76 Chapter 76. Two weeks pass

"Your Majesty! Your Majesty!" a messenger came running with extreme urgency towards the king who was sitting in his grand wooden chair with a large table containing countless papers while tending to his ministers.

"What is it? Can you not see that I'm really busy right now?" the King responded with annoyance.

"Sorry, sire! But something big has happened on the battlefield," the messenger spoke with a difficult expression.

"What happened?" the King asked and his body subconsciously stood up as he discerned from the messenger's face that it was bad news.

"I have good news and bad news, your majesty."

Hearing the mention of 'good news', the Kings body relaxed. He had been busy and stressed for the past year and it had massively burdened him.

"Give me the good news first," the King told the messenger as he sat himself down.

"The army has been able to continue defending the canyon and the good news is that our casualties have lessened by forty percent and about ten percent of the casualties have managed to join back to the battle," the messenger informed without hesitation.

Hearing this, the King released an extremely heavy sigh of relief as he relaxed his back on his chair, ultimately revealing a happy smile. But then he realized that if the good news was this great, then the bad news must have been equally worse.

"What's the bad news?" he asked forebodingly.

"We have heard leaked news that the Ruby army is in possession of a cursed object," the messenger slowly spoke with fear as he handed a piece of parchment to the King.

The King took the parchment paper, looked at it, and immediately, his eyes grew wide and his face grew extremely ugly. On the paper was a rough sketch of a large dark scepter with an extremely slender body.

"Where did this news come from?!" the King roared in rage as he seemed to have lost control.

The messenger immediately shook in fear as his legs began to tremble, "We don't know sir. That drawing was found on the prince's door step."

Hearing this, the King's mind instantly grew conflicted as he seemed to be stuck in a predicament.

"Plan an immediately operation. We need to validate this as soon a possible. If they really do have this object, then the war will be lost," the King painedly spoke.

The messenger did not spare any second as he immediately turned around and ran out the room.

"My king, what could it be that has caused you to be this serious?" one of the ministers could not contain his curiously and asked.

Hearing this, the King face turned extremely pitiful as he sighed deeply, "If I am not wrong, that was the legendary Nightkiss, the scepter of the Frost Forest King."

"THE NIGHTKISS?" the minister exclaimed in horror.

Across the Crystal empire, there was probably not a single noble person who did not know about the Nightkiss. It was an extremely famous scepter that was of unknown origin but it carried a tremendous reputation as it was used by the Frost Forest King a dozen centuries ago. It was rumored that with the power of the staff, he was able to rule and direct all monster beasts in the forest, numbering to a monstrous million and with this, he plagued almost half of the eight surrounding empires, bringing it under his rule. But he died during one of his conquests where he was stopped by a mysterious disciple from the Iudex sect. And since his death, the Scepter was nowhere to seen until now and it was speculated that all his own magical beasts were all sealed inside the scepter and that the only way to unseal it was to provide it with the blood of a million humans.

"What should we do, your majesty?" a minister asked worriedly.

"We must validate this news as soon as possible. But in the meantime, we must seek help from other kingdoms. This is going to be our top priority right now," the King decided as he stood up and began writing to the surrounding kingdoms that they had good relations with for help.

Meanwhile, at the battlefield, it had been about two weeks and the name of the 'Killing Cloud Mercenaries' ran rampant throughout the Lapis soldiers and reinforcements like wildfire. Vanessa and Leo's names had spread throughout the Lapis frontlines like a tsunami as many soldiers quickly learned about their saving feats and this managed to raise the morale of many soldiers as they knew their chances of death with these two around were lower. Their names had struck reverence in the hearts of these soldiers.

And while Garrick and Wenella were also quite famous, there were more well known among the ruby soldiers due to the amount that they were able to kill, causing morale to lower as the mention of the two's names caused fear to appear.

And alongside that, their training had gone extremely well. Garrick had unexpectedly broke through to refinement realm stage one and the weights on his body were doubled by Leo as Garrick's progress suddenly stormed up. And even more surprising was that Garrick suddenly seemed to be able to vague manipulate the mysterious energy inside the Axe but it had not grown to an extent where he was able to use it in battle yet.

But this had lessened the strain on Wenella and she was now able to act more ruthless as she no longer held back on her killing.

Another member who had grown exponentially was Vanessa. Leo's therapy session seemed to have changed her as she seemed to have really used her burdens for motivation. She also managed to make a huge break through to refinement realm stage two, enabling Leo and her to save more wounded soldiers.

Vanessa had rose through the ranks furiously as she sped into the top thousands and surprisingly made it to one rank behind Garrick while Wenella shot above them as she arrived at the top hundreds, striving for the top twenty spot.

The only person who had not made his appearance on the rankings yet was Leo as Vanessa had taken all his points but nevertheless, he was the most well known person in their mercenary across the battlefield and almost everyone knew his name. The Lapis Soldier knew him as the 'Miracle Guardian' while the Ruby soldiers called him the 'Asura Demon' due to him rendering about ten thousand soldiers mentally unstable.

Days grew more and more tense for Leo, his killing intent was slowly feeling like it was solidifying, making him shake with an extremely intense sense of foreboding. To make things worse, he found that he could not access the library and the impartation hallway in the Nether mansion.

But how everything worked out right now was perfectly fine for him as the people that he wanted to help were all doing so well.