Chapter 557: The Tournament Of Succession [III / Bonus - ]

Chapter 557: The Tournament Of Succession [III / Bonus Chapter]

"We’re moving too slow," Maya complained, kicking a piece of loose shale off the path. "Leona’s readings seem to be getting heavier... There’s something lingering on the wind above us, and walking down this mountain on foot is going to take forty-five minutes. By the time we reach the foothills, the first squads will already have butchered each other and scattered."

Leona glanced back at Aki, assessing her smaller unarmored frame.

"I could carry you on my back, Princess. With my wind reinforcement, I can leap down the rock faces three times faster."

Aki shook her head immediately.

"No," Aki said firmly, patting the lightweight harness strapped across her torso and more on the inside. "These armaments are designed to absorb environmental mana-shear and keep my organs from liquefying under high-altitude pressure and the pressure of the Sovereign Realm too. If you carry me while cycling your Second Stage core, the passive mana-friction bleeding off your skin will clash with the runes on my harness. It could rupture the stabilization and knock me unconscious so I need to move on my own."

Maya groaned, rubbing the back of her neck. "Then we need transport. Walking is out of the question."

As if answering her complaint, a low rumbling chorus of snarls vibrated from the rocky terrace thirty yards below them.

The three women crept to the edge of the shelf, peering over the rock face.

Gathered in a wide, sandy hollow carved into the mountain flank was a pack of five Dune Wolves... a mutated desert variation of the Dire Wolves found everywhere in the Sovereign Realm.

...Well almost everywhere.

These beasts were massive, standing five feet tall, their bodies covered in thick bristling coats of sandy-gold fur that naturally deflected friction.

Their tails were segmented and heavy like scorpions with their yellow eyes glowing and full of intelligence as they gnawed on the bones of an indigenous mountain ram.

"Well," Leona whispered, a sharp smirk spreading across her lips. "Look what the gods dropped in our path."

"Don’t kill them," Aki whispered urgently, grabbing Maya’s armored forearm. "We need them alive..."

Maya turned, raising an eyebrow. "You want to ride desert predators? They’ll rip your legs off before you place saddles, Princess."

"Just beat them into submission..." Aki insisted. "Break their stance! Don’t puncture their lungs or sever their leg tendons! I can handle the rest..."

Maya and Leona exchanged a swift glance... Frontline soldiers didn’t argue when an objective was clear.

"On my mark," Maya hissed.

Her Purple Core roared.

BOOM!

Maya launched herself off the ten-foot ledge, descending upon the pack like a falling meteor as she struck the center of the hollow with both boots, channeling her earth-mana straight into the bedrock.

CRACK-CRACK-CRACK!

The stone floor ruptured as massive blunt pillars of jagged granite shot upward from the sand, striking two of the Dune Wolves squarely in their ribs.

WHAM! WHAM!

The beasts yelped in shock, their breath exploding from their lungs as they were launched into the rock walls, stunned and gasping for air.

The remaining three wolves whipped around, their hackles rising, their jaws snapping with concussive force as they lunged at Maya from three angles.

SWOOSH!

Leona was already there.

The Amazonian captain dropped from above with her twin daggers spinning in reverse grips.

She didn’t use the blades to cut though as she wrapped her forearms in dense pressurized coils of swirling water-mana.

SMACK! CRACK!

She delivered two lightning-fast palm strikes to the muzzles of the attacking wolves with the hydraulic pressure concussing their sensory organs, sending them crashing into the sand, whimpering and clawing at their bleeding noses.

The alpha wolf... a scarred massive brute with one blind eye roared, coiling its muscular hind legs to leap at Leona’s exposed flank—

THUMP!

Aki landed from the ledge, dropping into a low controlled roll and in her hands, she held fifty feet of heavy, braided star-iron rope that Maya had carried in her rucksack.

Before the alpha wolf could complete its lunge, Aki moved and she didn’t hesitate either.

’I need to do this at the very least...’

She stepped straight into the beast’s blind spot, whipped the star-iron rope around its thick muscular neck in a wide, running loop, slid beneath its belly, and yanked the line tight with all her body weight.

SKRRRRRR!

The wolf’s momentum slammed its chin into the dirt but Aki didn’t let go.

She twisted the rope around its long, pointed muzzle, locking the jaw shut, and tied a complex multi-layered friction knot behind its ears with blinding four-second speed.

’Heh, I knew all of that knotting would come in handy one day.’

She pulled the remaining lengths of cord back over its broad shoulders, creating two perfectly balanced makeshift reins.

"GRR!"

The alpha wolf thrashed violently, its claws tearing up the sand as it was trying to shake the small human off its back.

Aki didn’t flinch.

She grabbed the beast by its heavy sandy ears, leaned down until her face was inches from its glowing yellow eye, and spoke with a coldness that didn’t match her face.

"Down," Aki commanded. "Or I let the woman behind me turn your skull into gravel."

The wolf froze.

It felt the bite of the star-iron cord around its jaw but it also smelled the fresh blood of the Crag Stalker still clinging to her boots and most importantly, it saw Maya Da Silva standing five feet away, her fist glowing with enough dark-purple mana to level a hill.

The alpha’s ears pinned back against its skull.

It slowly lowered its massive belly into the sand, letting out a submissive rumbling whine.

Within three minutes, Maya and Leona had bound the muzzles of two other wolves with identical harnesses.

Maya stood back, crossing her arms over her void-ivory breastplate, staring at the First Princess in wide-eyed astonishment.

"Where in the hell did you learn to rig beast reins like that?" Maya asked, genuinely baffled. "That’s a nomad knot if I’m not mistaken."

Aki sat atop the massive alpha wolf, running her gloved fingers gently through the coarse, sandy fur of its neck.

A soft melancholic smile touched her lips.

"It’s just... a little something I learned from someone," Aki murmured softly.

Her mind drifted back to the quiet snow-drenched courtyards of Blessed Land.

She remembered Reina, the cute Beast Tamer... Reina had spent days with Aki, patiently showing her how to read the muscle tension of wild predators, how to bind an alpha’s jaw without crushing its windpipe, and how to assert mental dominance over creatures that operated purely on the law of the jungle.

’Thank you, Reina,’ Aki thought with a surge of gratitude warming her chest. ’Everything Silas gave me... it’s all keeping me alive.’

"Hold on," Leona said, stepping forward.

The captain placed her glowing water-coated palms against the bruised flanks of the three captured wolves.

GLUG... GLUG...

Cool soothing azure mana washed over the beasts’ bruised ribs and concussed muzzles and the swelling receded instantly while their breathing evened out as Leona’s mid-Second Stage healing arts restored their stamina without restoring their feral aggression.

"They’re prepped," Leona said, vaulting onto the back of the second wolf with effortless cat-like grace. "They can run for three hours without stopping..."

Maya mounted the third beast, her heavy armor settling into the creature’s spine with a low grunt.

"Let’s move. We take the low ravines and loop around the northern ridge. We’ll be at the perimeter of that Safe Zone in ten minutes."

"Go!" Aki commanded, snapping the makeshift star-iron reins.

"AWOOOOOOOOOO!"

The three Dune Wolves surged forward in unison as their powerful clawed paws tore into the mountain shale, carrying them down the steep switchbacks with terrifying breathtaking speed.

The wind whipped violently against Aki’s face, tearing tears from her eyes, but she leaned low over the alpha’s shoulders, locking her knees against its thick ribs, matching the bounding stride of the predator beneath her.

They tore down the mountain, covering ground five times faster than they could have on foot, slicing through narrow ravines and dodging falling boulders with supernatural agility.

Yet as they descended past the two-thousand-foot marker...

Aki’s shoulders suddenly twitched.

"Huu..."

A sharp unnatural chill crawled across the exposed skin of her neck.

It wasn’t the thin dry cold of high altitude, no, it was like a crystalline frost that seemed to creep through the air like an invisible fog, numbing the tips of her fingers inside her gloves.

Aki frowned, glancing at the rocky crags flanking the ravine.

’When did it get so cold around here...?’ Aki wondered, her breath pluming into thick white clouds of steam. ’We’re approaching the desert floor... the temperature should be rising, not dropping.’

She looked ahead, opening her mouth to warn Maya—

Three hundred feet below them, lodged behind a massive overhang boulder that jutted out over the switchback like a jagged tooth, two figures sat in motionless silence.

They were the representatives of the Tsardom of Borealis.

Draped across their broad shoulders were the heavy silver-furred pelts of Tier-4 frost-bears, the white fur dusted with persistent, unmelting rime.

Beneath the pelts, their charcoal-and-steel plate armor was covered in an advanced chalky camouflage paste that matched the weathered granite perfectly, rendering them completely invisible to standard searches.

Yuri Volkov... a hulking broad-shouldered youth with a jagged combat scar running across his nose, his dark-blonde hair cut short, sat back against the rock, chewing slowly on a strip of cured reindeer fat.

Resting across his knees was a massive two-handed greathammer forged from frozen star-steel, its head covered in brutal diamond-shaped spikes.

Beside him crouched Svetlana Morozova.

She was lean, sharp-featured, with pale, ice-blue eyes that seemed to lack any sort of warmth.

Her silver hair was tied into two tight warrior braids, and her pale hands rested against a six-foot-long hunting spear whose tip was carved from a single translucent shard of glacier crystal.

Svetlana held her right palm flat against the granite rock face.

TICK! TICK! TICK!

Her Second Stage Purple Core was cycling at a whisper, sending microscopic pulses of mana through the stone’s crystalline lattice, reading the vibrations of the upper trail.

Svetlana’s ice-blue eyes snapped open.

"Three mounts," Svetlana whispered. "Rapid descent and moving at full sprint down the western gully."

Yuri swallowed his meat, a slow brutal grin spreading across his scarred face.

"Three mounts? Did Columbia get lost?"

"No," Svetlana said, her brow furrowing slightly. "I only register two native mana signatures... One is a dense high-tier Purple Core while the second is a mid-tier Blue Core."

Yuri paused, his grin widening until his teeth showed.

"Two signatures... and three mounts? The First Princess."

"It’s the Castellian," Svetlana confirmed, her grip tightening around her frost-spear. "And High Marshal Da Silva’s vanguard is running escort for her... They must have linked up immediately after the transit drop."

Yuri chuckled, a deep rumbling sound in his chest.

He reached down, picking up the massive star-steel greathammer with one hand as if it weighed nothing.

"The King’s discarded daughter," Yuri muttered, shaking his head. "They really thought they could parade an unawakened girl through Sector Forty-Four without paying the toll... The path below us is a ledge so if they clear this switchback, they enter the open sand."

Svetlana stood up, her posture coiling like an arctic viper.

"We don’t let them reach the sand. We break the shelf beneath their paws. We throw them into the ravine, separate the guards, and execute the Princess before Da Silva’s people can form a perimeter..."

Yuri stepped up beside her with his massive boots making no sound on the frost-coated rock.

"On my strike," Yuri whispered.

Through the narrow gap between the boulders, the thunderous pounding of heavy wolf paws echoed from the trail above.

THUD-THUD-THUD-THUD!

The lead Dune Wolf, carrying the First Princess, rounded the corner of the switchback at full sprint.

Yuri’s hand snapped upward in a sharp signal.

"NOW!" Yuri roared!

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

Yuri violently detonated the entire forty-ton overhang boulder with a single colossal swing of his frost-hammer.

The concussive shockwave shattered the rock into thousands of jagged, flying boulders, while Svetlana’s frost-spear thrust downward into the mountain path, unleashing a massive expanding glacier-wave that sheared the entire two-hundred-foot section of the stone ledge clean off the mountain.

CRACK-CRACK-SHATTER!

The ground completely ceased to exist beneath the wolves’ paws!

"SKREEEEEE!"

The Dune Wolves howled in sheer terror as the mountain collapsed into a catastrophic landslide.

The three mounts, Aki, Maya, and Leona were violently thrown off the mountainside, pitching out into the open sky in an uncontrolled terrifying free fall heading straight toward the jagged granite floor two thousand feet below.

...

[Author’s Note]

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

https://discord.gg/fa72E7e5m