Chapter 418: Void Engine

"Now this is true power. The sheer scale of the destruction is beyond even what we imagined..."

A rift in the void unfurled. Wang Yu stepped out, surveying the devastation wrought by the bombardment of the "Archangel" with satisfaction.

The once-magnificent royal palace of Aleisterre was gone. In its place lingered only shattered ruins, much of them still glowing with searing heat. Molten rock streamed down the slopes, while white vapor billowed skyward.

The kingdom's defenses had proven as frail as paper against a warhead forged by the reckless researchers of Skyborne City and the Church of Nightfall, who had crammed as much explosive yield they could into a shell.

The "impervious walls" of the palace, the intricate, layered defensive wards—none of it was of any use against a magitech bomb far too advanced for Aleisterre's primitive defenses.

At the instant of impact, the bomb set off a pulse of magical disruption that overloaded the palace wards, burning them out in a single stroke. The entire defensive framework collapsed into useless rubble.

Such was the nature of magitech. Beyond a certain level of technological superiority, outdated craft and wards would seem no better than children's toys.

A magician's strength may vary with talent and training, but magitech obeyed harsher laws: the advanced would utterly crush the obsolete.

And this particular warhead was born of the source of the most advanced magitech there was: Skyborne City. The researchers from the Council of the Arcane and the Church of Nightfall who had crafted this bomb were regarded as radicals among radicals, visionaries who pushed every limit.

In truth, the palace might have survived the strike if they had had time to deploy their ultimate defense, Themis' Shroud, which had once been raised against the God of Terror. But Wang Yu would never have allowed that. The Archangel was built precisely to deny them that chance.

From the beginning, the Archangel was conceived not for overwhelming firepower but for speed. It was meant to be the sword of Damocles suspended above the heavens, designed to accelerate its payload to such extremes that the strike would come faster than thought.

Themis' Shroud was a curio with unquestionable defensive might. Yet it had one fatal weakness: its activation depended on the flow of mana through countless overlapping minor wards.

Inevitably, there would be delays.

Perhaps ten seconds would pass between the detection of the danger and full deployment of the Shroud. The Archangel took less than one from launch to impact.

And those wards never even had time to detect the danger. The explosion annihilated the framework of wards before it could awaken, leaving nothing but ruins behind.

As for the warhead itself, Wang Yu had no idea what volatile horrors had been crammed inside. Outwardly, the bomb was no larger than the size of three human heads. Inwardly, however, it contained over a hundred hypermagic storage modules, each packed with a designated payload.

The outer layers housed pulses of disruption that rendered any defense meaningless.

The innermost layer held the true destructive core of the bomb: the condensed core of a Fire Elemental Lord, extracts of an Infernal Overlord's heart, and distilled dragonbreath drawn from living dragons—chiefly red and bronze dragons, whose breath alone could reduce cities to cinders.

And layered across it all was a reverse-phase temporal array, compressing the destruction into the briefest possible instant and forcing the maximum energy possible into that window.

The result was a bomb so ludicrous it should never have existed, an apocalypse stuffed into a casing barely larger than a melon. A group of researchers had, on Wang Yu's urging, stuffed all their impractical ideas and technologies considered too volatile for everyday use into it.

It was held together by thoughts and prayers alone. By all rights, the conflicting materials and spell structures should have triggered a premature detonation long before it could be launched by the Archangel.

But hypermagical engineering and the resulting "arcane chip" technology solved what had once seemed intractable. The warhead of pure destruction that resulted from this haphazard approach had been strong enough to level Aleisterre's palace to the ground.

"It's an impressive bomb, no doubt about it, but wiping out the entire royal family in one strike's not realistic, huh?"

Wang Yu's gaze fixed on the place where Donatien Charlemagne's throne had stood. There, a void rift slowly opened up, much like the one Wang Yu had conjured earlier to divert the brunt of the explosion. Out of the rift stepped Donatien Charlemagne, flanked by two unfamiliar figures. All three wore expressions as dark as storm clouds.

"You will pay the price for everything you've done," Donatien declared, his voice shaking with fury. "This is my kingdom, and I will never allow anyone to take it from me. I admit, I underestimated you. You're an aberration unlike anything in history. No one has ever grown in strength as swiftly as you have.

"When Rudolf first captured you, I should have had him kill you outright. The Archbishop of the Church of Nightfall, a newcomer among the Nightblades, a stray wandering knight out of nowhere... just how many masks do you wear?

"No. None of that matters anymore. As long as this throne remains, I alone am king. I will kill you, and then I will see the Nightblades erased from this world."

His eyes burned with venom as he glared at Wang Yu. The mountaintop palace he had built over years of scheming now lay in ruins, razed by Wang Yu. His confidants, his soldiers, his hoarded wealth—all gone. What he had left was only the throne beneath him, and the two legendary knights whose lives he had salvaged with his own power.

But for Donatien, that was enough.

"Kill him."

He raised his hand. A pitch-black greatsword, woven from void energy, materialized in his grip. Leveling it at Wang Yu, he gave an order to his two grim-faced knights.

Wang Yu waited in silence, neither responding to Donatien Charlemagne's challenge nor moving against his knights. Only the heavy, rising cadence of his heartbeat betrayed the storm within as his blood began to froth.

What Donatien thought and what he had planned out didn't matter. Wang Yu's resolve would not change. He had come here to finish the royal house, to settle all grudges, old and new, in a single stroke.

Wang Yu had noticed the throne beneath Donatien Charlemagne. It was no ordinary seat of power. Though the palace had been annihilated by the blast, the throne still stood intact, sheltering the space around it.

It was bound to the king in some arcane fashion, channeling void power into his body, even linking to some unknown plane from which it drew ceaseless strength. It was that bond that anchored Donatien's strength at the level of a legend.

His boast that he would forever be king as long as the throne endured was no idle lie. But what Wang Yu was more concerned about was the battlefield that was laid before him.

Donatien Charlemagne was no magician. His two surviving knights, his most trusted retainers, were clearly no magicians either. In that case, the impending combat would involve Wang Yu's specialty.

The two legends' armor alone revealed their roles. One knight was clad in massive plate, his defense clearly superior even to Alfonso, whom Wang Yu had recently faced.

The other wore much lighter armor, his figure strangely blurred—and this was no mere trick of the eyes. Even under the Chariot's perception, his body wavered as if he were cloaked by distortion. This was surely his potential at work.

The two knights lunged at Wang Yu from opposite sides, fighting spirit erupting around them, their legendary weapons blazing with destructive power. Still Wang Yu stood unmoving, as though waiting for something.

The Chariot's power surged within him. The void domain he commanded churned as vast streams of energy poured into the material plane, flowing into his body and spilling across the battlefield.

With no magicians present, he had no need to divert focus to the Silent Hall, to nullify enemy spells. All he had to do was push his flesh-and-blood strength to its very limits.

𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂

The Chariot demanded only one thing: void energy. Wang Yu fed it freely. The power seeped into his body, optimizing every process: muscle strength, blood circulation, bone density, lung capacity. Twisting reality itself, the void reinforced his flesh in every conceivable way.

Even the battlefield bent to him. Air resistance, gravity, friction beneath his feet—all obstacles were erased, all advantages amplified. The environment reshaped itself into the perfect arena for him.

In strength, speed, and defense, his body rose to new heights on every front. Beyond mere flesh, another force awakened within him: the wizardry he had once forsaken. His entire being entered a state of pure physical transcendence, bolstered by the power of the Chariot: the Void Engine.