Chapter 559: The Tournament Of Succession [V / Bonus - ]

Chapter 559: The Tournament Of Succession [V / Bonus Chapter]

The silence in the Great Assembly Chamber curdled.

Across the five risers, the soft sound of the optical projectors was the only sound cutting through the frozen air.

The white holographic panes hovering above the celestial marble table continued to transmit the panoramic overhead feeds from Sector Forty-Four, casting shifting cyan and pale emerald reflections across the pale unblinking faces of the world’s monarchs.

President Julian Vanderbilt Senior remained half-risen from his star-iron seat, his broad pinstriped chest heaving as if he had just dragged himself out of an icy river.

His fingers, adorned with the heavy gold signet rings of the Columbian mining trusts, dug so violently into the polished stone that the white projection beneath his palms flickered with static distortion.

"It’s an armament," Sir Arthur Pendelton of the Albion Concordat suggested, his dry voice cutting through the vacuum.

He tapped the silver ferrule of his walking stick against the obsidian floor, though his icy blue eyes were narrowed to needles as he leaned toward his personal console.

"It has to be an integrated relic, perhaps a mechanical item woven into the glove with a pre-charged spell?"

"That has been debunked long ago," Grand Tsar Nikolai Volkov rumbled, his deep bass vibrating the glassware along the southern arc.

The massive northern sovereign leaned forward, his heavy silver-wolf mantle spilling across his scarred forearms.

"Look at the particle dispersion on the third optical angle, Arthur. A stored spell from an ether-battery discharges in a linear uniform cone as it has no organic curve... What the girl just cast did not release from a chamber, It responded to the micro-twitches of her body of course which is why she was able to use it like that."

The man took a deep breath.

"There is not an artifact pulled from the entirety of the explored Sovereign Realm that can grant an unawakened frame the neuromuscular dexterity to manipulate wind-mana like a caster."

"And she is not wearing those kinds of technology," Chancellor Henri de Montmirail adjusted his spectacles, his hand visibly shaking against the silver wireframe. "The Warden already cleared her, apart from the items she’s wearing to survive in the sovereign realm, she is truly mundane. If she has no native pathways, controlling a second-tier wind-lance with that degree of directional density is an impossibility... To shape the mana around the arrow shaft requires active responsive channels running straight through the brachial plexus so her nervous system should have burned to charcoal from the inside out."

The murmurs swelled, rising from the mezzanine tiers where the younger scions and diplomatic attachés were leaning over the brass balustrades, their voices bleeding into a panicked discordant roar.

Princess Kiera did not look at the holographic panes.

She turned her head slowly, her pale golden eyes sliding up the star-iron steps toward the throne of the Throne.

The King of the World sat completely rigid.

The sapphire of his irises was stripped of its normal detached majesty as his pupils were contracted to microscopic vibrating points, staring directly through the image of the First Princess suspended in the air.

His broad shoulders were locked like stone masonry with his jaw clamped shut so tightly that a sharp spasm jumped beneath his cheekbone.

The authority that usually hung over the room like an immovable mountain felt strangely brittle, hollowed out by the sudden violent shattering of a reality he had spent years enforcing.

"Calm yourselves," the King’s voice sounded.

The chamber fell dead silent once more with every delegate freezing in place.

The King slowly opened his right hand, the star-iron signet ring glinting against the pale skin of his knuckles as he exhaled a breath that smelled of scorched iron.

"This is..."

He paused, his eyes darkening as he watched the smoking crater on the Wastezone floor.

"...the work of Blessed Land."

...

Fsssssssssh!

The howling updrafts that had accompanied the violent explosion of the wind-arrow slowly died away, leaving behind a thick suffocating curtain of pulverized sandstone and white quartz dust that hung over the desert floor like a low morning fog.

Aki drifted downward.

Her boots touched the coarse yellow grit of the Wastezone with barely a whisper of friction, the jade-colored glow clinging to her midnight-black glove fading back into the supple leather.

The recoil of the bow was still humming in her wrist in a dull throbbing ache that vibrated along the bones of her forearm, but her breathing was surprisingly steady.

She lowered the recurve mechanism with her blue hair plastered to her forehead with cold sweat and her azure eyes staring fixedly into the center of the twenty-yard crater five paces ahead.

’Did it work...?’

The question bounced nervously inside her skull.

The arrow had struck dead center.

Aki had seen the carbon tip punch through the frost barrier... she had watched the compressed vortex of pressurized jade blades engulf Svetlana Morozova’s chest plate before driving her straight into the bedrock with a lot of force...

An unawakened mortal would have been reduced to red paste and even an ordinary Awakened should have had every rib pulverized into powder.

Yet the hair on the back of Aki’s neck refused to lie flat.

Her instinct suddenly screamed like a siren and Aki didn’t hesitate.

She didn’t pause to confirm the kill either as her left fingers snapped shut inside the black glove.

POP!

A violent burst of wind-mana detonated against the sand beneath her heels, launching her backward and upward in an erratic, ten-foot arc.

SHIIIIING... BOOOOOOM!

A crescent blade of pure translucent glacial ice that was six feet wide and moving with the screaming velocity of a bullet erupted straight out of the dust cloud.

It whistled through the exact coordinates where Aki’s neck had been half a second prior, tearing through the air before slamming into the vertical granite wall of the mountain behind her.

CRASH!

The ice blade cleaved three feet deep into solid stone, leaving behind a weeping frost-scar that crackled with blue lightning.

The shockwave from the strike blew the hanging dust curtain violently outward, laying bare the floor of the crater.

Svetlana Morozova was still standing.

...Barely.

The northern spear-mistress was down on one knee with her six-foot hunting spear planted deep into the bedrock to keep her balance.

The pristine silver-bear pelt across her shoulders had been shredded down to ragged blood-soaked tufts of wool, and the heavy charcoal-and-steel cuirass covering her torso was split wide open from collarbone to hip, revealing an inner layer of shattered crystal-blue ice armor that was actively crumbling away in jagged smoking shards.

"Gah—!"

Svetlana violently spat a thick mouthful of dark blood onto the sand, her breath whistling through broken ribs with a wet gasp.

Her pale face was covered in a mask of chalky dust and gore with a jagged laceration running from her hairline down to the edge of her lip, but her ice-blue eyes were blazing with fury.

’She caught me,’ Svetlana’s mind raced with her fingers trembling against the shaft of her spear as she slowly forced herself to stand upright. ’The little stray actually caught me off guard. At the last second... if I hadn’t reflexively collapsed my entire defensive core into an internal cryo-cocoon between my skin and the armor... that wind would have ripped my lungs straight out of my back.’

She looked up, her gaze locking onto the First Princess who was currently floating ten yards in the air, riding a subtle draft of emerald wind-mana.

Svetlana gritted her teeth, the metallic taste of her own blood fueling the cold rage that defined the hunters of the Tsardom.

’She has no core,’ Svetlana analyzed, her mind working with frigid clarity despite the ringing in her ears. ’I scanned her and she had zero internal circulation during the drop, which means that the bow or those gloves are an external converter... It’s an artificial reservoir and artificial reservoirs have an immutable law which are known as capacity limits.’

"Ugh..."

’How many of those high-density wind lances can she fire before the battery runs dry? Two? Three? She definitely can’t sustain continuous flight while generating offensive output.’

Svetlana brought her spear back, shifting her weight onto her back foot, dropping into the low stance of the northern tundra clans.

"Impressive, Your Highness," Svetlana’s voice cut through the whistling desert wind. "A mortal managing to draw first blood against the Morozova bloodline so you’ll be a legend in the history books for twelve minutes."

She raised her left hand, wiping the blood from her chin with the back of her wrist with her eyes narrowing into cold slits.

"But a trick only works once," the northern champion continued, her tone dropping into a deadly whisper. "You landed a hit because I treated you like a piece of dead baggage... That mistake won’t happen twice. How long do you think you can stay suspended up there, Princess? And what on this earth made you believe you were out of my reach?"

VUUUUUUUM!

Behind Svetlana’s back, the air within a twenty-yard radius suddenly began to shimmer.

It wasn’t ordinary ice magic.

The microscopic moisture particles suspended in the dry desert air began to violently vibrate, turning into hundreds of razor-sharp translucent diamonds of crystallized rime.

They hung in the air like an executioner’s firing squad, each one no larger than a coin, but vibrating at high frequencies that tore tiny hissing fissures into the atmosphere.

"Move," Svetlana dared, a bloody psychotic smile twitching across her lips. "Let’s see if your little wind-toy can outrun three hundred frost-needles converging from every angle..."

Up in the air, Aki took a slow deep breath through her nose.

Her heart was thumping against her ribs, but the panic that had once ruled her childhood was nowhere to be found.

’She’s right...’ Aki thought, her mind calculating the resources left in her gear.

The Star-Iron necklace around her throat was warm, but the first diamond’s light had noticeably dimmed.

Firing that wind-arrow had consumed nearly a third of the reserve stored inside the pendant.

’I don’t want to draw upon the gloves themselves for now...’

Her left glove was dialed to Wind, which gave her mobility, but its destructive power had peaked with that ambush strike.

If she wanted to end Svetlana permanently, she needed to switch to the right hand... the glove that held the compressed Fire mana Silas had loaded for her.

Fire beats Ice.

It was the most basic elemental law in creation as a single point-blank detonation of the fire lance like the one she had tested in the Citadel would vaporize Svetlana’s cracked armor and incinerate her defensive channels.

’The problem is the opening,’ Aki realized, her eyes scanning the floating cloud of frost-needles.

Svetlana was an Awakened spear-mistress of the Second Stage.

Her physical reaction time, even with cracked ribs and internal bleeding, was three times faster than an unawakened human’s mundane muscle reflex.

If Aki tried to dive straight down, those needles would turn her into a sieve before her fingers could even align the palm socket of the blue glove.

’I have to take a hit,’ the realization settled in Aki’s stomach like a cold stone. ’I have to use the wind to dodge the lethal cluster, let the non-vital needles graze the harness, and use the momentum of the fall to force the palm right into her chest... It’s a fifty-fifty gamble.’

Aki’s jaw set as she reached up with her right hand, her gloved fingers curling into a fist as she was preparing to cycle the red runes—

TWITCH!

Down in the crater, Svetlana’s fingers tightened on the spear shaft with her psychotic smile widening as she prepared to unleash the storm—

BOOOOOOOOOOM!

A concussive shockwave of compressed roaring air detonated from the blind spot directly to Svetlana’s right and the northern spear-mistress didn’t even have time to register the shift in air pressure.

A heavy leather-bound combat boot, reinforced with a howling shroud of pressurized wind-mana, slammed squarely into the right side of Svetlana’s jaw with the force of a pneumatic battering ram.

CRACK!

The sound of teeth fracturing and bone groaning under violence echoed through the canyon.

Svetlana’s head whipped violently to the left with a spray of spit and dark crimson blood exploding from her lips as her entire body was lifted off the ground, spinning horizontally through the air like a discarded rag doll.

SKIDDDDD-CRASH!

She hit the sand fifteen yards away, carving a deep bloody furrow through the yellow grit before slamming into an outcropping of jagged sandstone boulders, the impact shattering the rock into powdery fragments.

"Don’t count me out yet, you northern bitch!"

Leona dropped from the sky, landing heavily in the center of the clearing with a low predator’s crouch.

The Amazonian captain’s combat uniform was torn at the shoulder with a thin line of blood running from her temple where Svetlana had struck her during the free fall, but her sharp hazel eyes were glowing with adrenaline.

The void-ivory armor plates on her shins hummed with pale-green wind runes, actively shedding the friction of the landing.

Svetlana scrambled to her feet among the broken boulders, coughing and sputtering blood as her jaw was dislocated at an ugly sickening angle.

She jammed her thumb against her own chin, violently popping the joint back into place with a sickening crunch as her eyes began blazing with murderous hysteria while she locked onto Leona.

"DIE!" Svetlana shrieked, her voice muffled by blood.

She swept her spear horizontally.

The three hundred hovering frost-needles in the air responded instantly, abandoning their tracking on Aki as they turned in unison, their crystalline tips aiming down at Leona, descending from the sky in a screaming blizzard of projectiles.

WHOOSH-WHOOSH-WHOOSH-WHOOSH!

The air turned white with magic but Leona didn’t retreat an inch.