Dex Williams returned to the underground secret hideout just before the first threads of dawn cut the belly of the sky. The smell of the wet rain still clung to his black cloak, mixed with the smell of the cold blood that had been spilled and the smell of the fear he had left behind in the alleyways of Seiron. No more than a few hours remained before the false Coronation Day ceremony, hours separating the dominion of treachery from the return of the greater honor.
The atmosphere inside the secret hideout was seething with a frantic yet terrifyingly silent activity. There was no shouting or clamor, only low murmurs, the scraping of blades being honed, and rapid, calculated footsteps. Every person knew that his life, the lives of his family, and the future of the entire western province hung on what would happen at noon.
In the main hall lit by faint torches, the veteran officer Torin and Commander Okon stood over a wide wooden table spread with a detailed map of the city of Seiron.
They were distributing final orders to the commanders of the small resistance units with stern faces. "Group Alpha will take up positions in the alleys leading to the central square, do not intervene until you see the blue flames," Torin was whispering as he placed small stones on the map. "Okon, your men will handle cutting the supply routes to the regional guard barracks the moment the chaos begins. We will not allow them to reinforce Sylvester's mercenaries."
In an isolated and dark corner of the hall, far from the noise of military planning, Lumia sat cross-legged on the cold stone floor. She was surrounded by a complex geometric circle of pure mana crystals pulsing with faint beats.
Her eyes were closed, and beads of sweat glimmered on her pale forehead. She was preparing the most important and most complex enchantment in the entire battle. The air around her appeared distorted, as though gravity and light were bending at the boundaries of her circle, a sign of her terrifying manipulation of void magic.
Dex passed through the main hall with quiet steps and headed toward a narrow, well-guarded corridor leading to the deep back room. Before he opened the heavy iron door, he felt the pressure. It was no psychological pressure, it was a genuine physical pressure sitting on his chest, as though the air in this part of the underground passage had become heavier than water.
He opened the door to enter a wide room, and there stood his father. Lord Marcus Williams, the Lion returned from the depths of death.
Marcus stood in the center of the room, bare from the waist up, his massive body, bearing maps of old battle scars, appearing like a Greek statue carved from hard volcanic rock. He was performing slow and deliberate movements, testing the flexibility of his right arm, and monitoring the speed of mana flow through his vital pathways that had fully healed thanks to Dex's energy.
The aura surrounding Marcus was not merely power, it was the embodiment of pure terror. He had passed through recovery and arrived at the apex of his former power and beyond, stabilizing at the terrifying SS+ rank, a rank that placed him on the verge of becoming a legendary entity in the Empire.
The air around him visibly rippled, trembling from the intensity of the magical pressure emanating from his pores. Had Lumia not placed an advanced void seal enveloping the entire room to suppress the leakage of his energy and conceal his magical signature, the detection devices in the palace above would have sensed the presence of this ravening beast hours ago, and Sylvester would have realized his end had arrived.
"Father, how do you feel?" Dex asked in a quiet voice as he approached, placing the map scrolls he had brought from the clan leaders' meeting on the side table.
Marcus turned slowly. His eyes did not carry the usual paternal warmth, they blazed with the fire of vengeance. A savage smile, baring his teeth, spread across his hardened face. "I feel as though I am a volcano that has been suppressed, choked, and shackled for long years underground, and now... now the time for its great eruption has come." Marcus clenched his massive hand until his knuckles produced an audible crack. "My body demands battle, Dex. My blood is boiling. I want to tear the head of my treacherous brother off with these two hands, I want to see the fear in his eyes as he realizes that the poison he fed me was nothing more than fuel for my wrath."
"You will have your direct chance with him, I promise you that," Dex said with quiet firmness, placing his hand on his father's forearm to remind him of reality. "But remember the plan well, Father. Blind fury will ruin everything. Sylvester is not alone, he surrounds himself with the Shadow Organization and controls the city's array. You will be the great shock, our devastating winning card that appears at the last moment, at the moment he believes he has won, to shatter the fighting spirit of his army and destroy their will to continue."
At that moment, the iron door opened and Lumia entered. She appeared fatigued, yet her steps were steady. She joined them and looked at Marcus, then at Dex.
Dex gestured toward her as he faced his father. "Lumia is the true key to our success today. The battle does not depend on the strength of our swords alone, it depends on neutralizing his most powerful weapon. Her mission is the most dangerous by far. She must infiltrate the inner perimeter of the coronation platform and disable the Crimson Necklace hanging at Sylvester's throat."
Dex drew a deep breath to lay out the danger. "That necklace is not mere ornamentation, it is the control key for Seiron's ancient defense array. If Sylvester senses defeat, or if we attack him directly before it is disabled, a single pulse of his own mana can activate the Self-Destruct Protocol and burn the city's heart with everyone in it as a final act of revenge."
Marcus looked at the slender celestial girl with deep gratitude, mixed with genuine paternal concern. She appeared very small compared to the mission placed on her shoulders. "Are you confident in your ability to do this, my daughter? The city's array is extremely complex, it was constructed by the Empire's greatest mages centuries ago. Breaching it from a distance seems impossible."
Lumia nodded with a calm and simultaneously frightening confidence. Her clear blue eyes, after her disguise had concealed their true color, gleamed with sharp intelligence and a deep understanding of cosmic laws. She raised her hand as though explaining something simple. "Magical arrays, however complex, ultimately depend on mana flowing through specific pathways. They try to repel any alien mana that attacks them. But I, I do not attack with mana."
Lumia's eyes widened slightly as she smiled coldly. "I use void magic. I do not confront the array with opposing force, I cancel the existence of mana entirely at the point of contact between the necklace and the array. I will create a very small void, an absolute emptiness, that cuts the connection. This will give Sylvester the illusion that the necklace is functioning, but in reality it will be completely isolated. I can provide thirty seconds only of magical blindness for the array before it senses the disruption and redirects its pathways."
"Thirty seconds?" Marcus whispered, grasping the brevity of that window in a battlefield.
"Thirty seconds is sufficient to change all of history," Dex said with absolute finality, the fires of confidence blazing in his eyes. "The moment Lumia disables the necklace, I will launch the first direct assault on the platform. I will tear through the Shadow Organization's personal guard formations and force Sylvester to retreat and expose his back, and in that moment, you will enter, Father, to end the nightmare."
A majestic silence reigned in the room. The plan was drawn on a knife's edge, any error, any delay by a fraction of a second, would mean the destruction of everyone.
The three of them left the deep room and walked through a long ascending corridor until they reached a secret observation point at the hideout's entrance, looking through a camouflaged aperture between rocks onto the sky of Seiron. Dawn was approaching slowly, driving away the remnants of night. The two moons that adorned the sky of this world were drawing very slowly and ominously toward their point of convergence, heralding the rare partial eclipse expected at noon: the precise time designated for the coronation.
Dex looked at the sky that had begun to take on shades of violet and gray, then turned to his father, then to Lumia who stood beside him like a faithful shadow. He raised his hand, where a spark of blue phoenix flames blazed.
"The Williams family's crest has always been the golden lion surrounded by red flames," Dex said in a voice overflowing with power and resolve. "But tomorrow, tomorrow at noon, that gold will transform in their eyes to blue. The color of my flames forged in the forest of death, and the color of your new eyes, Lumia. Tomorrow, we will not merely reclaim the throne, we will purge this house of the rot that has gnawed its roots entirely."
Lord Marcus placed his heavy, warm right hand on the shoulder of his young son, who had become a man leading armies, and placed his left hand with tenderness on Lumia's shoulder. He looked at them both with a pride greater than any Imperial medal.
"Tomorrow," Marcus said in a deep voice that echoed through the underground passage like the true roar of a lion, "we reclaim the honor, or we are buried with it."