Chapter 936: Close Combat
“What did you say?”
The King of Dawn shoved the dancer aside and came to his feet. She went down hard. A beautiful woman, barely covered by a pink silk scarf — she did not make a sound, though she was obviously hurt. Everyone else in the hall went still: servants, performers, jugglers, all of them suddenly studying the floor.
“Your Majesty…” The Secretary of State swallowed. “Your Prime Minister has rebelled.”
“Rebelled.” Appen said the word as if tasting it for poison. “Are you certain he’s rebelled — not simply courting those idiots outside the walls?”
He had known about the plotting nobles. Everyone who had survived Hermes and made it home had seen what he’d seen: the knightage wrecked, the king’s escape, the end of something. Loyalty was not a feeling that outlasted a military disaster of that size. The lords who returned had arrived at the same calculation, and gathering support from the three great families of the king’s city was the obvious first step toward whatever came next.
Appen had watched for it, prepared for it. He had expected the families to wait — to hedge, to lie low, to let the situation clarify before risking themselves. That was how men like Horford Quinn worked. Caution. Patience. Decades of accumulated instinct for keeping the family safe.
Not this.
Not Quinn — of all three, Quinn — standing up in public and inviting the foreign lords to his mansion. Not secretly. Openly. With an invitation.
An invitation to support the Quinn family.
Appen stood there, working through it, and could not make the pieces fit. The man had no army in the city. No soldiers, no territory, nothing sharper than a dozen household guards. What did he think he was doing? The move was so brazen it looked idiotic — and Horford Quinn was not an idiot. The sheer spectacle of a Prime Minister asking for support while sitting in the middle of a hostile king’s city would make him a laughingstock before the foreign lords, not a rallying point.
Something was wrong with the picture.
“Pass the order,” Appen said at last. “Commander Duke Bachov leads the patrol team to the earl’s residence. Bring Horford Quinn in front of me.” He paused. “Everyone else in the household is to be held in custody. Any resistance, they may be killed on the spot.” He wanted to see the old man explain himself. He wanted to see it done openly.
The hall emptied. Appen sat in the silence.
He didn’t particularly want the pleasure he’d dismissed. But when the room went quiet, the sounds from Hermes started — the roar he had been unable to stop hearing since the moment the first flash fell. Not thunder. He had heard thunder. This was something that had no correct name, because the world had not needed a name for it before he rode into that field.
The battle. The one-sided dissolution of his army.
He had come home and found he no longer had the courage to think about Roland directly. The failure at the battlefield had done something to him that was harder to identify than grief — he knew, with a flat and final certainty, that the Moya family had lost the Kingdom of Dawn. Not today, not this year perhaps, but the calculus was complete. A powerful neighbor with that kind of force and the Moya family with nothing left to put between them: the outcome had only one direction. Appen was simply waiting for the date.
He had wanted, when he took the throne, to be remembered well. A stable kingdom. Citizens who didn’t need to fear witches or demonic beasts or foreign pressure. One year in and it was already over.
Roland Wimbledon. The name tasted like ash. That was the source of all of it — a king bewitched by his witches, unmade by ambition, an aberration that had nonetheless cracked the whole structure of things. If not for him, Appen might have been something worth remembering.
He was still sitting there when the afternoon arrived with bad news.
The new minister stumbled in at a run. “Your Majesty — Sir Bachov is dead. The patrol team — the whole unit — is gone.”
“What?” Appen grabbed his collar. “Traps? An ambush in the mansion?”
“Hidden bodyguards, Your Majesty. I saw it myself.” The man’s words tumbled out. “Bachov demanded the earl come out. When refused, he forced the gates — and was killed by the guards immediately. Then those same guards came out of the courtyard after the patrol team outside. Boning knives, wooden sticks, stone bricks. In less than half a minute, the platoon was broken.”
“How many of them?”
“Seven. Perhaps eight.”
“Bastard.” Appen hit the minister, who went down. “Seven or eight and you’re calling it an ambush? In this city, any merchant keeps a dozen guards. There were a hundred and fifty in that patrol team — two hundred, possibly. You’re telling me they were beaten by eight men with kitchen knives?” He leaned over him. “Can’t you even fight at the level of wild boars?”
“Your Majesty — those people aren’t human.” The minister pressed himself against the floor. “Most of the patrol couldn’t survive a single blow. The strength, the speed — it wasn’t a man’s.”
Appen straightened.
He had seen this kind of thing before.
His father’s killers had been Pure Witches from the church. And before the assassination, those women had given him a demonstration — had made him watch what the God’s Punishment Army could do when given a target. He had never forgotten it.
Earl Quinn. Connected with the church.
The anger that rose in him was different from the ordinary kind. It came from somewhere older, somewhere he kept banked and sealed.
“Riseth!”
The knight entered at a run and dropped to one knee.
“Summon every mercenary in the City of Glow. Crossbows, rockets. I want Quinn’s residence burned to the ground.” His voice was flat and absolute. “Everyone inside. Human or monster — I want them ash.”
“But, Your Majesty, that’s the Inner City.” The knight hesitated. “If the fire spreads—”
“Do what I say.” He did not raise his voice. That made it worse. “If you don’t burn them, don’t bother coming back.”
Even the God’s Punishment Army could be killed with enough crossbow fire. If Quinn wanted to throw in with the church, he would get the same end the church was getting everywhere.
The next morning, another report.
The mercenary force had been prevented from reaching the earl’s residence. On the Rising Sun Avenue — in the middle of the street, in front of witnesses — an acrobatics troupe had attacked them from mid-performance.
Appen made the minister repeat it. Then he sat with it for a while.
An acrobatics troupe. Performing, and then fighting.
And fighting the same way Quinn’s guards had fought.
This time they had been carrying the weapons they’d taken from the patrol team: daggers, iron hammers, wooden shields.
Chapter 936: Close Combat
Translator: TransN Editor: TransN
“What did you say?” The King of Dawn pushed away the dancer in his arms as he suddenly stood up.
The dancer, a beautiful woman with nothing more than a pink silk scarf wrapped around her half-covered body, fell to the ground. Though she was hurt badly, she did not dare to voice out her pain.
The rest of the servants, performers, and jugglers also lowered their heads in panic. The entire palace abruptly became silent.
“Your Majesty…” The Secretary of State gulped and said, “Your Prime Minister has rebelled.”
“Are you sure he has truly rebelled and isn’t just supporting those idiots on the outside?” Appen didn’t know whether it was him who had misheard his minister or it was the fault of his staff blowing the news out of proportion.
Of course, he knew about the plans of those traitorous nobles—everyone who had returned alive from Hermes had witnessed the destruction of the king’s personal knightage as well as his miserable escape. It would have been naive of him to expect them to remain loyal to the royal family.
Some amount of rebellion was only to be expected. Gathering support and forming alliances with the three major families in the royal capital would clearly be their first choice. Appen had long been wary about this, but he believed that, going by the characters of the three old veterans, they would most likely play by the rules and lie low behind closed doors. After all, the king’s city was still in his hands, and any act of defiance was tantamount to suicide.
He did not expect that the first to cause a problem would be the Quinn family.
The collision with the smaller lords had already violated Appen’s bottom line. Perhaps the old earl just wanted to leave a way out for himself or make a stand… But no matter what the reason was, punishment was absolutely inevitable for such an impertinent act. For example Otto Luoxi—Appen had already shown mercy by not killing his childhood friend on the spot.
But… what does ‘rebelling’ mean?
Earl Quinn is still in the City of Glow, and he has neither subjects nor soldiers here. Does he want to rebel with just his dozen or so guards alone? That would be ridiculous. How would he be able to rebel?
“The earl did contact the other nobles, but not in secret. He issued an invitation!” The minister wiped the sweat from his forehead and said, “And he publicly invited all the nobles to his mansion to persuade them to support the Quinn family!”
Appen was stunned and almost unable to understand the news he had heard.
This move could indeed be perceived as a rebellion, but the way he did it was incredible!
Instead of asking for help from the nobles, he’s asking them to support the Quinn family—does Horford really know what he’s doing?
He had already become a dangerous vessel that could sink any time. How could he still think about getting the support of the nobility? This act was undoubtedly going to turn both sides into bitter enemies, and there was no way Moya could ever tolerate such a grave act of provocation. The sheer stupidity of the situation would only make those nobles look down on him.
But still, was the Prime Minister such an arrogant person in the past?
Appen brooded silently for a long time before finally saying, “Pass my orders down. Commander Duke Bachov is to lead the patrol team to the earl’s residence, arrest Horford Quinn, and bring him in front of me.”
“Everyone else in his residence is to be temporarily locked up in custody. If anyone opposes him, he may kill them on the spot! I would like to see how the earl is going to explain this.”
“Yes, Your Majesty!”
After this news, he was no longer in the mood for seeking pleasure. He dismissed everyone in the hall and sat paralyzed on the throne.
He didn’t really want to drown himself in pleasure, but once the surroundings became quiet his ears would echo once again with the roar of the sky thunder.
The war that ended more than a month ago had left a deep impression on him that he could never forget.
No… it was not a war, but a one-sided massacre.
His troops had no strength to fight back.
Whether it was the knights or the serfs, it made no difference when they were faced with the attack from Graycastle.
After he got back to the king’s city, Appen found that he no longer had the courage to confront Roland—the failure on the battlefield caused him even more heartache than the death of his father.
What made things even worse was the fact he knew that the Moya family had effectively lost the entire Kingdom of Dawn. What was the fate of offending a powerful neighbor? There was no doubt that, sooner or later, the other party would annex the country that he inherited from his father, and there was nothing he could do about it!
When he ascended the throne, he was full of ambition and was bent on governing this kingdom well. He wanted the citizens to live a stable life, and no longer have to worry about witches, demonic beasts, or other foreign threats. But just a year after he took over, and he was already completely disillusioned and had lost interest in political affairs and commerce. He was
just waiting for the enemy’s army to attack and leave him hanging on the city wall.
As he thought about this point, Appen’s hatred toward the king of Graycastle kept growing immensely, and he wanted to eat him alive!
If not for Roland Wimbledon, he would have left a mark in the pages of history as a famous leader of his generation!
All this was the latter’s fault—Graycastle’s new king had been bewitched by witches!
He slammed his palm on the armrest, and the burning fire in his heart had nowhere to be vented.
When Earl Quinn has been captured, I will make him have a taste of a king’s anger!
However, in the afternoon, his newly appointed minister ran into the palace in a panic.
“Your Majesty, Sir Bachov is dead! The patrol… The whole army is gone!”
“What…!?” The King of Dawn grabbed his collar in shock. “Did they have traps set up in the mansion? Or did they hide in ambush?”
“Yes, they had hidden bodyguards,” the minister quickly replied, “I saw it with my own eyes. At first, Bachov asked the earl to come out and barged directly into the house after being denied. But he was immediately killed by the earl’s guards. Not only that, these guards also rushed out of the courtyard and ambushed the patrol team that was outside the mansion—they were like madmen. They had all kinds of weapons in their hands, including boning knives, wooden sticks, and even stone bricks… in less than half a minute, the platoon collapsed!”
“How many people did they have?”
“Probably… seven or eight.”
“Bastard!” Appen struck the minister to the ground. “You call seven or eight people an ambush? In the City of Glow, even a businessman has a dozen guards. Have you been scared out of your wits!? The patrol team has about one or two hundred people. How can they be defeated by seven or eight guards? Even two hundred wild boars wouldn’t fall so fast—don’t tell me they can’t even compare to pigs in the hunting grounds?”
“Your Majesty, those people… aren’t human beings. They’re monsters,” the Minister cried out his grievances. “Most of the patrol team couldn’t even block a single one of their blows. That wasn’t the strength and speed of a man!”
Appen suddenly jerked up his head.
He seemed to have seen this type of scenario before.
That’s right. He remembered now that his father’s killers, the two Pure Witches from the church, had shown him the terrifying prowess of the God’s Punishment Army.
Could… Earl Quinn be connected with the church?
An uncontrollable anger suddenly rose from his heart!
“Riseth!” Appen yelled.
A knight came in quickly from outside the hall and knelt on one knee. “Your majesty, what may I do for you?”
“Immediately summon all the mercenaries in the City of Glow and bring in the crossbows and rockets. I want you to burn Earl Quinn’s residence to the ground!” He yelled, “I want them all to be burnt to ashes regardless of whether they are human beings or monsters!”
“But… that’s the Inner City,” the knight hesitated and said, “If it causes a big fire, I’m afraid it will be difficult to control it.”
“Shut up and do what I say!” Appen growled hysterically, “If you don’t burn him, you don’t have to come back to see me!”
Even the God’s Punishment Army, when faced with an opponent a hundred times their number and armored with crossbows, would not have a chance of victory. If they wanted to collude with the church, they would only be facing death!
…
The next day, the King of Dawn once again received news from the watchdogs that the entire mercenary group that had been prepared the night before had failed to even reach the earl’s residence.
While passing through the Rising Sun Avenue, the mercenary team was attacked by an acrobatics troupe.
He had to make sure he hadn’t misheard the minister’s report.
An acrobatics troupe performing on the street suddenly attacked the mercenaries in the middle of their performance. The mercenaries caught off guard and suffered heavy losses. It seemed those actors fought the same way as Earl Quinn’s guards.
But this time, the weapons in their hands were no longer random debris; they were wielding the daggers, iron hammers, and wooden shields that had belonged to the former patrol team