The Guardian gods Chapter 951

Instead of fighting, Wulv offered lucrative trade pacts designed to forge a lasting economic bridge between their domains. Yuki accepted with immediate urgency, acutely aware of the devastating effectiveness the Wolfings’ gear had already demonstrated in the ongoing conflict.

Her generals had suffered dearly against Wolfing mercenaries fighting under the banner of Lunara. The sheer durability of their armor allowed those warriors to throw caution to the wind, trading minor injuries or tanking direct blows in exchange for lethal strikes against her own forces. Securing those weapons and plates would elevate her army from ferocious to terrifying.

That excitement evaporated when Wulv added another set of wordings, the trade was not exclusive. The Silver Kingdom would enjoy the exact same access to these elite armaments, leveling the playing field between their war.

The realization struck her hard. The godlings, historically content to watch mortals tear each other apart from the distant realm, were suddenly dipping their fingers directly into mortal affairs.

Despite the godlings hedging their bets, the reassurance that they refused to pick a definitive side brought Yuki considerable comfort. The deeper she analyzed the situation, the clearer their motives became, they were simply laying the groundwork for diplomatic ties with whichever faction ultimately claimed victory.

Yuki possessed absolute confidence that victory would belong to her. The Silver Kingdom was fundamentally unsuited for total war, they merely projected a facade of grim resolve, but when forced to confront the actual, visceral madness of protracted slaughter, they inevitably cowered.

The Silver Kingdom remained tethered to outdated notions of chivalry and restraint, a fatal flaw that stripped away the ruthless adaptability required to survive total war. Their rigid adherence to morality left their psychological defenses wide open to subversion and corruption from within.

A knowing smile curved across Yuki’s face as she recalled Ragnar’s recent, clumsy attempt to sow discord and panic among her ranks. The provocation had completely failed to disrupt her forces. Instead, the enemy’s desperate gambit backfired entirely, sparking a brilliant insight in her mind on how she could weaponize their weakness and aggressively accelerate the rot eating away at the Silver Kingdom from the inside.

The insidious whispers of ascension swept through the world like wildfire, carrying the unmistakable fingerprints of her father’s handiwork. Yuki recognized his signature genius immediately, and a cold dread gripped her heart. She had been among the many leaders who recognized the catastrophic damage such knowledge could inflict upon the fragile hierarchy of a nation, joining forces in the past to ensure the record was fiercely suppressed.

The Silver Kingdom had scrambled with that exact same frantic caution, locking down every scrap of information to prevent the secret from leaking. Yet, Ragnar had outmaneuvered them all. The moment hostilities resumed, the secret of godhood infiltrated her own army, spreading with terrifying speed. It dangled an irresistible promise, a definitive path through which any mortal could transcend their limits and claw their way up to divinity.

The stratagem was devilishly clever. The moment Yuki and her ruling council caught wind of the spreading heresy, their immediate reflex was swift containment. They ordered the immediate execution of anyone who had glimpsed the secret, hunting down the spreaders and the infected alike before the revolutionary ideology could tear her forces apart from the inside.

The phantom echo of Björn’s mocking laughter rang in her ears, a sound Yuki initially failed to comprehend until she investigated the ground-level reality. Her people weren’t taking in the knowledge as she expected, they were treating the secret of ascension as casual campfire entertainment to pass the time between engagements.

Alarmed, Yuki and the council immediately infiltrated the military ranks with palace secret services to gauge the true mindset and opinions of the troops. The intelligence reports returned a unanimous verdict, indifference masking sheer amusement.

The complicated, arduous steps required to achieve divinity were deemed tedious and entirely too much work to carry out. Worshiping Björn was straightforward kill, slaughter, relish the battle, win, and reap greater physical strength as a direct reward.

The soldiers viewed Yuki as the tactical brain of the nation, noting that she was the only one smart or patient enough to care about such lofty concepts.

The campfire popped, throwing a shower of orange sparks against the damp night air of the siege camp. Around the blaze, a half-dozen Björn infantrymen, caked in dried mud and the stubborn stench of old iron passed around a rough wineskin. In the center of the circle sat a discarded parchment scroll bearing the intricate, forbidden glyphs of the ascension secret, currently being used to poke at the burning logs.

"Look at this fancy scrawl again," grunted Berg, a broad-shouldered veteran with a deep scar running from his jawline down into his collar. He jabbed the parchment deeper into the embers, watching the edges curl and blacken. "The high-ups were shaking in their boots over this? Some long-winded recipe about aligning your soul with a law and a set of doctrine to follow like a monk?"

Across the fire, a younger soldier named Jory snorted, wiping grease from his chin with the back of his gauntlet. "Imagine days without roasted mutton? My blade would rust in my scabbard before I ever sniffed divinity. Besides, what’s a god supposed to do with all that boring set of rules? You ever seen a statue drink mead? I haven’t."

A hearty round of laughter rippled through the circle. The notion of leaving behind the visceral, deafening joy of the battlefield for some ethereal, solitary plane of existence struck them as the ultimate joke.

"Exactly," muttered a scarred sergeant leaning back against a supply crate. "Björn doesn’t ask us to meditate or decode riddles written by sour-faced scholars. He tells us to march out, cave in a Silver Kingdom helmet, and take what we’ve earned. You kill enough bastards, your muscles get denser, your breath hits harder, and the tribe respects you. That’s all the godhood a man needs."

"Do you reckon if I smash enough skulls with my bare fists, Yuki’s scribes will write me down as a god?" Jory grinned, flexing a massive forearm wrapped in blood-stained leather.

"Depends, Skull-Crusher Jory," Berg mocked, raising his wineskin in a mock toast. "You might have to start with the commanders first. Though knowing our brain-box Yuki, she’d probably use your divine skull as a paperweight if you started demanding prayers during formation."

"True," Jory laughed, leaning back. "Let the Silver Kingdom priests worry about ascending and floating around on clouds. I’d rather stay right here in the mud, breathing heavy, and holding a warm blade. Much more honest work."

The average soldier possessed neither the patience nor the diplomatic skill to rally a group of worshipers, concluding that mortal devotion could never match the raw, responsive power granted by Björn.

Instead of aspiring to fragile godhood, the camps erupted into dark jokes about preferring fear over worship. The soldiers laughed, trading humorous ideas about whether crushing a specific number of skulls with their bare hands might eventually earn them titles like the "God of Skull Crushers."

Björn’s initial mockery of laughrer finally snapped into sharp focus for Yuki once the intelligence reports rolled in. A complex knot of conflicting emotions twisted in her chest, torn squarely between profound relief and lingering, bottomless annoyance at her army’s utter lack of loftier ambitions.

For the thousandth time, she cursed the singular, brutal simplicity of the people of Björn. Yet, standing over the reports, she had to admit that their stubborn, bone deep single-mindedness had just saved her entire campaign from collapsing inward.

The catastrophic alternative made her blood run cold, elite commanders dropping their weapons mid-campaign to meditate on their domain law. Vain officers abandoning tactical formations to build personal cults of worship.

An army of aspiring deities tearing the war machine apart from the inside out out of sheer hubris.

Ragnar’s sinister gambit had completely misfired against her forces, but the underlying brilliance of the weapon remained. If the secret of ascension was a loaded poison dart, she refused to let it rot in her own camp.

A cold, calculated smile touched her lips as she decided to weaponize her own father’s dangerous legacy. Hating every second of utilizing Murmur’s forbidden handiwork, Yuki turned Ragnar’s trap right back on its maker.

Just as the knowledge had leaked into her own ranks, she orchestrated its silent, seamless delivery straight into the heart of the Silver Kingdom. Unlike her bloodthirsty, battle-drunk soldiers, the Silver Kingdom was brimming with ambitious scholars, status-obsessed nobles, and desperate commanders. They were thoughtful, calculating, and poisoned by personal pride, meaning they would know exactly what to do with the method to godhood, and exactly how to tear themselves apart trying to claim it.

The unexpected injection of the ascension secret initially threw Ragnar’s realm and council into absolute chaos, plunging the Silver Kingdom into a flurry of panic. Two high-ranking noble houses collapsed overnight as suspicion, backstabbing, and forbidden ambition tore them apart, forcing Ragnar to wield a heavy iron hand to excise the rot from the roots. Yet, contrary to Yuki’s tactical projections, the strategy soon fizzled out far short of a total systemic collapse.

Ragnar himself was genuinely surprised, he had anticipated a critical, kingdom-ending crisis, but the wider populace displayed a startling immunity