Elden Ring: 2,000 Hour Speedrunner Becomes a Dragon Chapter 59 59: Moongrum

Arriving at the oak threshold of his private study, Lucia instructed the handmaid on duty to look after Malenia before ensuring the corridor was clear of ears. He guided Miquella inside, sealing the heavy timber panels. The two sat facing each other across an expansive black ebony desk, and with a practiced, casual economy, Lucia poured two steaming cups of clear tea.

"A few hours past, my scouts confird that the Carian Delegation cleared the final checkpoint at the Grand Lift of Dectus," Miquella said, bypassing the standard courtly introductions to lunge straight at the core of the ledger. "Their carriages will drop anchor outside the Leyndell walls by noon the day after tomorrow."

Lucia took a asured sip of the tea, his brow furrowing in mock contemplation. "If their transit conford to the original imperial itinerary, they should have cleared those gates over a moon ago, correct?"

In the absolute reality of the board, ever since Lucia had secured operational control of Mt. Gelmir—the critical strategic hinge connecting the Altus Plateau, Liurnia, and the Caelid wastes—through Clavell's administrative apparatus, every carriage movent within the Full Moon's territory had been logged across his desk. He had digested the intelligence of their sudden acceleration hours before Miquella's vanguard had even cleared the palace gardens. But since his alignnt with the exiled Perfur remained a restricted asset, his mask had to remain perfectly conford to an ignorant courtier.

Miquella let out a slow, heavy breath, his eyes fixed on the rising steam. "Twenty suns ago, their vanguard reached a periter exactly fifty miles south of the Lift. They frozen their position, constructed a heavily fortified camp, and refused to advance a single step—until this dawn, when they suddenly mobilized their assets to ascend the shelf. Knight Moongrum hand-delivered a personal dispatch directly to my father, declaring their arrival paraters for noon the day after tomorrow."

"Furthermore, Father has already dropped an imperial mandate across the court: a grand welcoming banquet will be hosted outside the capital periter the day after tomorrow to greet my brothers, Radahn and Rykard, and my sister, Ranni. The formal scroll of invitation will clear your gates by tomorrow's watch."

"Outside the walls?" Lucia's hand paused, his silver eyes flashing with genuine tactical surprise. "According to dynastic protocol, a reception for the sovereign heirs of the alliance belongs strictly within the high-security paraters of the Golden Temple. Why move the field?"

"That is the exact variance that compromises my sleep," Miquella whispered, his expression tight with anxiety. "My siblings have logged a grueling, dust-choked journey across the continent. They are royal blood; they belong within the sanctuary of the Eternal Palace. To force their welco into the open outskirts makes zero defensive sense. I calculate that Knight Moongrum embedded a specific leverage point within that dispatch—a clause that forced my father to concede to this bizarre staging."

Lucia leaned back, his fingers rhythmically tracing the ebony wood. "This Knight Moongrum... what is the absolute width of his operational file within your archives?"

Unlike the solitary, naless sentinel who would centuries later guard the library doors of the broken Academy within the ga's loops, the na Moongrum had appeared across Lucia's desk countless tis since his hatching—etched into historical logs, military biographic scrolls, and the tavern rumors of the lower city. The man was a walking legend.

As a mortal champion who had risen during the fires of the Unification campaigns, Moongrum was a contemporary of Oleg and Engvall, the legendary twin wings of the Storm King, making him significantly younger than ancient vanguards like Ordovis. Yet, the martial prestige he had carved across twenty winters of non-stop violence didn't rely match his peers—following the conclusion of the Liurnian wars, his reputation carried an aura of absolute dominance over the current era.

The world knew him by a singular, unyielding title: The First and Strongest Carian Knight.

"When Queen Rennala first drafted her elite inner circle, selecting the twelve foundational Carian Knights to shield the Full Moon, Moongrum was the initial warrior to anchor his shield to her crown," Miquella recounted, his voice dropping into a solemn register.

"Every mber of that circle was a world-class hero whose individual trics could shatter an army—entities like the Troll Knight Bolse, the Glintstone Drake Morlet, and the Magic Sword Seren. Before they ever swore their vows to the Moon, they were sovereign champions with illustrious body counts. Yet, an unbelievable, terrifying axiom has persisted across the Liurnia basin for a generation: they claim that Knight Moongrum's individual martial capacity is sufficient to eclipse the combined strength of the other eleven."

"To surpass the entire Carian inner circle single-handed?" Lucia felt a cold, primitive thrill click behind his teeth.

During the twin wars of the Erdtree, the solitary reason Liurnia had fought Radagon's golden expansion to an absolute logistical gridlock was Rennala's peerless starlight sorcery and the individual performance of her knights, who routinely countered the apex champions of the Erdtree.

But Lucia understood the structural math of those campaigns. The Golden Dynasty's Western Expeditionary Army held a nurical advantage in hero-class assets that multiplied Caria's roster by a factor of ten. The historical term "evenly matched" didn't an a Carian Knight fought a Leyndell champion in a standard, one-on-one duel. It ant each Carian operator possessed a combat efficiency that allowed them to engage multiple high-tier targets simultaneously, stubbornly freezing Radagon's line through raw, qualitative dominance.

For Moongrum to stand as the absolute apex of that demographic... his physical performance was functionally indistinguishable from a peak Demigod.

"During the Second Liurnian Campaign, when my father commanded the Western Expeditionary Army as its Commander-in-Chief, he locked steel with Knight Moongrum across three separate encounters," Miquella continued, his fingers tightening around his cup. "The first two engagents—staged before the walls of Redoyas and the gates of Caria Manor—concluded in absolute, blood-soaked draws."

"The final clash was logged fourteen winters past. Both empires were exhausted, their treasuries bleeding, and the front-line dispatches were thick with the rumors that Father and Queen Rennala had begun to entangle their personal affections." Catching the sharp, highly amused look Lucia directed at his brow, Miquella offered a helpless, dry shrug. "Do not scrutinize my face, brother. Those dynamics are public records across both realms. Father recounted the ledger to during my early archival lessons."

"That final duel was the closing battle between Radagon and Moongrum—the ultimate cross of steel between the Erdtree and the Moon before the alliance was locked. They t alone, stripped of their vanguards, upon the mirrored surface of Liurnia of the Lakes, just beyond the high spires of Raya Lucaria."

The boy prince paused, a deep, heavy sigh escaping his chest. "When the dust cleared from that water, both my father—who had logged the entire unification era without sustaining a single scratch to his armor—and Knight Moongrum had sustained catastrophic, life-threatening trauma. Father confided in that the internal structural damage he carried out of that lake was vastly more severe than the wounds he inflicted on the knight. It was the closest his divinity has ever co to absolute dissolution."

Miquella leaned forward, his pale features tight. "If the Full Moon had deployed any other diplomat to lead this delegation, my sleep would be undisturbed. But Rennala's health has imploded over the recent winters; the archives claim she has succumbed to an permanent, sorrowful illness that has stripped her of her capacity to handle court affairs. Objectively, my father bears the total, unyielding moral responsibility for her condition. If Knight Moongrum has marched onto our ridge to demand an accounting for her broken crown, I fear his steel might..."

"The board will unlikely descend into that tier of chaos," Lucia interrupted, his index finger rhythmically tapping the porcelain rim as his tactical engine parsed the variables. "You are allowing familial anxiety to cloud your mathematical filter, Miquella. The current geopolitical balance shares zero trics with the world of fourteen winters past. Following the triple consolidation of the Golden, Full Moon, and Ancient Dragon lines into a unified alliance, Queen Marika sits as the de facto sovereign of this continent. Ultimately, she was the entity who issued the royal recall to command Radagon's return to the capital. So long as the Eternal Queen anchors the head of that banquet table, unless Moongrum intends to legally declare total war against the Erdtree, he will not execute an extre maneuver."

He locked his silver eyes directly into Miquella's gaze, his focus sharp and entirely transparent. "There is no requirent for hidden daggers between our houses, brother. Farum Azula has recognized the Moon as its most steadfast ally since before the first crusade, and I am fully conscious of the fact that your arrival today was partially engineered to audit my alignnt. But since you have delivered your anxieties without a court filter, I will hand you an unvarnished ledger: the Carian Delegation's acceleration was not coordinated with my crown in the slightest. Is my positioning clear to your vanguard?"

They did not contact the dragons, Miquella calculated, a visible weight lifting from his brow.

A bitter, self-conscious smile touched the boy's lips. "The term 'audit' carries a sharp edge, Lucia. Before my boots cleared your courtyard, I did intend to verify your orientation—but as your friend, even if your ledger was conford to their offensive, my only reflex would have been to argue you out of the crossfire."

He let out a long, ragged sigh, his shoulders relaxing completely. "Thankfully, it appears my tactical engine was over-complicating the board. Lucia... my sincere thanks. Truly."

"Save your gold coins," Lucia chuckled, his smile relaxed and careless. "My circle in this capital is exceptionally small, and the number of entities I actively protect is smaller. If we are analyzing the ledger strictly... excluding Malenia's pastries, your na comprises roughly... half of an asset? Give or take a fraction."

"You absolute nace..." Miquella muttered, speechlessly rubbing his temples, though the dry, ridiculous banter instantly shattered the lingering dread in his chest.

Beneath the warm glow of the study lamps, the two Empyreans sat in a comfortable, quiet stillness, before a shared, genuine laugh rang out through the vaulted ceiling.

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