Chapter 599: Rowenna’s Wrath [Bonus - ]

Chapter 599: Rowenna’s Wrath [Bonus Chapter]

They walked up to the thick triple-layered quartz glass, looking down into the hermetically sealed testing chamber below.

At the center of the chamber, resting upon a pedestal of polished white titanium, lay the pair of midnight-blue combat gloves.

Under the harsh halogen floodlights, the star-iron weave gleamed quietly, the delicate crimson and emerald runes along the cuffs humming with a dormant light.

"Before we initiate physical testing," Vanderbilt noted, tapping the glass with a manicured finger, "the seller, Kara White, made several loud theatrical claims regarding operational hazards... She claimed an unverified user would suffer catastrophic meridian blowout so naturally, I assume it was mere bluster designed to protect her trade secrets. However, as a precaution, I must ask... Grand Master, do you detect any malicious, booby-trapped fail-safes embedded within the weave?"

Varun let out a dry condescending chuckle.

He closed his eyes, raising his right hand toward the glass as an intricate silver runic array flared around his palm, casting an invisible high-density diagnostic pulse through the quartz, washing over the gloves like a spectral net.

For ten seconds, Varun stood motionless, reading the mana reflections then he lowered his hand, his expression dripping with pure disdain.

"Amateurish posturing," Varun declared flatly. "The weave is complex, certainly, the conductive threading utilizes an unconventional high-velocity spiral pattern that mimics capillary action but as for defensive curses? Booby-trapped detonation runes? There are none as the mana channels are completely open too... It is a standard bypass and even a child could wear it."

Vanderbilt let out a loud triumphant laugh.

"Hah! I knew it! The barbarian was trying to scare us with ghost stories!" Vanderbilt turned to his chief research scientist, waving his hand aggressively. "Initiate Phase One! Bring in the test subject!"

Down in the testing chamber, a side door slid open.

A young man clad in a gray institutional jumpsuit walked out, escorted by two armed guards.

He was an Unawakened laborer from the lower Columbia salt mines, heavily compensated with sovereign credits to serve as a test vessel.

"Subject 44," the lead scientist barked over the intercom. "Step forward to the pedestal. Slip your hands into the conduits..."

The young man swallowed hard, his hands trembling slightly as he approached the white titanium stand.

He picked up the midnight-blue gloves, feeling the cool supple star-iron leather against his skin.

’I just have to do this...’

He slid his left hand in then his right.

The gloves fit smoothly, the leather automatically cinching tight around his wrists with a soft click.

CLICK!

The young man stood there for three seconds, blinking.

He looked up toward the observation window with a relieved smile breaking across his nervous face.

"Uh... hey, boss? It feels... totally fine. Kind of warm, actually. Like a winter mitten—"

SPLAT-BOOM!

Without a single microsecond of warning, Subject 44 violently detonated.

The pressure inside his arms simply spiked to forty thousand atmospheres in the span of a single heartbeat...

His forearms, his elbows, his shoulders, and his entire upper torso ruptured outward in an instantaneous shower of pressurized crimson blood, shattered rib bones, and pulverized muscle tissue.

SPLAT!

The concussive wet slap echoed off the titanium walls like a cannon shot, splattering thick steaming red gore across the inside of the observation window.

DRIP! DRIP! DRIP!

The room went dead silent.

Up in the observation deck, Vanderbilt froze mid-smile with his polarized goggles coated in a spray of phantom dread as he stared at the bloody smear on the glass.

Beside him, Grand Master Varun’s jaw went completely slack as his silver mandalas flickered and died.

"W-What..." Varun stammered, his noble composure cracking down the center. "What was that?!"

"Grand Master!" Vanderbilt roared, spinning around, his face turning an apoplectic shade of purple. "You said there were no booby-traps! You said a child could wear it! The man just turned into strawberry jam in front of my eyes!"

"Silence!" Varun snapped, his pride violently wounded as his old eyes flashed with anger. "The fault was on the man... The subject’s cellular walls were clearly deficient! His body was too fragile to absorb the initial sync!"

Varun shoved past the technicians, walking straight to the chamber’s airlock terminal.

"I will personally neutralize the variable," Varun growled, his fingers moving across the control slate.

He etched a glowing golden suppression rune into the console, routing the mana through the chamber’s ceiling projectors.

Down below, a golden beam of light lanced downward, bathing the gloves in an impenetrable suppression rune designed to lock down any foreign feeling.

"There," Varun stated arrogantly, dusting off his blue silk sleeves. "I have laid an imperial Grand Master suppression seal directly over the primary intake valves... Even if an ancient curse were dormant within the threads, it is now bound in chains of iron so bring in the next subject!"

Vanderbilt turned his bloodshot eyes toward the second test subject standing in the holding pen, a stocky middle-aged maintenance worker who was currently shivering so violently he could barely hold his trousers up.

"I-I’m not going in there!" the worker shrieked, backing away from the door. "You saw what happened to 44! He blew up! His ribs hit the ceiling!"

"You will go in there," Vanderbilt hissed, stepping up to the glass and keying the intercom, his voice dripping with ruthless authority, "or I will cancel your family’s medical coverage, evict your wife from the residential sector, and have your sons drafted into the military by midnight... Put the gloves on, or your entire bloodline starves in the dirt."

The worker broke down in silent tears, nodding weakly.

He stepped out into the bloody testing chamber, carefully avoiding the wet chunks of bone on the floor, and reached the pedestal and with shaking pale fingers, the man picked up the gloves, which were now glowing with Varun’s golden suppression runes.

He slid his hands inside.

CLICK!

The gloves cinched.

One second passed... Two seconds... Three seconds...

The worker took a ragged trembling breath as nothing hurt and his arms were still attached.

The golden suppression light was holding firm!

"I-I’m okay..." the worker whispered, looking up at the glass with tear-stained eyes. "I’m not blowing up—"

"Pull the trigger!" Vanderbilt ordered eagerly over the comms. "Form a fist! Channel the wind mana!"

The worker nodded, taking a deep breath, and slowly began to curl his fingers into a tight fist.

PULL! KRZZZZZZZZ-CRACK! SPLAT-BOOM!

The suppression seal was swallowed whole as the backlash this time was twice as violent!

The man’s body didn’t even have time to register the pain, instead, the pressure detonated straight through his cardiovascular system, vaporizing him from the waist up into an explosive cloud of red vapor and pulverized meat that slammed against the ceiling with a thwack.

PLOP!

A chunk of wet lung tissue slid slowly down the observation window, leaving a thick glistening red streak.

"ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR GODDAMN MIND?!" Vanderbilt screamed, completely crashing out.

He grabbed Grand Master Varun by the pristine collar of his two-hundred-year-old star-silk robes, shaking the ancient scholar violently with his spectacles flying off his face.

"You had ONE JOB!" Vanderbilt shrieked, flecks of foam flying from his lips! "One job! You are supposed to be the greatest runemaster on the planet! The World King promised me a genius! I paid forty billion credits for these gloves, and all you’ve done is turn two of my employees into pasta sauce! What the fuck is wrong with you?!"

Varun violently shoved Vanderbilt off him, his face burning bright crimson with humiliation.

"Unhand me, you mongrel!" Varun roared, his voice echoing through the facility. "Do not dare lecture me on the intricacies of the arcane! My suppression seal was absolute! It was swallowed! Something inside those gloves is actively consuming external runic interference!"

Varun turned on his heel with his robes billowing as he stormed straight toward the primary disinfection airlock.

"Grand Master, what are you doing?!" the lead scientist yelled.

"I am resolving this myself!" Varun bellowed, slamming his palm against the override release.

The heavy blast doors hissed open, and the two-hundred-year-old runic master marched directly into the bloody gore-spattered testing chamber with his boots squelching through puddles of fresh crimson runoff.

’I... I... I don’t understand.’

He reached the titanium pedestal, glaring down at the midnight-blue gloves.

’I’ve studied these before.’

He swept his hands forward, channeling his immense century-honed spiritual perception directly into the star-iron weave as he closed his eyes, searching every microscopic thread, tracing every millimeter of conductive silver wire.

’Clean,’ Varun thought, his brow furrowing in maddening confusion. ’It’s completely clean! There are no hidden traps! There are no secondary runes or cores! Why in the name of the First King are these people detonating?!’

His pride, bruised and battered by Vanderbilt’s insults, finally pushed him over the edge.

’I am a Grand Master of Earth...’ Varun told himself fiercely. ’I commanded an army in the Sovereign Realm and my core refinement is unbreakable... If there is an anomaly, it will yield to my will!’

Varun reached down, picked up the gloves, and thrust his hands inside.

CLICK!

The star-iron cinched around his wrists and Varun stood there with his eyes closed as he braced for the spike.

Five seconds passed... Ten seconds... Nothing...

The air in the room was calm and his meridians were steady as not a single thread of mana spiked in his chest.

’So what...?’

Varun slowly opened his eyes, looking down at his gloved hands with a smug arrogant sneer returning to his lips.

"You see?!" Varun shouted toward the observation window, holding his hands up triumphantly. "It was the inadequacy of your people! The mortal vessels were simply too weak! In the hands of a true master, the conduits are completely sta—"

"So..."

A voice echoed through the sterile chamber as Varun froze.

The voice wasn’t coming from the intercom and it wasn’t coming from Vanderbilt either.

It was a woman’s voice that was smooth, dripping with arrogance while coming directly from the star-iron weave around his knuckles.

"...you’re the pathetic little thieves, huh?"

Up in the observation deck, Vanderbilt and the technicians pressed their faces against the glass with their eyes wide.

"What the hell was that?!"

Varun stared down at his hands, his heart suddenly hammering against his ribs like a panicked drum.

"W-Who is speaking?!"

"Ahem!"

The voice cleared its throat, sounding remarkably annoyed, as if someone had just woken her up from a mid-afternoon nap.

"Allow me to introduce myself," the voice drawled with sarcasm. "I am Rowenna... The Grand Runemaser of Blessed Land and honestly, I am thoroughly disappointed."

Varun’s breath caught in his throat. "Rowenna...?"

"I regularly weave two distinct fail-safes into my proprietary works to prevent low-tier gutter trash from reverse-engineering my research," Rowenna explained, her tone sounding like an exhausted professor scolding a remarkably stupid student. "The first fail-safe is the conduits require Aki’s blood elasticity, which means common mortals blow up like over-inflated bladders but you already discovered that twice, apparently... How messy and unhygienic, here I was thinking Brida was an ogre."

She let out a dry clicking tut through the leather.

"And the second fail-safe... is specifically designed for arrogant, self-proclaimed ’scholars’ who attempt to perform unauthorized diagnostic scans and steal my intellectual property. It is truly a shame... for you."

Varun’s face went completely pale with his pride instantly flaring into defensive panic!

"Impudent child!" Varun roared, his voice cracking into a high pitch as he raised his gloved hands, his eyes glowing with bright silver mana. "I am Grand Master Varun! The foremost runic authority on the Earth! I have unraveled the works of the First Era! I have mapped runes of the void! There is no rune woven by a backwater hedge-witch that I cannot dismantle!"

Through the star-iron weave, Rowenna let out a loud mocking hysterical peel of laughter.

"Grand Master, my ass!" Rowenna cackled, her voice bouncing off the titanium walls. "Can’t you even see the runes, you blind old bat?!"

Varun blinked with cold sweat drenching his silk collar. ’What runes?! There are no runes!’

"Tch. Pathetic," Rowenna sighed. "Fine. Since you’re so hopelessly beneath my level... allow me to open your eyes."

SNAP!

An invisible veil dissolved within the sub-fabric of the gloves.

BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZT!

Before Varun’s horrified dilated pupils, the physical reality of the midnight-blue leather violently vanished...

In its place materialized a blinding labyrinthine nightmare of microscopic glowing purple script!

There weren’t ten runes... There weren’t a hundred either... There were tens of thousands of contradictory runic equations, woven so tightly together that they formed an impenetrable three-dimensional cage of pure madness.

Runes were stacked upon runes... spatial vectors collided with feedback loops and elemental bypasses were knotted together like a nest of rabid vipers.

It was filled with runes so monstrous that simply looking at the equations for two seconds made Varun’s nerves bleed with a sharp agonizing migraine tearing through his temporal lobes.

’How is this item even functioning?!’ Varun screamed in the shattered weeping silence of his mind. ’This isn’t an alchemical circuit! This is an arcane disaster waiting for an excuse to detonate! What kind of psychotic demon engineered this monstrosity?!’

The purple runes began to rapidly heat up as the star-iron leather started to glow, turning from dull gray to cherry-red, then to blinding incandescent white.

HSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!

Smoke billowed from the seams with the smell of scorched flesh filling the chamber as the intense heat seared straight through Varun’s palms!

"You see," Rowenna’s voice echoed cheerfully through the white-hot metal, "when I was still an apprentice at the Imperial Academy, before my Lord summoned me to Blessed Land, the senior professors stole my research all the time... They took my papers, took my credit, and called my equations dangerous so I made a solemn sacred vow... the next person who tried to reverse-engineer my work without my express written consent would be the first person I punished with the full weight of my academic wrath."