A murmur of confusion followed, but she pressed on.
"You call this place safe. You think these walls protect you. But what you call safety was built on the backs of enslaved hunters, on the screams of the weak pitted against monsters for amusement!"
Her eyes swept across the faces above her, the civilians, the soldiers, the trembling guards who had once turned away from cruelty in silence.
"You want peace? Then build it by yourselves. Protect it. Not through tyranny, but through unity."
Her words were not grand or poetic. They were carved from simple, unyielding truth.
And it struck something raw in the crowd.
But even as the murmurs shifted from fear to something like hope, a thought nagged at the edge of Ling Yu's mind, the practicality of it.
