."
Lord Marcus's eyes widened with genuine astonishment, and his aura receded slightly as he absorbed the scale of the catastrophe his son was alluding to. "You mean, the great magical cannons hidden in the walls? Those forbidden weapons that draw their pure and compressed energy directly from the earth's core beneath the palace?"
"Yes, that is part of it, and specifically I am speaking of the Last Refuge Protocol," Dex confirmed, his face growing darker and more grave.
"If you attack the palace directly, and if Sylvester senses a genuine and lethal danger he cannot repel, especially if he sees you storming his gates with your full terrifying power and advancing toward him with heavy steps, his cowardly mind will immediately understand that his end is inevitable and that all his plans have collapsed.
And in the desperation of a cornered rat with no exit, he will decide that if he cannot rule Seiron, no one else shall rule it after him. With a single mana-saturated press on that necklace he can activate the Self-Destruct Protocol and override every safety mechanism."
Marcus swallowed, picturing the scenario. Dex stepped one more pace closer to his father and spoke with extreme deliberateness, every word falling like a heavy stone thrown into a still pond: "Activating the Protocol will detonate the compressed and stable mana reservoir beneath the palace.
That explosion will not merely kill Sylvester and us, it will erase the northern half of the city of Seiron from the map entirely, converting it into a molten glass crater. Hundreds of thousands of innocent citizens, children, women, and workers, will be reduced to ash drifting in the air in a single second, before they even realize what has happened.
Are we prepared to carry that terrifying guilt for the rest of our lives? Do you truly want to reclaim the family's glory and build your throne atop a mass grave reeking of burning human flesh?"
A heavy, suffocating, absolute silence fell over the back room. Marcus's blazing anger extinguished all at once, and the SS+ rank mana retreated into the depths of his body like a tamed beast, replaced by genuine terror at the weight of responsibility.
He understood, with his military experience, that his son was completely right. A direct confrontation or an unplanned public assassination attempt would trigger a catastrophic trap impossible to undo, turning their victory into the most hideous crime in the continent's history.
Marcus looked at his son with entirely new eyes, eyes filled with astonishment and awe. He no longer saw the young man he had known before him.
He saw a frightening military acumen, a capacity for reading the enemy's psychology, and a sweeping comprehensive view of events he had never witnessed in him before.
This precise planning and anticipation of worst-case scenarios, this was not the thinking of an inexperienced young man who had spent his life among books and servants, but the thinking of a seasoned general, a strategic devil forged and seasoned by wars.
"Dex..." Marcus said suddenly, his voice breaking the barrier of silence, while his eyes examined every detail of his son's face with a strange suspicion, a complex mixture of absolute pride and buried fear. "Tell me the truth, are you truly certain about this matter of your memory loss in that cave?
This terrifying planning, this deep knowledge of the secret defensive mechanisms whose details even I was ignorant of, this glacial coldness in assessing losses and laying plans, this is not something a man learns from reading books in a library, nor something gained from a shock in the forest. Who are you, Dex?"
Dex paused for a moment. He felt his heartbeat quicken slightly. He knew his mask was trembling before his father's perceptiveness and long experience. But he did not retreat, and allowed no tension to show in his features. He turned slowly to arrange his daggers and weapons on the table, giving his father his back for a few seconds, gathering every shred of cold composure in his nerves.
Then he looked over his shoulder and answered in a voice completely void of emotion, a voice carrying the weight of an entire continent, and the weight of a previous life lived and a dark past:
"I have forgotten how to be a victim, Father, I have forgotten how to be a pampered child who closes his eyes and waits for others to come to his rescue. The world and its harshness taught me a single harsh lesson: survival is seized with iron claws, not granted as charity. And everything you see in me now, it is the price of that survival. And that is all that matters now, reclaiming what is ours, and burning the rest."