The Guardian gods

Chapter 878

Ragnar felt a wave of absurdity washing over him. Just a few months ago, he had been the one driving the kingdom toward conflict. He had craved a war with the people of Björn. He had meticulously laid the groundwork, even manufacturing a perfectly righteous political reason to ignite the spark.

Everything had been moving in the exact direction he wanted. He had even secured his son’s engagement to the princess of the Godlings, locking in a crucial, world-shaping alliance.

But then, the world cracked open.

The catastrophic clash between Osita and the Paragon of the Omadi Kingdom changed everything. Seeing the sheer, reality-warping scale of that battle and realizing the pathetic limitations of his own power had utterly shattered Ragnar’s confidence to face Björn. He had suffered from waking nightmares since that day. In his mind, he kept playing out a horrifying scenario, marching confidently into battle against Björn, deploying his grand conceptual laws, only to burn out his mana after a few meager attacks. He would be left completely drained, powerless, and utterly at the mercy of a monster who relished suffering.

Since that fateful clash, Ragnar had completely buried the notion of war. He hadn’t brought it up in council a single time. He had naive-mindedly believed that every Paragon across the continent shared the exact same unspoken sentiment, that no one would be foolish enough to engage in high-level warfare until they solved the glaring, fatal weakness of long-standing mana consumption.

But he should have known better. He had allowed himself to forget the most fundamental truth of the north.

The people of Björn had never functioned under the laws of reason. They were irrational, suicidal, murderous barbarians.

For years, with Yuki sitting on their throne and playing the game of sophisticated politics, Ragnar had foolishly believed that the northern kingdom had evolved, leaving their savage past behind them. But the broken border wall was a bloody awakening. He was being violently reminded that the people of Björn had never changed from their roots. They were still the same rabid wolves they had always been, and they were ready to burn the world down just for a taste of blood.

Looking at his distressed Paragons, who were practically unraveling at the seams, and his mortal council members, who looked utterly lost, Ragnar felt a surge of cold clarity. He realized with absolute certainty that if they continued down this path of panic and hesitation, they were going to lose the war before it even truly began.

He slapped the silver handle of his throne. A freezing, chilling shockwave of compressed air erupted from his palm, sweeping across the grand chamber like a sudden winter gale.

The sharp crack of the shockwave instantly silenced the hall. The bickering stopped, the pacing halted, and every eye in the room snapped to him.

"Look at you all. Pathetic," Ragnar said, his voice dripping with disdain as he looked directly at the trembling Paragons.

"In your current state of mind, you would be nothing but chopping meat on a butcher’s block for the people of Björn. Your weakness, your hesitation, and your fear are exactly what those barbarians thrive on. They smell your doubt from across the border."

Brushing past them, he turned his sharp gaze toward the lower council members and the military generals, his tone shifting into one of ironclad authority.

"We have been granted exactly what we have spent decades seeking, a righteous chance for revenge. This day has been a long time coming. And now that it is finally here, the Silver Kingdom will not be cowering in the dark."

He stood up from his throne, towering over the court.

"We are at war."

He spoke the words out loud, letting the heavy syllables hang in the air. He wanted them to hear it. He wanted the absolute, unyielding reality of those words to pierce through their panic and shock them into compliance. There was no more room for hesitation, the storm was here, and they had to face it.

"The past has taught us that our enemies are crazy and bloodthirsty," Ragnar continued, his voice filled with certainty. "If you face them unprepared, you will inevitably find yourself drawn into that very same madness. We have spent years preparing our minds and our strategies for this day, but make no mistake this war will be fought right on our enemy’s backyard."

He stepped down from the dais, his regal posture exuding an unshakeable confidence that began to bleed into the hearts of everyone present.

"They have Björn," he said, pausing as he looked up at the ceiling of the grand hall. "But we have something far greater. We have the Goddess."

With a deep, solemn reverence, Ragnar turned his body and bowed low toward the towering, pristine statue of Mahu that stood at the apex of the court.

"She will never abandon her children," he said, his words acting like a healing balm to the panicked spirits of his Paragons. The reminder of their divine protector instantly anchored them. Björn might be a force of raw, chaotic slaughter, but Mahu was the bedrock of their civilization, a beacon of absolute power and order.

Straightening up, Ragnar’s eyes flashed with tactical fire. "We must respond swiftly to their attack. We cannot allow them to build momentum. Gather the elite legions and have a troop deployed to the border immediately. We must wrest control back from them before their main force can mobilize."

Hearing those decisive orders, one of the council ministers quickly moved forward, sweeping away old documents to spread a massive, glowing tactical map across the center of the table for everyone to see.

With Ragnar’s words, the suffocating mood of fear and disbelief completely evaporated. The Paragons stepped forward, their eyes locked onto the glowing borderlines aiding as the high court of the Silver Kingdom officially began to draft their tactics for the coming war.

In the middle of the intense tactical discussion, Ragnar suddenly raised his hand, freezing the movement of the miniature troop pieces across the glowing map. He turned his sharp gaze toward the corner of the table.

"Check in with the Godlings," Ragnar commanded, his voice dropping to a low, calculated tone. "See if they still plan on going through with the wedding."

He locked eyes with the Paragon in charge of foreign communications, whose expression instantly turned serious. "Be ready for them to retract," Ragnar warned, anticipating the moves of their elusive allies. "They will likely try to use the current chaos at the border as an excuse to delay and extend the wedding timeline. We cannot allow them that room to breathe."

He leaned over the table, pressing his fingers into the silver borderlines on the map.

"Take my son with you. He may be our greatest help right now. If he can use his connection with the princess to push this wedding through, it will grant us our greatest aid and ally in this war. With the strength of the Godlings firmly secured on our side, victory over the barbarians will be ours to claim."

Far away on the southern continent, a tense and quiet shadow had fallen over the land. Following the catastrophic fallout of the last major conflict, the Empire and the Vampire Godlings had reached an unwritten, fiercely respected stalemate, they would stay out of each other’s way, drawing a hard line in the dirt that neither side was eager to cross.

On paper, the Vampire Godlings seemed to have walked away from the chaos as the true victors. They had seized the opportunity to aggressively expand their territory, swallowing up vast swathes of land for themselves while the dust settled.

Yet, within the grand halls of the Empire, this was hardly considered a loss. The regions the vampires had seized were lawless, distant borderlands, territories the Empire had never been able to fully govern or give its attention to anyway. Whether those wild lands belonged to the crown or the blood-drinkers meant absolutely nothing to the Empire’s design.

Today, however, a monumental shift was quietly taking place within the heart of the imperial palace.

Chen sat upon the obsidian throne, the ambient light of the chamber casting sharp shadows across his face. His gaze was locked onto a thick stack of complex parchment.

Before him were the theories drawn up by the finest minds of the Imperial Mages. They had spent months working desperately trying to solve the single greatest crisis facing the Paragons of the world, finding a way to breach the fatal gap of limited mana consumption.

Chen was so completely engrossed in the script that he didn’t notice an old man step casually out of thin air, find a comfortable place to sit, and simply watch him.

By all laws of power in the current world, that should have been impossible. Chen was a Paragon, his passive awareness was finely tuned to the fabric of space itself. Any form of displacement, any ripple in the local mana or element, should have triggered an alarm in his mind. Yet, with this old man, the world itself seemed to have kept perfectly silent.