The moment strength was brought up, Diomedes, Ajax, the great, and the others all squared off, none of them willing to yield to the others.
Odysseus's face went dark on the sidelines.
The implication was that he was the weak one, unworthy of the armor?
Who exactly was being insulted here?
Night stepped back from the center, earned his credit without getting his hands dirty further, and moved to the side to become an observer, quietly watching the Greek heroes get red-eyed enough to nearly smash each other's brains out.
Fight already!
Come on, fight!
The harder you all fight among yourselves, the better it is for Troy.
Although he really enjoyed the sight, there was a small part of him that felt slightly unsatisfied.
After all, he barely did anything, and they all fell right into it.
In fact, he didn't do much.
These heroes simply had flawed characters to begin with.
If they could genuinely unite, trust each other, and work together,
Troy would never stand a chance.
Even minor kings like Thoas joined the chaos, shamelessly insisting they were the wisest and strongest candidate to inherit Achilles's equipment, even though their actual ability placed them nowhere near that conversation.
Night: "..."
Achilles wasn't even dead yet.
And the premise of the whole plan was that Achilles was willing to lend the armor, not donate it.
How come it's all been turned into 'inheritance' in your mouths?
The ambition here was visible to everyone.
The arguing got loud enough that even Agamemnon got a headache, and eventually he shouted, "Enough!"
He looked at the group of animals and spoke. "Since none of you would back down, you might as well fight it out. Whoever won could have the right to inherit Achilles's armor."
When Night heard that even Agamemnon instinctively used the word "inherit," his eyelid twitched.
No single sentence could capture the layers of meaning in this scene anymore.
Fine. It's not my problem.
He just wanted all of them to move out and leave the main camp so he could start his own quiet infiltration.
But Nestor noticed something off about Night at this exact moment.
Every hero in the room was fighting red-faced over Achilles's armor, but the latter was the only one who looked entirely disinterested.
He didn't suspect Night's identity.
He just felt something was wrong.
Were there really heroes in this world who could stay unmoved by a set of equipment that powerful?
The more detached Griffith seemed, the more pure and untouched his image appeared, the stronger Nestor's suspicion grew that something far more enormous might be driving him underneath.
He didn't believe truly saintly people existed in this world.
Not even the gods were free of enormous desires.
The more powerful a being, the stronger and larger their desires.
A hero who had no interest in power, no interest in reputation, no interest in divine equipment.
But was he really as uninterested in everything as he appeared?
Or was it that,
He had an ambition so large and deep that none of these simple things were enough to satisfy it.
Because they couldn't feed that appetite, he stayed completely calm and steady.
What did he want?
It couldn't possibly be that he wanted to become the new King of Mycenae, could it? The thought sent a shiver down Nestor's spine.
He instinctively wanted to warn Agamemnon and tell him that Griffith might be far more dangerous than he appeared and far less simple.
And if Nestor and the others hadn't pushed him, they would never have known he had two ideas that good sitting in his head.
Why didn't he speak up before?
Maybe this person had truly enormous plans.
If he was actually looking at the seat beneath Agamemnon,
In the age of gods, such a thing was not impossible.
In the mythological world, the king of Mycenae was typically appointed directly by the gods.
The hero Atreus came to his throne this way. Agamemnon did too.
If someone performed brilliantly in this war, participated in by nearly every hero from across Greece, while Agamemnon came across as ineffectual or even died in some incident during the campaign, and the gods chose a new king of Mycenae,
They would almost certainly choose the most outstanding hero.
That thought made cold sweat break out down Nestor's back.
But just as he opened his mouth slightly to speak, he caught sight of Agamemnon next to him.
That expression on the man's face, that ugly, uncontainable pleasure at the thought of dealing a blow to Achilles, was impossible to hide.
Then he looked at the other side, where Night stood apart from everything, calm from start to finish, perfectly removed from it all, watching the tigers fight from his mountain.
Nestor remembered every infuriating response Agamemnon gave him every time he pushed the man to reconcile with Achilles.
Suddenly, he found he didn't want to share his suspicions with Agamemnon anymore.
This hopeless good-for-nothing.
Drinking and dreaming every day, buried in women, and still occasionally jealous enough to undermine capable men.
How much longer could he realistically place any hope in him?
Even if he warned Agamemnon to watch out for Griffith, knowing Agamemnon's arrogant personality, it would probably...
Thinking that through, Nestor let out a long breath.
He had no desire to wade into that mess.
All he wanted was to win this war.
Never mind—it's none of my business!
At the same time, on Night's end, the moment Nestor's sharp attention focused on him, Night noticed it.
Watching the old man go tense, then alarmed, then let out a sigh, behaving like someone unsettled in his own thoughts, he had no idea what conclusions the elder was drawing.
But for someone this committed to reconciling Achilles and Agamemnon, if not for his age making the nomination unlikely to succeed, Night would happily have recommended Agamemnon pick him to wear Achilles's armor and go to the front.
Let his good brother Hector take care of the problem.
When he noticed the old man stop paying attention to him, Night pulled his focus back as well.
He looked around at the room and saw the loudest competitors were now Diomedes, Great Ajax, and Odysseus.
The final pick would almost certainly come from among those three.
Other heroes, though they hadn't given up, were starting to read the situation. Their hunger for the divine equipment was cooling slightly, most of them privately acknowledging they weren't going to get it.
A few of the more clear-eyed ordinary heroes dropped out of the fight and accepted the outcome with reluctance.
Diomedes, representing the strongest of human warriors in raw power (strength).
Odysseus, representing the sharpest and most flexible mind (wisdom).
And Great Ajax, representing the greatest shield and defensive strength in the alliance (defense).
All three argued forcefully from their own strengths, none of them willing to back down.
But Ajax's position in the argument was the weakest of the three.
His defense was extraordinary, but it depended almost entirely on his famous holy shield.
The hero Achilles's fighting style was the complete opposite of Ajax's.
Achilles was speed and penetrating force, a meteor that broke through anything.
Putting on Achilles's equipment meant giving up his own. He couldn't bring his shield into the role.
The biggest advantage Ajax had, the thing that defined his strength, was essentially removed from the equation.
Even so, Ajax was not ready to let go.
Until, watching this play out, Night used a technique he developed by studying his musical blessing, hiding sound inside the wind, and sent something into Ajax's mind like a whisper delivered on air.
"If you trust me, give up the chance to claim Achilles's armor, Ajax, the great.
Getting Achilles's armor would not be a good thing for you."
The sudden, familiar voice in his ear made the arguing Ajax pause and go still for a moment.