An Understated Dominance by Marina Vittori

“Here’s the problem-even if we know Warrick’s intentions, how do we stop him?

“Austin asked.

Right now, Warrick had already disappeared without a trace. Austin’s team hadn’t even come close enough to get a hold of him, so there was no way to track him down.

West Lucozia’s vast territory and resources made it impossible to seal off every exit route completely. While it might be manageable in the short term, prolonging such an operation would significantly impact West Lucozia’s economy. Wasting resources on a single fugitive wasn’t a wise move.

“Warrick is a wanted man across the entire city. There’s no way he’s leaving through official channels. He’ll have to sneak his way out,” Dustin analyzed.

He continued, “According to the maritime charts, if he’s traveling from West Lucozia to Artea, he’ll have to go through Thaloria. That’s our lead. Get someone on it immediately-find out how many smuggling routes there are from West Lucozia to Thaloria.”

“Got it. I’ll get it done right away,” Austin replied with a nod. He quickly summoned his guards and relayed the orders.

The castle’s intelligence network worked efficiently. In less than half an hour, a special route map was delivered to Austin.

As he spread it out, he saw dozens of winding paths-all leading from West Lucozia’s border to various docks and ports in Thaloria. However, five of these routes were marked in bright red, which stood out sharply.

These routes weren’t found on any standard map, and few knew they existed. In other words, they were the secret channels used by smugglers. Unscrupulous merchants and corrupt officials had long exploited these routes for profit.

The castle had been aware of them for some time but had chosen not to take action. Cracking down on them would be a massive undertaking.

ways, letting them go unchecked had its benefits-it was like allowing a dangerous situation

the map. “If your guess is right, Warrick will have to choose one of them. If

too many troops to lay an ambush, it’ll be

bird, and

force, it’ll tip him off. But if we only send a handful of

escape from the castle. Regular armed

of them. It was nowhere near enough to cover all possible smuggling routes. Splitting them up would only weaken their strength, and that wasn’t

of that, Warrick had the backing of experts from the Hall of

all that trouble,” Dustin said coolly. “Just deploy your forces to seal off

now. So, this is what you meant by ‘

that he could escape. Dustin would then

was a clever strategy that wouldn’t

whether Dustin could take down Warrick, Austin had never doubted it. Even top-ranked martial artists on the Champ-Tier List had fallen by Dustin’s hand,

only himself to blame

was breaking, and the search operation in Celestria, the capital

and Austin already had a plan to capture Warrick, they still had to put on a show to avoid arousing suspicion from

behind a bookshelf slowly creaked open as a mechanism