Chapter 1753: Disgust
Chapter 1753: Disgust
Hearing Chizuru’s confession, spoken with lifeless, dejected eyes, the prisoner block broke.
It didn’t happen all at once, but in pockets, clusters of soldiers arriving at the same realization in the same breath and processing it in whatever way their bodies would let them.
A grizzled samurai two rows from the front bent double and vomited onto the stone between his boots. "Lord Raijin..." he choked between heaves, and the name hit the soldiers around him harder than anything Chizuru had said, because it made the dead man real again.
"They murdered him!" A young officer three seats down was on her feet, shaking so hard her armor rattled. "Everything was a lie...? Everything we fought for, everything we believed, all of it?!"
Disgust twisted her face beyond recognition, and she threw herself at the nearest elite soul with her hands reaching for the dead soldier’s blade.
The elite soul caught her by the wrists and held her still without drawing steel.
It was a Fujimori woman. One of their own dead, harvested by the Primordial Villain somewhere along the war, and the ghost of a samurai they might have once served beside looked at the living officer thrashing in her grip with eyes that carried no pity and no cruelty.
"Your life is no longer yours to throw away." The dead woman’s voice was calm and final. "If the clan you served was rotten, then earn a better one. Dying here rights nothing."
"Don’t give me your lectures, damned ghost!" The officer screamed and kicked and went limp in the same breath, sagging against the Elite Soul’s armored chest with a sob that cracked down the middle. "Just kill me... Please..."
Across the block, two more soldiers lunged at their captors from different angles, one screaming for someone to kill him and the other simply charging headlong into the nearest elite soul as if the impact itself was the point.
None of them were trying to escape.
They were trying to stop existing, and the dead soldiers restraining them refused to let them, pinning without punishing, holding without hurting, because the order had been clear and because every soul in Quinlan’s army understood exactly what it felt like to learn that the thing you served was rotten.
Quinlan heard all of it.
The screaming, the retching, the dull impacts of bodies against bodies, the barked commands of his elite souls and the other guards keeping order without drawing blood.
He filed the sounds away and let them do their thing for now, because he had achieved his goals with them and because the woman standing on the duel ground below him was the only thing in the arena that mattered right now.
He had a dozen more questions for Chizuru.
The sword’s nature, its feeding, why they joined this war to begin with instead of attacking the Vesper Consortium, and so many more...
All these threads would unspool into answers soon enough.
But those were for closed doors and trusted ears, not a hundred thousand spectators.
The arena had served its purpose. Every soul in attendance had just heard a Fujimori elder confess freely to the murder of a duke, the framing of his heir, the poisoning of a sacred duel, and the enslavement of an innocent woman.
Ayame’s name was clean. That was what this had been for.
Everything else could wait.
His attention settled on the girl in question.
She was standing between her broken sister and the woman who’d swooped in and formed a sisterly bond with her while having spoken a mere few sentences in all their time together.
Her katana sheathed and her hands empty at her sides, and the look on her face was one Quinlan had never seen before.
He had watched her fight through impossible odds and a nation’s worth of enemies without her composure cracking, but now she stood on a frost-covered duel ground with her sister’s blood pooling at her feet and every emotion she’d buried for years clawing its way to the surface at the same time.
His chest tightened at the sight of her turmoil.
"What does your heart tell you, Ayame?"
His voice carried across the duel ground, unhurried and warm.
Black Fang’s cold tone sounded, adding to his.
"I’ll take her head if you can’t."
As always, the Venomborne Terror was ready to kill. There was no hesitation in the grip on her blade, no reluctance, no acknowledgment that the woman she was offering to execute shared her blood just as much as Ayame had.
"Black Fang... Quin..." The petite samurai whispered on shaky breath.
She looked at Black Fang first, then at Quinlan, then, slowly, down at Kaede.
The Duchess of Silverwind had stopped trying to rise.
She lay in her own blood with her remaining hand pressed over her face, her body shaking with sobs that had gone past sound, airless and wretched, and between the fingers covering her eyes the devastation was so complete that it made everything the duel had done to her look gentle by comparison.
The sword, the arm, the humiliation in front of a continent, none of it had broken her the way the truth had.
"You didn’t..." Kaede’s voice came through her fingers, small and cracked and aimed at the boots she could see through the gaps in her hand. "You didn’t kill father...?"
Ayame didn’t answer right away.
She stood over her sister with the sheathed katana at her side and her hands empty, and the silence stretched long enough for the frost to creak between them.
"Of course I didn’t."
It came out tired and small, and the disappointment behind it cut deeper than any accusation could have.
"I loved him back then, back before I learned what he did to Black Fang. You knew that I did. You knew that I looked up to him, tried to be just like him..."
Her hands clenched at her sides.
"And you just... accepted that I did it?"
Her voice cracked on the last word, and the hurt that poured through had fossilized into a weight heavier than fury could ever be.
"The elders told you your sister murdered your father to steal a throne and you believed them within the hour? You never questioned it?"
She was shaking now, the words coming faster than she could aim them.
"Not in the full year I spent in chains did you think, ’maybe I should look into my sister committing the worst crime possible myself instead of taking what a couple scheming sacks of bones say’? You could’ve just bought me and used the slave magic to conduct a lie detection test, but instead you tried to kill me and the people I care about over and over again?"
Kaede’s hand fell from her face.
The eyes underneath were red and swollen and utterly destroyed, and whatever defense she tried to mount came apart before it left her throat. "They had evidence... documents, testimonies, people who swore they saw you meet with the League’s..."
The words died.
She heard how hollow they sounded, and the fight drained out of her like blood from the stump she was still pressing against the ground. Her lips trembled once, twice, and then the last wall gave out.
"I’m sorry..." The whisper left her in a shudder that ran through her whole body. "I’m sorry... I’m sorry..."
Ayame looked down at the girl whispering apologies into her own blood, at the stump where an arm used to be and the face that used to chase her through gardens, and everything hit her at the same time.
The hatred that had kept her alive through the slave house, the love she’d buried underneath it, the knowledge that this broken girl had screamed at a room full of murderers to save her life, all tangled with the fury that she had never once asked whether the accusation was true.
Beside her, Black Fang hadn’t moved, her hand resting on her blade and her violet eyes following the exchange without a word as Ayame finally replied to the pleading.
"I want to tell myself that the blade corrupted you, that you weren’t in control of your thoughts, but... It didn’t."
The pain that crossed Ayame’s face was so naked that the nearest rows looked away from it.
"You became their willing puppet before the blade awakened."
Kaede’s eyes went wide.
The weeping stopped, replaced by a stillness that was worse.
Her mouth opened and closed without sound, her throat convulsing around words that wouldn’t come, and the color left her face so fast it looked like something vital had ruptured inside her. But it had nothing to do with the wounds or the blood loss or the missing arm.
It was the truth landing where the sword used to sit, filling the hollow the relic had left behind.
She had no excuse.
The blade hadn’t whispered in her ear when she’d believed the elders. It hadn’t guided her hand when she’d signed the slavery papers.
Every choice she’d made before the succession, every accusation she’d swallowed without question, every night she’d spent hating Ayame for a crime the elders had committed, all of that had been her.
"Kill me." It came out strangled, barely human. "Please... kill me."
Ayame flinched.
"I can’t... I can’t live knowing..." Kaede’s remaining hand clawed at her own throat, her nails leaving red lines across her skin, and the retching sob that followed bent her double over the stone. "I believed them... I did this to you and I can’t take it back... Please, sister, please...!"
Ayame didn’t react. She couldn’t.
Kaede’s bloodshot eyes left her sister and found Black Fang.
"You...!" She dragged herself half a turn across the ground, smearing blood in an arc beneath her, her remaining hand reaching toward the woman who had spent a career hunting people far worse than her. "You hate me... I know you do... I’m one of the few kills that got away from you, aren’t I? Just do it, correct your track record..."
Black Fang looked down at her.
The Venomborne Terror studied the one-armed duchess writhing at her feet, and the contempt that settled over her features was so total and so cold that several people in the nearest rows physically recoiled from it.
"I’ve spent centuries dealing with the worst humanity had to offer." Her voice came cold and hostile. "I thought your father could never be toppled."
The arena held its breath.
"But you, Kaede Fujimori, are the most pathetic human being I have ever laid my eyes on."
Ayame gasped, her head snapping toward Black Fang.
The Venomborne Terror’s violet eyes stayed fixed on Kaede, and the disgust behind them burned colder than anything the frost could produce.