Chapter 67: The Clashing of Sovereigns

Elysia backed away another foot, her eyes searching his face as if looking at a stranger. "Ren... is she telling the truth? Are you... part of her?"

Evelyn didn’t answer. She stood frozen between Ren and Velista, her dark blue broadswords lowered slightly, her jaw tight as her gaze darted back and forth between the two, completely paralyzed by the revelation.

Velista merely folded her arms across her chest, watching Ren’s psychological collapse with a quiet, cruel satisfaction, her smirk widening into the dark shadow of the apocalypse.

WHOOSH!

Without warning, a massive jet of swirling, white-hot flames erupted from behind a ruined stone pillar.

The roaring pillar of fire swept directly toward Velista’s flank, scorching the air with intense kinetic heat. Velista’s eyes flicked sideways. With a fluid, effortless twist of her waist, she leaped five meters straight into the air, her dark gown billowing around her like obsidian wings as the inferno detonated against the cobble below.

While she hovered at the peak of her vault, a shadow detached itself from the smoke above her.

Miku dropped from the sky, her red eyes burning with feral fury. She reversed her grip on twin, black-steel daggers and swung them downward in a vicious, crisscrossing arc aimed straight at Velista’s throat.

Velista didn’t flinch. Mid-air, she rotated her torso a fraction of an inch, letting the lethal steel graze harmlessly through empty air. Before Miku could recover her momentum, Velista planted the flat of her palm firmly against Miku’s forehead, using the young assassin as a springboard to vault even higher into the sky before executing a light, flawless landing thirty paces away.

Miku hit the stone floor hard, rolling twice to absorb the impact before springing back onto her feet.

"Dammit!" Miku hissed, wiping a streak of soot from her cheek. "Missed!"

A second figure burst through the alley. Reika skidded to a halt beside her, extending a hand to steady Miku’s balance while keeping her blazing crimson eyes locked on the dark sovereign.

Velista smoothed her off-shoulder dress with two fingers, looking down her nose at the new arrivals with a patronizing chuckle. "My, my... I didn’t expect so many flies to gather for a simple negotiation."

Ren’s eyes widened as he caught a subtle movement from Evelyn’s left hand.

Behind her back, concealed from Velista’s sight, Evelyn was forming a precise sequence of hand signals—counting down from three to one with stiff, urgent twitches of her fingers.

Ren’s mind raced into overdrive. ’Why...? What is she thinking?! After Velista just claimed I’m linked to her, why isn’t Evelyn turning on me? Why is she still treating me as an ally instead of trading me away to end the swarm?’

He glanced back over the parapet toward the gatehouse. The combined lines of the Hero Corps and the Armed Military were still locked in a desperate, grinding war of attrition. The deafening roar of automatic gunfire and elemental explosions shook the stone foundation every second. Thousands of Aberrants continued to hurl themselves against the defensive wire.

’If this stalemate drags on,’ Ren analyzed, his knuckles turning white, ’our ammunition caches will empty out, and the mages will hit total mana exhaustion. We can’t drag this battle out. But can we actually take down a creature like her...?’

BANG!

A sharp, deafening gunshot shattered the heavy atmosphere.

A high-velocity projectile sped through the air from forty yards out, aimed with absolute, cold-blooded precision at the back of Velista’s ribcage. The heavy lead slug punched straight through her dark fabric, shattering bone and tearing through her heart nexus from behind.

Velista’s body jerked forward. A dark, viscous streak of crimson spilled from the corner of her lips.

Every person on the platform froze in shock.

Standing fifty yards down the stone promenade was Ryu. His black dress shirt was soaked in sweat, his eyes cold and devoid of emotion as he held a heavy tactical sidearm extended in a two-handed lock, smoke wafting from the barrel.

"You... pathetic rat..." Velista hissed, coughing up a spatter of dark blood as she slowly turned her head to glare at Ryu.

"Now!" Evelyn’s voice boomed across the promenade like a thunderclap. "Strike her together! Capture her!"

"Move!" Ren roared, casting aside his doubts as his command instincts kicked in.

Despite the hole blown through her chest, Velista’s eyes narrowed into twin slits of pure malice. She wiped the blood from her chin with the back of her hand, letting out a dark, raspy chuckle that chilled the blood of everyone present.

"Very well," Velista purred, her aura flaring into a suffocating, deep violet haze that turned the sky dark overhead. "If you refuse my generosity... I shall teach you the true meaning of despair!"

"Evelyn, take the high angle! Kael, freeze her lateral mobility! Miku, Reika, pinch her flanks! Ryu, hold cover fire!" Ren screamed, his voice cutting through the chaotic roar of magic.

The squad responded as a single, lethal unit.

Evelyn leaped fifteen feet into the air. A dozen glowing, sapphire energy blades materialized in a semi-circle behind her back—her signature Sky Blades. With a sharp sweep of her arms, the ethereal swords rained down like a blue meteor shower, targeting every square inch around Velista’s feet.

Simultaneously, Reika unleashed a roaring torrent of fire from her palms, pairing her elemental flame with Miku’s lightning-fast dagger sweeps. The twin girls flashed around Velista in a lethal dance, slicing and burning from both sides to keep the dark sovereign pinned within the ring of falling Sky Blades.

Velista didn’t draw a blade. She moved like a phantom—twisting, ducking, and swaying through the overlapping assault. Her movements were so unnaturally fast that her form blurred into violet afterimages.

BANG! BANG!

Ryu and Ren fired in rhythmic succession, their high-caliber rounds targeting the minute gaps in her evasion. Yet, with a flick of her wrist, Velista condensed tiny, localized black-hole singularities in mid-air, absorbing the kinetic energy of the lead slugs before they could touch her skin.

"Kael, now! Lock her down!" Ren shouted.

Kael slammed his palms onto the stone cobbles. "Glacial Realm!"

A jagged wave of ice erupted from his hands, shooting across the ground like a spreading frostbite. The sudden wave flash-froze Velista’s ankles, locking her lower body into three inches of solid, mana-reinforced ice.

"She’s pinned!" Miku yelled, springing forward with her daggers raised.

"Strike!" Evelyn descended from the sky, both mana broadswords aimed at Velista’s neck.

Velista merely sneered. "Crude."

BOOM!

A violent shockwave of pure dark energy exploded from Velista’s body, instantly shattering Kael’s ice into millions of microscopic splinters. The concussive blast blew Evelyn and Miku backward through the air.

Before Reika could disengage, Velista blurred forward, slipping past Reika’s guard. She drove an open-palm strike infused with dark aura straight into Reika’s solar plexus.

THUMP!

Reika spat a mouthful of blood as the kinetic force lifted her off her feet, sending her crashing into a stone pillar twenty yards away.

"Reika!" Kael lunged forward, his frost blade executing three rapid horizontal sweeps.

Velista dodged the first two with terrifying ease, stepped inside Kael’s guard, and grabbed the length of his steel blade with her bare, dark-infused hand. With a effortless twist of her wrist, she shattered the enchanted steel like brittle glass, before driving a knee into Kael’s ribs, sending him skidding across the dirt.

"Elysia! Disrupt her stance!" Ren yelled, raising his pistol to track her movement.

Elysia slammed her hands together, channeling her emerald wind magic into a swirling vortex beneath Velista’s feet while thick, thorny vines erupted from the stone to bind her limbs.

The momentary distraction worked.

"Ice core! Lock her!" Kael shouted from the ground, channeling his remaining mana through his hands directly into the earth.

A thick pillar of crystalline ice erupted around Velista’s torso, encasing her from the waist down in a dense, blue prison.

"She’s trapped! All units, full assault!" Ren bellowed, pointing his sidearm at her head.

Ryu discarded his empty pistol, drawing a long steel katana from his back as he sprinted forward alongside Evelyn, Miku, and Reika. Elysia gathered a dense, swirling sphere of pressurized gale-force wind in her palms, charging alongside them to close the trap.

Seven elite fighters converged on the frozen sovereign simultaneously from every direction.

From forty paces away, Ren caught sight of Velista’s face through the crystalline frost.

She wasn’t panicking. She was smiling.

Wait... Stop! Ren’s brain screamed, but the warning died in his throat.

BOOM!

The dark violet aura surrounding Velista didn’t just flare—it detonated into a massive, poisonous mushroom cloud of dark mana. The sheer pressure wave shattered the surrounding architecture and swept through the execution team like a battering ram.

"AAAAGH!"

Evelyn, Kael, Ryu, Elysia, Miku, and Reika were blown off their feet simultaneously, tossed through the air like ragdolls before slamming hard into the stone cobbles.

A thick, acrid purple smoke instantly blanketed the entire promenade. The toxic vapor burned the throat and eyes like acid, making it impossible to draw breath.

Ren dropped to his knees, clutching his face as his eyes watered violently. "Dammit... my eyes...!"

Through the haze of his blurred vision, a shadow moved.

Velista exploded out of the purple cloud at blinding speed. Before Ren could raise his pistol, she crossed the two-meter distance in a fraction of a second. Her right fist was enveloped in a dense, swirling ball of dark violet energy.

THUD!

The heavy strike slammed squarely into the side of Ren’s jaw.

The sheer kinetic force caused Ren’s vision to go completely white. His body spun twice through the air before slamming heavily onto his back. Before he could recover, Velista leaned down, grabbed him by his collar with iron strength, and hauled his half-conscious body toward her chest.

A swirling, dark spatial portal tore open in the air behind her.

"Ren!" Evelyn’s raw, panicked scream echoed through the smoke, but her body was too battered to move in time.

Velista threw a wicked, triumphant glance over her shoulder at the fallen group, stepped backward into the swirling purple void, and dragged Ren’s limp body through the threshold.

The portal snapped shut, leaving behind only the drifting scent of ozone and burning sulfur.

---

As the toxic purple haze slowly dissipated in the wind, the survivors pushed themselves up from the bloodied cobbles, coughing and gasping for fresh air.

Elysia stumbled onto her feet, her hands trembling as she looked wildly around the empty promenade. "Where... where did she go?!"

Miku pushed herself up from the rubble, her eyes wide with panic. "Hey! Where’s Ren?! Where did he go?!"

Kael, Ryu, and Reika scrambled toward the center of the platform, but there was nothing left except scorch marks and shattered stone.

"Dammit!" Evelyn slammed her fists into the earth, her nails digging into the stone until her knuckles bled. Tears of pure frustration and helplessness welled in her eyes. "Again... I failed again...!"

Ryu sprinted across the platform, scanning every alleyway with his weapon drawn, but his face grew darker by the second.

"If Ren is gone..." Reika whispered, her voice trembling with anxiety, "who is going to lead us? How do we hold the territory?"

Elysia folded her arms tightly around herself, her mind spinning as she stared at the scorch mark where Ren had stood. "Why did she take him...? Was she telling the truth? Is Ren really connected to that monster...?"

Evelyn slowly stood up, wiping the dirt and tear streaks from her face. Her sapphire eyes hardened into two pieces of razor-sharp ice as she looked out over the northern gatehouse, where the sounds of gunfire were finally beginning to subside as the last wave of Aberrants was eliminated by the garrisons.

"It doesn’t matter what connection they have," Evelyn said, her voice dropping into a cold, uncompromising tone that commanded absolute silence. "Ren is the leader of Lumiria. He stands with humanity. He built this refuge for us when we had nothing left."

Kael pushed himself upright, leaning heavily on his broken hilt, but his eyes burned with matching resolve. "The Princess is right. Without him, Lumiria falls. We owe him our lives."

Ryu sheathed his katana with a sharp, metallic click. "We track them down. We bring him back. End of story."

Evelyn turned toward the center of the territory, her hands clenching into tight fists at her sides as she stared into the horizon where the dark portal had vanished.

"Velista didn’t kill him," Evelyn muttered, her tone dripping with quiet, lethal promise. "Which means she needs him for something. We rebuild our lines, we secure the gates, and then we hunt her down. We’re getting him back... no matter what it takes."