The first prince had the largest number of nobles supporting him and the third prince had the support of a powerful duke who was also the maternal grandfather of the third prince.

So with them teaming up, it was extremely easy for them to find an excuse to blame the Triston family and brand them as the enemy of the crown.

Not just that but there were even people in the second prince's faction who were also unhappy with the rising momentum of the Triston family. So they also secretly helped out the two other princes from the shadows.

This way, the Triston family was surrounded by enemies from all sides and the enemies were also overwhelmingly powerful.

So even though the mighty Triston family had some hidden strength and were stronger than what the world knew about, they were still ubable to survive this calamity.

World knew that the Triston family only had 3 knights but actually they had 6 including Elise. But still, all of them started falling in battle one after another as their enemies had brought 10 knights with them.

So when the whole family was on the verge of destruction, Elise's father, a powerful high level knight had went all out and had killed three enemy knights in a very short period of time.

This had created a commotion in the battlefield and taking advantage of that, Elise had ran away. This was a decision made by all the members of the family. As long as their genius Elise was alive, the blood of the Triston family would also not disappear.

But the enemy army was more organised than Elise had expected them to be and the confusion was suppressed quite quickly before she could completely escape.

So three other knights came chasing after her and Elise had to continuously fight them off while she was running away.

This was a difficult thing to do but still as Elise herself was quite strong as a knight, she was about to make her escape by running into a deep forest which would be extremely hard for the unfamiliar knights to navigate and traverse.

But at that moment, one of the knight chasing after her took out some sort of special item and used it to shot metal pebbles toward her. This item was something like a slingshot but was just much stronger than a regular one.

But even more important that the slingshot like item was the pebble that was used on her. It had a special function and it could make the life force inside a knight's core to go berserk.

Elise had read about items like these in an ancient text of her family and according to it, they were called Artifacts. They were extremely rare and very few people had access to them.

So this pebble like artifact was the reason why the life force inside her core got out of control and destroyed the core itself.

But fortunately for Elise, instead of falling into the hands of the people chasing after her, she managed to jumped into a river and float away.

This river getaway was actually extremely risky especially in her condition where her core had broken and the life force was rampaging in her body.

But still, even in these terrible situations, she somehow managed to survive with her life and got out of water. But during this process, several bones of her body were broken.

But after this miraculous save, her luck ran out. Very soon after coming out of the river water, Elise encountered the slave traders and was easily captured by them in her powerless state.

That was how she ended up in the underground base of the Shadeshifter company as a lowly slave.

...

So with this kind of background, Elise had access to quite a few knight's secret arts. And even though her memory was not as frightening as Weiss's, she still perfectly remembered quite a few of them, especially the one that she herself had used to create her core.

And the notebook that she was holding in her hand was a better and improved version of that secret art of hers that was named the "Fleeting Shadow Secret Art".

After learning about her background, Weiss had asked her if Elise could tell her about the secret arts she knew about.

As her family had already been destroyed and most probably she was the only survivor left, she had no reason to hide it from her benefactor. So Elise had told Weiss about all of them.

Fleeting Shadow Secret art was special even among secret arts and it was way more complex too. Instead of focusing on two attributes like most other secret arts, this Fleeting Shadow focused on only one of the attributes which was agility.

This way, the increase it provided to the agility attribute was much greater than normal. This kind of approch was something that Weiss had found to be very interesting.

When creating her own secret art, she had though about it but had not followed through for various reasons. The main reason was obviously because it was a lot less versatile.

For example, if speed super specialised Elise came across a vitality and strength specialised knight, then her chance of winning would go down and she would not be able to inflict much damage to the Knight with a strong vitality.

Not just that but without enough endurance, she would also have a much harder time using her high agility for a long battle.

So in this modified version, Weiss had made some changes to lessen her disadvantages. Did she got rid of the unique aspect of the Fleeting Shadow and made it a generic double attributed secret art ?

Obviously not. Instead of destroying the unique nature of this art, she had made sure that it would boost the agility even more than before but at the same time it would also give a minor boost to the other attributes which would be able to support the high agility.

As Elise was reading this, she was having a hard time believing what she was seeing. The modified version of her Fleeting Shadow Secret Art was so strong that comparing it with the previous version was equivalent of comparing the heaven with the earth.

If she could rebuild her core using this newly modified technique as the base, then she would not just regain her previous strength, she would actually become much stronger than before.

Elise became so emotional after seeing this, that her eyes became moist and tears started to fall from them.

In her heart a desire for revenge against the enemies who had destroyed her life was hidden. But with her powerless state, there was no way for her to unleash these desires.

But now she wad finally seeing some hope. A hope of vengeance, a hope of relief. And this young lady before her was the reason why she was seeing this hope. This though overwhelmed her and that was why she started to crying.

Weiss was surprised to see the sudden tears and was unsure about why Elise was crying at this moment. But still, even though she did not understand the reason, Weiss still picked up a handkerchief and wiped the tears away.

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