Chapter 448: Chapter-448
The Seventh Prince let out a short, mocking exhale—a sound that was half-sigh, half-scoff. He didn’t even bother drawing a weapon. Why would he? In his past lives, this was the exact moment the Iron Convoy ceased to exist, turning into a hollow shell he could effortlessly step over to dismantle the Marquisate from the inside out.
He took another slow, unhurried stride into the center of the hall, his boots stepping right through a puddle of overturned stew.
Perched on the sloping roof beam, Heena watched his every move like a hawk tracing a field mouse. The burning rage in her chest had crystallized into a freezing, lethal focus. ’’Sickly? Bedridden?’’ she thought, her eyes narrowed to dangerous slits. ’’The Imperial Palace deserves an Oscar for keeping this monster’s true nature under wraps.’’
"Host,’’ the System’s voice crackled softly, dialed down to its lowest possible volume to avoid detection. ’’His mana fluctuations are stable, but highly compressed. He’s completely dropped his guard because he believes the timeline is matching his memories perfectly. He’s exactly where we want him.’’
’’Good,’’ Heena replied, her thumb gently nudging the mechanism of a small trigger device she held in her left hand—a manual tripwire override she had engineered with the trapsmiths just twenty minutes prior. ’’Let’s see how much he likes unscripted deviations.’’
Below, the Seventh Prince suddenly stopped.
His crystalline blue eyes flicked downward, landing on the massive, bearded veteran soldier who was supposed to be dead on the dining table. The veteran was doing a phenomenal job, but a tiny drop of fresh sweat had just rolled down his temple, cutting a clean line through the gray ash paste on his skin.
In the fraction of a second it took for the Prince’s eyes to widen with a sudden, sharp realization, Heena pressed the trigger.
’Snap!’
The heavy iron chains securing the massive, decorative iron chandeliers above the main hall didn’t just drop—they snapped violently under the force of pre-loaded counterweights.
But they weren’t dropping to crush him. As the three massive iron rings crashed toward the floor, they unleashed a pre-arranged perimeter of dense, heavy steel netting laced with specialized local paralyzing pitch. The netting slammed down in a perfect triangle around the Prince, instantly walling him into a tight, claustrophobic cage.
"Strike!" Heena’s voice rang out through the rafters, cold and sharp as an executioner’s blade.
Instantly, the "graveyard" came alive.
The two hundred and fifty "corpses" on the floor didn’t groan or slowly stagger up—they exploded into motion. Soldiers rolled, flipped, and sprang to their feet with a synchronized roar, drawing their heavy broadswords and forming a multi-layered, interlocking wall of steel shields around the trapped Prince.
Simultaneously, from the shadows of the roof beams right next to Heena, fifty heavy, armor-piercing crossbows fired in a single, deafening ’twang’. A storm of steel-tipped bolts, coated in thick, black tracking poison, rained down with absolute precision toward the center of the net.
The Seventh Prince didn’t panic. Even caught completely off guard, his regressor instincts were terrifyingly sharp. A sudden, violent burst of deep blue aura erupted from his body, expanding outward like a shockwave to deflect the falling bolts and violently rip against the heavy steel netting.
’Boom!’
The sheer force of his aura shattered the stone floor beneath his feet, throwing up a blinding cloud of dust and debris.
From her high vantage point, Heena didn’t wait to see the dust clear. She slipped off the sloping beam, her dark cloak fluttering behind her like the wings of a crow as she dropped silently toward the first staging platform closer to the ground.
"Don’t let him breathe!" she commanded, her voice cutting through the chaotic echo of the explosion. "Keep the pressure on!"
The Seventh Prince’s blue aura violently tore through the heavy steel netting, sending shrapnel and tattered rope flying through the air. The blinding cloud of dust and pulverized stone swirled aggressively in the center of the hall, but Heena’s eyes never left the spot where he stood.
As she dropped from the sloping roof beam, landing with a soft, practiced grace on a secondary wooden staging platform, she didn’t immediately lunge forward with her usual lethal precision. She didn’t utilize the full extent of her close-quarter foot combat skills to close the distance for a blindside strike.
Why? Because she wanted to see.
She wanted to gauge, with her own two eyes, exactly what kind of monster she was dealing with. This wasn’t just a generic antagonist from a story; this was a Regressor who carried the combat experience of entirely different lifetimes, wrapped up in the identity of a supposedly frail, sickly prince. To defeat a cheat-code like him, she needed to know exactly where his current ceiling was.
Through the settling haze of the explosion, the silhouette of the Seventh Prince finally became clear.
His face was completely covered behind a tight, matte-black stealth mask, leaving only his piercing blue eyes exposed. Those eyes, which had been filled with supreme, arrogant boredom just moments ago, were now burning with a mixture of sharp shock and absolute, icy fury. He looked at the wall of iron shields surrounding him, then flicked his gaze up toward the rafters where the bolts had rained down.
He didn’t look like a sickly, bedridden royal. He looked like a demon waking up from a nap.
"An ambush," the Prince muttered, his voice muffled slightly by the mask but still carrying a chilling, resonant depth that echoed across the stone walls. "This... didn’t happen before."
The fact that his precious timeline had fractured right before his eyes was clearly eating at him, but his body moved with terrifying efficiency. With a flick of his wrist, a slender, pitch-black longsword slid out from his sleeve, humming with a condensed, vibrating blue energy that made the very air around the blade warp.
Two elite soldiers from the front line charged forward, their heavy broadswords swinging in a coordinated, decapitating cross-slash.
The Prince didn’t even parry. He simply sidestepped—a movement so fast it looked like a blur—and delivered a brutal, aura-infused kick to the first soldier’s shield. The heavy iron shield shattered like cheap porcelain, and the veteran soldier was sent flying backwards across the hall, crashing into a stone pillar. With a fluid, backhanded slash, the Prince deflected the second soldier’s blade, the sheer kinetic force of the impact forcing the massive man to his knees.
Perched on the platform, Heena watched his movements with a cold, analytical gaze. Her fingers twitched against her hidden dagger.
’His reaction time is near-instantaneous, and his aura density is far above what a normal knight of his age should possess,’ she calculated swiftly. ’But he’s relying heavily on muscle memory and raw power right now because he’s pissed off.’
’[Host!]’ the System warned, its digital panel flashing red in her mind. ’[His combat power is registering at an abnormal level for this stage of the timeline! If you don’t engage with everything you’ve got right now, the battalion’s formation will break in less than three minutes!]’
"Shut up, System, I’m watching," Heena shot back mentally, her eyes locked onto the masked prince as he effortlessly parried another three-man vanguard. "Let him show me what else he’s hiding."
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