Elden Ring: 2,000 Hour Speedrunner Becomes a Dragon Chapter 60 60: A Predicament

The following morning, Lucia sat completely isolated within the cold shadows of his study, his eyes locked onto the gilded vellum resting in his gauntlet, his thoughts sinking into a profound, suffocating quagmire of confusion.

The literal architecture of the script was remarkably simple: Radagon would host an intimate, semi-private banquet along the eastern banks of the Leyndell Lake tomorrow at the noon watch to entertain the newly arrived Carian Delegation. The text leaned heavily into familial sycophancy, explicitly stating that all demigods under the sun were as close as true siblings, and closed by earnestly requesting that the Ancient Dragon Prince make ti to anchor his presence at the board.

What fractured the math was the absolute, illegal nature of the invitation.

This was no official imperial mandate issued under the twin nas of Marika and Radagon, as every court ledger had been since his welcoming banquet. This was a private missive drafted solely by Radagon's hand, locked at the footer by his solitary, personal red-wax sigil. In the cold paraters of dynastic law, this docunt shared zero trics with Queen Marika's crown; it was a personal, un-vouched request from the Elden Lord himself.

As for Her Majesty the Queen—the supre entity who should have occupied the central seat of that pavilion—she had shattered the capital's administrative schedule at the first light of dawn. The Eternal Palace suddenly announced that Marika would imdiately depart to lead a three-day morial convocation for the Eastern Expeditionary Legion within the provincial borders of Rodelia Town.

Before her carriage wheels had even cleared the cobblestones, the Queen had pre-emptively commandeered the Ancient Dragon Priestess, Lansseax, to grace her retinue. To complete the theater, she had packed Godwyn's legitimate heir, Godrick, alongside his un-ranked bastard cousin, Godefroy, into her luggage.

The entire maneuver was executed with the violent velocity of a lightning strike. The courier knight Lansseax had deployed to alert Valeria Hall hadn't even cleared the inner walls before the Queen's heavy vanguards had broken camp and rumbled past the lower gates.

In the laconic, rushed note the Dragon Knight delivered, Lansseax confird the worst: The Queen's sudden pilgrimage was a deliberate, masterful evasion of tomorrow's lakeside board. She commanded Lucia to enforce an absolute, paranoid caution over the next forty-eight hours. If a single anomalous variable cleared his gates, he was ordered to abandon Valeria Hall and retreat directly behind the high-security walls of the Ancient Dragon Temple. To fortify his periter, she had pre-authorized the mobilization files; beyond the five hundred Storm Knights permanently anchoring his personal estate, Lucia could temporarily command over eight hundred elite Temple vanguards for active self-protection.

Yet, the rapid decomposition of the political climate had already outpaced his sister's calculations. Originally, the toxic, unresolved sludge separating Radagon and Moongrum should have remained entirely insulated from Farum Azula's territory. But the millisecond that gilded vellum hit his desk, the board rewritten itself completely.

Lucia let out a long, heavy breath, his eyes staring blankly at the iron inkpot as his mind ran five separate predictive projections through his tactical engine.

He had to concede that Marika's thod of removing her crown from the crossfire was a masterclass in cosmic malice. Evaluated through a generous, courtly lens, her absence could be painted as a maternal gift—leaving an un-monitored, private horizon for Radagon and his estranged children to reconcile their houses, allowing the three Carian siblings to slowly accommodate themselves to the reality of their new stepmother.

But parsed through the unvarnished arithtic of power, her withdrawal was a death sentence for decorum. As the universally acknowledged supre divinity of the continent, her simple presence at that table would have functioned as an absolute, crushing ceiling. No matter how deeply Knight Moongrum loathed the man who had abandoned his Queen, the Carian titan would never dare to draw steel or shatter protocol while locking eyes with the Eternal Marika.

By walking away, she had systematically erased the solitary buffer on the board, rendering every defense vector Lucia and Miquella had calculated the night before completely obsolete.

Turning his focus to Radagon's sector, Lucia was genuinely blind to the Elden Lord's trajectory.

As the primary administrative adversary blocking his consolidation as an Empyrean, Radagon's relationship with his household was actively hostile. The blood-soaked skirmishes between the main plaza knights and the Fundantalist barons a moon past were a clear signature of their enmity. Yet, the syntax of this gilded letter was entirely un-routine. It didn't read like an imperial summon; it genuinely petitioned his attendance, even displaying an unprecedented, calculated conciliatory posture.

What was the dividend he sought to harvest? Did Radagon calculate that a silver-haired dragon youth could function as a buffer? Did he expect Lucia to wave his hands and quiet the Carian wolves if Moongrum reached for his hilt?

What an absolute joke. His data on Liurnia belonged to a past life behind a screen, and his "intimacy" with Radahn and Rykard was restricted to the cold mory of butchering their mutated god-fras to harvest their Great Runes. Playing the role of a dostic peace diator was completely outside his classification.

The solitary rational explanation was that Radagon was targeting the military mass he represented—the unyielding prestige of Farum Azula. As the ancient sovereign power that had fought the Erdtree to an absolute tactical standstill over a decade ago, the dragons commanded imnse geopolitical respect in the eyes of the Carian aristocracy. In all likelihood, the entity Radagon truly required at his flank was the High Priestess Lansseax. But with her crown pre-emptively locked into Marika's carriage, the Elden Lord was forced to settle for the Prince.

Tracing the logic to its ultimate convergence, Lucia's fingers went dead-still against the desk.

If the Queen executed a total tactical rug-pull, consciously harvesting Sister Lansseax to strip Radagon of his shield... why did her net intentionally leave behind within the capital walls?

Was this an permanent sliver of rcy granted to her husband to balance his ledger, or was this a lethal, un-notated stress test engineered to asure the survival stats of the Dragon Empyrean?

The blinding Altus sunlight cut through the vaulted windows, glaring against the ebony wood. Lucia's vision went montarily dazed, his focus fracturing. The pristine, vibrant, almost girlish eyes of the Queen from their first encounter outside the carriage re-surfaced within his mind. But this ti, the mory carried zero warmth; those blue pupils looked like a freezing, pitch-black cosmic abyss, chilling his demigod marrow to the absolute bone.

He drew a long, sharp breath, fighting the sudden spike in his pulse, forcing his cognitive gears back into a stable, calculating rhythm.

He was caught in an absolute, classic gridlock. If he hand-delivered a formal refusal to the palace, it would manifest as an absolute, un-mitigated insult to Radagon's executive dignity. Though their factions were ideologically opposed, their friction had not yet mutated into open civil warfare; detonating a total political schism on the eve of the winter festival was a catastrophic tactical move. Furthermore, Miquella and Malenia were conford by blood to sit at that table tomorrow. Thinking of those twin siblings huddling in the splash zone without his shield left his gut tight with a primitive anxiety.

But if he accepted the invitation, stepping into the pavilion alongside an aggressive, vengeful Moongrum... how could he, as the solitary un-aligned outsider on the field, position his steel when the blades cleared the leather?

He scanned his internal directory for a mind to share the weight. Sister Lansseax was currently tracing gravestones in Rodelia, entirely cut off from communication. Miquella possessed an extraordinary, god-tier intellect and a genuine loyalty as a friend, but the boy was a core node of the crisis—his blood belonged directly to Radagon's house. Lucia could never commit the strategic error of forcing his companion to execute a painful psychological choice against his own father.

Moreover, analyzing the tiline, Miquella had likely registered the Queen's sudden departure hours before the scouts reached Valeria Hall. He knew exactly what manner of gilded trap was sitting across Lucia's desk at this very watch. The fact that the young prince had uncharacteristically refrained from launching a courier, and had even chosen to keep Malenia insulated within their own garden walls today, was an explicit, wordless signal: he refused to burden Lucia with his own shadow, preferring his friend to write his own ledger without emotional arbitrage.

As for the two elder drakes resting under the oaks, or operational captains like Aegis and Guilel... their stat matrices were dumped entirely into raw physical violence. Their macro-intelligence was non-existent, and their data streams were identical to his own. Convening a council with his retinue would yield nothing but an afternoon of roaring and un-sheathed claws.

Just as his thoughts reached an absolute point of friction, a solitary na flickered from the depths of his mory battlefield—an entity existing outside the secular chess board: The Two Fingers, 'Epsilon'.

As the cosmic auditor deployed by the Greater Will specifically to supervise his trajectory toward godhood, that silent, timber-like entity was the solitary player who possessed the trics to crack a secular deadlock.

Lucia's eyes snapped open, his decision locked. He surged to his feet, throwing his cloak over his shoulders. "Guilel! Have the carriage prepped at the gate marker this instant. We ride for the Church of the Two Fingers."

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