I charged straight at Gracus.

Kill him.

With cognition accelerated to the limit, I could see and feel how many faces each shard had as it skittered under my boot.

I poured every sharpened sense into felling a single man.

Even full plate has seams.

With the thunder greatsword and my strength, I could crush plate and thrust between the joins.

I unfolded House Astreos standard swordplay, Linked Thunder, twenty-one times in a row.

Tatatatatang!

I targeted Gracus’s neck, the gap between shoulder and armpit, the gap in the couter at the elbow, the gap in the poleyn at the knee.

Plate etched with protective Engravings like “Sturdy” or “Shock Absorption” was monstrously hard, but I didn’t need to cut the plate itself.

Slice!

First thrust, sever the leather tie. Second thrust, slide the blade between body and armor like peeling a shrimp shell and strip the armor off. Third thrust, draw blood.

A craft that demanded enough speed and enough precision.

I had both.

Tatatatatang!

“Aaagh!”

Blood spattered from the thicker parts of Gracus’s body.

But even bleeding, he drove in and swung a maul with a head the size of a man’s skull.

Whoom!

It carried the force to pulp me armor and all, and voltage enough to sear nerves in a single stroke.

If it hit, anyway.

“Hah!”

Nereus, a half-beat slower than me, slammed in with the charge technique Heat Wave.

Boom!

A Blue Knight over two meters tall threw his full weight into that blow.

Screeech!

Even Gracus couldn’t hold his ground in place.

“Gh!”

In that very posture of bringing the maul down, he was shoved long and hard.

The tiles of the paved road shattered beneath his plate-reinforced boots.

Rumble!

I leapt for his right shoulder.

The shoulder where I’d already stripped off the pauldron.

Thanks to Leg-Strength Enhancement Engravings on my boots and the Sky Shard Cloak, my jump had room to spare, and I poured that surplus into the blade.

I kicked up in the air and spun my body like a top.

Skraaaang!

I drove in with the standard form Radiant Wheel.

Retreating, Gracus jabbed his maul to open distance, but Nereus rushed again with Heat Wave.

He had to take one of the two.

So—what will you do?

Thinking that, I chopped down.

Boom!

Gracus swept his maul up from below and met my Radiant Wheel.

My technique broke mid-execution and my body lifted into the air.

Had a follow-up come right then, it might have been fatal, but Gracus had to mind Nereus as well.

He snapped out a knockback kick—Backflow Kick, a Thunder-Step derivative—and booted Nereus’s cuirass away.

“Guh!”

Nereus shuddered, body convulsing abnormally wide as he reeled.

By then I had already kicked once more and turned a full circle in the air.

I raised my blade overhead.

I unfolded Imbuement to the brink of overload.

Vmmmmm!

The thunder greatsword went fully white-hot, glowing like a lighting magi-device.

【True-Energy Guidance: 5%】

A blade carrying more than my best.

I hewed down, white electric fire bursting in strands.

Boom!

“Kh!”

The golden current veil sheathing Gracus’s body shuddered hard.

Blood spattered from him again.

“Heh… heh-heh-heh.”

Yet he burst into laughter.

“Strong. Strong, yes. Exactly—strong for your age.”

Burned and battered all over, he laughed aloud.

“You think that’s enough to beat ‘Charging’ Gracus! Academy valedictorian? The Dreaming Thunder Star? Dual adoption? Warlord? You did things Blue Knights your age can’t, and you thought that made you something?”

His face, packed with fat and muscle, twisted hideously.

“You’re just a chess piece! A piece shuttled between senior adoptees and the young lord! Did you think beating me would make you a player at the board, not a piece? Is that the arrogance with which you made Gracus your enemy?”

The maul in his hand took on the same visible color of current as my thunder greatsword.

“You’re a hundred years too early! At your current level you’ll never defeat me!”

I didn’t know what to answer to that.

I simply mapped the local battlescape with bio-radar.

With Blue Knights clashing on all sides and spewing current in ropes, the image quality was atrocious.

Unless you were a Blue Knight as adept with bio-radar as I was, you couldn’t see even a few dozen meters out.

“Right. Maybe I can’t win.”

“Hm?”

Everything was coming into order.

“But I might be able to kill you.”

“What?”

Gracus narrowed his eyes.

“My lord! We’re ready!”

Joi shouted from the Insula rooftop above.

“Don’t hit us!”

I answered while looking in third-person at the ballista crews arrayed along nearby rooftops, terraces, and alley mouths.

Fwoooom!

A cannon shot flew in and smashed into the backplate of Gracus’s cuirass.

“Ghk!”

Crackle!

The golden current veil sparking over his armor shuddered again and then re-formed.

For the force they can exert, Blue Knights are light in mass.

Pure physical force from a cannon alone made him skid a step.

It wasn’t an unavoidable shot; the fact he took it meant he was more than a little rattled.

“Retainers—Retainers are doing this!?”

Gracus cried out in a voice halfway to disbelief.

“If you don’t like Retainers, here’s a Blue Knight!”

At some point Frey had come down from the Governor’s Citadel and was charging in.

“The peerless, heaven-insulting superlative pretty boy has come to protect Lord Kyrie!”

She windmilled a greatsword thicker than her own thigh.

“Sir Kyrie!”

“Lord Kyrie!”

Behind her came other Blue Knights famed in this war.

“I’ll say it once more.”

I smiled at Gracus.

“It doesn’t matter if we don’t win. It’s enough if we can kill you.”

Gracus was more flustered than he had ever been.

Kill me?

Kyrie didn’t know it, but this shook him more than taking Nereus’s Heat Wave, Kyrie’s Radiant Wheel, even Kyrie’s Heavenstrike.

Not to win—just to kill?

Rrrrumble.

The clouds the Navigators had scattered earlier gathered again.

Ssshhhh.

Under the first drops of rain, Gracus shivered.

Yes.

Kyrie was at odds with Traysan.

To the boy before his eyes, Gracus wasn’t even a mountain that had to be crossed.

If he won, he would fabricate every manner of charge binding together Traysan, Gracus, and the Royal Stellite Line.

All he had to do was write whatever letters in Gracus’s office, on Gracus’s paper, and stamp them a few times with Gracus’s signet ring.

If he lost, it didn’t matter so long as he could preserve some portion of his army.

He would withdraw to the capital and, matching words with Princess Erica, slander Gracus.

The very fact that he had thrown his full force against a boy as young as Kyrie, as he himself had said, would stand as proof of some filthy secret.

“Urgh.”

Gracus suddenly felt small.

The tens of thousands had scattered; the dozens of Blue Knights had all fallen or been taken.

“Aaaaaaaah!”

Under this rainy sky, he alone had to stand and face Kyrie and his army.

“How dare you!”

Loneliness—that was the essence of a Blue Knight.

A life like lightning is only possible when you aren’t conscious of others.

And a life not conscious of others is, even if the person doesn’t feel it as such, in truth lonely.

[“Do you know how I climbed this high?”]

At the instant he thought he had lost everything, Gracus displayed a degree of prowess that surprised even himself.

“Whoa!”

He burst Pressure mixed with Lion’s Roar, freezing Frey’s body in place.

Crack!

The Blue Knight who had been swinging her thunder greatsword like wind lost her center, and Gracus swatted her away with the maul.

[“I too came from a nameless house.”]

Clang!

Then, with his left hand, Gracus fired a hefty lightning shell.

As it flew, it swelled and swelled in the air until it became a sphere over five meters across.

It was the electrocraft Authority, Discharge Sphere.

Crackle-crackle-crackle!

Blue Knights Hensonia and Daniel, caught in the sphere, shuddered with electrocuted bodies.

If they hadn’t been Blue Knights, the output would have burned them to the bone.

Thud!

“Ugh!”

“Ghk!”

Gracus then slammed into both of them, sending them flying into the far Insula wall.

[“The adoptees and the major cadets stole every merit from me as well.”]

Other Knights and Blue Knights who rushed Gracus fell away without lasting even a couple of exchanges.

Even Feijin didn’t last ten.

Among ordinary Knights, Feijin had comparatively high resistance to current, but Gracus’s current was ultra-high voltage even among Blue Knights.

Slash!

Regardless of whether their attacks succeeded, even just touching Gracus’s body with a weapon meant electrocution; in that hell, to carve a crescent and draw a few drops of blood was feat enough.

[“And by refusing to give anything up even then—thrashing and clawing—I became governor of this great city.”]

Gracus smashed Feijin with his fist and pinned him into an Insula wall.

[“And then you came to this land with Izmael and Andromeda at your back and looked down on me!”]

Veins corded thick over his broad face.

[“You should have kept doing that.”]

“What?”

Kyrie overlaid Pressure and Lion’s Roar at once and canceled Gracus’s voice.

Vmmm! Vmmm! Vmmm!

[“If Mutated Beasts appeared, you should have drawn your sword and run to that village right away. If your rivals saw that and said you became governor yet wouldn’t hold center, that you abandoned your city—you should have fought them too. If their backers stepped in, you should have rammed them again.”]

A voice carrying both the electromagnetic waves of Pressure and the infrasound of Lion’s Roar was no different than a sonic-arts attack out of an adventure tale.

[“When you refused to give anything up and thrashed—you would have done exactly that.”]

Keep listening and your sense of balance would go.

[“But you—no. Since becoming governor, you didn’t do that.”]

Kyrie laughed as fiercely as the electromagnetic and infrasonic weight in that voice.

“……”

Gracus shivered, not because of Pressure and Lion’s Roar, but because of what he heard.

At some point, fear beat rage.

The mere thought of losing this power terrified him.

He hadn’t lived to see today.

He had lived looking to tomorrow.

A governor must do that.

A Blue Knight must not.

Kyrie drove in, blade blazing white-hot in front.

Tatatatatatatang!

He unfurled Linked Thunder in rapid succession.

Gracus had no thought of reading and dodging those thrusts.

He was already pushing Physical Reinforcement and Neural Acceleration past the limit.

If muscle was pierced or cut, he’d pack it with current.

If nerves burned and melted, he’d pack them with current.

If he just held and landed one clean maul strike, victory was his.

Flash!

“Kh!”

Lightning fell from the sky.

Kyrie thrust Linked Thunder in.

Crackle-crackle-crackle!

“Gyaaaaaah!”

Gracus convulsed in a pain like his entire body was on fire.

What is this?

It was abnormal damage.

Bare tens of minutes ago he had taken close to ten of Kyrie’s Heavenstrikes and withstood them easily.

In the end, a thundercrafter’s Heavenstrike can’t exceed the maximum voltage that thundercrafter can produce. My voltage should be far above his.

No matter how much oil you pour onto water, the oil floats on top; no matter how many Heavenstrikes Kyrie called down, it was hard for them to punch through the current Gracus had raised and enter his body.

So Kyrie chose to stab it in directly.

“Haa, haa. Haaaa!”

It’s biting.

He dropped lightning over Gracus’s head and, at the same time, unfolded Linked Thunder so the current would ride the blade into the body.

“Are you insane?!”

Even by Blue Knight standards, the tactic made Gracus blanch.

Even lightning you, yourself, called down hurts when it hits you.

Kyrie’s attack wounded both himself and his enemy.

Of course, as much as Gracus was being stabbed by a blade, he was taking more shock than Kyrie who held only the hilt—but Gracus had more mana, so practically speaking it was mutual self-mutilation.

“Only now figured it out? That bastard’s truly insane.”

“Urk?!”

Flash!

Nereus executed the same attack as Kyrie.

“And to beat a madman, I have to go mad too!”

He dropped red lightning as he drove Heat Wave, thrusting his blade into Gracus’s body.

“Gwaaaaaaah!”

“Hah!”

Kyrie called lightning again.

【True-Energy Guidance: 5%】

I can bear this. Use only my own mana for Heavenstrike, and pour True-Energy Guidance solely into Neural Acceleration and Physical Reinforcement—the outputs between Authorities diverge hard. I can win.

Smiling inside, satisfied.

Does this bastard not feel pain? He’s really insane.

You’re not in your right mind. Neither of you are! You want us all to die together?

Under the cold, rainy sky, the fight between the three burned hotter than ever.

Chapter 97

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