Chapter 563: What Are You, Ironman? [Bonus - ]

Chapter 563: What Are You, Ironman? [Bonus Chapter]

"I am going to turn your bones into ash, you eastern rat!" Marcus roared with his targeting computers locking onto Ren’s sternum..

Then...

The entire valley went completely quiet.

The screaming roar of Marcus’s jet thrusters abruptly died, choked down by a sudden suffocating shift in atmospheric pressure that dropped from the upper atmosphere like an iron ceiling.

The air grew impossibly heavy, freezing the dust particles in mid-air as a single slender hand materialized out of the empty air behind Marcus’s mechanized thruster-pack.

The fingers closed casually around the solid star-iron faceplate of Marcus’s armored helmet.

CRRRRRRRK!

The reinforced ballistic alloy... certified by Columbian military engineers to withstand direct hits from Tier-4 artillery groaned, buckling inward under the effortless casual pressure of five bare fingertips like an empty soda can.

Marcus froze in mid-air as the plasma jets beneath his heels sputtered out entirely.

He slowly twisted his armored neck to the left.

Through the cracked, flickering display of his red optical visor, he found himself staring directly into a pair of bored razor-sharp violet eyes sitting behind wire-rimmed glasses.

Kara was hovering casually in the open air, wrapped in a lazy translucent shroud of pale-green wind-mana.

Her dark hair was neatly parted, her tailored charcoal suit completely lacking any sort of dust or wrinkles, her empty left sleeve pinned neatly against her ribs, and her single right hand palming his entire armored head like a basketball.

She looked at the towering missile-laden mechanical monstrosity with an expression of exhausted pity.

"So what’s the concept here?" Kara asked, her voice becoming a flat unimpressed drawl that cut cleanly through the high-altitude wind. "You trying to be Iron Man?"

Marcus’s vocal synthesizer crackled with static.

"Iron... wha—"

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

Kara didn’t let him finish the syllable.

She snapped her hips in mid-air, her shoulder whipping forward with terrifying leverage, and hurled the three-ton armored chassis straight down into the bedrock like a pitcher firing a fastball.

CRASH-BOOM!

The velocity created a shockwave before the chassis even cleared twenty feet as Marcus slammed into the desert floor at a high velocity.

The concussive impact violently detonated the internal thermite fuel cells packed into his shoulder missile pods, erupting the entire mechanical suit in a massive secondary explosion of white-hot shrapnel and black smoke.

SKIDDDDDD-CRACK!

From the heart of the flaming crater, a blackened smoking human figure shot out across the dirt, tumbling violently across twenty yards of hard clay before coming to an unceremonious halt right at Ren Minamoto’s sandals.

Marcus Vanderbilt lay face-up in the grit, his armored suit completely vaporized away with his skin blistered and charred from scalp to heel as his breath was reduced to a whistling wheeze.

WHOOSH!

Before Ren could even process the sight, the emergency transponder badges pinned to Marcus and Talia’s bodies flared with white light.

The World Council’s spatial extraction runes triggered as well and in two rapid ascending pillars of pure luminescence, both Columbian representatives dissolved into thousands of shimmering motes of light, torn clean out of Sector Forty-Four by the automated salvage protocols.

Up in the air, Kara slowly drifted downward, her dress shoes touching the rim of the smoking crater with a light crunch of loose shale.

She looked down at the scorched circle of sand where Marcus had just been lying, shaking her head with deep disgust.

"Is the main Vanderbilt line really that pathetic?" Kara sighed, her right hand slipping lazily into her trouser pocket. "I flew all the way across the badlands hoping for a proper warm-up, and the kid folds the second someone touches his helmet... A complete waste of good tailoring."

Ren Minamoto chuckled, flicking the blood from his katana before sliding the blade back into its lacquered scabbard with a crisp clack.

"I have to agree with you, Lord Vespera," Ren said, bowing his head with sharp respect. "The Columbians believe machines and credits can replace thirty years of drawing steel under the waterfalls... They truly have no soul."

Kara flexed her single right hand with her violet eyes sweeping across the broken ridge, ignoring the flattery.

"The one I’m actually looking for isn’t here," Kara said, her voice dropping into a colder tone.

Her gaze locked squarely onto the two white-clad swordsmen standing on the ridge. "Which means I have to deal with both of you."

She stood with her single arm hanging loose, her mind working quickly.

’These two are too dangerous to leave roaming the sector,’ Kara thought, her eyes narrowing slightly as she assessed the calmness of Ren’s breathing despite the threat.

If Aki, Maya, and Leona ran into this pair in the open badlands, it would be a massacre.

Even Maya, with all her stubborn earth-shaping grit and that void-ivory armor, wouldn’t survive three minutes against Ren Minamoto.

The aura bleeding off this guy’s posture wasn’t ordinary high-tier mana... Kara could swear she could see the experience of the blade emanate from him too.

He moved with the terrifying instinctive movements of someone who had spent his entire conscious existence with a hilt welded to his palm.

...Which wasn’t that far from the truth.

’Practicing swordsmanship since the hour he came out of the womb,’ Kara mused with a dark smirk tugging at the corners of her lips. ’Talk about atrocious parenting.’

The intelligence dossiers Evelyn had forced Silas to study back in Blessed Land had detailed the bizarre obsessive history of the Minamoto clan.

According to the imperial birth records from the Yamato Sector, Ren hadn’t cried once when he was delivered.

No matter how many times the attending midwives had struck his back, the infant hadn’t shed a single tear.

Instead, his tiny fingers had reached out from his swaddling clothes, wrapping around the polished wooden hilt of the ancestral short-blade resting in his cradle, gripping the cord so tightly that they had to oil his knuckles just to pry the weapon loose.

’That’s going to be a mild headache,’ Kara thought, shaking her head a bit.

Still, she felt a sudden surge of quiet appreciation for her friend.

’Evelyn is a lifesaver,’ Silas reflected warmly. ’Forcing me to sit down for four hours in the Keep and memorize the combat habits, core stages, and personal neuroses of every scion in this tournament was miserable at the time, but it’s paying off right now... I’ll make sure to bring her back a crate of some pastries from the upper district when this succession circus wraps up.’

Though the memory of Evelyn’s departure that morning brought a dry scowl to Kara’s face.

’Claiming she had a date,’ Silas thought, he was still unconvinced. ’What an absurd, transparent lie. Who on this green earth would voluntarily take that woman out for a romantic dinner? Her breath perpetually smells of cheap cigars, she possesses the resting temperament of an angry badger, and she spends her days hoarding hundreds of millions of credits while walking around in threadbare cardigans pretending she’s on the verge of bankruptcy. Truly... only someone who survived the slums could possibly tolerate her bullshit.’

Ren took two slow deliberate steps forward with his fingers resting lightly against the twin pommels of the katanas sheathed at his left hip.

"Draw your weapon, Lord Vespera," Ren urged, his voice dropping into a low breathless rasp of intense anticipation. "The records don’t say what your weapon is but give me the honor of facing your steel."

Kara let out a soft amused chuckle as she raised her single right hand, curling her fingers in a lazy dismissive "come-at-me" gesture.

"Give it your best shot, kid," Kara spoke, her voice dripping with effortless arrogance. "Swing with everything you have. At the end of the day... you aren’t going to leave a single scratch on me."

Ren’s eyes flashed with a mix of fury and joy.

"Don’t regret those words!"

SHIIIIING!

Ren didn’t even take a running step as his right hand vanished!

The katana cleared the scabbard in a single imperceptible fraction of a second, the friction generating a screaming blinding arc of condensed azure lightning that tore the air apart.

[Lightning Sword]!

As the blade snapped forward, Ren’s mind flashed through twenty years of agonizing bloody repetition.

Ten thousand draws a day against the falling maple leaves... Ten thousand draws an evening against the torrential monsoons of the eastern islands... He had refined this single instantaneous draw until the steel ceased to be physical metal...

It had become an unbendable law of motion.

It moved faster than sight, faster than neural reflex, cutting through barriers like dry paper.

’Die or bleed!’ Ren thought with a savage triumphant grin as the lightning blade closed the distance to her throat—

SLAP!

The sound was insultingly mundane as Kara’s single right hand had not drawn steel.

Her bare open palm simply blurred forward, intercepting the lightning-sheathed katana at the exact midpoint of its trajectory, slapping the flat of the steel with the casual dismissive motion of someone swatting away an annoying housefly.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The concussive redirection shattered the surrounding air.

’H-huh...?’

The lightning slash didn’t touch her flesh as the entire attack was violently wrenched ninety degrees to the left.

The massive pale-blue lightning crescent whistled across the Wastezone, tearing three miles across the open basin before slamming squarely into the face of a granite mountain peak on the far horizon.

CRASH-SHATTER!

The entire upper third of the mountain peak disintegrated into a roaring avalanche of pulverized stone and blue sparks, collapsing into the valley below with a rumble that shook the bedrock beneath their feet.

Silence descended on the ridge once more.

Ren Minamoto stood frozen in his follow-through stance, his eyes wide as dinner plates and his breath catching so hard in his throat that he nearly choked.

Ten yards behind him, Fang Zhao’s curved blade slipped from his paralyzed fingers, clattering loudly against the rock.

Kara slowly lowered her right hand.

The palm of her hand was a bit blackened with thin wisps of pale-blue static and ozone smoke curling off her calloused skin where the lightning had made contact.

She lifted her hand, turning her palm back and forth before her eyes, inspecting the faint soot with an amused half-lidded smirk.

She looked up, meeting Ren’s completely paralyzed gaze.

"See...?" Kara drawled, flexing her unblemished fingers in the mountain breeze.

"Not even a scratch."

Ren Minamoto’s jaw remained slack, his tongue glued to the dry roof of his mouth.

The tsuka of his primary katana vibrated in his palm with a low shudder that traveled straight up the radial nerve of his forearm, rattling his collarbone.

’I still can’t believe it...’

That hadn’t been an elemental nullification field and she hadn’t summoned a spell to swallow the voltage or disperse the arc either.

She had used the bare unarmored skin of her hand, judged the exact vibrational frequency of the lightning singing through the steel, and shoved the physical vector off its track with unadorned brute strength.

"You slapped it," Ren whispered, the syllables scraping over his dry teeth like two pieces of rough slate. "You slapped away a First Strike draw with your bare hand..."

Kara White stood three paces out from the smoking trench, her right hand still held up before her face.

She turned her palm over once, inspecting the light dusting of gray soot clinging to her skin with half-lidded unimpressed eyes.

"Want me to be honest? Your edge-alignment was off by three millimeters," Kara said, letting her arm drop until her knuckles brushed the seam of her tailored trousers.

"When you draw against water, you compensate for fluid resistance... When you draw against air, you forget that heat expands the medium but you were cutting thin air and assuming the lightning would bridge the gap. That’s quite sloppy."

Ren’s throat bobbed.

A violent twitching flush crawled up from his collar, burning through his pale skin as the pride cultivated across twenty years of undefeated sparring bouts in the high stone pavilions of the Yamato Sector flared white-hot in his sternum.

CLACK!

His left hand dropped to the second scabbard resting along his sash and he drew his second blade.

The twin katanas crossed before his chest, their tips humming in mana as the pale-blue lightning coating the primary steel deepened, bleeding into an aggressive violet that kicked up loose shale around his sandals.

The wind whipped his dark bangs back from his eyes, revealing pupils dilated with focus.

"Fang!" Ren shouted without breaking eye contact with the woman in the charcoal suit. "Get your ass off the rock! We take her together or we don’t leave this canyon!"

Ten yards away, Fang Zhao kicked his scabbard upright with the toe of his sandal, catching the polished lacquered wood in mid-air with his left hand.

His face had lost every trace of its earlier sleepy boredom. The muscles along his scarred neck were drawn taut like bowstrings and his dark eyes fixed dead center on Kara’s chest.

"I told you she was an anomaly," Fang said, his voice dropping into a tight whisper.

He slid his left foot back, settling his weight into a wide, low-slung stance.

"You never listen to the scout reports... You just hear ’Gold Core’ and start foaming at the mouth like a rabid street hound."

"Shut up and draw!" Ren snarled.

Fang drew.

SHSHSHSHICK!

[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.

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