Chapter 556: The Tournament Of Succession [II / Bonus - ]

Chapter 556: The Tournament Of Succession [II / Bonus Chapter]

"Fools," Leona scoffed softly, sniffing at the thin air.

She reached up with a gloved thumb, wiping a bead of clear moisture from the tip of her nose with a faint snort.

"Spiking that much heat on deployment is an open invitation for every scavenger within ten leagues but the others? Silence. The Tsardom, Indus, House Bloom... they aren’t making amateur mistakes. They’re running silent, masking their heat signatures, and letting the loud idiots butcher each other first."

"Which means we can’t stay here," Maya said, stepping toward the narrow descent trail that snaked along the mountain’s spine. "Sitting on an elevated ridge makes us silhouette targets against the sky. Being sitting ducks up here is asking for an orbital bombardment or a long-range mana lance."

Aki swallowed hard with her fingers tightening around the straps of her harness.

"Especially since Alexander is down there," Aki said quietly and the name hung in the cold mountain air like a blade of ice.

Maya’s jaw tightened as Leona’s hazel eyes darkened with cold professional caution.

...Crown Prince Alexander.

Even with the heavy Star-Iron Suppression Rings clamped around his forearms, artificially strangling two-thirds of his internal mana channels to force his Fourth Stage power down to the Second Stage, the man was still a prodigy of House Castellian.

If Alexander caught wind of Aki’s coordinates... if he realized that his unawakened, discarded sister was traversing the Wastezone without the Gold Core standing directly in front of her, he wouldn’t hesitate for a single second.

He would descend upon them with the full fury of an insecure prince desperate to wash out his public humiliation in blood.

Aki looked over her shoulder, out across the vast expanse of the Wastezone toward the volcanic caldera looming on the horizon.

’Is that where Silas went...?’ she wondered with her heart clenching slightly. ’He left us behind because he knew his presence would draw the heaviest fire... If Alexander or the high scions sense a Gold Core moving, they’ll converge on him like wolves so he’s buying us room to breathe.’

She turned back to the Amazonians, her jaw setting with hard resolve.

"Let’s move," Aki commanded. "We need to get off this peak."

Before Maya could take the lead down the rocks, a strange hollow sound reverberated across the entirety of Sector Forty-Four.

VUUUUUUUM!

It wasn’t an explosion but an atmospheric broadcast array, woven through the ceiling of the realm.

A smooth synthetic voice echoed from the purple clouds above, vibrating in their teeth.

"Attention all combatants of the Exhibition... The Time limit remains set at one hundred and fourteen minutes and for the duration of the trial, defensive structures designated as Safe Zones will periodically manifest across the grid."

Aki, Maya, and Leona froze, listening intently.

"A Safe Zone is identified by an active cylindrical cerulean barrier. Upon crossing the threshold, a squad will be granted a ten-minute non-combat respite, during which external mana signatures are suppressed and restoration is accelerated. After ten minutes, the zone will collapse permanently. Be advised, competitors... the sands of the Wastezone are old and the sands do not always tell the truth."

PING!

The announcement cut off with a flat, sharp tone.

Almost simultaneously, five miles away in the lower valley... nestled right at the border where the rocky foothills bled into the endless sea of golden dunes...

A towering pale-blue pillar of light shot into the sky as a massive translucent dome of sapphire energy expanded over a ruined sandstone amphitheater, humming with visible calming mana.

Maya and Leona glanced at the blue pillar, their expressions looking unimpressed.

Without a word, both soldiers tore their gazes away from the safe zone, turning their backs on it as if it didn’t exist.

"Nobody’s using that," Leona muttered, rolling her shoulders within the void-ivory cuirass. "Only a squad that took catastrophic damage would willingly trap themselves inside a glowing blue beacon in the middle of an open desert. It’s a neon sign telling every sniper on the rim... Free kills in ten minutes."

Aki stood quietly, her blue eyes narrowing as she studied the glowing blue dome in the distance.

Her mind was already breaking down the mechanics of the game.

"Wait," Aki spoke up, stepping between the two soldiers. "Think about it from another angle."

Maya turned, her brow furrowing slightly. "What do you mean, Princess?"

"Leona is right... smart squads won’t enter it unless they’re desperate," Aki explained, her voice gaining momentum. "Which means squads that have already taken heavy wounds from the initial clashes like the ones who ran into Columbia’s shock-corps or took shrapnel from Shogya’s wind blades will have no choice. They’ll be forced to crawl into that barrier to keep their channels from burning out."

Aki pointed a gloved finger down toward the rocky ridges flanking the blue dome.

"And the ruthless squads? The ones hunting for easy eliminations? They won’t ignore the Safe Zone either. They’ll do exactly what Leona just described... they’ll set up camp in the crags outside the perimeter, zero their sights on the threshold, and wait for the ten-minute timer to expire so they can slaughter the wounded as they step out."

Maya blinked as a slow savage grin began to split her broad face.

"Ambush the ambushers," Maya said, her knuckles cracking against her palm with a sharp pop.

"Exactly," Aki nodded. "Why waste energy combing thousands of square miles of dunes trying to hunt scattered signatures...? We go down the mountain, we identify the high ground overlooking the Safe Zone, and we camp the people who are camping the dome."

Leona let out a low whistle looking at the First Princess with genuine newfound respect. "Cold-blooded. For a girl who grew up reading poetry, you think like a trench scout."

"When you spend your entire life being the target," Aki said, her voice dropping into a quiet whisper, "you learn how predators set their traps... It’s really nothing."

"Alright," Maya decided, gesturing down the trail. "That’s the play. But we need to move fast. Leona, how’s the air?"

Leona took another deep sniff of the mountain draft, her nose twitching.

She reached up, wiping her upper lip once more as her hazel eyes darted toward the jagged rock formations rising fifty yards above them on the upper ridge.

"It smells wrong," Leona said, her tone suddenly dropping into an urgent whisper. "There’s a musky heat on the wind so somebody’s up there or down, I don’t know."

Aki blinked, looking at the Amazonian captain in confusion. "How does that work? You can smell mana?"

Maya stepped closer, lowering her voice.

"Leona’s native mutation is mostly for her senses... Her dual affinity for Wind and Water lets her read microscopic shifts in atmospheric moisture and air density. She can’t pinpoint their exact core stage or read their specific mana, but she knows when living mass enters her immediate airspace. If she says there are bodies above or below us, there are bodies above or below us."

A cold prickle of dread ran down Aki’s spine.

She glanced up at the towering shadow-draped crags of the peak. A squad could be perched fifty feet directly overhead, masked by anti-detection cloaks, aiming high-caliber rifles down at their skulls at this very moment.

VUUUUUM!

The atmospheric broadcast flared one final time.

"Notice... Indigenous Tier-1 and Tier-2 fauna have completed their territorial cycles and competitors are advised to maintain constant armament readiness. Killing of monsters is fully authorized."

Aki didn’t wait.

She reached down to her thighs, checking the three balanced throwing daggers sheathed in low-friction leather along each leg.

Her hand moved to the heavy mechanism mounted along the outer edge of her right forearm... a fully retractable spring-loaded composite recurve bow designed by Blessed Land’s artisans or rather Thora.

With a subtle flick of her wrist, the star-iron limbs snapped forward with a clean shlick, locking into firing position, while a low-draw quiver of carbon-tipped arrows rested flat against the small of her back.

She was fully armed on the mundane front.

And more importantly...

"Haah..."

She kept her hands relaxed, letting the pitch-black beast-leather gloves blend seamlessly into the dark sleeves of her gear.

The World Council’s broadcast drones hovering in the clouds saw only an unawakened princess carrying mechanical weapons.

They had no idea that beneath the leather of those gloves lay the artificial mana pathways forged by Silas... a hidden spark of elemental magic waiting to detonate.

"Move out," Maya barked.

The three women sprinted down the narrow mountain trail.

The path was treacherous, especially since it was a steep jagged ledge barely two feet wide, bordered on the left by the granite wall of the mountain and on the right by a staggering two-thousand-foot vertical drop into the mist-choked ravines below.

Maya led the vanguard as her boots hit the rock with heavy thuds.

Despite the fifty-pound void-ivory cuirass she wore, the passive wind runes etched into the knee joints flared with green light, absorbing the downward shock and propelling her forward with supernatural grace.

Leona brought up the rear, her daggers drawn, sweeping their flanks.

Aki ran between them.

Without native mana to reinforce her ligaments, every step required razor-sharp focus.

Her lungs burned as the thin air scraped her throat, but the grueling physical conditioning Silas and the other girls had subjected her to in Blessed Land paid off.

’Well including the ones I subjected myself in... A little bit of credit goes to me after all.’

Her balance was centered, her core tight and her canvas combat boots gripping the loose gravel without slipping.

"GRAAAHHHH!"

The sound was not human.

It was a guttural wet vibration that came from the shadows of a wide fissure split into the granite wall thirty paces ahead and Maya skidded to a halt, her boots digging into the slate with a harsh sound.

SKRRRR!

"Contact!" Maya hissed.

From the dark cavernous crack, three massive shapes detached from the stone.

They were Crag Stalkers... indigenous Tier-2 predators that inhabited the high mountain rims of the Sovereign Realm.

Standing four feet tall at the shoulder, they resembled hairless four-eyed mountain panthers with hideously elongated forelimbs, their skin a mottled jagged gray that matched the rough granite perfectly and their jaws split open horizontally, revealing rows of black needle-sharp teeth dripping with viscous acidic saliva that hissed as it struck the stone.

HSSSSSSSS!

The lead Stalker lunged instantly as it crossed twenty feet in seconds, its massive forepaws tipped with curved three-inch obsidian talons aiming straight for Maya’s throat.

SWISH... SLAM!

Maya didn’t even draw a blade.

Her Purple Core flared violently behind her sternum as a dense, dark-violet aura erupted along her right arm, coating her skin in a thick vibrating mantle of crystallized earth-mana.

She stepped forward into the beast’s reach, dipping her left shoulder beneath the slashing claws, and drove her right fist upward in a vicious short-range uppercut.

BOOOOOOM!

The concussive shockwave sounded like a sledgehammer hitting a concrete slab.

The reinforced impact blew straight through the beast’s lower jaw, shattering the bone into a dozen jagged fragments and caving in its skull.

The four-eyed predator was launched five feet into the air, completely lifeless before its carcass crashed over the cliff edge and tumbled into the abyss.

"Flank!" Maya roared, already pivoting on her heel.

The second Stalker had bypassed Maya, using the granite wall to wall-kick horizontally through the air with its jaws wide open, diving directly at Aki’s exposed chest.

Time seemed to slow for the First Princess.

A long time ago, Aki would have frozen but not today.

’I can handle it...’

Her left foot slid back six inches, locking her balance into the slate.

With terrifying fluidity, her right hand swept to the small of her back, plucking a carbon-tipped arrow from the quiver, seating the nock into the star-iron string of her forearm bow, and drawing the cable back to her cheek in a single unbroken arc.

THWIP!

She released and while the arrow didn’t have mana behind it, the mechanical spring-tension of the dwarven mechanism was immense.

SPLAT!

The carbon-tipped point drove cleanly through the beast’s upper-left eye socket, punching through the optic nerve and burying six inches of steel into its frontal lobe.

"SKREEEEEE!"

The Stalker shrieked, its momentum dying in mid-air as its body convulsed, crashing heavily onto the path three feet from Aki’s boots and it kicked twice in the gravel with its black blood pooling on the stone, before lying completely still.

Aki didn’t even pause to breathe.

She dropped the bow mechanism, reached down with her left hand, drew a six-inch hunting dagger from her thigh, and drove the steel blade straight down into the creature’s spinal joint with a sharp crack, severing the neural cord to ensure it was dead.

She looked up, wiping a stray drop of black bile from her cheek.

Behind her, Leona had already concluded her business with the third beast.

The Amazonian captain stood over a headless Stalker carcass with her twin daggers glowing with pale-blue water-mana as she smoothly sliced the fluid off her steel with a clean flick.

Leona looked at Aki, then looked at the dead beast at the princess’s feet.

"Clean shot," Leona muttered, an appreciative grin tugging at her mouth. "Direct through the orbital cavity... You do have a lot of experience in killing monsters, who taught you?"

"I was taught by a person who don’t tolerate missed shots," Aki said, stepping over the carcass, her breath coming in quick shallow puffs. "It’s not the best feeling in the world..."

Maya surveyed the narrow canyon ahead with her scowl deepening.

...

[Author’s Note]

The Discord has been set up! Feel free to come along, the invite link is below...

https://discord.gg/fa72E7e5m