Chapter 558: The Tournament Of Succession [IV / Bonus - ]

Chapter 558: The Tournament Of Succession [IV / Bonus Chapter]

The wind screamed and the gravity wrenched Aki’s stomach into her throat.

Yet for the Awakened, the catastrophic fall did not mean panic.

In high-tier combat, the perception of time operated on an entirely different scale.

As the debris fell around them in mid-air, the falling boulders seemed to slow to a lazy floating crawl.

Yuri Volkov plunged through the clouds of dust, falling alongside them with a wild smirk plastered across his scarred face.

"Good morning, Amazon!" Yuri yelled across the empty air, raising his greathammer high above his head to cleave Maya in two.

WHAM!

He didn’t get to swing as Maya Da Silva had already twisted her body in the open air.

Her Purple Core roared like an active volcano, her dark eyes blazing with fury as she swung her heavy combat boot in a blindingly fast horizontal roundhouse kick.

CRACK!

Her void-ivory-armored heel slammed squarely into the side of Yuri’s jaw with the reinforcement shattering his teeth, sending the hulking northern berserker spinning violently through the air until his back slammed into the vertical face of the mountain with a thunderous boom.

SMASH!

Yuri didn’t fall.

He dug his free hand into the granite cliff, his fingers tearing through the stone like butter and his head snapping up with blood pouring from his split lips.

"Hehe..."

His eyes blazed with berserker joy.

"THAT’S IT!" Yuri roared, his laughter booming over the gale. "COME ON, WARRIOR!"

He pushed off the cliff face with both boots, rocketing down the vertical wall like a mountain goat with his greathammer whistling through the air as he charged after Maya.

Maya hit the vertical wall feet-first, her void-ivory greaves absorbing the inertia, and sprinted down the sheer rock face at full speed to meet his advance.

CLANG! BOOM! SMASH!

The two titans clashed horizontally along the mountain wall, their blows creating concussive shockwaves that blew away the falling rubble.

Down below them in the open sky, Aki was tumbling helplessly through the air.

WHOOOOOOSH!

The ground was rushing up with terrifying speed... fifteen hundred feet... twelve hundred feet...

Aki flinched, her hands clawing at empty air, her heart hammering violently.

But even amidst the absolute terror of the fall, her eyes remained wide open as she looked around and for a fraction of a second, she was completely mesmerized.

’This... this is an Awakened battle...’ Aki thought, her breath catching in her throat.

It was terrifying, but it was brutally magnificent.

Above her, Maya and Yuri were tearing the mountain apart.

Yuri’s physical strength was monstrous as he was a true berserker whose blows carried the weight of falling glaciers.

Every time his star-steel hammer struck, the air cracked with thunder, forcing Maya to give ground.

"GET OFF HER!" Maya screamed mid-air.

While parrying Yuri’s hammer with her forearm, Maya thrust her open palm toward the cliff face below Aki.

RUMBLE!

A colossa, fifty-foot pillar of solid granite erupted horizontally from the mountain wall, shooting out directly beneath Aki’s descent, aiming to catch the falling princess and break her plunge.

"I DON’T THINK SO!" Yuri bellowed!

The northern berserker twisted in mid-air, his hammer igniting with terrifying pale-blue frost-mana but he didn’t hit Maya.

He brought the hammer down squarely onto the base of Maya’s stone pillar.

BOOOOOOM!

The massive granite pillar was pulverized into gravel before Aki’s boots could even touch it.

"DIE, PRINCESS!" Svetlana’s melodic voice echoed from the falling mist!

Svetlana Morozova was descending from the clouds like an arctic valkyrie with her frost-spear leveled straight at Aki’s throat.

WHOOSH!

"NOT TODAY!"

Leona materialized between them however the Amazonian captain didn’t rely on brute force... She was a master of the magical aspect of combat instead so in mid-free-fall, Leona snapped her fingers!

GLUG-GLUG-FSSSSSH!

A massive churning ribbon of high-pressure azure water materialized out of thin air, coiling around Aki’s falling body like a gentle liquid cradle, instantly dampening the princess’s terminal velocity and redirecting her momentum horizontally toward a soft sand dune five hundred feet below!

"I’ve got you, Princess!" Leona shouted.

"You have nothing," Svetlana whispered coldly.

In mid-air, Svetlana’s spear twitched and she released the handle as her hands wove a complex three-stage somatic sign in a tenth of a second.

"Rim-weave!"

CRACKLE!

It was a bizarre horrifying application of high-tier cryo-magic as Svetlana didn’t freeze the outside of Leona’s water-ribbon... she targeted the microscopic oxygen molecules within the liquid.

Instantly, the entire twenty-yard coil of water supporting Aki flashed into millions of razor-sharp jagged ice needles!

SHATTER!

The liquid cradle exploded outward, severing Leona’s mana connection and sending Aki plunging back into free fall.

Leona’s hazel eyes widened in pure shock.

"What kind of sick magic is—"

SWOOSH!

Svetlana was already inside her guard.

The northern spear-mistress had closed the five-yard gap in the blink of an eye with her movement looking frictionless.

She caught her falling spear in a reverse grip, drove the blunt butt of the shaft into Leona’s solar plexus, and followed up with a vicious, ice-coated palm strike directly to Leona’s chin.

CRACK!

"Gah—!"

Leona coughed out a spray of blood, the shock paralyzing her nervous system for a split second as Svetlana spun smoothly in the empty air, her right leg whipping around in a brutal axe-kick that struck Leona’s shoulder, violently knocking the Amazonian captain completely off course.

SKIDDDDD-WHOOSH!

Leona was blasted thirty yards away through the air, tumbling violently toward the rocky ravine.

"Princess!" Leona choked out, desperately channeling a burst of wind-mana beneath her boots to stabilize her flight as she thrust her open palm toward Aki, attempting to conjure another water stream to catch the girl—

FZZZZT!

Only a thin sputtering mist erupted from her hand...

Leona’s heart sank into her stomach.

The hit had thrown her too far.

In the dry silica-choked atmosphere of the Wastezone, atmospheric moisture was practically nonexistent.

Without proximity, her mid-Second Stage Blue Core simply didn’t have the casting range to reach Aki.

"Damn it!" Leona screamed, watching helplessly as Svetlana leveled her spear and dove straight after the falling princess.

...Three hundred feet from the ground.

...Two hundred feet.

The wind roared in Aki’s ears, tearing at her hair with the vast expanse of yellow sand and jagged boulders rushing up to meet her at over a hundred miles per hour!

Above her, Svetlana Morozova descended with terrifying grace, falling feet-first with her ice-spear aimed dead center at Aki’s chest.

Svetlana looked down at the First Princess, her pale ice-blue eyes carrying a trace of genuine pity.

"Under normal circumstances," Svetlana said, her voice cutting clean through the roaring gale as she drew closer, "I would be terrified of what your father would do to my family for this... House Castellian does not forgive the execution of royal blood."

The spear tip began to glow with a sharp, blinding azure point of concentrated frost.

"But this is the Exhibition of Succession," Svetlana continued, her tone chillingly flat. "The World Council watches, the rules are absolute and for the glory of the Tsardom... First Princess, you need to go."

...One Hundred feet from the ground.

...Eighty Feet.

Svetlana prepared to thrust her spear through Aki’s heart, ready to use the recoil of the impact to cushion her own landing on the sand below yet as Svetlana looked into the girl’s face...

The northern spear-mistress’s breath hitched.

Aki wasn’t screaming, she wasn’t closing her eyes or curling into a pathetic ball either.

The First Princess of House Castellian was staring directly back at Svetlana with wide unblinking azure eyes that burned with fearless defiance.

VUUUUUUUM.

Before Svetlana’s widening horrified eyes... Aki’s eyes began to glow.

"Hehe..."

Her pupils erupted into a brilliant radiant emerald green.

FSSSSSSSSSH!

From the midnight-black beast-leather glove encasing Aki’s left hand, a massive vortex of concentrated Wind Mana roared into existence.

The gale detonated around her smaller frame in a howling spiraling cyclone of pressurized jade currents that tore the falling dust to shreds.

Svetlana’s jaw dropped in shock.

’WIND MAGIC?!’ Svetlana’s mind screamed in pandemonium. ’SHE’S AN UNAWAKENED MORTAL! HOW IS SHE CYCLING WIND MANA?!’

Aki didn’t answer her.

"Like Leona said, Not today..." Aki whispered, her voice cutting through the cyclone with razor-sharp venom.

SNAP!

Aki clenched her left fistand the wind-mana swirling around her body condensed into a high-pressure cushion beneath her boots.

With a brilliant fluid spin that would have made an acrobat weep, Aki kicked off the air, twisting her entire silhouette three hundred and sixty degrees through empty space.

SWOOSH!

She spun cleanly past Svetlana’s outstretched spear and in a fraction of a second, their positions completely inverted!

Svetlana was now at the bottom, plummeting toward the hard earth fifty feet below and Aki was positioned directly above her, riding the crest of the jade cyclone.

...Aki didn’t hesitate as her right hand flew to the mechanism on her right forearm!

SHLICK!

The star-iron recurve bow snapped open.

Her fingers blurred to the small of her back, plucking a carbon-tipped arrow, seating the nock, and drawing the string all the way back to her ear in a single smooth motion.

VUUUUUUUUUUUUUM!

From the midnight-blue glove on her right hand, the Star-Iron necklace around her throat flared with blinding brilliance.

A massive concentration of emerald wind-mana poured through her artificial pathways, wrapping around the carbon arrowhead in a screaming rotating drill of hyper-pressurized air blades.

HSSSSSSSS!

Aki looked down through the sights, her glowing green eyes locking onto Svetlana’s pale terrified face.

Aki clicked her tongue.

...Tsk.

"Fall."

TWANG!

She released the string!

BOOOOOOOOM!

The arrow detonated as a wide lance of roaring jade wind-mana erupted from the bowstring, swallowing the lower airspace in an all-consuming gale that followed.

Down below, Svetlana had barely enough time to cross her forearms and summon a desperate paper-thin sheet of frost before the world turned green.

The roar of the rushing wind was the last thing she heard.

CRASH!

The pressurized arrow slammed squarely into Svetlana’s chest plate as the elemental shockwave drove the northern champion down with the unstoppable force of a falling meteor, smashing her violently into the solid sandstone bedrock of the desert floor.

BOOOOOOOOM!

A crater twenty yards wide ruptured across the desert floor, sending plumes of pulverized sand and shattered stone roaring three hundred feet into the air.

[In the Great Assembly Chamber]

The silence was... unexplainable.

It was not the respectful tense silence of a court watching a duel, more or less was the suffocating silence of more than five hundred people whose fundamental understanding of physical reality had just been violently shattered across the floor.

At the Grand Table, Pharaoh-President Menes Al-Mansur sat frozen. Grand Tsar Nikolai Volkov’s jaw hung completely open, his massive hands resting paralyzed on his knees.

High Marshal Valeria Da Silva’s smirk was gone, replaced by wide stunned amber eyes staring at the holographic feed.

Up in the mezzanine, Matriarch Etilga Bloom’s lace fan hung loosely from her limp fingers, completely forgotten against her lap.

Down at the main dais...

The King of the World sat upon his star-iron throne and his face was paper-white.

The color had completely drained from his noble features, his sapphire pupils contracted into microscopic trembling dots as he stared at the center screen hovering before his seat.

Across the globe, the live broadcast chat which had been scrolling at millions of messages per second with over 1.4 billion active viewers watching Kara White’s departure had ground to a dead halt.

There were Zero comments as not a single soul on Earth could process the visual feed displayed before their eyes.

The First Princess of House Castellian... the useless unawakened failure who had been cast out into the dark for twenty-five years floating gracefully down on a cushion of jade wind-mana, holding a smoking bow over the pulverized crater of a northern prodigy.

Finally, after fifteen excruciating seconds of dead, frozen silence...

A choked ragged gasp tore through the Grand Table.

President Julian Vanderbilt Senior leaned forward, his face turning an angry apoplectic purple, his hands trembling so violently against the celestial marble that his signet rings clattered like teeth.

He looked around the room, clutching his own throat as if he were suffocating, his voice cracking into an incredulous high-pitched scream.

"The First Princess..." Vanderbilt choked out, his eyes bulging out of their sockets.

"...CAN USE MAGIC?!"

...

[Author’s Note]

Thanks for the castle and the support too! Every single bit matters... Phew~ Let’s get more GT! Also make sure to join the Discord.

https://discord.gg/fa72E7e5m