Chapter 566: House Bloom Hunts [Bonus - ]

Chapter 566: House Bloom Hunts [Bonus Chapter]

The image of the severed head dissolving into black sand inside their Citadel quarters flashed violently behind his eyelids, sending a cold nauseating chill through his gut.

He stayed silent for five agonizing seconds, staring down at his sand-covered palms.

Then, he forced a low mocking scoff through his teeth.

"Kara White is an anomaly, Safira," Tariq said, his voice gaining false desperate momentum as he tried to convince himself as much as her. "The intelligence reports from Europa confirmed it... she only awakened her core when she was nineteen years old so she’s a street brawler who stumbled into power."

He scooped up a fistful of golden sand, letting the dry grains pour through his fingers.

"Meanwhile... you and I have been swimming in the sands of Khemet since we were sixteen. Our bloodline has commanded silica manipulation for centuries. Do you honestly believe an unrefined barbarian who learned magic three months ago can match the ancestral masters of the desert on our own soil?"

Safira looked at the falling sand, then nodded slowly, some of the tension draining from her shoulders.

"You’re right. In the dunes, we are gods."

Tariq exhaled a long, quiet breath through his nose, slumping slightly against the ridge.

’I hope to the gods she believes it,’ Tariq thought with cold sweat prickling beneath his bronze armor. ’Because if that monster actually comes out here... what if she decides to summon high-tier lightning? Lightning strikes sand and turns it into solid, brittle glass... She could vitrify our entire domain in a single strike or fire? A high-density flame blast could superheat the dunes and bake us alive inside our own mantles.’

The possibilities were terrifying suffocating nightmares.

"Tariq," Safira’s voice suddenly hissed, sounding very sharp and urgent which made Tariq snap his head up.

"What?"

Safira pointed a trembling sand-coated finger toward the northern ridge, two miles away where the yellow dunes met the jagged foothills of the mountains.

"Look," Safira whispered. "Something is flashing."

Tariq squinted through the shimmering heat waves and high along the spine of the northern sandstone ridge, a tiny point of light was pulsing.

Flick! Flick!

"A transponder beacon?" Tariq muttered, his brow furrowing beneath his sand cowl. "A distress flare between separated squads? Or is someone trying to regroup?"

Before the thought could finish forming in his mind... The tiny point of light didn’t flicker again.

It ignited.

WHOOSH!

The flashing light transformed into a blinding sphere of white-hot crimson flame.

The heat was staggering... even some distance away across the open desert, the ambient temperature spiked by twenty degrees in the span of a single second.

The air screamed as the sphere of fire detached from the ridge, rocketing across the sky toward their exact coordinates with the terrifying roaring velocity of a missile.

Tariq’s pupils violently dilated into microscopic points.

"SUBMERGE!" Tariq screamed, his voice cracking in panic. "SUBMERGE NOW!"

WHOOOOOOSH!

Tariq and Safira threw their hands forward, violently diving headfirst into the crest of the dune.

Their ancestral mana liquefied the silica around them, swallowing their armored bodies thirty feet down into the subterranean belly of the sand.

A microsecond later...

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The colossal crimson fireball detonated against the surface of the dune and the apocalyptic explosion ripped a fifty-yard-wide, twenty-foot-deep crater into the desert floor.

The ungodly temperature of the blast didn’t just scatter the silica... it instantly superheated millions of metric tons of sand, fusing the earth into a smooth translucent lake of boiling red glass that crackled with persistent dancing tongues of crimson fire.

FSSSSSSSSSH!

From the smoke and heat haze on the northern ridge two miles away...

A slender elegant silhouette stepped casually onto the edge of the glass-crater’s rim.

Her heavy opulent robes were gone, replaced by a skin-tight, reinforced strike cuirass of midnight-black leather and dark crimson steel that hugged her athletic frame. ℴℴ𝘮

Two curved, serrated hunting daggers rested horizontally across the small of her back, their blades humming with hungry dancing embers and her long, vivid crimson hair whipped wildly in the superheated desert wind, framing a porcelain face touched by a cruel smirk.

Seraphina Bloom slowly spun one of her curved hunting daggers around her index finger with effortless dexterity, her ruby-red eyes glowing with pure sadistic anticipation as she looked down into the bubbling glass crater.

"Well, well~" Seraphina purred softly, her melodic voice cutting through the hissing heat like a sharp razor.

"Just the little desert rats I was looking for."

She snapped the dagger into a reverse grip, her crimson mana flaring along her calves like twin comets.

It was time for House Bloom to hunt.

Seraphina then reached up with a pale bare hand, hooking two fingers beneath a stray lock of vivid crimson hair that had plastered itself to the side of her neck.

The strands burned with the dark unblemished luster of fresh furnace coals, catching the sulfurous light of the lower sky as she pushed the hair behind the shell of her ear with slow deliberate precision making the black lacquered plates of her strike cuirass clicking quietly against the silver wire cinching her waist.

A low amused murmur stirred in the back of her throat.

’He better be watching this stream,’ Seraphina thought, her gaze drifting lazily toward the nearest administrative lens hovering forty paces out over the rocks.

Silas had to see this.

He needed to sit down, keep his eyes open, and watch his prospective consort dismantle these people without needing to call on a single piece of external armor.

It was a matter of basic household discipline.

If they were going to formalize the union before their elders and shut her mother’s relentless nagging down for good, the man needed to understand the standard he was marrying into.

’Right now, his water magic is able to suppress my base fire,’ she considered, her thumb tracing the smooth bone pommel of the curved hunting dagger riding horizontally along the small of her back. ’Val also mentioned his water was strong and had weight behind it the last time they saw, but base flames are just the floor. If we get married, I expect his arts to fully extinguish my standard output on demand... A prospective consort whose husband cannot even handle a minor domestic disagreement without receiving third-degree burns across his chest is an embarrassment to House Bloom. He needs to take his core training seriously. The elder council already looks at his commoner origins like a bad case of crop rot so if he cannot physically dominate the family dueling rings, those withered old hags in the inner court will never let him hear the end of it.’

She exhaled through her nose, the breath pluming into a faint wisp of scorched air that dissolved against the arid wind.

Turning her head three inches to the right, Seraphina glanced over her shoulder at the figure standing motionless against the gray granite crag five paces behind her.

Tyon Bloom stood with her combat boots planted wide on the shale with her arms crossed over a broad compact chest encased in dull bronze-washed chain and charcoal cuirass leather.

Her face was locked into an aggressive sour scowl, her jaw clenched so tight the muscles bulged beneath her skin like knots in wet rope.

Her short russet hair had been cropped down to the scalp with sheep shears, leaving jagged tufts that bristled against the high collar of her gambeson.

Seraphina understood the scowl.

Tyon was third-generation stock from the cinder garrisons out on the volcanic perimeter... the border marches where the lesser branches of the Bloom bloodline spent their lives eating salted mutton, sleeping on gravel, and trading skin with feral salamanders while the main house in the city held court under silk awnings.

Seraphina knew for a fact that if she had been dumped into an ash trench at four years old to fight over water rations, she would wear the exact same miserable blood-seeking expression every minute of the day.

"Tyon," Seraphina said.

The retainer did not shift her weight.

Her head snapped toward Seraphina with a sharp militaristic jerk, her hand dropping flat against the hilt of the serrated broad-cleaver strapped across her thigh with a dull clack.

"My Lady," Tyon barked with her voice sounding rough and dry since it was scraped raw by two decades of breathing hot basalt dust.

"Clear out," Seraphina commanded, her tone lazy and unhurried as she waved a lazy hand toward the jagged canyon pass cutting west toward the river basin. "Take the ridgeline... The Albion Concordat and those arrogant dogs from the Indus Directorate are skirmishing near the secondary aqueduct. Go put your boot in their ribs. Flush them into the open, break their spirits, and keep the northern approach clear. We are here to secure this bracket without wasting time."

Tyon’s brow pulled down, her small dark eyes narrowing with immediate suspicion.

"You intend to sweep this quadrant solo? The scan registered two heavy signatures diving into the basin before the strike."

"I am saving my power for Kara White," Seraphina replied, her voice dropping into a cold tone that brooked no debate. "The trash down here is not worth the wear on my sole leather... Go."

Tyon stared at her lady for one full second, searching for hesitation and finding none.

She grunted once.

BOOM!

Tyon’s heels ignited with a sudden violent burst of dense orange fire with the kick launching her forward like a stone from a siege engine.

The displaced shockwave whipped Seraphina’s crimson hair across her eyes as the retainer blurred across the shale, clearing the fifty-yard span of the crag in three bounding strides before dropping into the shadowed cleft of the western canyon.

Once the sound of Tyon’s boots faded, Seraphina looked south.

Far across the cracked salt flats, miles past the shimmering heat waves where the badlands gave way to the central caldera, the atmosphere was still trembling.

The residual ripples of that clash between Ren Minamoto and the Lord of Blessed Land were washing through the lower crust in low-frequency shudderings that made the loose gravel around her boots dance like boiling water.

A cold prickle traced the skin between Seraphina’s shoulder blades.

She had awakened her Lord Core and bonded her Primordial Fire Spirit when she was five years old.

She was not some pampered bureaucratic heiress stuffed into silk robes to make the family crest look respectable during trade summits... She had buried her daggers into beasts before her permanent teeth had finished coming in so she knew what slaughter looked like.

Looking at the sheared profile of that mountain peak on the far horizon... seeing how the upper third of a granite massif had been cleanly erased from existence, she knew she could not have matched that volume of destructive output without fully fusing with her Primordial Spirit and burning thirty percent of her soul pathways to cinder.

Yet Kara White had attacked the strike somehow, without releasing even half the presence Ren had brought to bear.

Seraphina took a slow deep breath, pulling the dry desert air down into the furnace of her lungs, letting the heat settle the sudden racing of her pulse.

’She is absurdly strong,’ Seraphina admitted, her jaw tightening as she stared at the distant smoke. ’Completely outside the normal curve but I just have to be stronger... Simple as that as there is no other path.’

She was prideful to the point of arrogance, quick to draw steel, and notoriously vicious when cross-examined, but she was not stupid.

Her objectives in this tournament had never matched her mother’s grand designs.

Etilga Bloom had spent three straight days before the opening ceremonies pacing the drawing rooms of the mansion, barking orders, reviewing balance sheets, and demanding that House Bloom use this arena to demonstrate military dominance over every foreign delegation.

But even Etilga, for all her political posturing and venomous ambition, possessed enough strategic clarity to know that tossing Seraphina straight into a meat-grinder match against Kara White in the first hour was a fool’s wager with terrible returns.

’Mother is playing the secondary board,’ Seraphina realized, a sharp, wicked smile curving her lips as she adjusted the leather vambraces along her forearms. ’She probably entered into some screaming match with the King of the World before the gates opened so she does not need me to kill Blessed Land today. She wants me to hunt the next best trophy on the roster... Crown Prince Alexander. She wants House Bloom to publicly drag the golden boy of House Castellian through the dirt, strip his suppression rings, and prove to the High Council that the Royal lineage is brittle, corrupt, and ripe for replacement.’

Seraphina gripped the pommels of her paired daggers, feeling the cold power of the star-tempered steel through her leather wraps.

"I will fetch your royal scalp, Mother," Seraphina murmured softly to the empty desert. "I will crack Alexander’s teeth across the marble before the broadcast ends but first... let me bully these two little desert rats."

Forty feet beneath the surface of the Great Dunes, the world was pitch-black, suffocating, and motionless.