Chapter 540: Siding With Aki [Bonus - ]

Chapter 540: Siding With Aki [Bonus Chapter]

Every eye in the amphitheater swiveled to Crown Prince Alexander.

The young man sat rigid as a corpse, his face dead white with his hands trembling against his terminal and his lower jaw clamped so tightly that a line of saliva ran down his chin.

He looked like an animal that had spent years being beaten with an iron rod every time it failed to jump high enough.

"He awakened," Kara continued, stripping away the entire illusion of the royal family. "He bled for you for so long... He broke his bones carrying your standard, executing your enemies, doing everything you told him an Awakened prince was supposed to do and what did it get him? The second a little girl born of some side affair in the eastern provinces manifests a Purple Core, you drag her out, set her on your knee like a prized porcelain doll, and completely erase thirty years of your son’s loyalty in front of the entire world... He’s sitting right there, Majesty. He looks like he’s about to have an aneurysm, and you haven’t looked him in the eye once today."

Alexander’s head lowered slightly, his shoulders beginning to shake with silent violently suppressed tremors.

Kara adjusted her glasses with a crisp flick of her finger, her gaze sweeping back up to the high dais, locking onto the King with contempt.

"I was born an orphan," Kara stated. "I grew up in Valoria City. I never met my mother, never knew my father, never had a single soul to look out for me but I’ll tell you this: if I had been cursed with a father like you, I would have thrown myself off the nearest observation spire years ago... People like you have no right to call themselves parents. You’re just a parasite wearing an imperial coat, using your own blood to feed your ego."

The Great Assembly Chamber fell into an abyss of horrified silence as nobody breathed and nobody rustled paper.

The First Princess sat in her low chair, her hands trembling in her lap, her vision blurring entirely as hot silent tears carved clean paths through the dust on her cheeks.

Nobody had ever said it.

In the entire history of House Castellian, through the cold isolation, beatings, and neglect, not a single human being had ever dared to stand before the King of the World and tell him the ugly truth...

That he was a monster to his own blood.

On the dais, the King did not speak as the stillness around him warped.

VUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!

The deep dark void-light bled into his irises, replacing the sapphire brilliance with a swirling bottomless blackness that began to pull the ambient light out of the air.

The temperature around the throne plummeted to absolute zero with the moisture in the air crystallizing into dark frost along the star-iron backrest.

It was the unmistakable prelude to Destruction... the same unconditional erasure that had wiped the Amazonian officer out of existence twenty minutes ago but Kara didn’t flinch.

She sat back in her violet-velvet chair, crossed her legs, and watched the void-light consume his pupils with her lips slowly curling into a wide smirk.

"What?" Kara provoked softly, her violet eyes glinting through her lenses with mocking disdain. "You want to kill me now? For telling the truth in front of your peers?"

She tapped the armrest with her single right hand with her smile widening into a terrifying fearless grin.

"Go ahead and try it, King... Bring out that ancestral Destruction passed down from the First King."

Kara tilted her head, her voice dropping to a confident whisper.

"It won’t work on me."

The King paused, his sapphire eyes flickering downward toward the edge of the celestial marble table.

The dark void-light that had begun pooling at the rims of his irises did not violently detonate as everyone expected... it wavered, thinning out into fine, stagnant smoke before dissolving back into his spiritual pathways.

His broad chest rose and fell once, catching slightly at the throat.

Across the entire circular expanse of the Grand Assembly Chamber, the silence had ceased to be mere courtly decorum.

More than five hundred people sat frozen in place, their gazes darting frantically between the high star-iron throne and the one-armed woman lounging in the violet-velvet chair.

’Destruction was passed down from the First King?’

The whispered question echoed through the minds of every dignitary in the hall, utterly alien and terrifying.

To the World Council, the King’s authority was an undisputed constant of the post-Apocalypse era... a catastrophic martial power native to his person that had atomized Lords, collapsed rogue bastions, and held the continental borders rigid for generations.

None of the nine major powers had ever been told of its true genesis as not even the oldest records preserved in Europa’s central archives spoke of ancestral marrow-transference.

Yet the King himself was trembling.

It was an imperceptible microscopic shudder running along the thick tendon of his right wrist, completely masked from the gallery above, but his knuckles were drained of all color where his signet pressed against the white stone.

’How does she know?’

The question tore through his thoughts with concussive force.

It was a blood-sealed imperial secret.

The lineage of House Castellian had kept the truth chained in the dark crypts beneath the Citadel ever since the First King had perished in the ashes of humanity’s original capital.

The world was meant to believe the reigning monarch was simply born to be the best.

The transference of the ancestral embers, the agonizing ritual of absorbing a predecessor’s dying core, the two distinct arts bound to the crown... no living being outside the immediate throne had ever spoken those syllables aloud.

’Is she plagued by it?’

The King stared at Kara with his breath caught cold in his ribs.

...The Knowledge.

The horrific double-edged curse that had broken their founding ancestor’s mind.

The First King had written of it with trembling ink-spattered hands in the private royal grimoires... A Gold Core did not merely accumulate power, it forcibly opened the mind to the raw mechanics of the universe, dumping infinite architecture, ancestral memories, and cosmic truths into the cerebral cortex until the skull felt as though it were being split apart by rusted iron wedges.

The First King had died screaming not just from the Black Dragon’s claws, but from the agony of knowing too much...

’Does she see through the veil?’ The thought tightened like a noose around the King’s throat. ’Does she know of the second power? Does she know what I hide beneath my heart?’

The King was too silent to know how to proceed.

For the first time since he had taken the crown, he was genuinely shaken.

He glanced down at the violet chair, his pupils contracting as he took in her posture.

Kara was smiling.

It wasn’t a fierce battle-hungry grin, nor was it the haughty smirk of an arrogant Lord.

It was an amused casual expression that showed she had seen every single gear turning inside his head, read the panic written across his marrow, and found the entire spectacle wonderfully pathetic.

There were a hundred desperate questions rotating through the King’s mind... questions about Asgard, about the First King’s journals, about the threshold demanding to be torn from her throat.

Yet before the King could force his tongue to move or compose a shred of dignity, Kara let out a soft dismissive breath through her nose.

"You know what? Never mind," Kara said, rolling her shoulders back against the violet velvet.

Her voice was completely normal, carrying a relaxation that sounded entirely out of place in a hall built for royal decrees.

"Maybe I overstepped a little bit. It’s my bad, honestly. I get a little cranky when my blood sugar drops, and having people yell before I’ve had breakfast makes me talk too much. Forget I said anything."

The casual retreat fell upon the table like a lead weight.

She offered the apology with an airy flick of her single right wrist, not caring in the slightest that she had just rattled the mental foundations of the most powerful ruler on Earth.

The diplomats around the table blinked with their mouths dry as they were unable to keep up with the whiplash of her temperament.

"However," Kara continued, resting her right elbow on the armrest and leaning her cheek against her knuckles with her wire-rimmed glasses catching the harsh glare of the chandelier, "let’s talk about the Blessed Land negotiations a bit because to be completely frank with everyone sitting at this table... I’m already feeling pretty damn disrespected."

The air in the chamber tautened instantly.

"We haven’t even formally opened the dockets," Kara said, her violet eyes sliding across the semi-circle of rulers, lingering for half a heartbeat on Julian Vanderbilt Senior’s sweat-soaked collar, "and already I’ve had people barking at me and people staring at my empty sleeve like I’m a carnival freak. I came here in good faith to discuss the territory but I don’t really like the behavior of some of the people in these seats and if this is how the World Council treats independent sovereigns... maybe I shouldn’t bother negotiating at all."

She tapped her fingers against her jaw, letting out a small lazy yawn.

"I could always just pack my bags and disappear straight down into the Sovereign Realm for the next hundred years."

SHK!

Every ruler at the Grand Table stiffened simultaneously.

The words hit them like an electric shock straight through the chest.

’Disappear into the Sovereign Realm.’

It was the ultimate nightmare scenario for the World Council... a phrase that sent cold dread running down the spine of every military strategist and corporate oligarch on the planet.

A Gold Core was dangerous enough sitting inside Europa’s borders but if she pulled an Odin?

If she abandoned the mortal plane entirely, descended through the rifts, and vanished into the endless expanses of the Sovereign Realm where no mortal radar, no orbital satellite, and no army could ever track her?

Humanity’s only Gold Core would become an unreachable untouchable phantom.

And if she ever decided to emerge from a rift fifty years later, she could tear down a civilization over breakfast and vanish before the sirens even went off.

’Wait,’ thought Grand Tsar Nikolai Volkov, his thick frost-bitten fingers tightening against his knees as his strategic mind kicked into gear. ’The Umbral Basin is an isolated sector right? The transition portals there are unstable. If she wants to maintain Blessed Land with how big it’s going to become, she has to rely on the World Council’s supply chains. She has to buy our—’

"Don’t bother doing the math, Tsar," Kara said, cutting through his thoughts as if he had spoken them through a megaphone.

Volkov flinched, his massive frame jerking back against his chair.

Kara smiled, her violet eyes glowing faintly behind her clear lenses and locking straight onto the King’s pale face.

"I don’t need your supply lines," she said, her voice dropping into a light melodic drawl that carried to the highest rafters. "Because after all... the All-Father of Asgard, Odin, already sent word. He called for me to come down and meet him in Asgard."

THUD!

It felt as though the entire room had dropped ten feet into the earth.

The King stiffened so violently that the star-iron backrest of the throne groaned under the sudden spike of his aura!

The air inside the dome grew blistering with the moisture on the walls instantly evaporating into thin hissing steam.

’Odin called for her?!’

The revelation was a hammer blow that shattered every remaining shred of leverage the World Council held.

Odin.

The First Gold Core who had abandoned humanity centuries ago to sit above the deities in the deepest most unfathomable layers of the Sovereign Realm.

And now, the first new Gold Core born in human history was casually sitting here, drinking their wine, telling them that Odin himself had already extended an invitation to his court.

The entire dynamic of the room inverted in an instant.

Kara White wasn’t an upstart lord looking to buy trade permits or beg for recognition... She already had the greatest sponsor in existence waiting for her in the deep trenches so she was simply stopping by the World Council out of mild curiosity, checking to see if humanity had anything worth trading before she turned her back on them forever.

They had zero leverage.

While the nine rulers and the seven hooded magistrates were still choking on the geopolitical weight of that reality, Kara pushed her star-iron chair back with a soft, effortless scrape against the stone.

She stood up.

Her tailored double-breasted suit fell into place with the empty left sleeve pinned flat to her ribs, swaying slightly in the hot drafts rolling off the dais.

"So, yeah," Kara said, stretching her neck until the joints popped with clean, muffled clicks. "Since you people want to waste time with this little Tournament of Succession to fight over dirt, and since the Princess over there needs a second combatant so she doesn’t have to apologize to Julian’s little syndicate..."

She stepped out from behind the Grand Table with her single right hand tucking into her trouser pocket.

"I’ll just go with Aki myself."

The announcement fell upon the assembly like a falling bell.

"Lord Vespera!" President Julian Vanderbilt Senior choked out, his heavy square face turning pale as ashes. "You cannot possibly—"

"I’m entering the bracket as her representative," Kara continued, ignoring his presence.

She turned her head, looking up toward the elevated boxes where the noble houses were seated.