Chapter 1352 — Turbulence
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 5
A few words of idle chatter with an old friend had brought back a little of the old feeling to Wycliffe, who had only just returned to the surface from the medical ship. He breathed a quiet sigh into the chill wind of late winter edging into spring, then turned his gaze toward the military camps that had sprung up outside Red Jade City not long ago, and the assorted vehicles weaving between them. There was a note of feeling in his voice: "A lot of people say the Cecil folk are like ghosts and gods when it comes to infrastructure, but I never really understood that until I saw with my own eyes how these camps and roads came to cover the ground outside Red Jade City in just a few days—the rest of it I can wrap my head around, but how in the world did they run that many barracks from the foot of the city wall all the way to the forest's edge in a matter of days?"
"Dropped them straight out of the sky," Carmilla said with a shrug. "While you were waiting for the doctors to screw your new arm into place, they sent in two more aerial fortresses from the rear. 'Frontline engineering ships,' or something like that. They were stacked full of these square 'container houses' like crates, and then they just airdropped the whole lot onto the plains..."
Wycliffe was dumbstruck. After a long, blank pause, he reached up with his alloy-built hand and rubbed the bridge of his nose, feeling the touch of metal against skin as he muttered to himself, "So I was thinking too small..."
Carmilla's gaze, however, had stayed fixed on the human king's mechanical arm the whole time. She studied those armor plates, joints, and connecting tubes with their mechanical beauty in earnest, and had it not been for the constraints of her station as High Chieftain, she likely would have already blurted out, "Take it off and let me play with it." That undisguised stare did not escape Wycliffe's notice, and the human king could not help but laugh. He waved the arm in front of Carmilla, and the neural signal triggered some mechanism within it. With a humming ring, the plates near his wrist sprang open, and an energy blade brimming with arcane radiance coalesced out of the air in an instant, its brilliant light glittering in the eyes of the orc High Chieftain.
Carmilla immediately let out an exaggerated cry: "Whoa—"
Wycliffe laughed again and casually flipped his wrist. The energy blade dispersed, and his mechanical palm suddenly split open down the middle, revealing a ring-shaped rune structure and a crystal array inside. A small arcane missile launcher appeared before Carmilla's eyes.
"This thing is way more useful than your cleaver," the human king said smugly to the High Chieftain. "The doctors said that since I'm a powerful Transcendent myself and can support a greater mana drain, they stuffed a whole bunch of experimental weapons into my mechanical arm—you're no match for me now."
"Whoa—" Carmilla exclaimed again, then her eyes narrowed. "Can you take that off and let me play with it for a couple of days?"
"Absolutely not," Wycliffe refused without hesitation, swiftly restoring his arm to its original state. Then, as he fished out a pipe and clamped it between his teeth, he lit it with an electric arc that sparked from the tip of his mechanical finger. "Once this is installed, it's the same as my original arm—the nerves, the bones, everything's connected together. I'm just showing it to you..."
Carmilla's ear twitched. Her face showed obvious disappointment, and she looked down at her own arms, muttering under her breath: "Then maybe I should just cut off my own arms and swap in a pair like yours..."