Chapter 575: Genevieve’s Situation [Bonus - ]

Chapter 575: Genevieve’s Situation [Bonus Chapter]

The seconds her boots cleared the rim, an incandescent sphere of roaring volcanic fire descended vertically out of the upper sky.

The fireball struck the sandstone mound with the concussive fury of a falling mortar shell and the compacted sand exploded into an outward geyser of superheated dust and molten shale.

The entire four-yard promontory where Genevieve had been standing a heartbeat earlier was completely erased, collapsed into a smoking blackened crater of boiling quartz.

WHOOSH!

Genevieve fell through the air, her teal coat snapping like a whip as she rotated her core to face the sky.

Hovering thirty feet above the smoking ruin was a woman.

She wore no high-tier silk robes, no shimmering runic mantles, and no decorative crests.

Her athletic frame was clad in a brutal functional uniform of scorched charcoal leather and dull bronze-washed chainmail while her short-cropped russet hair was hacked close to the scalp, bristling aggressively against the arid wind.

...But it was her face that caught Genevieve’s attention. Her jaw was set in a bitter sneer, her dark eyes blazing with the raw fury of someone who had just walked five hundred miles over broken glass specifically to slit your throat.

In short, she looked eternal pissed off.

’What the fuck...’ Genevieve thought with her gray eyes narrowing. ’A Bloom retainer?’

Tyon Bloom did not pause to introduce herself.

CRACKLE!

Her right hand blurred forward and a secondary sphere of dense orange-red fire ignited in her open palm, whining with compressed pressure as she hurled it straight down toward Genevieve’s falling silhouette.

"Eat basalt, you whore!" Tyon snarled as the fireball tore downward, dragging a screaming vacuum of displaced air behind its trajectory.

Genevieve remained entirely composed in mid-air.

’It seems she has a temper...’

She swung the long fluted barrel of her anti-material rifle upward.

The weapon was forged from fireproof void-tungsten, specifically heat-treated to withstand the high-temperature friction of chemical discharges.

CLANG-HSSSSSSSSS!

Genevieve caught the descending fireball with the flat of the heavy rifle barrel, meeting the projectile like a batter stepping into a fast pitch.

With a sharp, fluid twist of her forearms, she redirected the attack.

The roaring sphere of flame bounced violently off the blackened steel, screaming back into the sky at a forty-five-degree angle before detonating harmlessly against the upper cloud layer.

THUD!

Genevieve’s boots touched the loose sand below as she immediately kicked off her heels, executing a flawless backward aerial flip that carried her fifteen yards across the desert floor.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

Three more fireballs rained down in rapid succession, striking the sand along her retreat path with deafening concussions.

Geysers of yellow silt erupted around her, falling like hot rain, but not a single spark touched the hem of her coat as she landed softly in a low crouch with her right hand releasing the heavy rifle.

THUMP!

The firearm dropped into the coarse grit, discarded without a second thought.

In close-quarters combat against a high-output flame skirmisher, a long-range firearm was nothing more than an anchor.

CRASH!

Tyon Bloom descended from the sky with her boots slamming into the desert floor twenty paces away with the weight of an anvil.

The impact threw up a blinding ring of red clay, but she walked through the dust without blinking with her broad hands resting at her sides and her russet hair bristling in the hot air.

A sudden aggressive desert gale kicked up between them, howling through the narrow gap between two low dunes, whipping Genevieve’s emerald hair across her shoulders and rustling Tyon’s bronze chainmail.

Genevieve slowly rose to her full height.

She smoothed the lapel of her teal coat with a gloved thumb, looking at the scarred furious woman before her.

"Genevieve de Montmirail," she said with her voice sounding smooth and lacking any sort of fear. "Representative of the Europa Directorate."

Tyon spat a globule of yellow grit onto the sand between them as her dark eyes were locked dead onto Genevieve’s throat.

"Tyon Bloom," she grated out, the syllables sounding like grinding millstones. "And I don’t give a solitary shit about your Directorate..."

Genevieve smiled faintly. "A woman of few words. How refreshing."

Tyon took a slow heavy step forward with the sand crunching loudly beneath her thick combat soles.

The instruction had been beaten into her since childhood... In the arena, you dismantle the mind before you crack the bone.

High nobles are brittle glass as a single well-placed insult makes their mana shake.

"You know," Tyon said, her scarred lip curling into a venomous mocking sneer, "I expected Europa to send actual soldiers into this bracket... Instead, they ship out a pair of over-perfumed court whores in tailored coats. Your cousin folded like a wet sack of grain the second an Amazonian woman touched his chest, and you’re standing out here with paint on your eyes pretending you belong on a battlefield. Is everyone in your family this pathetic, or did they just pick the two biggest cowards so the rest of the house wouldn’t have to bleed?"

Genevieve did not flinch.

Instead, a quiet amused chuckle slipped past her lips as she tilted her head with her gray eyes sliding over Tyon’s cheap mismatched chainmail, the rough linen of her sleeves, and the harsh weathered leather of her boots.

"A valiant effort," Genevieve said, her tone dripping with light effortless amusement. "Truly. The standard psychological conditioning of House Bloom... Bully the opponent, mock their lineage, force an emotional overextension. It’s very effective against sheltered scions."

Genevieve took a single elegant step forward with her hands resting casually at her hips.

"Except... you aren’t House Bloom, are you?"

Tyon’s left brow twitched.

"Look at that armor," Genevieve continued, her voice sounding melodic and devastatingly precise. "Dull bronze wash over stamped low-grade iron... A tunic sewn from rough border-flax and those boots... standard garrison issue from the sulfur mines of the volcanic perimeter. You aren’t from the main estate in the capital, my guess is you are from a broken third-tier border family. The kind of branch lineage that lives in mud huts, chokes on ash, and trades their daughters to the front lines just to get a tax exemption on sheep feed."

Genevieve’s smile widened looking like she was a scary doll.

"You aren’t a warrior of House Bloom, little girl... You are a disposable hunting dog they dragged out of the sulfur trenches, wiped the shit off your nose, and pointed at the arena so their precious Seraphina wouldn’t have to scuff her manicure. Tell me... when this tournament is over, do you get to sleep in the stables, or do they make you ride back to the border in a wooden crate?"

SNAP!

The air pressure between them detonated as every drop of blood in Tyon’s body rushed straight to her temples.

"I will burn the skin off your fucking bones!" Tyon shrieked!

BOOOOOOOOOOM!

Tyon’s heels ignited with violent explosive orange fire as she tore across the twenty-pace gap in the span of seconds, leaving a smoking gouged trench through the sand!

She drew a heavy serrated broad-cleaver from her hip, channeling a roaring mantle of flame along the cutting edge as she swung horizontally for Genevieve’s throat.

SWOOSH!

Genevieve did not attempt to parry the massive steel blade at all, she did know her limits so she stepped inside the arc instead.

Her movement was terrifyingly fluid, like water flowing around a jagged rock as she ducked beneath the flaming cleaver, letting the three-thousand-degree heat scorch the tips of her emerald bangs, while her right hand flicked a concealed lace-wrapped cylinder from her sleeve.

PFFFFFFFFT!

A dense pale-yellow mist hissed from the nozzle of the cylinder, spraying directly into Tyon’s face.

Tyon’s combat instincts flared as she held her breath, but the chemical wasn’t meant to be inhaled...

The moment the pale-yellow alchemical vapor touched the roaring volcanic flame coating her own cleaver, the chemical reaction occurred.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

A secondary chemical explosion detonated right between their chests.

"Gahh!"

The blast tore through Tyon’s guard with the concussive pressure blowing her broad-cleaver out of alignment and staggering her footing across the sand.

Genevieve rode the shockwave backward, completely unharmed as her core was circulating a protective film of dense mana.

’I think I might add this to my own techniques.’

Truly making your opponents rage before fighting them made them very predictable... Perhaps if Tyon was in the right state of mind, she would have been able to see that attack coming from miles away.

’But then again, she doesn’t really look very smart, does she?’

Before Tyon could regain her center of gravity, Genevieve blurred forward again.

She drew a slender silver-plated combat stiletto from her inner coat, pouring her Second Stage core into the weapon.

The metal hummed with a terrifying high-frequency kinetic vibration that turned the tip into an invisible blur.

SHLICK!

The stiletto pierced straight through the bronze chainmail on Tyon’s left bicep, severing muscle and scraping hard against the bone.

"Gah!" Tyon grunted through clamped teeth but she didn’t retreat.

She had been on the borders all her life... pain was just a reminder that she was still breathing.

Tyon dropped her cleaver, letting the heavy steel fall into the sand, and drove her left forehead forward in a brutal bone-shattering headbutt aimed straight for Genevieve’s nose.

CRACK!

Genevieve’s head snapped back with blood spraying from her split lip, but the European scion didn’t panic.

As she stumbled, Genevieve’s left hand flicked a second alchemical capsule against Tyon’s collarbone.

CRACKLE-HSSSSSSSSS!

A thick emerald-green gel coated Tyon’s chest and neck, instantly smoking as it began to liquefy the leather and chainmail, eating into the flesh beneath with agonizing acidic heat.

"Die in the ditch you crawled out of," Genevieve hissed, her gray eyes cold as ice as she spun on her heel, driving a reinforced combat boot squarely into Tyon’s wounded ribs.

WHAM!

The kick sent Tyon skidding fifteen yards across the dirt, leaving a trail of smoking blood and dissolved leather behind her boots.

"Haah... Haah... Haah..."

Tyon hit the ground on one knee, panting heavily, her left arm hanging limp as her chest sizzled with green acid.

Blood dripped from her brow, running down into her eye, but she forced herself upright, her dark eyes blazing with feral hatred.

Genevieve wiped the blood from her lip with the back of her glove.

"You have grit, dog," Genevieve said, circling slowly like a wolf inspecting a dying stag. "I will give you that but grit without technique is just slow suicide. You are outmatched in alchemy, outmatched in speed, and outmatched in intellect."

Tyon spat another mouthful of blood, her right fist igniting with a fresh burst of orange fire.

"I don’t need intellect to snap your spine," Tyon growled, lunging forward again!

She closed the distance with terrifying ferocity, throwing a rapid combination of heavy flame-laced punches... left hook, right straight, spinning back-fist!

The flames roared, superheating the surrounding air, but Genevieve slipped every single strike with infuriating efficiency.

SWISH! TAP! DUCK!

Genevieve moved like a ghost, her slender frame twisting just outside Tyon’s reach.

Every time Tyon overextended, Genevieve’s stiletto flashed, carving shallow bleeding lines across the border girl’s forearms, thighs, and flanks.

In less than two minutes, Tyon was covered in dozens of lacerations, her uniform soaked in blood and the corrosive gel eating deeper into her collarbone.

Genevieve was dominating the engagement.

’I find it hard to believe that she’s a Bloom...’

This was a merciless dissection of a brute force fighter by an elite academy prodigy.

Inside the Grand Assembly Chamber, the silence was tense.

Along the high southern mezzanine, several ministers from the Europa Directorate were already nodding approvingly, murmuring praises about the Montmirail dueling doctrine.

Sitting in her velvet chair, Matriarch Etilga Bloom watched the live projection with her lace-trimmed fan resting gently against her collarbone.

Her expression held no trace of worry.

In fact, behind the painted silk of her fan, Etilga’s dark red lips were curled into a wide satisfied smile.

Her amber eyes glittered with dark anticipation as she watched Tyon bleed across the sand.

’Cut her deeper, little viper,’ Etilga thought, a shiver of genuine delight running down her spine. ’Keep cutting and strip the flesh from her ribs. You think you are winning a duel... you have no idea what kind of monster you are waking up.’

Down in the basin, the clash reached its boiling point.

"Haaargh!"

Tyon threw a desperate lunging overhand right, pouring every drop of her remaining core into the fist but Genevieve caught the telegraph instantly.

She ducked beneath the roaring punch, stepped deep into Tyon’s pivot, and drove her left hand forward, slapping a heavy pressurized alchemical canister directly against the left side of Tyon’s face.

CLICK.

"Checkmate," Genevieve whispered.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The thermite-grade canister detonated at point-blank range and a blinding white-hot flash enveloped the left side of Tyon’s skull.

The horrific temperature instantly incinerated her hair, burned away her left eyebrow and eyelid, and charred the skin, cheekbone, and ear down to the blackened, smoking meat.

"AAAAAAAAGH!"

A raw agonizing shriek tore from Tyon’s throat as the concussive explosion blew her off her feet, sending her crashing horizontally into the sand thirty yards away.

She tumbled through the dirt like a ragdoll, finally coming to a halt face-down in the coarse grit.

The left side of her face was completely blackened, smoking with sizzling chemical residue with blood and blister-fluid pooling beneath her jaw.

Her body twitched once, twice, before going still.

Genevieve stood in the center of the clearing with her chest heaving slightly as she flicked the soot from her stiletto.

"Disappointing," Genevieve murmured, shaking her head as she sheathed the blade. "All that shouting for nothing."

She turned her back, preparing to retrieve her anti-material rifle and reposition toward the Safe Zone—

FSSSSSSSSSSSSSH!