"Greeting me? I am afraid that is quite a far cry from what you are actually harboring in your heart," Remilia remarked coolly, her crimson eyes scanning Theresis from head to toe.
Theresis instantly felt a crushing wave of pressure settle over the clearing. His fingers subconsciously tightened around the hilt of his legendary greatsword, his muscles locking into a coiled, defensive stance.
The atmosphere fractured, freezing both sides in a tense, silent deadlock.
Before the Regent could speak, the elite bodyguards who had raced after him from the city gates finally arrived. Sensing the immense threat radiating from the travelers, they instantly surged forward, drawing their heavy blades and forming a protective wall in front of their commander.
The display of loyalty was fierce and undeniable, but in this specific situation, it made Theresis's chest tighten with sudden dread.
"Stand down!" he commanded, but his warning came a fraction of a second too late.
Up by the horses, Meiling adjusted the bridge of her dark sunglasses with a single finger, her posture dripping with casual arrogance. She flipped her right hand over, palm facing skyward, and curled her fingers inward in a slow, unmistakable beckoning motion.
The highly provocative gesture shattered the discipline of the elite vanguard.
In the eyes of these loyal soldiers, Theresis was the heavens themselves—the guiding north star for the entire Sarkaz race and the leader they revered above all else. For a mere carriage driver to not only omit the most basic protocols of respect upon meeting the Regent, but to actively mock them with such a mocking gesture, was completely intolerable.
With a collective roar, they lunged toward her.
Watching the line of steel charge her position, Meiling's lips curled upward into a brilliant grin, her fighting spirit soaring to spectacular heights.
"Come on then!" she shouted, her voice echoing across the flatlands. Instead of retreating into a defensive shell, she surged forward to meet them head-on. She chose not to invoke a single Spell Card, opting to dismantle the vanguard using nothing but her bare fists.
As the lead guard brought his heavy blade down in a thunderous vertical arc, Meiling deflected the strike with a lightning-fast slap.
The elite warrior had never anticipated that an unarmed opponent could intercept a descending weapon with such casual precision. To serve on the Regent's personal detail, these men had to be top-tier combatants, possessing a lethality equal to the hidden blades who had historically targeted Queen Theresa. They represented the absolute peak of Kazdel's military elite, and their striking power was immense. A standard warrior would have been cut clean in two, forcing even Theresis to choose between a swift dodge or a heavy parry with his own sword.
Yet, Meiling's palm struck the flat of the rushing steel with a delicate, perfectly measured tap.
The timing of her redirection was flawless down to the microsecond. A fraction of a second too early, and her fingers would have been sliced apart by the descending edge; a fraction too late, and the blade would have cleared her shoulder line. But her strike met the metal at the exact spatial intersection required, forcing the heavy sword to veer off course and whistle harmlessly past her flank.
Meiling's left hand didn't remain idle for a single heartbeat. Like a venomous viper exploding from its burrow, her fingers shot out from beneath her guard, driving straight toward the center of the man's chest armor.
The soldier held his breath, bracing his muscles to absorb a shattering, explosive impact. But when her fingertips made contact with the steel plate, he felt practically nothing—the sensation was as gentle as a lover's soft caress.
In that fleeting moment of profound confusion, the guard's rhythmic breathing faltered. Instantly capitalizing on the split-second lapse, Meiling snapped her hand back a mere hand's span to generate leverage, her fingers coiling into a tight fist as her entire body weight surged forward in a seamless explosion of kinetic energy.
The guard was launched backward through the air like a stone from a catapult.
Had a seasoned martial arts scholar from the Far East been standing in the clearing, they would have instantly recognized the maneuver as one of the legendary finishing techniques of the Xinyi Xingyi style—the Crushing Fist.
Though the punch covered a remarkably short distance, utilizing a power generation range of only a few inches, the internal shockwave rippled clean through the target's torso. The heavy steel breastplate remained completely intact, offering zero protection against the focused internal energy passing through it. The vanguard soldier crashed heavily into the dirt, entirely stripped of the strength required to stand, coughing up dark crimson fluid as his lungs struggled for air.
Before the first man had even skipped across the grass, the remaining bodyguards converged on Meiling, their blades flashing from multiple angles.
The dragon gatekeeper remained entirely unhurried. Her hands moved with an elegant, deceptive slowness that defied their actual blinding speed, attaching her palms fluidly to the two nearest weapons. With a subtle twist of her wrists, she pulled and guided the incoming momentum, causing the expressions of both attackers to turn to pure shock.
They discovered, to their horror, that the handles of their swords were no longer obeying their physical commands.
Just as they hesitated over whether to break their grip and scramble backward, Meiling had already guided the stolen trajectories of their own steel to block and parry the remaining incoming slashes.
With the cross-grid of weapons locked in a chaotic knot, Meiling's hands struck out like snapping whips, planting a dual palm strike squarely against the chests of the two bound soldiers. Both men flew backward into the grass, their tumbling bodies cluttering the path of their advancing comrades and successfully fracturing the enemy's offensive momentum.
This time, Meiling had seamlessly transitioned into the circular mechanics of Tai Chi, a style brilliantly designed to conquer explosive speed through fluid patience, leveraging an opponent's own mass against them in the chaos of a melee brawl.
"Beautifully done! Yay!"
A short distance away, Flandre poked her blonde head out from the carriage window. Watching Meiling display such effortless martial prowess, the child clapped her hands repeatedly, cheering at the top of her lungs.
Hearing the child's cheerful shouting, the remaining guards cast aside their lingering hesitation. Exchanging a grim, silent look, their expressions shifted into those of warriors who had burned their bridges behind them, and they charged Meiling with reckless abandonment.
Meiling dropped the defensive posturing and seized the initiative, striking first.
Her movement vocabulary shifted instantly, abandoning the gentle breeze and soft drizzle of her previous defensive loops for a fierce, domineering style of pure close-quarters combat. She stepped inside the guard lines with an explosive stride. Before the nearest men could even raise their hilts to establish a block, she opened her palm into a rigid claw, driving it straight toward the throat of the lead soldier.
The man snapped his forearm up to parry the lethal thrust, but he failed to anticipate Meiling's trailing hand, which tracked the open seam created by his raised elbow to strike directly at his eyes.
Forced to alter his defense mid-motion, the soldier raised his secondary hand to shield his vision. Though his reflexes were remarkably swift, the desperate defensive posture completely obscured his view of Meiling's torso.
Deep within his blind spot, Meiling's third strike had already altered its trajectory, driving cleanly through his guard to connect solidly with his throat. With a choked gasp, the elite soldier clutched his neck and collapsed to the turf, entirely neutralized.
Without breaking her rhythm, Meiling dropped into a low crouch and lunged forward once more, driving her shoulder directly into the midsection of the next guard. Simultaneously, her lead foot hooked behind the man's ankle.
With a subtle, rolling shove of her torso, the man was sent airborne, colliding hard with a trailing comrade. The pair rolled across the dirt in a tangled heap before losing consciousness entirely.
At this point, only a single guard from Theresis's personal detail remained standing.
He swallowed hard, his throat dry as he looked across the field of his fallen brothers. Facing an adversary of this caliber, he knew with absolute certainty that defeat was inevitable, yet his martial honor left him zero room for retreat. Letting out a deafening roar to bolster his failing morale, he raised his blade and charged.
Meiling's style transformed yet again.
She nimbly slipped past the desperate downward slash, her frame blurring as she closed the distance, arriving directly in front of his chest at a range of less than a foot. Engaging a master martial artist at such close quarters is exceptionally dangerous, as the tight spacing limits standard power generation and renders conventional weapons entirely useless.
Meiling flicked a rapid palm strike toward the man's face. The soldier subconsciously threw his hands up to cover his head, only to realize the impact never landed. Looking up through his fingers, he discovered that Meiling's figure had completely vanished from his field of vision.
In that single heartbeat of misdirection, a pair of powerful arms wrapped firmly around his waist from behind.
In the eyes of the remaining observers, Meiling had deceived the man's spatial awareness with a simple facial feint before fluidly sliding behind his back like a fish cutting through deep water. Dropping her center of gravity, she locked her grip around his midsection, her muscles tightening like steel bands.
With a sudden, explosive release of coiled strength, she arched her spine backward, driving the soldier over her head in a magnificent, soaring bridge.
The German suplex was executed with flawless, textbook perfection. The back of the final guard's helmet impacted the turf with a dull thud, knocking him unconscious instantly.
As the dust slowly settled across the open plain, only Meiling remained standing, calmly brushing a stray speck of dirt from her uniform sleeve.