Chương 281: 58. Flight Plan 1

The next morning, before I was even fully awake, the sheer noise from the fortress's outer camp kicked me right out of my dreams. I don't mean that metaphorically. It literally felt like a physical boot to the head. First came a series of short, urgent bugle calls piercing through the morning mist, followed immediately by the chaotic symphony of iron buckles clashing, saddle straps snapping, wooden crates thudding, dragon claws scraping against the earth, and the heavy thud of marching boots.

Somewhere in the distance, some poor bastard was screaming in a way that suggested he was being scolded so harshly he had begun to question the very concept of his own existence. For a split second, I genuinely thought we were under a night raid. Then I opened my eyes and realized the truth was far more terrifying. Lei Lian was already awake. And when Lei Lian was awake, it was generally understood that everyone else had forfeited their right to sleep.

By the time I threw on my coat and rushed out of the tent, the sky was just beginning to bleed into a pale, pre-dawn gray. The entire outer camp of the Three Rivers Fortress was alive, groaning and stretching like some colossal beast forcing its bones upright before the sun could rise. The wyvern cavalry camp was even more absurd. Rows of wyverns crouched low against the biting wind, their leathery wings half-spread, their breaths exhaling thick plumes of white frost.

Maintenance racks stood in neat, imposing lines. Saddles, safety cables, spare short-spears, fire-resistant cloaks, signal flags, and ration bags were hung with terrifying precision. The female riders of the Yinglong Guard were already fully armed, moving with the frantic yet flawless efficiency of people who had permanently deleted the word "tardiness" from their dictionaries.

Some were crouching by the edges of the wyverns' wings, inspecting the bone joints; others were aggressively slathering ointment into the wing membranes; a few were tapping the base of the saddles with wooden mallets, listening intently for the microscopic sound of a structural fracture. I stood at the entrance of the camp path and watched for exactly two breaths. I sincerely felt that this was no longer a military preparation.

This looked like the opening dress rehearsal for a massive, high-altitude slaughterhouse show. All that was missing was someone pulling back a velvet curtain and announcing: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to today's scheduled aerial suicide.

"So you finally decided to walk out of there alive." Lei Lian's voice smashed into me from the right. I turned to see her already standing beside an ash-blue wyvern, a heavy clipboard in one hand, while the other effortlessly tossed a leather strap to a subordinate. She was wearing light armor designed for flight today—the shoulder, waist, and leg guards were all tightly bound and streamlined. She looked exactly like a blade that had already been unsheathed and was just waiting to taste blood.

"I was half-expecting you to play dead in your tent and wait for us to conquer Fort Louis before crawling out to claim the glory."

"That is the greatest misunderstanding you have ever had of me," I replied deadpan, meticulously buttoning my coat.

"I am a man of immense responsibility. I only claim glory from entirely safe locations. I would never just hide in a tent to do it." A few of the Yinglong Guard riders nearby simultaneously burst into laughter. Lei Lian merely scoffed, clearly too exhausted by my existence to figure out if I was being self-deprecating or genuinely stating my life's philosophy.

"Cut the nonsense. Your advance squad is assigned to the first wave. We aren't the main assault; we're flying straight to Fort Louis to deliver the deployment plans finalized here last night. You are responsible for speaking human words. The rest of us are responsible for killing. Remember the division of labor, and don't mix them up."

"This division of labor sounds incredibly hostile to my personal safety."

"No, you misunderstand," she said, raising her eyes to meet mine. Her tone was terrifyingly flat.

"What will truly be hostile to your personal safety is if you deliver the words wrong." Right. Understood. In this particular military faction, the cost of a slip of the tongue was vastly higher than the cost of a severed neck. I was just about to ask which wyvern's back I was supposed to be strapped to when a low, rippling commotion swept through the far side of the camp. It wasn't chaos. It was a primal, instinctual retreat. I didn't even need to look to know who it was.

As Ignicia walked down the end of the camp path, the sky perfectly transitioned from gray to a bruised blue. She was still in her human form, her long crimson hair sweeping back in the morning wind. She wore a black outer coat designed for mobility over a tightly bound, ruthlessly efficient combat suit. Her face was naturally intimidating enough on a good day, but today she wore absolutely no expression.

She looked like a localized natural disaster that had personally selected today's date to descend upon the earth. And the most troublesome part was that she was usually fully self-aware of this fact. Everyone who crossed her path—whether local garrison troops, combat mages, or even the hardened Yinglong Guard—naturally stepped half a pace back. The former out of sheer terror, the latter out of deep reverence.

Mix those two emotions together, and the effect was a lot like walking down the street and realizing the entity approaching you wasn't a princess, but a highly mobile, actively furious volcano. She walked straight toward us, her gaze sweeping over the entire launch pad. Her eyes lingered on the wyverns, the cavalry, the supply racks, the signal flags, and the bundles of short-spears, before finally locking onto me.

"You didn't sleep like the dead. That's slightly more promising than I anticipated."

"Thank you for the high praise. I originally planned to sleep like the dead, but then I remembered I had to fly today, so I figured it'd be more auspicious to stay awake and draft my last will and testament." The corner of her mouth twitched. It wasn't quite a smile, just that microscopic shift that screamed, 'That was a remarkably stupid thing to say, but not quite stupid enough for me to instantly incinerate you.'

"Fort Louis has already received the summary of last night's military report. They know our advance party is coming," she said.

"But knowing is one thing; seeing is another. Don't embarrass me up there later."

"Let me just clarify something," I said, honestly raising a hand.

"When you say 'embarrass,' does that mean I'm not allowed to vomit, not allowed to scream, or not allowed to have my legs turn to jelly and require physical support upon landing?" A female rider nearby, who was in the middle of fastening a belly strap to her wyvern, couldn't help but turn her head to laugh, nearly dropping her iron buckle into the wyvern's scales. Ignicia stared at me, her voice chillingly indifferent.

"None of the above are permitted." How utterly unreasonable. Humans are inherently fragile creatures with a natural fear of heights. Why was it that, in her eyes, I was like a fish on a cutting board—strictly forbidden from struggling before being served? Right on cue, Olivia arrived. Compared to almost everyone else in this mud-soaked camp, she looked as if she had just stepped out of an entirely different dimension of order. Her armor, cape, gloves, and sword were all immaculate.

Even the leather of her boots was so pristine I genuinely doubted whether she had actually stepped on the same dirt as the rest of us. Adeline followed half a step behind her, her expression as rigidly measured as always, though her eyes swept over the launchpad with a faster, sharper tactical assessment than usual. If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. Olivia stopped in front of me, offering a graceful nod before turning to acknowledge Lei Lian and Ignicia.

"Greetings, Lord Cedric. The reception roster for Fort Louis, the preliminary supply manifest, and the advance camp layout are all right here." She handed me a neatly bound scroll of parchment.

"Furthermore, I have ordered the second wave of the supply convoy to assemble before noon. If the fortress can coordinate in time, the subsequent rations and fodder will follow within two days." I took the parchment. It didn't feel like a document; it felt like destiny was aggressively shoving a brick into my hands.

"Every time you hand something to me, your tone sounds exactly like you're entrusting the ancient legacy of a noble house to a toddler who just figured out how not to spill his soup."

"If you possess that level of self-awareness, that is a positive thing." Olivia smiled, a picture of Victorian elegance.

"A self-aware person is, at the very least, less likely to accidentally throw the entire fortress away."... Did you hear that? That is high-tier noble mockery. You think she's showing concern, but she's actually strangling you with velvet. Adeline chimed in from the side, her voice like steel.

"My lord, please double-check your securing cables before flight. The last time you landed, your posture resembled luggage that had been violently hurled from a balcony."

"It didn't resemble it," I said, my voice thick with profound grief.

"Fundamentally, it was the exact same thing." Lei Lian finally lost her patience and slapped her clipboard against a wooden rack.

"Enough idle chatter! First row, attach cables! Second row, inspect claws! Third row, mount up!" The moment the order dropped, the tempo of the entire launchpad accelerated. The riders of the Yinglong Guard moved in perfectly synchronized waves. Some vaulted into their saddles, some knelt on the wyverns' backs to lock the mechanical restraints, while others slotted bundles of short-spears into the side-racks.

Their movements were so terrifyingly clean it looked like a single, massive machine dismantled into six hundred parts, operating in perfect unison. The wyverns rose one by one, their long necks lifting, their spines uncoiling. The heavy muscle fibers at the base of their wings rippled under the morning light. It was a magnificent, suffocatingly oppressive sight. If they were an elite force on the ground, right now, they were a swarm of unsheathed blades preparing to slice the sky open. And I?

I was the singular slab of meat among these blades, strictly responsible for being tied down tightly to ensure I didn't fall off first. Honestly, my role was very clearly defined. So clearly defined it made me want to cry. Ignicia took a few steps forward, stopping in the exact center of the launch pad. In that split second, the surrounding area fell into a synchronized, breathless silence. She didn't speak immediately.

She just slightly lowered her eyes, as if she were awakening something ancient and colossal from deep within her own blood. Then, the heat arrived. It wasn't the comforting warmth of a campfire. It was the crushing, pressurized heat of a blacksmith's furnace violently pumping its bellows right into your face. The morning frost beneath her boots instantly vaporized, retreating outward in a perfect circle.

The black coat draped over her shoulders was pushed up by the thermal updraft, the edges lighting up with a brilliant crimson line as if licked by invisible flames from the inside. In the next heartbeat, her skeletal structure elongated. Her silhouette was rewritten. Red light exploded outward from her body like molten metal. It wasn't my first time seeing her shift into her dragon form. But every single time I witnessed it, I couldn't help but think—Ah, so disasters really can be this beautiful.

The slender human form was torn apart in a storm of fire and light, replaced instantly by a rapidly expanding, titanic shadow. Scales materialized piece by piece, glowing like iron pulled from the forge and quenched in the night sky. Her long neck reared back, the ridge of her spine extending all the way to a lethal tail. Her massive wing bones slammed open on both sides with a deafening boom, unleashing a wave of scorching wind.

The morning mist was violently ripped in half, and for a brief, terrifying second, the entire launchpad was swallowed by the shadow of those crimson wings. A few of the local garrison troops instinctively stumbled backward. Some even subconsciously reached for their weapons, only remembering halfway through the motion—Wait, this one is an ally. Theoretically. And theories, as we all know, are only reliable when spoken out loud.

Ignicia's draconic eyes swept down from on high, her gold-and-red irises reflecting the entire camp. She didn't roar. She merely exhaled a low breath, and the resulting thermal shockwave was enough to snap several nearby flags violently backward. Honestly, some people are just born to stand in high places and issue commands. And some people don't even need to issue commands. They just spread their wings, and you immediately start auditing your own life choices.

She was clearly the latter, in an extra-large, premium edition. Lei Lian vaulted into her saddle, settling onto her ash-blue wyvern, and immediately raised her arm.

"Yinglong Guard—" Six hundred movements froze simultaneously.

"Advance first wave, prepare for launch sequence!"

"Yes, ma'am!" The sheer synchronization of their voices made my spine tingle. It was at this moment I was directed to my seat—not behind Lei Lian, thank the gods, or I would have spent the entire flight listening to her creatively insult me in the shortest sentences possible. And not with Ignicia either. While I didn't exactly cherish my life, I wasn't quite ready to entrust it to the turbulent wake of a fire dragon's slipstream. I was assigned to the rear seat of a Yinglong Guard squad leader's wyvern.

She was a young rider with a high ponytail, looking barely out of her teens, yet her movements were terrifyingly veteran. As she locked my securing cables, she said without batting an eye:"My lord, if you feel the urge to vomit during takeoff, please aim to the left."

"Why the left?"

"The right side is carrying our signal flags and spare short crossbows."

"... Is my dignity hanging on the left?" She finally cracked a smile.

"Don't worry. Up at that altitude, things like that are very hard to see." These people really got more ruthless the better you knew them. But what was even worse was that I was actually starting to hear a twisted sense of comradery in that ruthlessness. Humans really are creatures easily domesticated by their environments. Give me another half a month here, and I'll probably start believing that being strapped to a flying lizard is a perfectly normal morning social activity.

Olivia stepped back, raising a hand to adjust the buckle on my cape. Her movements were light, her expression perfectly restrained.

"Lord Cedric, Fort Louis is not the Three Rivers Fortress. It is much closer to the front. The tempo will be faster, and absolutely no one will go out of their way to accommodate you."

"That sounds like both a warning and a grim prophecy."

"It is both." She looked at me, pausing for a fraction of a second.

"Also... please stay safe." She said it so flatly, with almost zero inflection. But the flatter it sounded, the more it felt like she had taken everything she couldn't say out loud and compressed it into those few words. Before I could respond, Ignicia spread her wings at the front of the formation, generating a deafening wave of air pressure. Lei Lian's voice dropped like an executioner's blade:"—Launch!" The next second, the entire row of wyverns kicked off the earth. The world was violently yanked downward.

My stomach dropped out of my body. Every sound around me tangled into a chaotic roar before being stretched into thin, shrieking lines by the rapidly ascending wind. The ground, the tents, the wooden racks, the flags, the dirt roads, the construction sites, and the silhouettes of people all shrank at terrifying speed. The outer edges of the Three Rivers Fortress, which had been buzzing with activity all night, flattened out in the morning light like a rapidly unfurling tactical map.

I gripped the securing cables like a drowning man, trying very, very hard to swallow back a sound that was definitely not a scream during our first steep ascent. The female rider in front of me must have felt my entire body go rigid. She kindly turned her head and shouted over the roaring wind:"My lord, are you holding up?" Taking a face full of wind that threatened to peel my skin off, I miraculously managed to squeeze out a response:"If you're asking about my mental state, absolutely not!

If you're asking if I'm dead, then tentatively, I'm okay!" She laughed out loud, the wyvern beneath us vibrating slightly with her amusement. Ahead of us, Ignicia's crimson silhouette had already pierced through the edges of the cloud layer. She flew at the very front, like a burning spear, cleanly slicing the morning sky in half. The Yinglong Guard, led by Lei Lian, fanned out on both flanks in a meticulously staggered formation.

They protected the central command and advance elements while simultaneously clearing the visual airspace for the following routes. The morning sun slowly crested behind the clouds, grazing the wyverns' wings, the armor plates, the spear tips, and the edges of the flags. The entire formation looked as if it had been plated in cold, brilliant gold. It was an obscenely beautiful sight. And obscenely dangerous.

And right in the middle of it all was me—strapped down tighter than cargo, a satchel of documents on my shoulder, a head full of logistics from last night's war council, pressing forward into the hostile sky alongside this advance squad toward Fort Louis. The earth slowly unfolded beneath us. Rivers, rolling hills, forest belts, roads, villages, barricades, and supply lines looked like they had been drawn onto the ground with a thick, forceful brush.

Beneath the distant cloud layer, the horizon leading toward Fort Louis was still weighed down by a lingering, bruised gray. I knew that wasn't just morning mist. There were armies in that fog. There was fire. There were the unspoken horrors left out of last night's military reports, and there was the brutal tempo of war that our advance flight was desperately rushing to intercept. I took a deep breath of the freezing, high-altitude air mixed with the sharp scent of wyvern breath.

Looking down at the heavy buckles keeping me attached to the saddle, I suddenly felt a bizarre sense of reality. Yesterday, I was sitting in a tent, arguing with people about supply lines, teleportation gates, tactical retreats, and troop deployments, talking as if I were actually some sort of important figure. And this morning, I was officially strapped to a wyvern, flying straight into the meat grinder of Fort Louis. So this is what being a supreme commander actually meant.

It didn't just mean slamming your hand on the table to make a final decision. It meant that after you slammed the table, you were expected to be strapped to that very table and hurled into the sky. I couldn't help but laugh into the rushing wind. Good. This is more like it.