Chapter 1754: Declared Love
Chapter 1754: Declared Love
"You made a mistake you don’t want to live with, and your solution is to beg the sister who’s visibly about to fall apart to carry your death on top of everything else you’ve forced her to carry?"
Kaede’s reaching hand dropped just as Black Fang decreed, "Your entire existence disgusts me."
The silence that followed was absolute. Even the suicide charging Fujimori soldiers in the stands paused.
"W-what...?" Kaede stared up at Black Fang with her mouth open and her hand limp against the ground, and whatever was left of the woman behind those eyes collapsed inward.
The begging stopped.
The reaching stopped.
Even the sobs stopped, because the woman on the ground had just been told that her desire to die was one more act of cruelty toward the sister she’d already ruined, and she had no answer for it.
Her body convulsed once, twice, and then the sounds that came weren’t language anymore, raw, animal, wretched, her hand clawing at her own face as if she could peel away the person who had done those things and find someone underneath worth saving.
Ayame watched her sister fall apart, and the composure she’d held through the entire duel, through the confession, through every impossible thing this arena had thrown at her, finally fully broke.
Her breathing hitched short and ragged, and her hand trembled on the katana’s hilt so badly the scabbard rattled against her hip.
The nearest rows saw it happen in real time, the Blade of the Primordial Villain who had carved through enemies dozens of levels above her without hesitation coming apart at the seams over a one-armed girl begging to die.
She opened her mouth to say what came next, and nothing came.
She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t kill the girl she grew up with, and she couldn’t forgive the woman who had almost completely ruined her life.
The sister who chased her through gardens, who laughed with her about the dumbest things, the puppet duchess who signed the slavery papers and felt owed gratitude for it, they were the same person, and Ayame could not reconcile them no matter how hard she tried.
Seeing that his beloved samurai was truly breaking apart, Quinlan rose from his seat.
The movement was unhurried, almost lazy, the Primordial Villain unfolding from his throne like he’d decided the arena had served its purpose. Blossom slid off his lap and landed on her feet beside him without sound.
A hundred thousand gazes swung toward him.
The emotional devastation on the duel ground, the sisters breaking apart, the blood, the confessions, the begging, all of it had held the arena’s attention until the man on the throne decided to stand.
Then every eye in the colosseum remembered who had built these walls and why they were sitting in them.
"Seraphiel Vaelorith."
His voice rolled across the frost, steady and commanding and so thoroughly unbothered by the carnage around him that the entire arena shifted.
In the elven sections, every elf within earshot stiffened.
Heads snapped toward the blonde healer in their ranks, eyes wide.
Ayame heard his voice before the words registered.
His tone cut through the noise in her head the way it always did, and her glassy eyes found his face and held on like a rope thrown to someone going under.
The spiral stopped. Her breathing caught, hitched, and steadied by a single degree, because Quinlan was standing and speaking and the world still had a floor beneath it.
Seraphiel was already moving.
The Dawnbringer vaulted the railing of the elven section without a word, her body clearing the gap in a blur of blonde hair and elven grace, and she landed on the duel ground in a crouch right next to Ayame.
Her arms closed around the petite samurai before Ayame could react, pulling her into a hug so fierce it lifted her clean off her feet, and the eyes above Ayame’s head were red-rimmed and bright with tears the Dawnbringer had been holding.
Ayame stiffened.
Then her hands came up slowly, gripping the fabric at Seraphiel’s back. The sound that escaped her was small and muffled against her friend’s chest.
"The relic is sustaining her body, but not for much longer," Quinlan continued while his healer held his samurai together.
His attention drifted to the severed arm still scraping across the stone, closer now, the blade dragging itself toward him in blind, frantic lurches that had covered half the distance since the interrogation began. "The farther it moves the quicker she deteriorates."
Seraphiel pressed her lips to the crown of Ayame’s hair and whispered, "It’ll all be okay."
Then she released Ayame gently, squeezed her shoulders once, and turned toward the bleeding girl on the stone.
Golden light bloomed around her hands as she crossed the frost, and Liora fell in behind her with two healer elite souls flanking them both.
Seraphiel’s palms pressed flat against the stump while radiant warmth flooded into wounds that had been left open too long, and the bleeding slowed as color crept back into skin that had gone grey.
"Until further notice, she’s our prisoner," Quinlan announced, then added in a softer tone, "Please keep her alive."
All four of them nodded and started working on her.
As they did, Ayame turned to look at him, and the trembling stopped.
He was standing tall, unhurried and steady, the Primordial Villain surveying the aftermath of a continent’s worth of emotional wreckage with the same calm he’d bring to a morning briefing.
"Quin..."
Her voice broke on his name, soft enough that only the nearest rows caught it.
She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, dragging the tears across her cheek in one rough pull, and the smile that surfaced through the mess was so warm and so unguarded that several people in the front rows forgot to breathe.
"Thank you..."
Quinlan paused for a moment to take in the breathtaking sight that his eyes were capturing in this very moment, then merely smiled back at her, soft and full of adoration.
"Shameless as ever..." Seraphiel muttered from behind Ayame, her hands still glowing gold against Kaede’s wounds while she worked. "He’s just standing there basking in everyone’s attention while I do all the work, and he’s the one who gets thanked?"
Both of them heard her.
Ayame’s giggle came out wet, shaky, completely adorable, the kind of sound that had no business existing on a blood-soaked duel ground. It cracked through the heaviness in the arena like sunlight through stormclouds.
"I love you, my arrogant primordial..."
She said it in front of a hundred thousand people without a shred of hesitation, her eyes red and her face streaked with tears and her smile brighter than anything the frost had seen all day.
Quinlan’s grin deepened. "And I love you, my precious samurai."
"Ugh... You two are impossible..." Seraphiel’s groan carried across the duel ground, and Ayame’s giggle came back louder this time, fuller, the kind of laugh that shook her shoulders and made her press a hand over her mouth.
In the human sections, a woman turned to the man sitting beside her and stared at him with an expression that could have curdled milk.
The man noticed, looked back, and immediately found somewhere else to be looking.
Three seats down, another woman elbowed her husband so hard he nearly fell off the bench, and the whispered argument that followed boiled down to a single devastating question that was being asked across a dozen rows at once: why couldn’t they say those three words - I love you - at least one tenth as easily as the Primordial Villain had?
The dwarves sat in stunned silence.
A grizzled war chief with a beard braided to his belt leaned toward his second and muttered, "That’s the Primordial Villain? The one we’ve been told is the scourge of the continent?"
His second didn’t answer, because the man who had marched through their forts and massacred their people on his way here was currently grinning at a petite samurai like the rest of the continent had stopped existing.
In the elven sections, it was worse.
Half the ranks had their hands clasped together in front of their chests with tears streaming openly down their faces, murmuring prayers of gratitude for having witnessed the Holy Son’s pure, radiant love with their own eyes.
Myrasyn dabbed at the corner of her eye with a silk handkerchief and smiled from ear to ear.
Quinlan watched Ayame laugh, and the knot in his chest that had been tightening since the moment her composure first cracked finally loosened.
He had been coming apart too, quietly, behind the calm, watching the woman he loved drown in a choice no one should have to make.
The ache that existed in his chest had been worse than any wound he’d taken on any battlefield.
But she was smiling now. Seeing that gorgeous, reckless, tear-streaked smile filled him with enough relief that it almost made him laugh with her.
Ayame’s laugh was still in his ears when the scraping registered again.
The severed arm had scraped closer while the arena’s focus was elsewhere, the relic dragging itself across the frost in blind, desperate lurches, fingers twitching around a hilt that refused to let go.
It was less than three paces from his feet now.
Quinlan stepped forward and began walking toward it.
’A demonic blade empowered by a scumbag’s blood, huh...’ His eyes narrowed with interest as he closed the distance. ’Let’s see what Nyxara’s bloodline blessed this world with.’