Chapter 245: The Sovereign’s Clash and the Sovereign’s Chair

Amelia’s restraint snapped like a dry twig. Like a dam breaking.

No one called her Amelia. Not since her own mother died over a hundred years ago. Everyone called her Headmistress Veyrith, or Tyrant Empress, or Your Excellency, or Monster. Never just Amelia. Never with that tone.

In a blur of motion that defied human sight, that even Lynx’s agility could barely track, she crossed the distance between them. The air cracked.

Before Lynx could finish his sentence, a black-gloved hand shot forward with terrifying speed, seizing him tightly by the throat. Her fingers were strong, unyielding, like steel cables wrapped in silk, like a vice made of diamond.

Clack!

She lifted his entire six-foot-two frame clean off the polished marble floor with one hand, her immense strength choking off the air in his windpipe. His feet left the ground.

His boots dangled and kicked slightly. Her white eyes flared with sudden fury, glowing brighter, almost pure light.

"You think you’re untouchable, don’t you?" Amelia growled, her face mere inches from his, her chest heaving with agitated breath, her massive bust rising and falling rapidly against her coat.

"You think your little charm and your little tricks make you invincible? You think you can walk in here and say my name like you own me?"

Lynx, hanging in the air, managed to grin despite the hand around his throat. "Well... when you put it like that... it sounds kinda hot..."

Amelia’s eye twitched again.

Without waiting for another word, her other hand pulled back and drove a devastating, mana-infused punch straight into Lynx’s jaw.

Her fist was wreathed in dark red mana, crackling with power enough to level a building, to shatter a mountain.

CRASH!

The impact sounded like a lightning strike. A thunderclap inside the closed office. The sheer kinetic force of her punch sent Lynx flying backward through the air like a cannonball.

He smashed through a heavy decorative wooden partition that had stood there for a hundred years, splintering it into a thousand pieces.

Crashing hard against the far black marble wall and sending dust and debris showering across the floor. The wall cracked where he hit. A Lynx-shaped dent.

Amelia didn’t give him a single second to recover. Her body dissolved into a swirl of dark smoke, her coat fluttering like wings, reappearing instantly in the air above where Lynx lay in the rubble.

She plummeted downward like a falling meteor, her fist wreathed in dark red energy, aiming a second, skull-crushing blow straight at his chest that would have caved in a normal Transcendent’s ribcage and stopped their heart.

At the very last microsecond, Lynx’s Lightning Stride and Agility kicked into overdrive. His body sparked with blue-white lightning, illuminating the dust.

He twisted his torso violently to the side, rolling through the dust, coughing.

BOOM!

Amelia’s fist slammed into the solid black marble floor where his chest had been a millisecond before, vaporizing a three-foot crater into dust and sending a violent shockwave rippling across the entire office.

The crystal lamp swung wildly. Papers flew off shelves. The coffee cup rattled.

Before the smoke could even clear, Amelia vanished again.

Swish.

She reappeared directly behind Lynx in a silent puff of shadow mana, her presence silent, deadly, like death itself.

Her black-gloved hand wrapped around his neck a second time, slamming him back against the wall with crushing force.

The back of his head hit the marble with a dull thud. She began to squeeze, her fingers digging deep into his collar as her Eternal-rank pressure flared to crush his windpipe permanently.

Her white eyes were inches from his, burning with cold fire.

Lynx’s feet dangled off the ground. A fresh stream of crimson blood trickled down from his nose once more, thicker this time.

His face was slightly red from the lack of air. His hands were gripping her wrist, but he couldn’t pry it off. She was too strong.

Thanks to his Immunity and Primordial Healing, he felt zero physical pain, his nervous system simply registered the trauma without the suffering, like reading a damage report on a screen, but his body hung suspended in her iron grip. He couldn’t breathe, but he wasn’t panicking.

Amelia leaned in close, her breath hot against his ear, smelling of coffee and ozone and faint perfume, her voice a low, lethal whisper that made the air vibrate.

"I could snap your neck right now, Lynx. I could erase you from this academy, bury your body under seven layers of sealing wards beneath the Spire, and no one on this continent would ever know what happened to you. The Saintess herself wouldn’t find you nor the King Himself. Your little girlfriends would cry for a week or a month at most and then forget you. Do you understand where you are? Do you understand who you’re talking to?"

Hanging by his neck, bleeding slightly from the nose, Lynx didn’t flinch. He stared into her white eyes.

Instead, a slow, deeply amused smile spread across his lips. His heterochromatic eyes glowed brighter.

’She’s strong,’ Lynx thought, feeling the raw, terrifying density of her grip. ’Way stronger than anyone I’ve met down below. I can’t overpower her physical grip or control her blood directly, her Eternal-rank core is too dense for my blood magic to pierce her skin. Her mana defense is like a wall of diamonds, like a fortress. If I try to invade, I’ll just break.’

’But... she’s holding me with her hand. And her glove has my blood on it. And gravity... gravity is always there.’

In that split second, Lynx’s heterochromatic eyes flashed with a brilliant mix of silver and blue, his hidden sigil pulsing faintly beneath his skin, under his shirt.

Since he couldn’t control her blood directly, he targeted the microscopic beads of blood and moisture smeared across her black glove and his own neck.

He used his Blood Manipulation on the surface layer, making the blood suddenly slick, slippery, vibrating.

Simultaneously, he activated a micro burst of Singularity Collapse, twisting the local gravity around her right arm by a factor of fifty, making her own arm suddenly weigh a hundred tons for a fraction of a second, pulling it down.

Snap-shift.

A sudden, jarring spatial and gravitational anomaly gripped Amelia’s wrist and hand.

It didn’t injure her, nothing could injure her that easily, but it threw her absolute center of gravity violently off kilter, creating a tiny, half second window of resistance in her muscle memory, a glitch in her perfect control. Her arm jerked down an inch.

It was all the opening he needed. Half a second was an eternity for someone with very fast agility and teleport.

Before Amelia could react to the bizarre gravitational shift wrapping around her glove, Lynx’s body shimmered out of existence.

He didn’t just turn invisible using his passive, he triggered Instant Teleportation, a skill that bypassed even Eternal-rank spatial locks if used at point-blank range and with blood as a medium.

Blink.

Amelia’s glove suddenly closed on empty air. Her fingers snapped shut with a loud clack that echoed. Her dark red aura slammed into the empty wall, shattering the marble into powder where his head had been.

She whipped her head around, her white eyes wide with sudden shock, her hair whipping.

"What...?"