Chapter 539: Don’t You Have A Human Heart? [Bonus - ]

Chapter 539: Don’t You Have A Human Heart? [Bonus Chapter]

Down across the semi-circle, President Julian Vanderbilt Senior slowly expanded his chest.

The terror and humiliation that had soaked his collar moments before vanished completely, swallowed whole by the dark hungry ambition of a conqueror who had just smelled blood in the water.

The lingering burning spots from Kara White removing her blood on his silk lapel were forgotten as he adjusted his platinum cufflinks, his heavy square jaw jutting forward in satisfaction as he leaned over the table.

’A suitable punishment...’ Vanderbilt thought, his mind racing through legal precedents, marital treaties, and financial leverage like an automated printing press.

’She is useless as a martial asset,’ he calculated ruthlessly, his small, dark eyes drilling into Aki’s pale profile. ’She has no core and she has no mana. She couldn’t kill an unranked pest if her life depended on it but she carries the pure untainted blood of the first King! If the King permits it... I will demand her hand in marriage for Julian! Once she is bound by contract to the Vanderbilt registry, any child she bears will combine royal blood with Columbian industrial infrastructure... That heir will hold a legitimate unquestionable bloodline claim to the Throne! If I cannot wear the crown in my lifetime... my grandson will take it!’

The snare was ironclad.

Aki’s breath came in thin ragged sips and her chest felt as though it were being compressed between two sheets of cold iron.

Her shoulders caved in slightly beneath the heavy midnight velvet of her gown.

Did she have a choice?

There was no choice.

The entire summit was an engine built to grind her to dust as her father had stripped away the final shred of her royal immunity with a few casual words.

If she refused to apologize, she would be hurled into an active Sovereign Realm rift zone against Awakened prodigies... monsters like the bare-chested Indus warrior with the burning crimson tattoos, the lightning-fast blade masters of Yamato, or the armored brutes of Borealis.

Even if the runic non-lethal dampening wards kept her heart beating, she would still be brutally battered into the dirt on a global livestream feed.

It would provide the exact public legal justification her father needed to erase her from the royal records once and for all, casting her out into the streets as an embarrassment to the lineage.

The secret wager with Alexander didn’t matter and her quiet pride in the name Silas had given her didn’t matter.

The only road forward... the only way to survive the afternoon and keep drawing breath was to lower herself to the flagstones, press her forehead against the freezing stone at Vanderbilt’s leather shoes, and beg for mercy like a disgraced scullery maid.

Her eyes stung, blurring with the hot bitter sting of unshed tears as Aki desperately wanted to turn her head toward the violet-velvet chair.

She wanted to look at Kara... she wanted to look through the black-haired, one-armed disguise and catch the familiar irreverent glint in Silas’s eyes.

...The only person who had ever looked at her without seeing a royal defect.

’No,’ she told herself, biting her lower lip until the metallic taste of blood flooded her mouth. ’Don’t look at him... Don’t let him see you like this...’

She couldn’t bear to let him witness her complete pathetic surrender.

Even draped in a woman’s silhouette, he was Silas.

He had stood against the horrors of the Sovereign Realm without flinching... she refused to make him watch her crawl on her belly before the men who had spent her entire life stepping on her neck.

Yet the silence was dragging.

The King sat unmoving and Vanderbilt’s thin, cruel smile widened by the second with his eyes practically undressing her political future.

Aki’s jaw loosened.

Slowly... agonizingly... her head began to tilt downward.

Her chin dipped toward her collarbone and her spine curved with her velvet skirts rustling softly against the cushioned bench as her upper body began the humiliating descent toward the floor.

And then...

She stopped dead.

’Huh...?’

It was not out of any sudden defiance but rather because her body physically seized, frozen in place by an invisible suffocating wall.

VUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUM!

A soundless vibration ripped through the marrow of every living thing in the hall.

It was not the explosive blinding detonation of golden light that had shattered the skylights minutes earlier.

...It was infinitely worse.

The air itself turned rancid as it was with the unmistakable metallic stench of fresh murder, ruptured organs, and rotting bone marrow.

It felt as though an invisible stagnant swamp of pure concentrated death had suddenly breached the foundation stones and flooded the chamber to the ceiling.

DRIP! DRIP!

Up in the third tier of the Borealis delegation, a junior military attache clamped both hands between his thighs with his face turning the color of curdled milk.

A dark warm stain spread rapidly across the gray wool of his trousers.

His nervous system had completely surrendered to primal panic, voiding his bladder before his conscious mind could even process the threat.

Down across the Grand Table, the World Council Magistrates recoiled in their high chairs.

SHING!

Magistrate Bloom’s right hand flew to the hilt of his ancestral saber with his knuckles turning chalk-white as a violent sheath of crimson mana erupted around his forearms in pure desperate reflex.

Beside him, the female Council Member who had previously suppressed the entire room with her gravity field sat rigid as an iron bar with her featureless white porcelain mask trembling as her manicured fingernails dug deep into the celestial marble.

The aura leaking from the violet chair was no longer golden or divine.

It manifested as thin hair-like needles of blood-tinged golden lightning that whipped across the table’s surface, etching microscopic grooves into the ancient stone with persistent hisses.

’How many...?’

The horrifying question screamed through the minds of every hardened veterans, rulers and Lords in the room.

’How many thousands of monsters... how many mountains of corpses... how many screaming humans or monsters had this woman butchered with her bare hands to forge a bloodlust this terrifyingly powerful?!’

This was not the presence of a hero at all if she could be called one, she felt like an executioner yet, amidst that suffocating swamp of hostility...

Aki felt nothing.

...Not a single microscopic ounce of the pressure touched her skin.

The air surrounding her small low-tier chair remained completely sweet and cool as if an invisible flawless sphere of tranquility had settled over her shoulders, insulating her completely from the nightmare drowning the rest of the amphitheater.

Aki’s chin snapped upward and Kara was still seated in the violet-velvet chair.

She had not risen as she sat with her legs crossed at the ankle with her tailored charcoal suit uncreased and her left sleeve pinned flat to her ribs.

But her wire-rimmed reading glasses were gone, held loosely between the knuckles of her single right hand, dangling against her knee.

Her jet-black hair was gently lifting, floating in the micro-gravity generated by her soul pathways and beneath those dark bangs, her glowing violet irises had contracted into two terrifying vertical needles of rage locking straight onto the King of the World.

Aki’s breath caught.

Her heart slammed against her ribs with an impact so violently tender that her vision blurred entirely with hot tears spilling over her lashes and running down her pale cheeks into her collar.

’Si– Silas... didn’t let me bow,’ Aki thought, her soul shuddering within her chest. ’Silas... is sitting there, threatening the King for me.’

The silence in the Great Assembly Chamber was suffocating.

Nobody dared to shift a boot as even the King remained frozen against his throne, his sapphire eyes pinned to the seated black-haired woman whose murderous intent was aimed directly at his forehead.

Kara tilted her head with her right arm resting casually across the star-iron armrest of her chair.

When she spoke, she didn’t shout.

"King of the World..."

Kara’s violet eyes flared with the golden needles whipping across the marble toward the dais.

"Don’t you... have a human heart?"

The King stared down from the star-iron dais with his sapphire irises completely motionless.

Across the vast span of the Great Assembly Chamber, not a single breath stirred.

The King’s jaw was locked and he looked at Kara as though she were speaking a dead tongue... as if the word heart were an archaic untranslatable glyph carved into a tomb rather than an organ in his chest.

"A heart?" the King murmured. "You disrupt the governance of mankind to preach morality, Lord Vespera?"

Kara let out a soft dry breath through her nose.

SHHHHH!

The blood-tinged golden lightning did not explode outward anymore as she withdrew it instead.

In the span of a single heartbeat, the suffocating miasma of murderous intent receded, folding neatly back into her chest like a blade slipping into an oiled scabbard.

The rancid stench of torn marrow vanished and the oppressive atmospheric gravity lifted, leaving the hundreds of petrified dignitaries in the mezzanine gasping for air, clutching their collars as if they had just been hauled up from the bottom of an ocean trench.

Kara leaned back into the plush violet velvet of her chair, resting her single right elbow on the armrest.

She reached up with her right hand, casually unfolding the wire-rimmed glasses she had been holding by the temple, and slid them back over her ears, pushing the bridge up her nose with her thumb.

"Yeah," She said, dismissive of the five hundred people recovering from near-fatal cardiac arrest. "Maybe I overexaggerated... A little theatrical, honestly. My bad."

Down along the guest arc, Aki remained frozen as the cold, suffocating terror of having to bow before Vanderbilt was gone, replaced by a surreal ringing disbelief as she stared at the black-haired woman sitting alone at the table.

Kara tilted her head with her violet eyes glinting behind the clean lenses.

"Let’s be real for a second, Majesty," Kara continued. "What kind of backwards, dysfunctional parenting manual are you working out of up there? Because from where I’m sitting, your entire domestic philosophy is a joke..."

The silence in the hall turned brittle.

Alexander’s head jerked up from his desk with his bloodshot eyes widening in horror.

Beside the King, Princess Kiera didn’t move though her golden gaze was fixed unblinkingly on Kara and the pleasant curve of her lips slowly freezing over.

"Watch your tongue, girl," the King warned, the sound vibrating through the marble table. "You sit before the Throne and the discipline and lineage of House Castellian are not matters for an upstart Lord to dissect."

"Lineage?" Kara scoffed, letting out a short mocking laugh that echoed cleanly off the vaulted dome. "You call this discipline? You have a daughter... your own flesh and blood, born of your royal house and your solution to her not awakening an internal battery is to treat her like a broken chair in the corridor. Abandoning a child just because she didn’t inherit the family fireworks is just a pathetic cowardly excuse."

The King’s eyelids lowered by a fraction of an inch with his sapphire gaze turning to frozen iron.

"A princess is not an ornament, Lord Vespera," the King replied. "The royal bloodline exists solely to anchor the civilization of this planet against the dark... A noble of House Castellian who cannot manifest a core cannot bear the weight of a Royal title. She is a civilian who drains the prestige of the Crown and beyond that... her very birth brought about the death of my Queen. She took the life of the only woman worthy to sit at my side then returned nothing to the realm in return. Why should the Throne waste its sentiment on an empty vessel?"

He laid it out before the governing bodies of the world without a single trace of hesitation.

In his mind, it was an unassailable equation... A daughter who had cost him his Queen and produced no mana was a net negative on the species’ balance sheet.

Kara didn’t blink, she didn’t even look outraged... The woman just looked pityingly unimpressed.

"Her birth killed your Queen?" Kara asked, resting her chin on her right palm with her violet eyes boring straight through him. "And you blame a newborn infant for uterine hemorrhaging and shock? That’s what we’re going with? You’re the Monarch of humanity, wielding ancient authority, and you hold a grievance against a baby because your medical mages couldn’t stabilize your wife’s vitals? What a childish thing to do..."

A sharp audible intake of breath hissed through the mezzanine.

Up in the Bloom family box, Matriarch Etilga Bloom covered her mouth, her ruby eyes blazing with scandalous delight, while Lohan Sterling’s hands tightened around his legs, staring at Kara as if she were walking across a minefield in silk slippers.

The King’s fist clenched against the armrest with the metal groaning audibly.

"She failed the fundamental requirement of her blood—"

"Do you actually feel things for your own children?" Kara interrupted.

The question wasn’t shouted.

It was asked quietly, with the casual devastating directness of a physician noting an incurable infection.

The King stopped.

His lips remained parted with the next cold decree dying in his throat.

For the first time since the summit had convened, the monarch looked completely derailed.

His sapphire eyes flickered, his gaze shifting across the semicircular table, suddenly finding more than five hundred pairs of eyes staring back at him in dead waiting silence.

"Feel... what?" the King muttered, the words leaving his mouth with an awkward disjointed stiffness.

Kara chuckled.

"Look at you," Kara said, shaking her head. "You actually had to process that. ’Feel what?’ That’s incredible... A father who doesn’t even comprehend the concept of parental affection. It’s honestly worse than I thought."

"You speak from complete ignorance!" the King snapped back, his voice rising, the composure cracking just enough to show the defensive brittle pride beneath the crown. "I have preserved this empire! I have tempered my house into the sharpest blade humanity possesses! Alexander commands the northern legions! Kiera wields an core that will safeguard our eastern sea borders for a generation! I have provided them with resources, legions, and the greatest martial inheritance on the globe!"

"You didn’t raise children," Kara said. "You bred tools and you aren’t even good at managing them."

She leaned forward, pointing her single right forefinger across the celestial marble.

"You used your son as an example right...? Now let’s take a look at your son," Kara said.