Chapter 103 Breakthrough Anomalies

The cockpit hatch swung open with a slow, grinding screech, unleashing a blast of metallic stench and clotted gore that made Richie gag. Although he had claimed his fair share of lives on the battlefield, rarely had he been forced to confront the gruesome aftermath at point-blank range—and the wretch Trisli had slaughtered had met a particularly hideous end. Only now did Richie understand why she had eagerly claimed the role of executioner while delegating the scavenging of spoils to him; sifting through the carnage was thoroughly revolting work.

He gained a renewed awe for Trisli's lethal prowess. To kill an armored pilot straight through the protective shell of their magitech suit was a feat reserved exclusively for Glorious Knights; even accomplished via ambush, it remained an astounding display of martial supremacy.

The cockpit was awash with crimson. Delicately pinching the front casing open with his fingertips, Richie tried to be as meticulous as possible, yet stray smears of blood still stained his knuckles. Beneath the shattered cowling rested the glowing energy crystal, which he carefully pried free from its housing.

Just as he finished extricating the crystal, a flurry of rustling noises erupted from the adjacent thicket, and Trisli emerged at a brisk run, hoisting the wooden glider over her shoulders.

"Careful, do not snap the tailfin," Richie warned.

To repair the contraption, he had labored relentlessly from the break of dawn until two in the afternoon without taking a single breath of rest.

"If it is bound to fall off, I would rather it snap right now than when we are soaring two thousand feet in the air," Trisli replied tartly.

Her retort was devoid of any deference or gentleness.

Faced with Trisli's resurging dominance, Richie found himself speechless; the heavenly days of complete indulgence back at the club were well and truly behind them.

After fitting the harvested energy crystal into the glider's drive mechanism, Richie hoisted the lightweight craft above his head and jerked his chin toward Trisli, signaling for her to climb in first.

"My upper body might squeeze inside, but what about my hips?"

Trisli knitted her brow in deep skepticism, roughly gauging the glider's fuselage with her hands.

Shaped like a traditional lute—bulbous and wide at the front, yet tapering into a slender tail behind—the cramped craft naturally invited her doubts.

"No need to worry. We just leave the lower hatch unlatched. Your backside will be exposed to the open air, so it might get a bit chilly," Richie said with an easy shrug.

He seemed not in the least concerned by her predicament.

Trisli shot him a venomous glare; she knew full well he was playing tricks, and knew precisely what kind of indecent scheme he had in mind.

After a brief hesitation, she obediently crawled inside. Immediately, she felt his hard, thick length press firmly into her body. She had already anticipated this shameless ploy and was thoroughly resigned to his wanton impulses. Once she was settled in place, Richie broke into a rapid sprint. As he ran forward, the rhythmic jostling caused his intrusive shaft to shift back and forth within her moist folds—an awkward and embarrassing sensation, yet having endured far more overwhelming intimacy during their days together, she gritted her teeth and bore it.

Moments later, she felt him leap forcefully into the air, flattening his torso flush against her as the glider caught the wind and took flight.

Cramming two adults into a cockpit designed for a lone pilot was undeniably stifling, yet beneath the discomfort lay an unspeakable, intoxicating thrill.

"How were you so sure this contraption would actually fly like this?" Trisli could not resist asking.

Her voice was carried away by the rushing slipstream.

"Did you forget? I have pulled this off once before," Richie remarked casually.

A faint smirk played on his lips.

Memory struck Trisli at once—back in Polmo, Richie had made a similar tandem flight with Randy.

"What happened last night?" Richie asked, having held back the question for hours.

He had suppressed his curiosity all morning out of fear of attracting Varedin reconnaissance scouts, but now that they were soaring high among the clouds, that dread had vanished.

"I do not know either," Trisli answered, equally longing for an explanation.

"Perhaps it is connected to my practice of Heaven and Earth Sundering. Legend holds that at its pinnacle, this divine technique can harness the myriad forces of the cosmos, and the moon naturally belongs among them."

"You are hardly the only one who cultivates Heaven and Earth Sundering," Richie noted.

As a practitioner of a transcendent martial art himself, he was intimately familiar with the principles governing divine techniques.

"Then perhaps it is tied to our Dual Cultivation. In any case, we will have ample opportunity to study it later," Trisli replied with serene indifference.

Having broken through her bottleneck the night before to attain the rank of Knight of Honor, she had regained the cool, unruffled composure of an ancient, undisturbed well.

As the glider climbed higher into the sky, biting gusts of alpine wind poured in through the unsealed hatch. Richie shivered violently in the freezing gale; while the rest of his body could endure the chill, his exposed lower parts, slickened by the lubricating dew from their union, stung as though lacerated by icy blades whenever the draft whipped across them.

"Heh, suffering the fruits of your own mischief, are you?"

Sensing his shivering misery, Trisli let out a mocking chuckle, then reached a delicate hand downward to guide his chilled flesh.

Shifting her hips, she drew his numbed, freezing flesh tightly against her heated warmth, tucking him securely between her soft thighs and tender folds. Plummeting from bitter frost into such velvety, scorching heat sent a violent tremor coursing through Richie's spine, and with an uncontrollable spasm, his swollen shaft erupted, spilling his burning essence deep inside her. Trisli was well aware of his sudden release, which vividly resurrected the wanton scene aboard the reconnaissance balloon. This airborne coupling was scarcely any different, and the mere thought caused her breath to grow hot and ragged.

Though their entwined posture inside the narrow shell was scandalous, their merged silhouettes drastically reduced aerodynamic drag, and with Trisli present, their combined reserve of Combat Aura multiplied substantially. Had Richie flown alone, he would have been forced to land and recuperate after five or six hundred kilometers; but with Trisli continuously replenishing their power, by the time her Combat Aura neared depletion, they had already cleared the airspace controlled by the Norman Alliance.

Along the border, both the Norman Alliance and the Dante Alliance maintained cordon lines formed by interlocking reconnaissance scanning grids. Skirting around such an expansive perimeter was practically impossible, so Richie boldly piloted the craft straight through.

He had remained on edge the entire way, dreading that enemy air defenses might be waiting in ambush, but their transit proved completely unhindered and untouched by hostile fire. Even after entering Allied-controlled territory, Richie refrained from landing haphazardly, knowing the intelligence and wreckage he carried were of supreme strategic value and could brook no mishap.

Just as on the previous night, Richie selected a desolate, uninhabited mountain ridge to bring the glider down. By the time they touched earth, dusk had faded into night, and a luminous full moon hung gracefully above the treetops.

"The moon seemed even rounder last night," Richie remarked with pointed insinuation.

Trisli glared at him fiercely, understanding his innuendo all too well.

In this season of vigorous botanical growth, highland grass blanketed the slopes half a foot high; spreading a waterproof tarpaulin over the thick turf made a pallet scarcely less comfortable than a plush down mattress.

Richie had always preferred taking the dominant upper position, but on this occasion, in order to let Trisli bathe in as much lunar radiance as possible, he resigned himself to reclining beneath her. Seeing such an aloof, haughty noblewoman compelled to take the initiative was an exquisite pleasure in its own right.

Having laid out their makeshift bed, Richie noticed Trisli had not yet returned from the stream, which reminded him of an urgent task he had nearly overlooked.

Fetching a wrench and pliers from the glider's onboard maintenance kit, Richie swiftly dismantled the pair of wooden propeller blades. Having safely returned to Allied-held territory, this improvised propulsion was no longer required. Clapping his hands together, he unleashed a pulse of Combat Aura that reduced the birchwood blades to powdery sawdust in an instant, then dug a shallow pit and buried every trace.

Just as he finished tidying the ground, Trisli returned. Her hair was damp and crystalline droplets clung to her pale skin, showing she had just bathed in the nearby brook. Different women possessed their own unique allure: Lina was untamed and passionate, Merlin gentle and tender, Calli coldly alluring, and Dana heroically statuesque. Trisli's beauty, by contrast, lay in her aristocratic reserve. Standing unclad beneath the silver moonbeams, she was undeniably breathtaking.

Stepping forward, Richie wrapped his arms around her waist, overcome by an overwhelming impulse to kiss her deeply upon the lips.

"Stop. A kiss is a declaration of love, and between us there is no love whatsoever. Aside from during Dual Cultivation, you are forbidden from kissing me," Trisli commanded, spoiling the mood without remorse.

Her rebuff was brisk and uncompromising.

"Then what about making love?" Richie countered, irritation prickling his chest.

He had known many women, but rarely one so difficult to tame. To assert his absolute claim over her body, he slid his hand down between her thighs, caressing and probing her sensitive intimate core with blatant insolence.

"Mating is merely a biological imperative. It can proceed entirely without love—to say nothing of rape," Trisli replied coldly, voicing what she genuinely held to be fact rather than mere sophistry.

Her dispassionate tone made it clear she truly regarded carnal relations with clinical detachment.

Richie rolled his eyes, feeling like an utter fool for having asked such a question when he already knew her romantic affections were reserved exclusively for women. Without a doubt, her heart had been surrendered long ago to Robin, that equally peculiar girl; yet bearing an exalted knightly bloodline, Trisli was bound by duty to produce an heir, meaning she would inevitably have had to bed a man sooner or later, which explained her pragmatic mindset.

Stung by this sense of dismissal, Richie resolved to teach this proud woman a lesson she would never forget. Tracing a finger down the cleft of her rounded buttocks, he came to rest against her tight, delicate rear portal, where his fingertips held a gleaming silver sphere humming with relentless mechanical vibrations.

It was an implement capable of driving any woman to the brink of delirious torment.

Applying gradual, unrelenting pressure, Richie steadily eased the vibrating sphere into her tight aperture—a cruel punishment reserved specifically for recalcitrant women.

All strength vanished from Trisli's legs in an instant; she clamped her teeth down hard, fighting desperately not to let a whimper escape her lips.

Gathering her trembling, curled body in his arms, Richie carried her to the pallet, reclined onto his back, and slowly lowered her onto him, deliberately driving his unyielding shaft home to impale her fully.

The overwhelming dual onslaught from front and behind pushed Trisli to the very verge of fainting; she struggled instinctively to pull away, only to discover that at some point, her wrists and ankles had already been bound tight with leather straps.

Thrust to the precipice of climax from the opening instant was an intensity she had never before endured, yet the subsequent rhythm grew familiar: the pleasure escalated in tortuous increments, repeatedly bringing her to the threshold of endurance only to withhold final release, a calculated method of compounding agony and ecstasy that she loathed with a passion yet found herself helplessly craving.

Suddenly, a surging stream of Combat Aura welled up from below, wrapped in an unfamiliar outer membrane unlike anything she had felt before. Trisli was well aware of Richie's renowned unique constitution; back at the club they had refrained from this out of fear of exposing their identities, but out here in the wilderness, there were no restraints left.

After just a single meridian circuit, she realized the immense benefits firsthand, finally understanding why so many elite female knights threw themselves at this young man; after merely one cycle, her reserve of Combat Aura had tangibly multiplied.

Inhaling and exhaling through energetic resonance, the currents of Combat Aura flowed between their bodies in a continuous tidal rhythm, swelling from a slender thread into a robust cord. This was not Richie's first time engaging in Dual Cultivation with a Knight of Honor, yet the experience was unprecedented: previously, any disparity in cultivation realms meant the weaker partner held back the stronger, anchoring the overall efficiency to the lower rank. Now, however, the tempo and potency were dictated entirely by Trisli.

This seemed directly tied to her "Field," which enveloped their surroundings in an all-encompassing perimeter, drawing him completely into its influence so that the Combat Aura coursing through his meridians operated under its guidance. If Dual Cultivation had previously meant mere joint training, it had now transformed into seamless, total fusion.

The torrential influx of Combat Aura expanded so rapidly that it strained even his formidable capacity to the limit.

Prior to their departure, Loralis had forcefully propelled his Vajra discipline to the Fourth Stage, completing his physical body tempering to render his bones, viscera, and vitality vastly superior to ordinary knights, allowing him to harbor several times more Combat Aura than peers of his tier; that he felt overstretched was testament to how terrifyingly immense this shared current had become.

Imperceptibly, the extraordinary phenomenon from the previous night manifested once more: not only did Trisli begin emanating a hazy white radiance, but Richie's skin glowed in unison. Positioned with her back to the sky, the crisp moonlight cascaded across the slender curves of her spine, waist, and hips, tracing an ethereal silhouette whose shimmering aura appeared dreamlike against the lunar gleam.

In this posture she looked like a celestial goddess descended to the mortal plane, a deity enduring sweet carnal subjugation. As the moon climbed to its zenith, their shared luminescence grew ever brighter, gradually coalescing into specific acupoints across their bodies to reveal intricate, luminous patterns.

Across Richie's torso, clusters of light twinkled like celestial constellations, varying in luster, with the brightest jewel shining at the exact center of his forehead, interconnected by threads of radiance that resembled a radiant net draped over his skin. The nodes along Trisli's body were fewer in number, yet linked in unbroken, flowing ribbons, resembling an exquisite mystical tattoo.

As the night wore on past midnight, thick mists began to rise.

Fed by the nearby brook where Trisli had earlier bathed, the heavy fog rolled across the clearing in dense layers, blotting out the moonlight; robbed of the lunar rays, their radiant patterns gradually subsided, and Richie brought their movements to a halt.

Having savored the supernatural efficiency of that harmonious Dual Cultivation, returning to mundane cultivation speeds felt utterly unbearable.

"It truly appears to be linked to the moon," Richie observed, looking to Trisli for her insight.

Trisli lay draped limply across his chest, gasping for breath, her trembling limbs slick with glistening perspiration as though she had just been pulled from the depths of the river.

More than half an hour elapsed before her dizzy senses cleared; the combination of physical exhaustion and severe dehydration left her thoroughly drained of strength.

"Millennia ago, the ancients had already observed that the moon possessed arcane power. Have you never heard the legends of werewolves?" Trisli murmured weakly.

Her faint voice was muffled against his skin.

Her reference to werewolves was deliberate malice; such beasts of ancient folklore were nothing more than Awakened knights like Richie, who had presented a terrifying guise during his initial awakening and slaughtered several men.

Across history, numerous Awakened knights had shared similar berserk awakenings, which explained why superstitious ancient folk had branded them as demons and monsters.

"The only lunar connection I know is that women's monthly cycles are tied to the moon," Richie grumbled with a curse, twisting the vibrator's control dial to maximum intensity.

The silver sphere inside her buzzed with ferocious ferocity.

Trisli curled up violently, writhing in breathless, agonizing spasms; only after a full quarter-hour, when Richie deemed she had tasted enough punishment, did he finally dial the setting back.

"Do you take pleasure in provoking me?" Richie demanded.

He stared into her flushed face.

Rather than answering, Trisli countered with a strained gasp, "Since when did you become so overbearing?"

"Quite simple: from the moment I claimed you," Richie replied without hesitation.

His tone was absolute and uncompromising.

"Men are all wretched scoundrels," Trisli spat.

She turned her head aside with undisguised contempt.

Richie casually cranked the dial back to maximum, enjoying the sight of her helpless squirming as he remarked, "I know little about other men, but I learned one lesson from my father: pamper a woman all you like, but always make sure she knows who is the master of the house."

Another quarter-hour passed, convincing Richie that Trisli harbored masochistic tendencies; why else would she persist in provoking him despite knowing full well the agonizing torment that followed? On anyone else, it might be judged foolishness, but Trisli was a woman of peerless intellect.

"What time is it now?" Trisli asked once she managed to catch her breath.

Her voice was barely a whisper.

"Probably not yet three in the morning," Richie guessed, glancing lazily at the sky without bothering to consult his timepiece.

He estimated the hour purely from the shifting dark.

"Can you still sleep?" Trisli asked.

She looked up at him in the dim gloom.

Naturally, Richie was wide awake, just as he had been the night before—a truly bizarre phenomenon. Typically, lovemaking was followed by deep languor and heavy fatigue from the expenditure of physical and spiritual energy; yet these two sessions had produced the exact opposite effect, leaving him charged with surplus vigor as if possessing boundless vitality waiting to erupt.

"Do you know what is causing this?" Richie asked, abandoning his former formal deference toward her.

His tone was casual and familiar.

"I have no idea either," Trisli confessed, a rare moment of ignorance for her.

It was truly uncommon to find a topic she could not illuminate.

"If only the old uncle were here," Richie sighed.

He thought back to the enigmatic middle-aged librarian.

"Even he might not know for certain, though there is one place where the answer might be found," Trisli remarked.

Having studied under that very same librarian and holding a reader's pass of her own, she had browsed through the vast archives he oversaw.

"Where is that?" Richie's interest was instantly piqued.

His eyes brightened with curiosity.

"The Packington Imperial Palace," Trisli answered.

"The authentic, original Book of Power is housed within its royal vaults."

"The Book of Power? The uncle gave me a copy once."

Richie remembered it clearly—it was compiled entirely in foreign languages of various nations, without a single word of the Monstoke tongue.

"That was merely an abridged transcription, utterly incomparable to the original. The authentic text contains a hundred times the knowledge found in your copy," Trisli explained, her gaze filled with profound yearning.

Her longing was unmistakable.

She harbored her own private ambitions; she was the one who desperately desired to study the Book of Power, yet she understood that only by attaining the Heavenly Stage would a knight earn that privilege, exempt only for the Packington imperial lineage and the direct descendants of the Four Guardians.

Their current mission had been exceedingly hazardous, which promised equally magnificent rewards; thus she had set her sights upon the sacred text, knowing her own status might fall short, whereas Richie's unique standing might just suffice.

Having planted this seed in his mind, Trisli refrained from pressing further, aware that Richie was exceptionally shrewd and would detect her ulterior motives if she pushed too hard.

"There are still hours before dawn, and sleep is out of the question. Do you care to do something?" Trisli asked.

She raised an eyebrow in inquiry.

His member twitched slightly against her thigh: "Have you not had enough?"

Trisli's face flushed scarlet; glaring at him with a mix of coquettish fury and indignation, she snapped, "Unfasten me at once! Did you not used to spar through morning drills with Dana?"

"You just want an excuse to beat me black and blue," Richie muttered defensively.

He was allergic to morning sparring, most of his memories associated with it being bruises and pain, and Trisli had a track record of using that very pretext to thrash him in the past.

"Are you a man or not? I merely wish to test my newly acquired abilities under cover of this dense fog," Trisli provoked him.

Her words dripped with unmistakable provocation. Richie reached for the vibrator's dial, but paused his hand midway.

Subduing a woman in bed was no true feat; dominating her through genuine martial prowess was where true mastery lay.

While not typically one to gamble on chivalric bravado, he possessed newfound confidence; though Trisli still held the upper hand at present, two years from now the tables might well be turned. Reaching down, he unbuckled the leather straps binding her wrists and ankles.

The mountain mist hung heavy and thick, compounding the pitch darkness into an impenetrable blanket where one could not see one's own outstretched fingers.

Yet within the gloom, crisp cracks of discharging Combat Aura detonated at rapid intervals.

The last time Richie and Trisli had met was during his final return to Peines, where they had crossed swords; on that occasion, he had been utterly dismantled, the disparity between their capabilities an insurmountable gulf.

Meeting again after merely half a year, Richie remained at a disadvantage, yet was now able to exchange offensive and defensive maneuvers on balanced terms. The blinding fog was completely irrelevant to both: Trisli had broken through her bottleneck via Heavenly Hearing, granting her a perceptual Field that already bore the profound attributes of a Glorious Knight's Domain.

Richie was even less constrained, having long accustomed himself to perceiving the environment with his entire bodily awareness rather than relying on sight and hearing.

In this sensory arena, he held an enormous advantage.

Trisli's Force Redirection was extraordinarily formidable, an art that had caused Richie immense grief in earlier bouts, prompting him to spend the past six months deciphering its counter. Since his own Mirror Reflection technique belonged to the same family of deflection arts, analyzing its mechanics came far more naturally to him than to others.

Force Redirection was essentially an elevated method of borrowing and deflecting momentum. Countering it could be achieved through several avenues, the simplest being overwhelming brute force: if an attack was so devastating it could not be shifted, deflection was rendered useless; likewise, if a strike moved faster than she could react, the technique fell flat.

Richie, however, was not arrogant enough to meet her head-on in a clash of raw power, for her foundations were far deeper than his own; hence, he relied strictly on tactical finesse, employing techniques of sticking and entangling.

In weaponry, Richie enjoyed a distinct edge: he wielded a pair of clawed gauntlets paired with forearm bucklers, whereas Trisli fought using merely an ordinary tree branch snapped casually from the grove.

Yet infused with her dense Combat Aura, the frail bough was scarcely inferior to forged steel; her combat doctrine favored elusive dexterity over blunt force, wielding the branch with ghostlike unpredictability.

Neither pulled their strikes: pale azure sword-edge aura hissed from the tip of Trisli's branch, while Richie countered with sweeping arcs of cold, razor-sharp claw marks.

The azure sword aura expanded and contracted erratically, extending up to ten feet at its crest and retracting to less than an inch at its nadir; Richie's claw streaks appeared dim, yet severed tree trunks like paper and cleaved boulders wherever they brushed.

Suddenly, Trisli's wrist flicked, causing the branch to tremble as the sword aura dispersed; where it had previously condensed into a razor-sharp blade, it now dissolved into a translucent, nearly invisible phantom silhouette, prompting Richie to surge forward, seizing the apparent opening.

Instinctively pivoting her tip, Trisli swept the phantom blade across his path. Richie raised his arm to meet it, his shield intercepting the incoming edge.

The buckler was wafer-thin, fashioned from a slender sheet of steel whose outer face had been polished to a flawless mirror sheen.

The sword aura had struck the buckler several times before, deflecting harmlessly off its reflective curve, but this impact felt fundamentally altered.

The moment they clashed, Richie detected a microscopic tremor rippling within the translucent edge.

The sensation was terrifyingly familiar—an exact replica of his own signature attack!

His claw style was derived from the Lightwheel Slash, whose essence lay in using Combat Aura merely as a scaffold to transmit high-frequency vibration waves; thus, the sheer volume of Combat Aura mattered little, the destructive potency dictated entirely by the intensity of the oscillation.

Highly economical, the technique was ideal for prolonged attrition and nearly immune to deflection, for even if an opponent bounced the supporting aura back, failing to sustain the high-frequency vibration rendered it completely toothless.

His supreme offensive skill happened to be the absolute nemesis of his supreme defensive art—a rich irony that had never troubled Richie before this moment.

True practitioners of the Lightwheel Slash were vanishingly rare, and those who mastered it fewer still; yet the impossible had just unfolded before his eyes, sending Richie leaping back in desperate retreat.

Trisli yielded not an inch, her barely perceptible blade pursuing him relentlessly like maggots clinging to bone.

Sensing mortal peril, Richie urgently activated Breath Concealment—the life-saving secret art imparted to him by Loralis, descendant of the Shadow King, prior to their expedition.

The art proved instantly effective: the moment his aura vanished, the psychic focus locked onto him shattered, causing her pursuing blade to lose its quarry.

Trisli reacted with razor sharpness, immediately fanning her sword aura into a sweeping web of strikes that engulfed the entire sector ahead of her.

Flushed from his invisible redoubt, Richie scrambled backward, instantly re-engaging his Breath Concealment.

"Haha, Annielia truly invested heavily in you, even passing along the Shadow King's signature secret art," Trisli chuckled, seeing right through his maneuver.

Vanishing entirely from an opponent's perception was the peerless trademark of the Shadow King's bloodline.

"Stop, stop! I surrender!" Richie called out in exasperation.

He hastily sued for peace.

"Not a chance. Keep fighting," Trisli refused flatly, accelerating the tempo of her strikes; evidently, she had been holding back until now.

Her attacks grew even more ferocious and relentless.

"Is this really necessary? Why so ruthless?" Richie cried in anguish.

"Are you trying to murder your own husband?"

"Just endure it a little!" Trisli teased with playful coquetry, though her strikes gave no quarter.

Her blade whistled with deadly precision.

Richie cursed under his breath: this was not bedplay where one could simply grit one's teeth and bear it! Yet knowing protests were futile, he could only steel himself and spar for his life.

Combat was indisputably the finest crucible for martial growth, a truth Richie had long understood; it was merely that very few people could push him to such frantic extremes anymore.

Pressed to the brink by Trisli's onslaught, the dormant potential within his bones began to surface.

Richie's greatest talent lay neither in absolute offense nor impenetrable defense, but in rapid learning: having lacked formal knightly schooling, his repertoire was cobbled together from disparate sources—some gifted by Lina and Dana, others stolen and adapted from adversaries.

Seeing Trisli wield a sword aura nearly identical to his own technique, he seized upon the revelation immediately.

Originally, Lina had taught him the Lightwheel Slash to compensate for his lack of ranged attacks; yet entrenched habits died hard, and his love for close-quarters grappling had caused him to continually rework it into an intimate melee maneuver.

Now Trisli had delivered a harsh, brilliant lesson.

The secret of the Lightwheel Slash was using Combat Aura to propagate high-frequency vibration waves; previously, Richie had generated both aura and oscillations simultaneously, balancing them together as an energy weapon.

Trisli, however, took a different approach: she first forged a cohesive blade of Combat Aura, then channeled the high-frequency vibration waves along its edge.

With a fierce roar, Richie unleashed his counterstrike.

A razor-straight beam of energy lanced forth from the curved blade affixed to his right index finger.

Dim and glassy like a pane of transparent crystal, it surged with unstoppable velocity; seeing Richie execute the identical maneuver, Trisli showed no surprise.

This was a recognized derivation of the Lightwheel Slash, known throughout the martial realm as the High-Frequency Vibration Wave Blade.

Compared to the Lightwheel Slash, which only a handful of individuals could master, far more knights wielded the High-Frequency Vibration Wave Blade, and in practical utility, it was arguably even more versatile.

As Trisli's sword aura and Richie's blade aura clashed in mid-air, the contrast became immediately apparent: her sword aura was clearly inferior in raw density, repeatedly severed in two, yet reformed endlessly with fluid grace; Richie's blade was sharper, but comparatively rigid. Nevertheless, it allowed him to reclaim his footing.

"An imitation never matches the original!" Richie shouted in triumph, as though he were not the one fighting from behind.

The words had scarcely left his mouth when Trisli abruptly vanished from his perception.

Before he could register her disappearance, an azure blade lanced in from his right flank, her presence snapping back into his senses the instant the strike was loosed.

Was this not the exact Breath Concealment technique Loralis had passed down to him? Richie swerved violently to dodge, cloaking his own aura at the same time; yet the moment he vanished, Trisli's signature vanished as well, turning the clash into a lethal game of blind man's bluff.

Only now did Richie fathom her true ambition: she possessed the terrifying ability to steal and mimic an opponent's secret techniques in the heat of battle.

In his memory, she had never displayed such a gift before, meaning it was almost certainly a miraculous attribute unlocked by her recent breakthrough.

Judging by how her mimicked sword aura shattered against his genuine blade, stolen arts could not rival their authentic counterparts in depth.

As the morning fog began to disperse, the two finally broke off, recognizing that continuing was pointless: stripped of stealth, Richie's raw prowess remained no match for Trisli's overwhelming foundation.

The consequence of their morning drill was that the woods bordering the riverbank had been sheared level, the ground littered with fractured limbs and pulverized boulders.

Yet this proved advantageous, sparing them the effort of clearing a runway for takeoff.

Squeezing tightly into the narrow glider once more, they resumed their tandem flight.

Perhaps because their sparring had earned Richie a measure of her genuine respect, when his body entered hers this time, Trisli revealed a delicate, demure blush across her cheeks.

Returning to Allied territory carried the great blessing of flying by day without fear of hostile pursuit, though daylight brought its own embarrassment: Richie occasionally sensed roving gazes looking up from the ground below, and Trisli, whose mental prowess exceeded his, felt them with even greater acuity.

Her heart was in complete turmoil: on one hand, the clandestine exposure brought an exhilarating surge of forbidden pleasure, even sweeping her into spontaneous climaxes on several occasions; on the other, she felt suffocated by profound shame. Back in Casmolina, she could justify her surrender as a necessary sacrifice for the realm, but out here in Allied skies, what possible excuse remained?

To banish these humiliating thoughts, Trisli forced herself to focus entirely upon her martial advancement. For ordinary warriors, attaining the rank of Knight of Honor was the crowning pinnacle of a lifetime; for someone of her pedigree, it was merely the starting gate.

Heaven and Earth Sundering was categorized as a combat technique, yet was the most peculiar of its kind, capable of seamlessly fusing into a knight's core discipline.

Because core disciplines varied from knight to knight, every cultivator's experience with Heaven and Earth Sundering was entirely unique; ancestral records served only as reference, leaving each practitioner to blaze their own trail.

For instance, this wondrous ability to mirror foreign techniques in real time had never been chronicled in any manual; regrettably, she could only replicate their external form without reverse-engineering their internal formulas, yielding creations that possessed the shape but lacked the soul.

Beyond that lay another pressing dilemma: the unprecedented efficiency of their Dual Cultivation far exceeded anything she had known, meaning that at this pace, she would encounter her next bottleneck in at most a single year.

Advancing from Knight of Honor to Glorious Knight involved two fundamental thresholds, and she had already shattered the prerequisite regarding mental power, meaning the moment she accumulated sufficient Combat Aura, she would cross into the rank of Pseudo-Glorious Knight without resistance.

In the past, such swift progress would have thrilled her beyond measure, but now she viewed it with deep apprehension.

Each martial tier demanded its own profound comprehension, and the deeper one's insights, the more dominant one stood among peers; she was hailed as a genius not merely for reaching Ace Knight at a tender age, but because she invariably stood at the absolute zenith of every rank she attained.

Yet abandoning such rapid advancement was equally unpalatable, for realm was the ultimate foundation: standing upon higher summits afforded broader horizons, revealing at a single glance mysteries that confounded lower ranks.

Above all, her ultimate aspiration was to become a Sword Saint, and the sooner she breached the Heavenly Stage, the closer she would be to that crowning destiny.

Even as the glider drifted downward toward the earth, Trisli remained ensnared in indecision, torn by the agonizing difficulty of the choice before her.

Their landing zone was a vast expanse of arid desert; prior to touchdown, Richie had withdrawn from her body, ensuring that outward appearances revealed nothing amiss.

The officer assigned to receive them was a middle-aged commander whose gaze burned like torches: towering in stature, with bristling crew-cut hair and a full beard, his weather-beaten complexion was dark and leathery, his knuckles prominent and palms encased in dense calluses.

"It is well that you have returned safely," the man called out from where he stood.

Rather than stepping forward to welcome them, he maintained a distant stance, his severe, scowling countenance at sharp odds with his welcoming words.

"Father, I am glad to see you. I did not expect you would come in person," Trisli said, her voice faltering as a pale cast washed over her cheeks.

She harbored an evident dread of her stern sire.

Beyond dread lay agonizing shame, for she knew her father's discerning eyes had already detected the lingering traces of their intimacy.

Richie had initially bristled at the reception's icy hostility, but upon discovering the man was Trisli's father, he swallowed his retort.

Still, he showed no fear, having dealt with formidable patriarchs of similar stature before—Bosrova, Caron, and to a degree, Mosalai.

Aside from Mosalai, he held little affection for the other two fathers, and the austere figure before him clearly belonged to the same mold.

Between rough men, there was little need for pleasantries; a formally trained knight would have offered polite courtly courtesies, but to a self-taught warrior like Richie, such aristocratic etiquette was meaningless.

Accompanying the commander was an entire escort company.

Two knights promptly stepped forward to hoist the glider onto a transport truck, while a third took custody of the sealed canvas bag containing the Grey Feather wreckage.

"I have heard much of your renowned name," the middle-aged knight said, striding over to stand before Richie.

Looking down from his imposing height, he planted a heavy palm on Richie's shoulder.

The pat appeared casual, yet it drove Richie into the ground like an iron peg, burying his legs calf-deep in the desert sand.

The impact sent an agonizing shockwave vibrating through Richie's skeleton, feeling as though his entire frame had been struck with a massive sledgehammer.

A warm, metallic coppery taste welled up in his throat.

Knowing that spitting out the stagnant blood would relieve internal bruising, Richie nevertheless clamped his jaws shut and forced the liquid back down.

"Father!"

Trisli glared furiously at her father; but the commander paid no heed to his daughter, his eyes widening in genuine astonishment when Richie stood rooted like an iron pillar, his physical frame reflecting the kinetic force back against the palm.

"You have mastered the Vajra?"

The middle-aged warrior asked in disbelief, his stern anger instantly replaced by open shock.

The knightly realm was brutally straightforward: all worldly titles were fleeting, and only martial might was real. In the eyes of national leadership, Richie's prestige as a master armorer far outweighed his knightly tier, but to this uncompromising traditionalist, armor craftsmen were merely auxiliary artisans serving the front lines.

"I have only recently broken through to the Fourth Stage of Vajra Might," Richie answered with feigned humility.

Though his tone sounded modest, it was unadulterated boasting; yet any warrior present could only acknowledge his right to boast, for how many in the world dared cultivate this punishing divine art, and how few among them ever succeeded?

"Impressive, truly impressive. If an opportunity arises, I would relish the chance to cross blades with you," Trisli's father said, this time without an ounce of sarcasm.

He genuinely wished to test the young man's true combat prowess.

Raw tier did not automatically guarantee combat supremacy, nor did mastering a divine art grant effortless superiority; martial strength was a synthesis of cultivation realm, foundational discipline, combat arts, and battlefield instincts.

He no longer cared that Richie had tangled with his daughter; in fact, he found the prospect rather appealing, for should she bear a child, the offspring could inherit his prestigious family surname.

From the perspective of noble bloodline succession, Richie was far more coveted now than he would be after ascending to the Heavenly Stage, for in the knightly realm, an inexplicable law persisted: unions between two extraordinarily potent bloodlines rarely produced heirs. At present, Richie was merely an Ace Knight whose bloodline had not reached overwhelming dominance, making him capable of fathering children with powerful matriarchal lineages—an advantage that would vanish once he crossed the Heavenly threshold.

"I would be honored," Richie replied against his better judgment.

In his heart he scoffed that only an idiot would volunteer to spar with a Heavenly Stage monster, but he tactfully offered an excuse: "Regrettably, my custom magitech armor remains in the City of Heaven."

"Your suit?"

Recollection struck Trisli's father instantly: "You mean the Wisdom King that commanded such thunderous glory during the Festival of Heaven?"

"Indeed. That suit is tailored uniquely, and my full capabilities can only be unleashed while piloting it," Richie affirmed.

He was not exaggerating: at the controls of the Wisdom King, he could single-handedly duel an entire squad of Knights of Honor—and that had been his level half a year ago.

Being a dedicated martial fanatic at heart, Trisli's father immediately became captivated by the topic.

On the day of the Festival of Heaven, he had sat upon the grand VIP observation pavilion and witnessed the Wisdom King's domineering might with his own eyes.

"I heard that the craftsmanship required to forge the Wisdom King is extraordinarily difficult. Is that true?" the father inquired.

Every veteran knight who had witnessed the Wisdom King's brilliance harbored dreams of commissioning a similar masterpiece as a permanent family heirloom.

That was precisely how most illustrious ancestral heirlooms had originated.

The fabrication of the Wisdom King was among the Dante Alliance's most guarded state secrets, possessed only by a handful of luminaries, leaving even senior commanders like Trisli's father in the dark.

Richie wisely maintained diplomatic silence.

Sensing the boundary, the middle-aged knight cleared his throat and patted his daughter's shoulder: "You must have suffered greatly during your mission in Casmolina. Take advantage of the respite and rest well."

Trisli cast a sideways glance at Richie; she had indeed suffered endless ordeals, yet none of them had been inflicted by the Varedins, but rather by this insatiable youth—and most tragically, her tribulations were far from over, this being merely the opening chapter.

Knowing her father's words were purely well-intentioned sympathy, she was nonetheless struck by a sudden wave of dread: how in the world was she going to draft their debriefing report?

"Will you write the mission report, or should I?" Trisli called out to Richie, leaning toward him.

Her brow was tightly furrowed.

"Report? What report?" Richie asked with utter blankness.

He looked as if the concept were foreign to his very existence.

"Never mind. Leave it to me," Trisli sighed, overcome by helpless despair.

She had hoped to pass the burden to Richie, for truth be told, drafting this particular dossier was a nightmare.

Official debriefings could not be fabricated, nor dared she falsify crucial intelligence; yet two paramount breakthroughs anchored their entire mission—their infiltration of the reconnaissance balloon to spy upon the Iron Blood Corps encampment, and their brazen escape under the guise of an amorous outing.

Both episodes were steeped in shameless, wanton debauchery, yet the tactical details could not be omitted from military analysis. The more Trisli pondered the task, the hotter her cheeks burned; in the heat of passion she had abandoned herself to his touch, but committing every depraved detail to ink was pure mortification—especially knowing the parchment would be permanently sealed into High Command's historical archives.

The mere thought that centuries in the future, historians, commanders, and perhaps even her own direct descendants might pore over those classified records made her wish the desert sands would open up and swallow her whole.