Knights and Magic Wand
Chapter 671: 313 (Late, after 3 o'clock or refresh and watch in the morning)

Chapter 671: Chapter 313 (Late, after 3 o’clock or refresh and watch in the morning)

The dawn sunlight finally brushed over Oran City.

On the streets of the West District, where the riot broke out, Royal City Guards locked down every entrance and exit due to martial law.

Even without counting the civilians affected, the brief riot resulted in nearly a thousand casualties, with the streets filled with the bloody scent of humans and horses, lingering for a long time without dispersing.

The entire city remains in a closed-door lockdown, with tens of thousands of soldiers still hunting and capturing fugitives involved in conspiracy and chaos.

Those rebels still alive are now each thrown deep into the underground prison beneath the Royal City.

….

After the riot was quelled, the martial law continued for three full days without ending.

The Knights’ Tournament was naturally forced to temporarily cease, with the atmosphere inside the city shifting from lively and festive to tense and dangerous, leaving hundreds of thousands of residents in a state of panic.

Leon and Kovis, acting as “advisers” familiar with Athiasians, spent the three days accompanying Marcus, Commander of the Imperial Guard, thoroughly investigating every stationed lodge in the Kantadar Western nobles’ district.

Through careful identification of bodies and cross-verifying testimonies from the Kantadar noble witnesses, Leon discovered that among the hundreds of noble knights from Vellozal and Magya, over a hundred of them had unidentifiable identities.

Not to mention those attendants and servant teams accompanying these fake Kantadar knights.

Coincidentally, these hundred-odd members of the Kantadar family formed a network among each other, with emblems, clothing, and backgrounds traceable, yet all were of insignificant repute, having little familiarity with most of the nobles in their regions.

Additionally, they had over ten small Kantadar nobles from the west truly aware of their protected identities.

These dozen accomplices of the Athiasians were identified after detailing the social activities of those deceased troublemakers from genuine Vellozal noble families through mutual recollections.

The Kantadar nobles uninvolved in the turmoil are now eager to clear their suspicions and escape from Oran, longing to return home from this place of disaster, not hesitating to testify against their compatriots who had openly or covertly proven the identities of the rebels.

In their view, these bastards nearly condemned the knights like themselves, who had merely come to participate in the tournament, to die meaninglessly in a foreign land. They had no intention of sheltering their compatriots who almost implicated them.

Leon, uncertain whether more Kantadar nobles acting innocent lurked among the crowd, nevertheless found catching these dozen collaborators of the Athiasians to be quite a fruitful outcome.

…

Once he finished collaborating on what he could, Leon returned to the Avalon team’s lodging from the kingdom’s high officials overseeing the investigation.

On the second floor of the lodge’s small building, Leon heard from Ines some intelligence extracted by the interrogators from the mouths of those dozen Kantadar collaborators over the past few days.

Reportedly, the destitute nobles from Kantadar aiding the Athiasians were coerced and tempted by the Felcon family from the West to participate, offering identity guarantees and protection to foreign black-robed men in this high-stakes gamble.

According to them, besides receiving considerable wealth beforehand, they were promised unimaginable vast territories and power for their small families if the operation succeeded.

Even if they failed, regardless of whether they managed to flee back to the Vellozal territory with the Athiasians or not, Felcon would assist their families in seizing the lands of those Kantadar Western lords executed in Orland’s fury… a high risk, but equally high reward.

“…..From Emperor Caso, I’ve learned that among the Kantadar Western nobles who came this time, those who didn’t participate in the chaos were almost all past political rivals and loosely affiliated members of the Felcon family.”

“The Western White Bird family is probably thinking… if the Athiasians’ conspiracy fails, they’d use our Orland people to help him eliminate dissent in the Western Alliance, which is why they’re aiding those Athiasians,” Ines lazily lay back against the soft armchair, placing down her teacup, while the velvet folding fan in her left hand lightly tapped on the thigh wrapped by the formal dress, speaking leisurely as she glanced towards Leon.

Leon leaned back in the chair beside her, nodding slightly as he grasped the turn of events.

Currently, the city’s various security teams, after careful searches, have found several nondescript houses within the districts stretching from the Great Arena to Royal Palace Avenue, holding five rare devices already assembled but not yet set up.

Though their designs differed somewhat from the Athias Army’s standard equipment witnessed by Kovis, compared with magic-guided crossbow arrows, these items are precisely magical devices intended to launch guided crossbow arrows.

Even though the Athiasians in the Royal City prison subjected to severe interrogation remain tight-lipped, this magical contraption unearthed from the city further corroborates their conspiracy target—Lydwen III.

The Knights’ Tournament in the capital is too large in scale and extensive in duration, with Lydwen unable to attend every day from beginning to end, hence according to traditional arrangements, the king would only appear with royal family members to watch the most powerful knights after half of the matches conclude, ultimately awarding the victor the title of “Champion Knight” along with corresponding rewards.

The siege crossbow hidden between Royal Palace Avenue and the Great Arena was evidently prepared meticulously for the King of Orland departing the palace passing that location.

Within these three days, searching inside the city turned up about two hundred magic-guided crossbow arrows smuggled into the Royal City, which, should the Athiasians have succeeded, under the crossfire of these powerful magic-guided crossbow arrows, Leon thought it would make Lydwen’s fate far worse than that of the brainchild from the preposterous Meile Sect in his previous life, caught unawares by hundreds of huge arrows and “sniped,” unable to find even a few intact pieces of good flesh in the end.