Lord Summoner's Freedom Philosophy: Grimoire of Love-Chapter 504: Royal Final Battle (1)

The mirror blade: he noticed hairline scratches across the fuller on the reflective side, tiny scoring invisible unless light struck at a harsh angle. Likely the relic deflected direct energy bolts, but broad-area effects—the kind that wrapped—would leak through the scratches.

Mage’s orb: the star-fields inside spiraled clockwise. But when the mage turned left, the rotation countered slightly, as if inertia fought the motion. In that fractional lag he saw the spatial lens flicker out behind the caster’s left heel—perhaps twenty degrees of blind spot.

The knight: armor whistled when he inhaled, sigils aligning and creating temporary vents. On exhale the plates resettled with a clack. If those vents clogged with molten metal from a lightning strike, heat would cook him alive under his own skin. Good.

The Queen: she exhaled in short syllables, lips forming silent words. Her hands twitched like a gambler counting cards four hands ahead. Lyan timed the twitches—five heartbeats apart. Precognitive bursts, but limited by processing speed. Overwhelm with layered feints; let her drown in choice.

He stored the observations, locking them behind calm eyes.

"Astellia is scum," the King repeated, raising his chin. "Rats squealing in stolen palaces. We are the last empire of men."

"Then it’s a shame," Lyan replied, voice pitched almost sad, "to wrap such pride around cowardice."

The Queen flinched—a micro jerk at the word shame as if that specific future unravelled something she’d preferred hidden. Lyan filed the reaction: psychological lever acquired.

The broader princess barked a low laugh. "Coward? Father, permit me to unmake him."

"Blood of my blood," the King murmured indulgently, gesturing with two fingers. "Show him how royals dance."

But no one moved yet. Standoff tension, like dry grass before storm lightning.

(No illusions. Precision,) Griselda hissed.

Lyan inhaled, feeling his own heartbeat slow until it matched the flicker of the sconces—four beats, hold, four beats. In the stillness he ran a rapid-fire simulation: twelve seconds, eight combatants if he included himself, fifteen predicted vectors of attack.

First second: lightning feint at the mirror sword to gauge reflection tolerance. Bounce angle ninety-three degrees—redirect into temporal gauntlet zone.

Second: residual current arcs into after-image path; princess stutters, temporal displacement misaligned.

Third: coin flick at Queen to seed false vision, simultaneously step left to dodge predicted lance of command energy channelled through crown vent.

Fourth to sixth: roll through mage’s spatial warp, angle the glaive punt upward—orb fracture threshold eighty percent; a crack should offset lensing.

Seventh: lightning surge downward into stone under cursed knight—ungrounded armor, internal conduction.

Eighth to twelfth: dispatch disoriented princesses, break mirror with blunt force, maintain mana shield from Arturia to deflect spectral spears.

He tasted each beat like acid on the tongue—necessary, inevitable.

"I don’t need illusions," he whispered. "I need precision."

The King twitched, puzzled by the confession, but it was too late. Lyan stepped.

A clap of white-blue lightning erupted from his glaive tip, spearing straight toward the mirror blade princess. She met it with a sneer, swinging her sword like a door to bounce the bolt—exactly as planned. Electricity ricocheted, shattering a marble statue on the far wall, but Lyan had already pivoted, spinning the shaft so the bolt’s tail arced sideways into the air thick with time-shadows near the gauntlet sister.

Static exploded around her. For a heartbeat the corridor filled with three, four, nine overlapping silhouettes of the princess—each a half-phase copy as the relic tried to recalibrate. In that disarray Lyan lunged, not with the glaive but with his boot, slamming a precise kick into her ribs the instant she solidified. Bone cracked—a hollow drum inside armor.

The Queen inhaled sharp—he heard the hiss though twenty paces away. Her rune coronet flashed sickly violet. Lyan flicked a tiny gold coin from his belt pouch, a gambler’s token from Josephine, straight toward her left peripheral. Her silver eyes darted, pupils dilating, following the gleam. Choice split. She recalculated futures—too late.

Lyan shot right instead. The mage gestured, and air warped into a shimmering curtain, twisting parallel pillars like taffy. Lyan dropped low, rolling, feeling the warped gravity tug at his spine. The world bent stomach-lurching sideways; he pushed through, came up on a knee inside the mage’s blind foot angle and smashed the glaive butt into the orb.

Crystal shrieked—a brittle, sorrow-shiver that skated up the marble pillars and echoed like a dying star in the dome. Tiny fractures spider-webbed across the orb in the mage’s arms, fine as frost on winter glass. Inside, the pocket-sky of constellations blinked and guttered, as if someone had snuffed candles in a distant universe one by one. Lyan watched the pattern collapse with the clinical fascination of a surgeon noting the tremor before a heart stops. Every vanishing star told him exactly how much power the relic was hemorrhaging, exactly how many heartbeats remained before the lens would implode and fold the mage in on himself like wet parchment.

The mage’s face crumpled into a child’s mask of disbelief. "Impossible," he mouthed, voice cracked raw with the sudden absence of omnipotence.

"Unfortunate," Lyan corrected, and meant it. The man’s fear was so tangible Lyan could taste the copper of it in the back of his throat—a reminder of his own nights waking to battlefield ghosts. He had no quarrel with fear; fear was honest. It was obsession that curdled a kingdom, and every ounce of obsession in this room radiated from the King like rancid incense.

Movement—that was all the warning he got. The mirror-blade princess, the broader of the two, stepped in front of her father. For the first time he saw uncertain tension in her shoulders, a heartbeat-flicker where the reflection in her sword stuttered and doubled her own wide eyes. She was brave, no question, but the courage was fraying now that the celestial orb had cracked and the air no longer bent to Varzadian will.

Across the dais her sister—the wiry duelist whose silver gauntlet painted ghost-hands in the torchlight—shifted her stance. Lyan’s gaze slipped sideways, cataloguing tremors. Earlier, her after-images had been crisp, each echo of her limb as clean as a jeweler’s cut. Now, though, the relic apparently drank more mana than she possessed; the projections bled around the edges, ghosts smeared like wet ink. Her breathing hitched, and a veiled note of panic colored her eyes—clear hazel shimmering toward amber, an echo of her father’s but without the cruelty.

(They still look for an exit,) Cynthia whispered, soft and grave. (Give them one.)

(Spare the pretty ones if you must,) Lilith teased, yet there was an odd gentleness beneath the velvet.

Griselda crackled—no words this time, only sparks: impatience battling restraint.

Lyan adjusted his grip on the glaive, feeling the oiled haft glide beneath his palm, and stepped toward the fallen mage—not to finish him, but to pivot so the princesses stood between him and the raging King. A subtle shift, but it said I am not here to butcher children. It said I notice your fear, and I will not feed it. The smaller princess flicked her eyes to his boots, reading that message quicker than words; he saw a tight nod, almost invisible, before she replaced it with a defiant lift of chin.

"Back, Ara," the King snarled, noticing her hesitation. "Hold your line." freeweɓnovēl.coɱ

The command struck Lyan harder than any spear. Not because of the venom, but because of what it lacked: a father’s concern. He watched Ara’s shoulders flinch under the rebuke, watched the mirror-blade princess—Kassia, if he recalled the genealogies correctly—squeeze the hilt hard enough for knuckles to blanch. Their fear was no longer directed at him; it was stitched into their very bloodline, a lifelong tightening of sinews whenever that man’s voice cracked a whip.

And suddenly Lyan understood: the royal relics were not purely honors but shackles. They amplified strength, yes, but they also magnified obedience, feeding through blood oaths older than any of the wearers. It was power purchased at the price of will. The insight soured his gut. He would break their weapons if he could, but not the women still half-hidden inside the steel.

"Princess Ara." He spoke her name gently, letting it roll across the chamber with the warmth of a hearth. "That gauntlet is draining you. You feel it—how the echoes shake apart now? You can drop it. Live."

Her brows knit. Sweat dotted the furrow of her cheek despite the cool subterranean air. She opened her mouth—maybe to answer, maybe to protest—but the King’s crown hissed with a fresh corona of amber light. The spikes spat arcs into the air, and the mere scent of ozone cowed her back into silence.

"Treachery, always treachery," the King hissed, more to himself than anyone, like a gambler muttering odds. "Stand your ground, girl."

Lyan’s chest tightened. Every soldier he had ever saved—or failed to—stood behind his ribs in that moment, urging him to keep speaking. But the fight had not paused. Out of the corner of his eye he caught the mage staggering upright, one elbow braced on a pillar that now bent at an impossible angle. Blood ran from his nostril in a bright thread. The cracked orb wobbled in his other hand, swirling star-shards still chewing at the chamber geometry in erratic gulps.

A sound like grinding ice spiraled upward—the mirror sword twisting, refracting fresh torchfire as Kassia stepped into a guard position. Her gaze locked on him, not with hatred but with a soldier’s bleak resolve. "Drop your weapon," she said, voice husky with unshed smoke. "Or I will break you against that pillar."

"Doubtful," he murmured, but he made sure the respect in his eyes reached her. She fought despite fear; he honored that.

He drew a measured breath, letting Arturia’s white mana soak his muscles, a cool bloom under the skin. The glaive hummed. Up close the runes looked like fresh snowflakes caught on silver branches—beautiful, yes, but also a reminder of burdens carried farther than most human bodies could endure. Griselda’s spark flowed beneath, wanting release.

Not yet.

New n𝙤vel chapters are published on fre(e)webnov(l).com