Chapter 320: Chapter 317: Coronation Ceremony
"Liberate all Mouse Speakers! Mouse Speakers will be slaves no more!"
Quite a few Mouse Speakers had entered the slave markets of the Shadow Land, just like Little Coal Ball. They were popular among the upper echelons of the Shadow City because they were small, ate little, and could squeeze into tiny holes and crevices to catch food like frogs for their masters.
Therefore, upon reaching the Core Area, they added slogans inciting the slaves to rebel to the song announcing the Mouse Speaker Kingdom’s attack. Some residents of the Core Area were so frightened by this bizarre procession that they bolted their doors shut, making sure to kick their Mouse Speaker slaves out of their homes first.
"King" Singrev sat on a massive cart cobbled together from junk and wood. The cart, nearly three stories tall with ten pairs of wooden wheels, was slowly moved along by twenty Mouse Speakers and hundreds of mice pulling from the front and pushing from behind.
His Majesty the King personally led the charge, perched at the highest point and holding the Kingdom’s banner aloft.
Freddy, the royal Minstrel, stood at the front of the cart, leading the procession in song. Every sound from his roaring throat and nearly-snapping Qin strings was massively amplified by twenty Magic Horns. Next to him, the genius drummer Little Coal Ball hammered away on an assortment of metal pots and pans.
As the King’s personal guards, Rorschach and Benedict stood on either side of Singrev with their hands clasped behind their backs, wearing earplugs. The mortified Caroline, too ashamed to show her face, had activated her [Phantom Skill] and was hiding among the ranks of Gray Elves.
’Damn it, if you listen to it for long enough... it actually starts to sound okay.’ At that moment, Caroline, the commander, Silsa, and the other Gray Elves all felt their sanity crumbling.
Singrev bobbed his head to the beat, overlooking his frenzied subjects and finding it incredibly thrilling. He also noticed he was suddenly feeling hot all over and filled with a seemingly endless supply of energy. He could wave the banner nonstop without his arm even getting tired.
"Rorschach, I can really feel power surging through me!"
"Okay, Singrev, stay grounded. Don’t let the will of the Shadow Land dominate you!"
"Don’t you worry one bit! I’ll always be an adventurer at heart!"
Rorschach could also feel another portion of the Power of Order returning from the Deep Diving Area and attaching itself to Singrev. His only worry now was that Singrev’s mind would be warped by the Divine Power of the Lord of Order and Is.
To be on the safe side, he condensed a blue orb of light that sank into the Dwarf’s body. Singrev shuddered and bellowed, "Awesome!"
’...Does that count as a good review?’ Rorschach didn’t dwell on it and fixed his gaze on the Marquis’s Mansion.
...
As the procession swept triumphantly through the territories outside the Core Area, the Marquis was still venting his fury.
Of course, he had sensed the changes in the Shadow Land. The breaking of the seals, one by one, signified that the system of power the Lord of Order had established there was on the verge of collapse. While the Marquis had passively absorbed some of this power, making him stronger, he had also completely lost his perception of the areas outside the Core Area.
The Marquis puzzled over what was happening for a day and two nights to no avail. As it happened, the weakening seals allowed more members of the "Return of the Holy Mother" Sect to break into the Shadow Land. Thus, the Marquis immediately arrived at a logical conclusion—this group of Cultists was behind everything!
Once again enraged, the Marquis unleashed his enhanced power, dispatching his Shadow Guards far and wide. These pitch-black phantoms swiftly scoured the Core Area, dragging every suspicious person they found back to the Marquis’s Mansion.
Just as the true invaders—the Mouse Kingdom—arrived at his doorstep, the Marquis was preparing to execute a high-ranking leader of the Sect.
"To return to the embrace of Mother Earth!" The Sect’s regional director for the Shadow Land gritted his teeth and unleashed his faction’s signature technique. Using his own flesh and blood as nutrients for an alien species, his body erupted into grotesque, thick vines that sprayed a toxic, aggressive green mist.
The Marquis remained unfazed. He used the same move he’d tried on Rorschach’s group, sending his Shadow Guard to attack first. Yet he keenly sensed that any of them that entered the green mist became corrupted by Mother Earth. They not only showed signs of losing control, but also began to mutate and multiply.
Fortunately, he had a self-destruct trick of his own. It wasn’t the Marquis himself who exploded, but rather his control over the black shadows, which he detonated to shred the Cultist’s mutated vegetation.
Faced with the mess, he decided to dispose of the broken vines in the Deep Diving Area, only to find he could no longer open the way to it.
What in the world was happening?!
Finally sensing the Mouse Speaker Kingdom’s invasion, the master of the Shadow City transformed into a black shadow, passed through a wall, and appeared high above the Core Area.
"It’s you! You damned Casters!" His eyes immediately locked onto Rorschach. To the Marquis, everyone else was just cannon fodder.
’No, wait. That bearded one sitting highest up, the shortest one, feels familiar...’ "Aha! So you’ve come to steal my power and seize the Shadow Land!" The Marquis’s furious voice echoed throughout the Core Area. At this moment, he was not only a vessel for the Lord of Order’s power but also a nexus of corruption from Is. His beard, hair, and cloak all transformed into black tentacles, writhing ostentatiously in the air.
This corruption was also causing the Marquis’s sanity to slowly slip away.
Singrev shot back through a Magic Horn: "Who wants your power? Look at you, you’re not even human anymore!"
Words were useless. The Marquis summoned a giant, fish-like creature. It was pitch-black and bore a slight resemblance to the entities that swam through the Holy Land. It opened its abyssal maw, wide enough to swallow Singrev’s entire three-story-tall contraption.
Despite its enormous size, the creature was incredibly fast. But just as it was about to collide with them, it crashed squarely into a barrier of blue light. Resisting the Marquis’s pressure, Rorschach rose into the air, inch by inch. Simultaneously, the blue light shifted to green and began to seep into the fish-like creature. Its shadowy form receded, slowly revealing a skeleton of white bone.
The Marquis recalled his greatest Shadow Guard just before the verdant light could completely purify it. The screen of green light erupted outward in an instant, but the Marquis tore a curtain of murky blackness from the ground to meet Rorschach’s assault.
At the junction where the two energies clashed, all matter, living or otherwise, would rapidly decay one moment only to be reborn the next. Anything unfortunate enough to be swept by these clashing forces too many times would lose its original shape, twisting into forms that shouldn’t exist and sprouting iridescent crystals.
"You’ve gotten stronger, Rorschach!" the Marquis sneered. "But not strong enough!"
Rorschach felt the Marquis abruptly pour more power into his attack. The dark curtain rapidly contracted, focusing its might to pierce a single point in the verdant barrier.
The young man’s expression was calm. "It’s not that I’m not strong enough. It’s that you’re not weak enough yet."
The words had barely left his mouth when two more figures tore through the air. One was an old man in the pure black robes of a Priest—the Black Cultivator, holding the Crown of Thorns. The other was so completely shrouded in a manifested Spiritual Light that their face was obscured; only a red Magic Robe, stirring as if in a phantom wind, was visible, with dark gold Runes flowing across it.
"The Lord of Order crowns King Singrev! May this great King of the Mouse Speakers live for ten thousand years and be ever victorious in battle!" While Singrev was still gawking, the Black Cultivator slammed the crown down on his head, making the Dwarf howl in pain.
The most rudimentary coronation ceremony in the history of the Ferolun Continent was completed amidst the cheers of the subjects and the pained cries of the King, carried out by the last Shepherd Leader of Is on behalf of the Master of Light and Order.
The Marquis suddenly coughed up a mouthful of dark blood, his hand flying instinctively to his left side.
He could clearly feel more than half his power being instantly drained away and transferred to that howling Dwarf. The Marquis couldn’t understand why the Black Cultivator would side with them.
With his energy in disarray, the green screen of light immediately broke the stalemate and washed over the Marquis. Stripped of his dark power, the heroic middle-aged man instantly withered into an ancient bag of bones. At the last possible second, the power of the Shadow Land flooded back into his body, pulling him from the brink of death. Even so, he was now gravely wounded.
The Mage in the red robe, his face obscured by Magic Light, flew up to stand beside Rorschach. He pointed his staff at the Marquis and mocked him in a language that no one else there could understand: "Lord Marquis, the ancients say, ’The first to attack is the first to fall,’ and ’In a beam struggle, the one on the left always loses.’ You’ve made two fatal mistakes!"
Hiding within the Rebel Army, ready to strike, Caroline’s eyes widened in shock. The Red Robed Mage was using Rorschach’s voice!
