Breathing in that pervasive cool fragrance clinging to their bodies, the soldiers felt as though they were not fighting in a gloomy, dense forest at all — but strolling through Her Majesty's rear garden, where flowers bloomed in abundance.
This saturating kind of care made them feel as though their lives were worth more than gold in Her Majesty's eyes.
If anyone dared let Her Majesty lose this battle, they swore in their hearts — they would spend their last breath and tear out the enemy's throat with their own teeth.
The soldiers made this silent vow to themselves, and some even leaned close to whisper it to one another.
Inside the carriage, Willow was carefully spritzing the hem of Sophia's skirt and the cuffs of her sleeves with floral water.
The faint fragrance of the floral water diffused through the narrow space, and the taut line of Sophia's profile softened, just slightly.
Her Majesty is always like this — speaking in the most composed of tones while doing the most tender of things.
She had Irene and Daphne prepare all of this in advance, even accounting for the pests that would emerge with the change of seasons.
This near-obsessive mastery over every detail — that is the true secret of how she carved her way out of the Imperial Capital's murky waters.
Watching Her Majesty's pale-gold eyes drift half-closed in the fragrance of the floral water, I find myself thinking: the sharpest sword in the world cannot compare to the exhaustion etched on her face right now — the weariness born of caring too much.
Willow half-knelt on the cushioned bench inside the carriage, her fingertips kneading Sophia's temples with the utmost gentleness, her voice dropped so low it seemed she feared disturbing the deep stillness that filled the cabin:
"Your Majesty, there are red threads in the whites of your eyes.
Since the campaign began, the chessboard in your mind has not stopped turning for even a single moment.
Avalon's terrain is treacherous — if your health suffers, that would be the greatest defeat Mason could ever know.
Please rest for a little while. Even just a quarter of an hour."
Sophia slowly opened her eyes. The pale-gold of her irises held none of the weariness Willow had expected — instead, they gleamed with a cold clarity, sharp as the edge of a blade.
She gave a slight shake of her head, then extended slender, pale fingers and gently lifted the side curtain of the carriage.
"Willow. Look at the soil."
Willow followed Sophia's gaze.
Along the fringes of the undergrowth that had been sprayed with floral water to drive away poisonous insects, the ground was damp and soft — earth that never saw sunlight. Fallen branches and dead leaves had been trampled to pulp by the footsteps of five thousand soldiers, yet beneath that thick layer of decomposing matter, the surface was strangely, almost unnaturally level.
"Do you see it?"
Sophia's voice remained cool and detached, but it carried the cutting clarity of someone who had already seen through a lie.
"According to our scouts' intelligence, this is the only official road leading into Avalon's heartland.
And yet — beyond the tracks we ourselves have carved these past few days — there are no old wheel ruts anywhere on this road. Not even a concentrated trail of hoofprints."
Willow gave a faint start, her pupils contracting sharply.
So this is Her Majesty's divine vantage point.
While the rest of us were still marveling at the eerie fog and the ferocity of the poisonous insects, Her Majesty's eyes had already cut through all of that — and were reading the true reality of this land itself.
Avalon may be remote, but if they colluded with Olan, there must have been large-scale movement of goods. The heavy stone materials, the repeating crossbows, even the supplies Olan provided — none of that could simply vanish into thin air.
If there are no wheel ruts on this main road, then there is only one possibility — the road we have been walking is a dead-end trap that Avalon deliberately left for invaders.
The real logistical arteries — the paths that bypass the miasma and the hidden traps — have been perfectly concealed within an entirely separate system.
Her Majesty is not troubled. She is peeling away skin.
She is stripping back Avalon's disguise, layer by layer, hunting for the true jugular vein.
Can this kind of panoramic perception that transcends spatial dimensions truly belong to a human being?
"Avalon's people are not ghosts. They eat. They need to transport goods."
Sophia let the curtain fall and drew her fingertip lightly along the straight dotted line on the map.
"If this marked road bears no ruts, it means they have built an entirely parallel network of routes.
Perhaps natural limestone caves reshaped into underground channels. Or road segments hidden behind the treeline."
She turned her head, her silver hair — moonlight made solid — shimmering with an intelligent gleam in the faint lamplight:
"The reason Olan dared to establish their altar here is precisely because they were certain that outsiders would exhaust their food and their lives on this unmarked dead end.
But they miscalculated one thing..."
Sophia gave a cold, quiet smile, her tone carrying the serenity of someone who holds all the pieces:
"The scraps of fodder Delilah left behind — they were not scattered at random.
I understand now why she pointed toward the ridge on the upwind side.
Because that is where the true artery entrance lies — the one that actually bears wheel ruts."
Just then, Irene came burrowing into the carriage with the furtive energy of a spy, clutching a freshly drawn soil survey report in her hands.
"Your Majesty! Something strange has turned up!" Irene announced, her pink ponytail swishing with every word.
"I just had the engineers dig down a bit, and the soil layer underneath is absurdly soft — it absolutely cannot support the weight of large siege crossbow carts.
If Olan's forces actually came through here, their heavy equipment would have sunk straight into the ground and become fossils by now."
Sophia looked at Irene, a thread of quiet approval moving through her gaze:
"Then we need waste no more time on this muddy road.
Pass the order — the entire force is to begin angling toward the ridge on the left flank. Send out our sharpest observers to search for road segments bearing wheel ruts."
When the order reached the ears of those five thousand masked soldiers, the oppressive weight that had been building from the seemingly endless road ahead instantly evaporated.
Look at that — Her Majesty has seen through the enemy's scheme again!
I knew it. How could we have walked this long without seeing a single wheel mark?
Turns out we'd been going in circles inside the enemy's script this whole time.
The main force was soon left to rest in place while Sophia dispatched several squad captains with their men fanning out in all directions to search for alternative routes.
About an hour later, the various reconnaissance squads sent to different directions began returning, one after another, emerging from the thick, pale-grey mist.
Their armor was beaded with cold, clinging dew, and the edges of their specially made Black Rose masks were dampened by the warm breath of long exertion — a telltale sign of hard miles covered.
Sophia remained sitting quietly in the carriage, turning over in her fingers the scrap of fodder that Delilah had left behind.
When the last squad captain came stumbling back into camp, the entire expeditionary force seemed to hold its breath, suspended in anticipation of that one answer.
"Reporting—!"
The captain of the first squad — the one that had been sent deepest along the official road — dropped to one knee, his voice worn to a ragged edge:
"Your Majesty's wisdom is unmatched! We pushed nearly twenty li further along that so-called official road, and the soil just kept getting softer — it was like a skin of loose dirt stretched over a swamp.
And the miasma grew so thick the torches nearly went out.
If not for Lord Irene's masks and Your Majesty's warning, our brothers might truly have been swallowed alive by that bog."
Next, the captain of the third squad — tasked with probing the flanks — stepped forward. His complexion was pale, and a residue of wide-eyed shock still clung to his expression, the kind left behind by a profound disorientation of the mind:
"Your Majesty, the dense forest on the left is nothing less than a living maze.
Every single tree in that forest — no matter the height, the angle of the branches, or the texture of the bark — was uncannily, impossibly identical.
We made landmarks as we went, yet every so often we would find ourselves back at a place that looked exactly the same as somewhere we had already been.
If the simple compasses we carried hadn't been recalibrated by Lord Irene, none of our dozen men would have made it back."
With those reports delivered, a short, heavy silence fell inside the carriage.
Irene slapped her thigh in exasperation, nearly snapping the surveying board in her hands:
"This is absolutely absurd! How can a forest where every tree looks exactly the same even exist?
Did those Avalon people plant their trees with a ruler and measuring tape? This completely defies the laws of natural growth!"
Sophia raised her eyes slightly. The pale-gold of her irises was utterly untroubled — there was even the faintest trace of a cool smile there, the kind that comes from having a hypothesis confirmed.
"It is precisely because it defies natural law that it reveals the truth of what is really happening here."
Sophia's slender fingertip came to rest on a blank section of the map.
"What they call an 'identical forest' is not magic.
It is an exceptionally precise array-planted grove, engineered to exploit the blind spots of human perception.
They selected specific tree species with synchronized growth cycles and artificially manipulated the direction of their growth.
In thick fog, a person's sense of balance and spatial awareness degrades. Once your mind becomes accustomed to a particular visual pattern, the brain automatically filters out minor deviations — and you end up walking in circles."
She set down the curtain, her voice dropping low and measured:
"Avalon's people built this dead road and this maze-forest as an invisible wall of the mind.
They don't need to kill anyone. They only need to let every intruder, consumed by self-doubt, slowly eat through their last wheat cake."
Willow, standing beside the cushioned bench, felt a wave of cold numbness rise along her spine.
When the squad captain said they almost hadn't made it back, Her Majesty's expression was one of perfect, transparent clarity.
In Her Majesty's eyes, this maze that sent five thousand elite soldiers into a cold sweat is nothing more than a mediocre geometry problem, already disassembled and solved.
If Avalon's architects ever learned that the misty illusion they built with such pride — the one that had protected them for centuries — is, in Her Majesty's assessment, merely an artificially managed array of planted trees, they would probably cough up blood and die on the spot.
Her Majesty is not on a military campaign. She is conducting a logical execution of this land.
Time seemed to lose all measure inside the viscous fog.
Just as Irene was on the verge of crumpling her surveying charts into a ball, a squad captain known for his extraordinarily sharp eyes — one who had stayed silent the entire time — came sprinting back.
The light armor he wore, soaked through with Black Rose floral water, gave off a faint, spectral gleam in the mist, and his voice trembled slightly with barely-contained excitement:
"Your Majesty! We found it!
Beyond a stretch of jagged boulders to the northwest — a place that looks like a dead end — there is a narrow path almost completely buried under weeds and lichen.
If we hadn't spotted half a wheel rut sunk into the soil beneath a few crooked-necked trees, we would have walked right past it!"
Sophia did not issue an order immediately. Instead, she dispatched two more meticulously careful squads to cross-verify the find.
A short while later, their reports matched exactly.
The path was extremely narrow, flanked on both sides by thorny shrubs and ancient trees too wide for a person to wrap their arms around. For a cargo wagon carrying heavy freight to pass through, it would require not only exceptional driving skill but also extraordinarily precise route guidance.
"This is it."
Sophia stepped down from the carriage. The toe of her boot gently brushed aside a scatter of dead leaves that looked like pure disorder, revealing the compacted, hardened soil layer beneath — formed over time by the grinding weight of heavy loads.
"Avalon's people can deceive eyes. But they cannot deceive gravity.
The more hidden a place, the more of their survival's weight it has borne."
She raised her hand and swept it forward, her expression as deep and still as a dark pool:
"Full force — tighten formation, abandon the main road, enter the narrow path."
Once the convoy moved into what could barely be called a path, their pace of march slowed to an agonizing crawl.
The carriage axles let out a grating, tortured sound as they scraped between narrow tree trunks, and the soldiers were forced to hack away at the thorns blocking their passage with their swords while staying alert for cold arrows that might come flying from anywhere within the fog.
One hour passed. Then two.
The landscape around them seemed to have fallen into an endless loop — still the same boundless dead timber, still the same pale-grey miasma, still the same crushing silence that made a person want to scream.
The new recruits, who had held Sophia in unquestioning reverence, began to feel — after their experience in the identical forest — the first hairline fractures of doubt forming in the depths of their hearts.
"Are we really not lost? There's barely even a road here. The carriage is nearly being ground to splinters."
"Her Majesty said there were wheel ruts here, but apart from that first little stretch, all we've seen since is mud.
Is this Avalon's curse? Letting us slowly rot in this green graveyard?"
"Shut it!"
"Look at Lady Willow and Miss Irene — they're both completely calm.
If Her Majesty dared bring us in here, then this road leads straight to the enemy's vitals! Our lives were given to us by Her Majesty — even if it's a dead end, we follow that silver light all the way to the bottom!"
Willow watched the new recruits through the carriage window. She could feel the uneasy restlessness stirring among the surrounding soldiers — but what she cared about far more was the expression on Sophia's face.
Her Majesty does not spare a thought for the soldiers' doubts, because the map she sees in her mind has already moved beyond the limits of what eyes can perceive.
She chose this most difficult of roads because she has already calculated that at the end of this seemingly abandoned path lies the one joint in Avalon that no one else has ever found.
This audacity — to wager against the common sense of the entire world, and to win decisively every single time — is even more intoxicating than the finest Alchemy wine.
Your Majesty... what you are doing here is not fighting a war. You are teaching this land what a true Divine Miracle looks like.
Just as the tension pressing down on the column was nearing its breaking point, the view ahead opened up with an almost eerie, sudden flatness.
The canopy of branches that had blotted out the sky seemed to have been parted by some great force, revealing a crossroads laid out in the shape of a cross.
The soil here was no longer the treacherous soft mud — it was paved with some mixture of crushed stone and hard-packed earth.
More importantly, at this intersection, the wheel ruts that had been barely visible before now converged into deep, sunken grooves — some pointing deeper into the fog, others pointing toward the great ridgeline that soared up into the clouds.
"Your Majesty! Look over there!"
Irene pointed excitedly at a stone marker at the edge of the crossroads. The characters carved into it were too worn to read clearly, but the stonework was unmistakably human-made.
"We made it through! We actually found their artery!"
Hailey, pressed close against Sophia's knee, gripped her charcoal pencil in both small hands and pressed a bold cross-shaped mark onto her sheet of parchment:
Late spring.
Deep within Avalon.
Her Majesty has activated the ultimate navigation mode — Truth Will Always Reveal Itself!
Just now, when everyone went quiet, Hailey thought it was so dark and so frightening.
But Her Majesty kept holding her sword the entire time, and her hands never shook once.
The reason Her Majesty brought us down the narrow road is because Her Majesty knows: only the guilty-hearted hide their most precious things in the weeds.
The thick, viscous fog, once it passed that logical crossroads, at last began to thin as the elevation rose.
Through the jagged silhouette of the fir tree line, a dark grey outline — carrying with it an ancient, oppressive weight — began to materialize at the far edge of everyone's field of vision.
It was Avalon's city wall — rough stone blocks with deep green moss packed into every crack, casting in the moonlight a quality that was both decayed and inexplicably solid, both eerie and immovable.
Just as the new recruits' breathing grew rapid and their hands moved instinctively toward their swords, Sophia's voice — cool as spring water over stone — swept low through the trees once more:
"Full force, halt.
Dress ranks in place. Rest for one hour."
"No fires. No loud noise."
Sophia stood beside a boulder that had been sprayed with floral water, her cloak swaying gently in the faint breeze.
Her pale-gold eyes were fixed on the distant watchtower, where the sweeping light of Olan-style patrol torches could be faintly seen moving in slow arcs.
"Avalon's sentinels are accustomed to the silence of the fog. A single thread of cookfire smoke where none should be will become the signal that destroys us.
Irene — distribute the prepared rations."
The soldiers who had been champing at the bit immediately reined in their killing intent, and with practiced discipline they settled against tree trunks and behind boulders.
In Mason's military law, Her Majesty's will is the one and only truth.
There was no hot, steaming broth — but when the quartermaster soldiers pressed paper-wrapped dry rations into their hands, the fervent light in those soldiers' eyes blazed back to life all the same.
The soldiers sat cross-legged on the damp but cool lichen-covered ground and unwrapped the parcels in their hands.
Inside were not only the thick black bread — produced under Bardess's supervision, made with a generous measure of oil and salt — but also two pieces of wheat cake baked to a dry, crumbly crunch.
What made them hold their breath was a stack of smoked ham sliced tissue-thin, glistening with a crystalline sheen of fat, and two substantial strips of very firm salted beef jerky.
"Gulp."
A new recruit swallowed hard, his hands trembling as he pinched up a slice of ham and placed it in his mouth.
The fat melting across his tongue — carrying a faint smoky wood fragrance and the punch of refined salt — nearly brought tears to his eyes.
"Holy saints above... I've never eaten anything this good in my entire life.
Back in my village, you wouldn't see a scrap of meat all year round — even on New Year's, the whole family had to split one egg between them.
And here we are now, fighting a war!
Fighting alongside Her Majesty, and somehow we're eating ham that only lords and nobles are supposed to deserve.
Who are we to call this risking our lives?
This is practically Her Majesty taking us on a picnic to Avalon!
Eating this meat, breathing in the floral water on our skin — I feel more at ease in this dense forest than I ever did in my leaky little grass hut back home.
Her Majesty treats our lives like they're made of gold. If I don't go punch a hole straight through that crumbling city wall up ahead, what face would I have left to go back and collect my work-points?"
That sense of satisfaction rising up from the stomach transformed in an instant into the most unshakeable morale.
In their eyes, what Sophia had given them was not merely food — it was the dignity of being human.
Willow took up a small piece of wheat cake with the crust trimmed away and stepped quietly to Sophia's side.
She watched the soldiers wolfing down their food with desperate hunger yet not daring to make a sound, and the corners of her lips curved into an expression of helpless, devoted enchantment.
Look at this. This is Her Majesty's method.
She needs no flowery words to rally their spirits.
That one stack of ham is more effective than any speech before battle.
Her Majesty calculated the precise psychological breaking point of these new recruits, and at the most oppressive moment possible, delivered to them the highest order of physical reward.
When the dopamine detonates inside their minds, Avalon's city wall stops looking like an obstacle — and starts looking like a massive, gift-wrapped box of work-points waiting to be cracked open.
This absolute loyalty achieved through the exploitation of biological instinct — that is the most bewitching element of Her Majesty's logic.
Your Majesty... your profile in this moonlight is more luminous than any god Avalon has ever worshipped.
Irene chewed on a strip of jerky, and with a few technical soldiers working alongside her, rapidly assembled several black metal frames in the shadows of the treeline.
"Faster, get the silencing pads fitted in."
Irene muttered with her mouth full.
"When we launch the attack, I want these powder charges to go off without so much as a whisper reaching those Olan dogs' ears."
The soldiers didn't understand. The soldiers did it anyway.
The hour of recovery passed in the blink of an eye.
That precious smoked ham and thick black bread converted themselves into the most direct kind of physical energy, flowing into the limbs and bones of five thousand Mason elite soldiers.
The fog in the forest reached its deepest density in the darkest hour before dawn. Sophia rose to her feet, and her silver armor scattered cold, fractured light in the dim air.
Every soldier held their breath. Five thousand pairs of eyes converged on the master of the throne like a gathering of sparks.
They had rehearsed countless siege scenarios in their minds: scaling ladders in close-quarters brawls, battering rams grinding against gates, even drawn-out sieges of attrition.
Yet the very first words out of Sophia's mouth plunged every single mind into a split-second crash.
"Listen carefully, all of you. The tactic we are about to execute does not require you to fight for your lives. It only requires you to perform."
Sophia spread out her compact field map and drew her fingertip across the heavy gates of Avalon:
"First formation — circle around to the edge of the dense forest on the right side of the city gate. No charge needed.
Your task is to make as much noise as possible. Wave your torches. Shout insults.
The fouler, the better. Avalon's people and the Olan nobility fancy themselves aristocrats — nothing gets under their skin faster than being heckled by the rabble.
Second formation — same operation, on the left flank. Draw the sentinels' attention.
Remember: your lives are worth more than this broken wall. If you see crossbow bolts coming, you get out of the way. You do not take them head-on."
The soldiers exchanged bewildered glances. A two-handed swordsman could not help scratching his head, his voice dropped to a low mutter:
"Your Majesty... no battle cry, no assault on the walls — just shouting abuse?
Is... is that really going to work?"
"It's called sensory overload."
Sophia's cool gaze swept across him, and the doubting soldier immediately retracted his neck.
She looked toward Bardess, who stood to one side, and a thread of absolute, unqualified trust moved through her eyes:
"Bardess — take the elite Black Musketeers, bring the simplified black powder bombs Irene made, and while the left and right flanks are turning the air blue, move directly under the main gate."
She paused, her tone as flat as if she were discussing how to cut a wheat cake:
"Avalon's gate is a hundred years of fir wood clad in copper plating. Physically speaking, it is very solid.
But to Irene's toys, it is nothing more than a fragile membrane.
Detonate three times in succession. I want that gate erased from the map entirely."
The soldiers who had still been wrestling with traditional siege thinking had their minds ignited in a single flash of revelation, instantly wrapped in a stunned, almost breathless awe.
"Holy saints above... what were we thinking just now? We were actually still thinking about how to climb ladders?
In Her Majesty's eyes, that fogbound barrier that has bottled up the Northern border for centuries is nothing more than a wooden door that a few sticks of gunpowder can solve.
Why waste time trading crossbow fire?
Why fill the moat with bodies?
Her Majesty's tactics are so brutally... magnificent.
She uses our shouting to lock down the enemy's cognitive function, then uses Lord Irene's simplified black powder bombs to physically blast open the road.
This is what Her Majesty means by efficiency.
Noble etiquette? Rules of attack and defense? Measured against Her Majesty's logic, every last one of those is a life-wasting piece of garbage!"
Irene grinned and patted the black wooden case on her back — filled to the brim with the results of several nights she had spent working through the night in the West Tower.
"Don't worry, Your Majesty!
These black canisters are packed with refined saltpeter and sulfur. I even threw in some finely ground iron pellets for good measure."
Irene's eyes, sapphire-bright, blazed with fervent excitement.
"Never mind a wooden gate — if I had enough explosive, I could blow Avalon's entire city wall clean off the face of the earth!"
Willow watched this scene unfold, the devout enchantment in the depths of her heart almost overflowing its banks.
So this is Her Majesty's genius — they had prepared for all of this from the very beginning, Her Majesty and Miss Irene together.
Once you see through Avalon's weakness — border defenses stretched thin, no large-scale ranged suppression weapons — all the elaborate art of war loses its meaning entirely.
Her Majesty doesn't need a brilliant encirclement net. She needs only one single, crushing logical blow to shatter the shell her enemy has built their survival around.
This mode of thinking — completely abandoning convention and driving straight for the core of the target — that is the true secret of why the Black Rose can reign supreme over all things.
Avalon... are you ready to meet this sun that does not play by anyone's rules?
Sophia turned back to the edge of the carriage. The long sword in her hand rose slowly, and her pale-gold eyes caught, in the darkness, the flicker of panicked firelight atop the city wall.
"Pass the order. Full force, take your positions.
Let Avalon's nightmare begin with Mason's first profanity."
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