Reborn as a Hated Noble Family, We Start an Industrial Revolution-Chapter 109: The Silver Eagle Ambush

The Alps-Draconia Pass was a lethal monument of nature’s indifference. Its towering granite walls rose on either side like the jagged teeth of an ancient, petrified beast, seemingly ready to crush anyone daring enough to navigate its frozen throat. At the base of the gorge, ankle-deep snow—treacherous and bone-chilling—shrouded the slick, obsidian-colored rocks. The wind, howling through the narrow crevices, sounded like the banshee wail of a primordial monster. Yet, on this fateful afternoon, the raw voice of nature was drowned out by a far more artificial discord: the rhythmic, heavy thrum of hundreds of hooves galloping from the southwest.

The House Sudrath convoy ground to a halt at the narrowest bottleneck of the pass. Captain Elian, a man whose instincts had been forged in the crucible of a hundred skirmishes and sharpened under Sir Riven’s brutal tutelage, raised a closed fist high above his head.

"HALT THE CONVOY! TURTLE-SHIELD FORMATION! ACTIVATE MANA-CIRCUITS!" Elian’s roar was a physical force, cutting through the mountain gale.

In a matter of heartbeats, the hundred Sudrath infantrymen moved with a surgical precision that only months of relentless training could produce. They formed a tight, overlapping circle around the carriages of Roland and Rumina. Large, rectangular shields—constructed from a lightweight carbon-steel alloy—were locked together, creating an impenetrable wall of matte-black metal. Behind the shields, the tips of the Magitech Spear MK-IIs began to emit a steady, high-frequency hum, their mana-compression circuits ionizing the freezing air into a pale blue electric glow. They were a bastion of the future, standing amidst a landscape of the past.

On the snowy horizon, the four hundred Silver Eagle Knights appeared like a shimmering tidal wave of silver and steel. They did not decelerate until they were a mere fifty meters from the Sudrath barricade. At the vanguard, mounted upon a gargantuan black warhorse that snorted plumes of superheated steam—a side effect of the illicit Alchemical Stamina Potions—stood Prince Marcus.

Marcus had pointedly refused to wear his helmet. His golden hair, perfectly coiffed despite the journey, stood in stark contrast to the sheer arrogance radiating from his features. He yanked back the reins of his mount, staring down at the Sudrath convoy with a smile of such profound condescension it felt like a physical insult.

"Roland Sudrath! Come out of your iron box!" Marcus’s voice echoed, bouncing off the granite walls with the weight of a royal decree. "Or would you prefer I drag the cooling corpses of you and your sister back to Sol-Regis as trophies?"

The carriage door creaked open with a slow, deliberate cadence. Roland stepped out with a terrifying calmness, followed by Rumina, who clutched the case of Rianor’s data crystals as if it were her own heart. Roland was dressed in a deep navy velvet cloak draped over his charcoal suit, looking entirely too composed for a man surrounded by a cavalry force four times his own. 𝒻𝑟𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝑛𝘰𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝘤𝘰𝘮

"Prince Marcus," Roland offered a slight bow—a gesture of formal etiquette that carried the unmistakable sting of a mockery. "A long journey just to greet an old friend. I am impressed your mount hasn’t suffered a cardiac arrest yet, given the illegal alchemical stimulants you’ve forced into its veins."

Marcus’s face hardened into a mask of rage. He reached into the inner lining of his breastplate and produced a parchment adorned with a conspicuous black wax seal.

"Cease your prattle, Golden Tongue! In the name of His Majesty King Edward IV, and via the Emergency Decree ratified by Queen Eleanor, House Sudrath is officially declared traitors to the crown!" Marcus read the text with a booming resonance, ensuring every soldier present understood the finality of the charge. "The crime: Attempted smuggling of restricted military intelligence and heretical technology into the sovereign territory of Draconia. The penalty: Death for those who resist, and permanent exile for those who surrender!"

Marcus let out a low, jagged chuckle, his eyes dancing with a predatory triumph. "Did you truly believe you could hide behind the skirts of those winged lizards? You were caught in the act, Roland. Surrender now, and perhaps I will petition my Mother to ensure your head is taken by a sharp blade, rather than a dull axe."

Roland remained silent for a momentary beat, and then, he began to laugh. It wasn’t the laughter of a man facing the gallows; it was a genuine, melodic sound of amusement. He stepped forward, moving past the protection of his knights’ shields and ignoring Rumina’s frantic tug on his sleeve.

"Marcus, Marcus... you were always the dullest of your brothers, weren’t you?" Roland began, his voice suddenly shifting into a terrifyingly clear, sharp register—the weight of his Golden Tongue beginning to weave its web. "You speak of treason? At this very moment, the Iron Empire is raining railgun shells upon Northreach, vaporizing your own countrymen. And yet, you bring four hundred of the kingdom’s finest knights to the eastern border just to chase two civilians? Where were the Silver Eagles when the people on the coast were being butchered? Oh, I forgot... you were too busy polishing your silver plates at the Capital’s gala."

"Watch your mouth, commoner!" barked a knight beside Marcus—a man named Sir Ulbert, whose face was marked by a jagged scar.

Roland didn’t even blink. He turned his gaze toward the ranks of the Silver Eagle Knights. "All of you! Look at your prince! He brought you here not to preserve sovereignty, but to satisfy a petty, personal vendetta against my family. You risk your lives here, in the freezing shadow of the Alps, while your wages haven’t been increased in two years because the royal treasury is being bled dry to fund Queen Eleanor’s luxuries!"

A murmur of unease rippled through the rear ranks of the cavalry. Roland’s words had struck the most sensitive nerve of any soldier: their survival and their families.

"House Sudrath never betrayed Aethelgard," Roland continued, his voice dropping into a heavy, authoritative tone. "We gave you glass. We gave you paper. We gave you a future where your children don’t die of the common cold. Look at my soldiers! They do not shiver because their armor is lined with high-quality nylon. They do not hunger because their families in Northreach live in prosperity. And you? You are nothing more than guard dogs being fed scraps by a court that wouldn’t care if you froze to death tonight!"

"ENOUGH!" Marcus unsheathed his blade, his face turning a dangerous shade of crimson. His pride as a prince and a commander had just been systematically dismantled in front of his own men. "The charge is legally binding! This decree carries the royal seal!"

"The Queen’s seal, Marcus. Not the King’s," Roland corrected him with a chilling calmness. "King Edward was too weak to sign the death warrant of his oldest friend, Lucian Sudrath. So your mother did it for him. That is not a law; that is a coup written on expensive paper."

High above on the cliffs, hidden behind mounds of frozen snow, five members of the Ghost Squad observed the scene through thermal-imaging optics. They did not utilize radio; the signals were too unreliable in the gorge. Instead, they used Vibro-Comm—bone-conduction communication integrated into their jawbones and ear canals.

"Target locked. Marcus is in the crosshairs," whispered a sniper named Dom. The vibration of his vocal cords was transmitted through the sensors in his neck, received instantly by his comrades as a clear, un-distorted voice inside their inner ears.

"Hold fire. Wait for the Master’s signal," another voice replied.

Back below, Captain Elian stood like a pillar of steel beside Roland. Though he knew they were outnumbered, Elian felt not a shred of fear. To him and his hundred men, House Sudrath was the world. Before the Sudraths rose, Elian was merely a peasant’s son who had nearly died of starvation during a harsh winter. Now, he was an officer with dignity, his family living in a warm apartment in Northreach with stable mana-electricity.

"Prince Marcus," Elian spoke, his voice raspy yet unwavering. "We are Sudrath Knights. We do not bow to decrees written with the ink of lies. If you wish to touch our Young Master, you will have to march over a mountain of our corpses!"

"WE SHALL SEE HOW STRONG YOUR LOYALTY REMAINS WHEN YOUR HEADS ARE SEVERED FROM YOUR SHOULDERS!" Marcus roared. He hoisted his blade high into the gray sky. "CAVALRY! PREPARE FOR THE CHARGE! CRUSH THEM! LEAVE NOT A SINGLE SOUL—"

"Marcus," Roland interrupted one last time. His tone had shifted from provocative to something deeply cold and laden with a lethal threat. "I am giving you one final opportunity to turn back. If you take a single step forward, history will not remember you as a brave prince. History will remember you as the carrion that rotted in this pass because of your own insatiable greed."

Marcus responded only with a crazed, high-pitched laugh. "Four hundred against a hundred, Roland! You have no chance! CHARGE!!!"

The thunder of the cavalry began to build as they spurred their mounts into a gallop along the narrow path. Marcus led the charge, his eyes wide with a bloodthirsty fanaticism. Roland took a deep, steadying breath, turning his head slightly toward Rumina and offering a microscopic nod.

"Forgive me, Father," Roland whispered softly, thinking of Lucian who always sought to avoid bloodshed if a word would suffice. "But this time, my tongue must be bathed in blood."

Roland raised his right hand, then dropped it sharply—the execution signal for the snipers on the cliffs.

The verbal confrontation was over. In the silent, frozen void of the Alpine Pass, the first high-pitched thwip of a Gauss Rifle began to tear through the atmosphere, signaling the beginning of a literal hell for the Silver Eagle Knights.