The city held its breath. It was D-Day.A strange, nervous energy hummed through the Ironclad District, fueled by anticipation, fear, and the sheer spectacle promised by Crown Prince Alexander. The streets below the safe house were empty, the populace having flocked to the designated viewing platforms or huddled indoors, bracing for the Black Peak Meteor Strike.Inside the safe house, the air was still and electric. The team was cloaked in black, their faces illuminated only by the faint, purplish glow of Edam’s active Shadow Thread and the crystalline sheen of Hedle’s tools. They had rehearsed this moment a hundred times in their minds, but the reality was a terrifyingly simple sequence of actions that had to be flawlessly executed.“The Prince’s broadcast has begun,” Rina whispered, her eyes fixed on the tiny, muffled scrying lens built into the assassin’s ledger. “He is giving his speech. The strike will happen at the climax. That is the moment of maximum sensory disruption. Hedle,

The Blind Spot ProtocolThe surveillance net cast by Balthazar’s Mercenary Guild was not merely a physical presence; it was a sophisticated, Aetheric web woven into the very fabric of the Royal Academy and key Ley Line nodes across Aethelgard. For weeks, Rina had existed in a state of suspended animation, her true Space Mage abilities locked down, using only the mundane, traceable power of the runic constructs Mordi and Hedle had secured. Balthazar was watching for a ripple—a sudden, anomalous burst of Non-Euclidean Aether that would betray the presence of a true dimensional mage.Rina, Mordi, and Davina met in the heavily shielded, damp-earth cellar beneath Lyra’s apothecary. The air was thick with the scent of volatile chemicals, a natural disruption for any sensitive Aetheric tracking.“His net is tightening, Rina,” Mordi stated, his face grim. He held a small, antique Aetheric sensor that glowed a sickly, pulsing red. “Two new tracking runes have been activated near the Palace’s m

The Trial of the Obsidian MineThe Battle of the Obsidian Mine was not fought with fireballs, but with the cold, unforgiving edge of financial law. Weeks after Rina’s attack on the Palace, the ensuing political disorder served as a dense fog, obscuring the precise movements of the assassins while providing cover for opportunistic vultures. The first to strike was Liona Varrick, a name synonymous with land speculation and legal cruelty.Varrick’s mercenaries held the mine’s main gate, their Aetheric shields humming, while the real conflict played out in a hastily erected command tent. The air inside was humid and thick with the scent of wet leather and ozone. The representative of the Bright Family was huddled nervously behind Prince Kael, the Crown’s eleventh son, who had arrived to personally intervene. Kael, a man known for his rigid, by-the-book adherence to the Kingdom’s labyrinthine property laws, considered this seizure a grotesque violation of noble protocol.“You have overstep

The Golden-Haired Prince and the Merchant CounselorThe temporary royal office felt less like a seat of power and more like the deck of a sinking ship. Prince Alexander, the Crown Heir, sat hunched over his mahogany desk. His light golden hair, usually perfectly coiffed, was slightly dishevelled, and the severity of his jaw was accentuated by the dark circles under his eyes. He had successfully weathered the palace attack and the subsequent political earthquake, but the sheer volume of the crisis was drowning him.The mountain of data that Mordi Chernyi had unleashed—the fully activated Mana Conduit Ledger—was a biblical flood of damning evidence. Alexander was now armed with the power to erase entire bloodlines, but he lacked the means to organize the chaos into actionable, legally sound verdicts.“The problem, Counselor Mordi,” Alexander stated, massaging his temples, “is timing. The Varrick legal claim on the Bright Mine is sound only because the Brights have no standing left. If

The Gilded Cage of Counselor ChernyiThe Royal Palace, once a place of ceremonial pomp, was now a silent, tense labyrinth. Counselor Mordi Chernyi found his new daily routine was one of constant, suffocating stress. He was no longer the quiet academician; he was the Arcane Systems Advisor to Prince Alexander, the man who held the key to the terrifying truth of the Mana Conduit Ledger.Alexander, with his striking light golden hair and an ever-present look of exhaustion, kept the Ledger’s existence a profound secret. The downfall of the Brights and the Varricks had been strategically masked. The Brights were publicly destroyed by the overwhelming evidence of their private army and unauthorized Skill Orb production—acts of immediate, undeniable treason. Varrick was ruined through a meticulous, retroactively applied financial judgment. The public assumed these were the first, decisive moves of an aggressive, legitimate investigation, not the fruit of a magical artifact that could expose