sonovelo Chapter 206: Veronica’s Training (01)
Chapter 206: Veronica’s Training (01)
In the city of Whitefall, the weather was also unusually warm for the winter season.
That day, at the city’s barracks—which were infinitely inferior to those of Goldenveil—a thousand men stood assembled in tight formation.
Before them stood Alistair Vaelor, their Leader. A golden Lord who had already slain many of his peers.
Over the past few months, aware of how rapidly Goldenveil was growing, Whitefall had refused to fall behind.
Alistair had forced the two vassal villages to join Whitefall, attacked three other neighboring villages, and personally led the assaults on more than five goblin camps. As a result, Whitefall’s population had swelled to nearly nine thousand.
From those nine thousand, he had recruited a thousand guards and organized a militia of two thousand soldiers.
With such a force at his disposal, he was fully confident that Ethan would never stand a chance against him.
"How is their training progressing?" Alistair asked.
His face bore a gentle, dignified expression, his steady eyes fixed on the soldiers drilling below. Behind him, a cloak of beast hide fluttered, stirred by the warm breeze.
"Good, my lord," replied the captain of the Whitefall guard, striking his fist against his chest in salute.
"Before summer, half of them will be at the second stage. Almost all of them possess at least Rank D talent, so it shouldn’t be difficult, especially with the aid of the artifact."
Hearing that, Alistair allowed a smile of approval to cross his lips.
He now had five third-stage warriors, and soon he would have another five hundred in the second stage, on top of the two thousand five hundred already at that level.
In his mind, there was no scenario in which Goldenveil could withstand three thousand men.
What excited him most, however, wasn’t the number of his soldiers, but the artifact he had acquired on a recent mission.
An artifact capable of increasing the speed at which his warriors gained experience and advanced in training by ten percent!
That meant that for every ten months of training, his soldiers accumulated the equivalent of eleven months of experience.
Wasn’t that simply wonderful?
Just as Alistair was preparing to offer a few words of encouragement to the guards in training, a faint vibration radiated from his spatial ring.
The communication device he had given to his agents in Goldenveil had been activated. That meant his mother was already in possession of it!
Without hesitation, he pulled the device from the space ring and listened intently to his mother’s words.
[Hello, dear. I managed to reach Goldenveil and infiltrate the Lord’s mansion. That fool Ethan is already in the palm of my hand, but unfortunately, the bastard managed to discover and eliminate all our agents in the city.
Don’t worry, though. He doesn’t know who I am. I’ll send weekly reports on the current situation in Goldenveil, and when the time comes, I’ll make sure the gates open for you.
Just remember to send me a list of all the new agents you’ll dispatch here. I’ll do my best to protect them until the right moment.]
A laugh of pure satisfaction escaped Alistair’s throat.
He could already picture himself ripping out the heart of that damned Ethan Goldenveil, forcing him to watch as he destroyed each of his beautiful wives.
Alistair loved that.
The despair.
He wanted to tear off their limbs, one by one, while they cried desperately for their man.
Wouldn’t that be wonderful?
If only Ophelia knew just how twisted her son truly was, she wouldn’t feel a shred of guilt for having betrayed him for Ethan.
***
Oblivious to everything happening in Whitefall, Ethan finished the procedures with the Hell Soldier’s Gate.
After giving his subordinates a few more basic instructions, he headed back to his mansion.
He considered going straight to training, but after a moment’s thought, he decided to first check on how Veronica’s training was progressing.
Her brother would lead the next group to enter the Hell Soldier’s Gate, and at that very moment, his mind was being forged by Aerick and Doran.
Naturally, she should be working just as hard as he was, right?
A slight smile tugged at Ethan’s lips as he recalled the layout of his enormous mansion.
There were four training arenas in total.
Evelyn occupied the first with Mireya, Alice was in the second with Veronica, and Ophelia held the fourth with the maids.
Only the third remained empty.
Ethan, however, didn’t head toward the empty arena. He walked to the second one instead.
The moment he pushed open the door, a wave of heat washed over him.
Alice and Veronica were in the middle of combat training.
"It’s not fair, you’re too fast, Master!" Veronica shouted between heavy gasps.
Having been in Goldenveil for quite some time, well-fed and training diligently, Veronica was no longer that thin, skeletal woman.
Her waist had stayed practically as slim as before, but her other curves were now incomparable to what they had been.
The red dress now hugged a lush, curvaceous bottom, the fabric stretched taut over each ample cheek, perfectly tracing the two plump, crescent-shaped mounds that met gloriously at the deep cleft between them.
Her breasts were no longer smaller than Alice’s.
The full, heavy globes strained against the dress’s neckline, the seams seeming to plead for mercy.
As she came to an abrupt halt, those large, perfect mounds of flesh rocked forward under their own weight before settling back with a soft, jiggling tremor that rippled obscenely through the exposed swell of her cleavage.
Now, she stood just one step behind her master in beauty, and that was through no fault of her own.
Alice was simply too beautiful, like a goddess among mortals.
"I’m not too fast; your spells are just too slow," Alice instructed.
"Focus the power; don’t scatter it. Unite everything into a single line, and then attack. Only disperse your power if you want to cause large-scale damage. Otherwise, the more you compress your mana, the stronger it will be against a single target."
The golden-haired beauty seemed completely relaxed, having dodged dozens of Veronica’s attacks without much effort.
With her grimoire floating in front of her, Alice’s own body hovered in the air, as if she were lying on an invisible pillow.
It was elegant and sensual, though it consumed too much mana to be used in a real battle—at least not before she reached the fifth stage.