The audience erupted, a wave breaking in a stone basin; the generals in the command post likely already had their own ideas.

But the crowd hadn’t seen the front lines; under the mohawked commentator’s pointed question, their tongues seized like gears in sand.

The mic swung to the knights’ side, and the captain of Special Unit 314 slid fully into character.

He declared, voice like a drawn blade, “We will drive the enemy back and defend the Holy City and the Empire’s people!”

The spotlight fell on Shelika; to fit the exercise script, she spoke the enemy’s lines like frost over spring water.

Her smile was a thin hook. “What a ringing answer. Let’s hope you last a little longer.”

Another ripple of shock rolled the stands.

The commentator tugged the focus back like a fisherman with a taut line. “Looks like both sides are full of confidence!”

His voice stayed aflame, then rose. “Much as I want to cheer for the Holy Maiden—if she wins, doesn’t that mean our knights can’t protect our home?”

A groan ran through the crowd, a cloud dimming the sun.

“So, people of Gaia—your voices,” he thundered, a drumbeat under banners, “tell me, which side do you want to win?”

They were soldiers of the Shadowspirit Legion and Dark Spirits living in the Holy City; under the mohawked host’s gentle herding—he was military staff, after all—their fighting spirit caught fire, especially the former.

“Go, knights! Don’t you dare lose!”

“Yeah—yeah!”

“For the Gaia Empire, for the Earth Mother—we can’t lose to those white spirits!”

Support for the knights surged like a tide, and the air burned like noon on sand.

Maybe the heat felt right to him, because the commentator announced the exercise without another beat.

“Good! I hear you loud and clear. Without delay—General Herman!”

“Yes!” The man held weight in the ranks, so he served as referee for the drill.

General Herman was a greasy middle-aged uncle, but his movements weren’t greasy at all—

As a Sky Rank Knight, he rode Battle Aura down like a hawk stooping and landed in a clean pose—then didn’t quite stick it—

“Ah!” His boot hit a banana peel, he face-planted in front of everyone, and his meticulously kept wig popped off.

Laughter burst like firecrackers; the whole field shook.

But the general earned his rank; while citizens still laughed, he acted like nothing happened, popped up, slapped the wig back on, cleared his throat like a gavel, and proclaimed, “I declare the exercise officially begun!”

The sudden call hit like a cold splash; before the crowd caught up, the drill had already started.

And the knights moved first.

“Press! Press!” the squad leader barked.

The seven knights of Unit 314 launched a wave attack on the Eternal War Armor—

The leader charged in front, all seven igniting their Battle Aura; power surged through them like floodwater, and their sprinting figures flickered like heat mirages; the distance that had seemed far snapped shut.

To Shelika, this was expected, a storm she’d already seen on the horizon.

There was a script, sure—but it didn’t dictate how to fight. Both sides could show real strength, and to make this look real, they had to take it seriously for a while.

So Shelika faced them seriously; this time she’d equipped the Eternal War Armor with a massive warhammer—

With the knights closing like thunderheads, she chose to steal their feet first.

She drove the War Armor forward, power pooling in both hands, then smashed the ground in a single brutal beat.

Thoom!

Just as she expected, the quake split the earth like cracking ice, and the knights’ blistering speed staggered; a few nearly kissed dirt on the spot.

Shelika took the opening; she locked onto the nearest knight and hurled the hammer.

The War Armor’s hammer was a modified siege ram—too big and too heavy for any man.

If it hit him full-on, even if he didn’t shatter, he’d be a lamp out in one breath.

The audience felt their hearts pulled tight like bowstrings.

But this knight was still a knight of the Demonic Human Race, Earth Tier strong, his Battle Aura like a furnace.

Among aura arts, the demons shone brightest; demonic sigils crawled his skin, fine-tuning aura into cunning, surgical techniques.

At death’s edge, he flared his aura; sigils blazed like molten lines, and then—

“Hah!” The Daemon Knight snapped on a body-guarding art, Humanoid Bastion.

Aura condensed into a shield; with a KLANG, it shouldered the giant hammer aside.

“Oooh—!” the crowd breathed, a wave cresting.

It was a fine show, but defense alone didn’t make a Demonic Human Race knight fierce.

Two more knights of that race snatched at the gap left by the thrown hammer; blades came from left and right, lightning-quick, aimed at the War Armor’s head in a crossing strike—the War Armor had no way to slip it with body movement.

Like the crowds at every viewing platform, the generals in the command post watched, eyes narrow as blades.

The general who’d joked the War Armor was “pathetically weak” doubled down on size: “The Divine Warrior’s strong, but too big means clumsy. It can’t beat agile, fit knights.”

He wasn’t wrong, not in isolation—but on a battlefield that wasn’t a weakness. A Celestial Spirit’s Divine Warrior fought with one or two knight regiments at its flanks; closing in meant suicide, and those frames didn’t wander alone.

This exercise was special, though, so the generals who knew better kept their retorts behind their teeth.

Let the people see knights beating a Divine Warrior—that was the win.

Shelika wanted that too. But if she lost too fast—“stop fighting already”—the crowd would smell theater and sneer, “you weren’t even trying to kill.”

So she chose not to lose that fast.

The crossing slash wasn’t something a massive frame could dodge with footwork, but that didn’t mean Shelika had no answer.

True Crimson Whirl had been upgraded into a Divine Power weapon; it held divine charge and could serve as a soul-core.

Meaning, the Eternal War Armor now ran on True Crimson Whirl. It didn’t need Lance to feed it Battle Aura.

The power-rod of True Crimson Whirl sat in a sword-slot beside the cockpit seat.

It still held a full store of divinity—ninety-five percent remaining, enough to trigger the divine art Feast of Night Domain three times.

Shelika gave the order. “Big guy—activate Feast of Night Domain.”

The War Armor had a lot of undiscovered tricks; using a divine weapon as a power source to boost the frame was one of them.

Text flickered across the screen. “Loading extra modules. Running divine-art function ‘Feast of Night Domain’.”

A burst of busy clicks chattered in her ears, and the Eternal War Armor unleashed the domain.

Divine art bloomed; the world in Shelika’s eyes and the War Armor’s went dark like dusk under an eclipse. Time sagged; everything moved as if through honey.

The two knights’ once scintillating speed softened into a slow, deliberate drift.

“Good…” Shelika murmured, the word warm as tea.

She watched them “walk” in like old men on an evening stroll and told the frame, “Avoid their strikes, then counter—keep it measured.”

More text rippled. “Understood. I’ll try not to kill these two targets.”

In this slowed world, the Armor moved like a fish in water. Its body was huge, but the speed gap was a canyon; even so, it slid past the crossing blades with ease.

Being so close, Shelika saw it clearly—the cross-cut had terrible weight.

Without the dodge, the War Armor’s head might well have split.

But they’d slipped it, and the Armor answered with two precise jabs—like getting clipped by a car at forty kilometers an hour.

Feast of Night Domain ended.

Light rushed back; then the world rewound, like a tape spooling back, to the instant where the cross-cut was about to land.

Did the domain fail? No.

Shelika remembered what the god of wine had said: “Feast of Night Domain meddles with cause and effect.”

She and the Armor had touched the causality of those strikes; they turned hit into miss, and they added two punches’ worth of harm. That was the interference.

Time resumed at the beat before the dodge—so a strange miracle unfolded.

The War Armor didn’t move an inch, yet both blades missed as if by choice; two crossing lines straightened into parallels, and the knights slid past its sides.

Their eyes flew wide—this wasn’t what they willed.

But causality had been rewritten; there was no stopping it.

As they “slid” through the air behind the frame, they smacked an invisible wall—

And that wall hit like a train coming head-on, blasting them away.

All that, and the War Armor hadn’t taken a single step.

Knights, soldiers, citizens, generals, the commentator—

Every last one stood stunned.

Tens of thousands fell silent, a field after snowfall.

The heat bled away into an uncanny hush.

“What just happened?” someone finally asked, voice small in the stillness.

“No idea. I just saw two knights—bam—and they flew.”