Chapter 158

Chapter 158

"Can't we just rest up and fight our way through?" Youngest Princess turned around with her hands on her hips.

"Can you beat that ugly knight?" I glanced at her.

"No......" Youngest Princess said, lacking confidence. Then she seemed to think of another idea. "What if we rush through at full speed, as we did at the front lines?"

"That won't work, Your Highness. The traps inside the tower aren't something you can outrun." The old servant loosened her grip on the short staff slightly and wiped it against her dirty clothes.

"What about climbing up the outside of the tower?" I asked, rubbing my chin.

"That won't work either. The defenses on the outside are even tighter. And far more lethal." The old servant shook her head.

"Now that the energy tower sees us as enemies, we have to remember — this tower was built from the start to defend against the Shadow attacking from outside. Attacking from the outside is a true dead end."

The atmosphere froze.

From the darkness below, you could faintly hear the sounds of corrupted crystal beings and puppets fighting each other.

Although the puppets and crystal beings that had been on standby charging were now corrupted, there were still a large number of normal puppets throughout the castle.

By now, the two sides were probably clashing in every corner of the castle.

I asked the old servant, "So, how do we actually break through this tower?"

"The energy tower can't be broken through." The old servant looked completely defeated.

"When you went charging at the tower with the ugly knight, weren't you going in thinking you could succeed?" I asked, a little puzzled.

"I'm sorry, Knight. I was too reckless. Even if nothing had gone wrong with the ugly knight, we wouldn't have made it very far up."

The old servant seemed even more deflated. "High-intensity fighting would drain the energy stored in the ugly knight's body very quickly. In the end, we still would have been trapped inside the tower."

I frowned and said, "No defense is truly unbreakable. As someone who has lived in this tower for so long, you should know it better than anyone."

"That's true."

"Then you must have thought about what kind of attack could actually bring this tower down."

"Yes......"

"Let's hear it."

"Sigh...... There's really only one way......"

The youngest princess and I instinctively looked toward her.

The old servant tightened her grip on the staff and raised her head.

"Use several times the Shadow's forces to keep attacking simultaneously from both inside and outside. Throw wave after wave of lives at the front until the energy tower's defense mechanisms are completely overwhelmed."

The old servant ignored the shocked expressions on my face and the Youngest Princess's, and continued.

"Every mechanism in the energy tower has a theoretical limit — a maximum rate at which it can deal damage and hold back attackers.

As long as the attack exceeds that limit, the tower's constant time-reversal magic can be completely paralyzed.

That goes for the traps, the puppets, and the golems alike. Even the ugly knight couldn't hold back an army of thousands."

"Wait — does that mean......" Youngest Princess was stunned.

"Yes...... If we had several times the Shadow's forces, we could break through the energy tower head-on......" The old servant trailed off and lowered her head in defeat.

"Are you kidding me? There are only three of us! Three!" Youngest Princess was starting to lose it.

"That's exactly why I said the energy tower can't be broken through." The old servant's head drooped even lower.

I stared out toward the front lines and stayed out of the exchange between the old servant and Youngest Princess.

A heavy silence settled over the rooftop.

The lantern sitting on the ground lit up a small patch around it, and the shadows of the three figures gathered around it stretched back into the thick darkness behind them.

The darkness beyond the lantern's reach seemed to grow even deeper.

"We don't have much time. The front lines could fall any moment." I turned back and said, "We need to move. Now."

Youngest Princess and the old servant both looked hopeless, unable to say a word.

"Why is everyone just standing there?" I asked.

"Where are we supposed to find an army like that?" Youngest Princess grabbed her head.

"Knight, it's already a dead end." The old servant sighed. "After a hundred years of waiting — I never thought Salt Castle would come to this."

"Who said it's a dead end?" I said with a slight smile.

Youngest Princess and the old servant both looked up at me in surprise.

"Several times the Shadow's forces — don't we already have that?"

"What?"

"How is that possible?"

I ignored their outbursts and said with a smile, "Of course we do. They're in the storage area."

The old servant was the first to catch on. "You mean the sleeping purifiers?"

"But the magic circuits are corrupted right now. Even if we wake them up, we have no way to change their orders." The old servant hesitated.

"Oh — you mean......" Youngest Princess started to understand.

"Exactly. We don't need to change their orders. We just need to wake them up and tell them to fight."

"But how do we do that?" The old servant looked completely lost. "With an army that large, there's no way we can adjust each purifier's behavior in real time."

"We don't need to manage their behavior rules in real time the way Eldest Princess does. We just need to give the order." I said, walking to the edge of the rooftop as I spoke.

The old servant's puzzled gaze followed me.

Looking down, the puppet below had already taken care of all the corrupted crystal beings and was now standing there in a daze.

"Hey, you! Climb up here!" I called down to it.

The puppet paused for a moment, then quickly scrambled up using all four limbs, flipped nimbly over the eave, and stood in front of me.

"Good. Spin around. Let me see."

The puppet then began spinning in circles, while the old servant stood there frozen, mouth hanging open, eyes wide with disbelief.

"Why — how is this possible......" The old servant stared at the spinning puppet as if her entire understanding of the world had just been rewritten.

"Hahaha!" Youngest Princess had seen it coming, but she still burst out laughing at the sight.

I turned back. "Any questions?"

The old servant shifted her gaze back to me, looking at me like I was something she'd never seen before.

"Wait a moment!"

A burst of quick syllables rang out — "Control."

The old servant quickly took hold of the puppet and murmured to herself, "The orders haven't changed? How is that possible?"

Then she focused and tried adding a real-time command, ordering the puppet not to move, no matter what happened.

She looked back at me and said, "Knight, would you try that again?"

"Of course." I nodded and gave the puppet the order. "Spin around."

The puppet immediately began spinning in place.

The old servant blurted out in complete shock:

"It bypassed the orders and the rules — and went straight to the result? This......"

I asked with a smile, "What's wrong?"

"Do you realize you just tore down the entire framework of magic?" The old servant turned back to me with a complicated expression. "You...... you skipped the cause and went straight to the effect."

Eldest Princess had said something similar before.

I shook my head. Now wasn't the time to get caught up in that. "If there are no more questions, let's go. To the storage area."