Chapter 1749: A Lost Soul
Chapter 1749: A Lost Soul
The silence in the arena held long enough to become its own verdict.
On the floor, the relic kept dragging the severed arm across the stone in short, blind scrapes that went nowhere.
Five paces from it, Kaede lay in a spreading pool of her own blood. Color drained from her face with every heartbeat as the strength that had never truly been hers bled out alongside the rest.
Ayame looked down at her sister.
Kaede looked up at her.
Neither spoke. The wind stirred frost between them and carried the sound of the relic scraping stone somewhere behind Ayame’s heels, and for a breath the only thing left on that floor was two sisters and the wreckage between them.
"I kept imagining what I’d do with you," Ayame finally spoke up.
Her voice came quiet, almost conversational, as if she were talking to herself with Kaede as the audience.
She tilted her head and studied the one-armed woman bleeding at her feet the way she might study a problem she’d prepared for and found smaller than expected.
"Every night in that slave house, every morning I woke up in chains, every time a stranger looked at the collar on my neck and decided I would be a perfect trophy to buy, and even after I was freed... I kept thinking about this moment. Standing over you. Having you at my mercy the way I was at yours."
She let the words settle across the frost. "I had so many plans for you."
The colosseum listened.
"I thought about taking your head. Clean and quick, the way our father taught us to finish a defeated opponent."
"Don’t speak of him...!" Kaede shouted weakly.
Ayame ignored her. "But standing here now, looking down at you, I know I wouldn’t derive a single drop of joy from watching you die to my blade. I expected to. I really did. I sharpened that fantasy until it was the only thing that kept me going through the worst nights of my life, and now that it’s finally here..."
She trailed off, and the silence she left behind was worse than any sentence she could have finished.
The samurai who had never once lost her composure during the duel was losing it now, and the thing unraveling her wasn’t fury or grief.
It was the hollow where those things should have been.
She had carried this vengeance like a second blade for a long time, drawn it a thousand times in her mind, and now that the moment had arrived, the blade was light. Empty. It cut nothing.
"Then I thought about turning you into one of Quin’s souls," she continued, and her voice found its footing again, though it sounded different than it had a moment ago.
"You would fight for us for eternity, serving the sister you sold with every swing of a blade you’d no longer control."
She watched Kaede’s bloodless face and sighed with genuine disappointment. "But I’m not even confident you’re good enough to become one."
A tremor ran through Kaede’s remaining hand, and the fury that erupted from her was ragged and wet and cracking at every edge. "Don’t lecture me about what I deserve!"
Ayame didn’t seem to hear her. She was already reaching into her pocket ring.
What came out was a plain iron collar, dull and unadorned, the kind fitted around the neck of every slave sold in a common house.
She held it up between two fingers and twirled it, slow and idle, the metal catching the winter light as it spun.
"Remember this, sister?" Ayame smiled softly. "It was the ’necklace’ you were so kind to gift to me for my 18th birthday."
Kaede’s mouth shut.
Her throat worked once, and her remaining hand rose an inch toward her own neck before she caught herself.
"I could put this around your neck and sell you into a slave house, letting you find out what it’s like," Ayame said, her voice dropping into something low and thoughtful as she watched the collar spin.
"The disgusting slave merchants, the forced baths, the hundreds of prospective buyers who look at you and smile kindly while wondering what’s the quickest way to circumvent your contract’s clauses and get into your pants. I could give you the full experience."
She studied the iron for a long moment.
Then the collar stopped spinning.
Ayame’s hand fell to her side with the iron hanging from her fingers, and the woman who had held a hundred thousand people in her grip stood on the duel ground with nothing left to say.
Every punishment she had imagined, every revenge she had sharpened in the dark, and not one of them fit.
Not one of them filled the space that Kaede’s betrayal had carved out of her, because the ugly truth waiting at the bottom of all that hatred was that no amount of suffering she inflicted on her sister would give her back what she’d lost.
The vengeance was supposed to feel like victory. It felt like holding an empty scabbard.
Ayame Fujimori stood on the frost with an iron collar in her hand and a continent holding its breath, and she had no idea what to do next.
She looked lost.
So utterly, incredibly lost.
Then...
*Clap!*
A single clap cracked across the silent arena like a stone thrown into still water.
Then another. And another, unhurried and warm.
*Clap! Clap! Clap!*
Quinlan sat on his throne with a dogkin in his lap and clapped for his samurai, and the smile on his face was so openly, shamelessly proud that it burned through the weight pressing down on the duel ground like sunlight through fog.
Ayame’s head snapped up.
"Quin?"
She found him across the arena.
"Quin..."
As soon as her eyes met his, the emptiness cracked open.
What poured through was so bright and so sudden that a hundred thousand people watched it happen in real time.
The iron collar slipped from her fingers and clattered against the stone, forgotten, because the woman who couldn’t find a reason to punish her sister had just remembered the reason she’d survived it all in the first place.
He was sitting right there. Clapping for her. Proud of her. Happy for her.
"I did it, Quin."
Her voice broke on his name, and she didn’t care.
She was grinning through it, a grin so wide and so recklessly happy that it belonged on a girl running through a garden, not a blood-soaked warrior standing over her broken sister.
"You did." Unadulterated pride emanated from his voice. "What a magnificent duel that was, my beautiful samurai."
"!!" Ayame’s eyes widened.
She pressed a hand over her face, and the sound that escaped through her fingers was half laugh and half something she would deny to her grave.
Her shoulders shook once. Then she dropped her hands and looked at him with eyes so soft the nearest rows had to look away, because whatever lived in that gaze felt too private.
She loved him so much it hurt, and every person watching knew it.
Movement at the rim of the duel ground caught her eye.
Black Fang had left her post.
The Venomborne Terror was crossing the frost toward Quinlan’s seat, and as she walked, her hands came together in a soft, unhurried clap that barely carried past the first row.
*Clap. Clap. Clap.*