Chapter 431: The Root

Far ahead of the Serpent’s Maw, the black waters of the lower trench were running thick and warm with crimson.

Yua moved through the submerged ruins like a phantom made of liquid gore. Her black dress was torn at the hem, floating around her knees, and her long dark hair drifted freely in the churning sea. Her black-and-red eyes held no hesitation now. The initial shock of the surprise attack had passed, replaced by the razor-sharp, lethal efficiency of a pureblood princess defending her territory.

A squad of seven vanguard mages surged down a narrow coral corridor, their polished wooden wands raised, bright yellow light condensing at the tips.

"Target spotted! Fire—"

Yua didn’t let them finish the word.

She flicked her wrist, and the spilled blood floating in the water around the fallen merfolk instantly responded to her command. The floating liquid froze into hundreds of paper-thin, needle-sharp crimson needles. With a simple snap of her fingers, the needles shot forward like a gale of red iron, slicing through the mages’ enchanted white robes and throat seals before their light shields could even materialize.

*THWIP-THWIP-THWIP!*

Seven bodies went limp instantly, drifting silently into the dark trench floor.

Yua didn’t even slow her pace. She stepped over them, her hand snapping out to manipulate the fresh blood pouring from their wounds, pulling the liquid toward her palms to condense it into two jagged, six-foot whips of hardened blood-glass.

She turned the corner, unleashing a wild, spinning flurry of strikes that shattered the hulls of two small scout boats, drowning the spell-scribes inside before they could raise an alarm.

"Is that all the council has?" Yua muttered to herself, her voice low and raspy as she wiped a smear of red from her cheek. "Weak... pathetically weak."

"Do not mistake the vanguard’s foot-soldiers for the council’s true strength, little leech," a smooth, cultured female voice echoed through the canyon.

The water around Yua suddenly went dead calm. The natural currents of the trench stopped, and five figures descended slowly through the dark sea, hovering twenty feet above her.

They didn’t wear the simple white robes of the vanguard, nor the heavy plate armor of the knights. They wore tight, obsidian-colored leather coats embroidered with intricate silver roots crawling up the sleeves, ending in a five-leaf clover emblem on their chests.

These were **The Root**—the elite, black-ops execution unit directly beneath the Grand Archons, comprised of high-ranking battle-mages who handled the council’s most horrific purges.

There were three women and two men.

At the center stood **Vesper**, a tall, sharp-featured woman with short platinum hair and a silver eye-patch covering her left socket. To her left was **Thorne**, a broad-shouldered man with heavy bronze gauntlets and a severe, scarred jawline. To her right stood **Kaelen**, a slender young man twirling a thin silver rapier between his fingers, his eyes completely pale blue. Behind them floated the twin sisters, **Lyra** and **Mirei**, who held identical carved obsidian staves that hummed with a low, oppressive vibration.

Yua’s eyes narrowed as she felt the raw, suffocating mana radiating off the five of them. They weren’t like the low-level mages she had been dicing up. Their presence was heavy, solid, and terrifyingly composed.

"The Root," Yua spat, raising her blood-whips, the liquid humming with her internal core frequency. "Executioners."

"An educated vampire," Vesper said, her lips curving into a dry, cold smile. "How delightful. Thorne, clear her guard."

Thorne didn’t say a word. He slammed his bronze gauntlets together!

*BOOM!*

A shockwave of compressed, physical force erupted through the water, shattering the coral walls beside Yua and blasting her blood-whips into a fine mist of useless red droplets.

Before Yua could recover her stance, Kaelen moved. He glided through the water with unnatural speed, his silver rapier thrusting straight toward her throat in a blinding streak of blue light.

Yua leaned her head back, the sharp tip of the rapier grazing her collarbone, leaving a shallow line. She hissed, snapping her claws out to grab Kaelen’s wrist, aiming to drive her fangs straight into his exposed neck.

"Too slow," Kaelen murmured softly.

Behind him, the twin sisters, Lyra and Mirei, crossed their obsidian staves.

**"Gravity Well: Fourfold Seal!"** the twins chanted in unison.

An invisible, crushing weight slammed down onto Yua’s shoulders! The water pressure around her multiplied by twenty, driving her down onto her knees, cracking the stone seabed beneath her boots. She gasped, her lungs aching as the sheer force pinned her to the ground.

"You speak of weaklings, yet you kneel so easily," Thorne taunted, stepping forward and bringing his massive bronze gauntlet down in a devastating, heavy overhead strike aimed right at Yua’s head!

Yua gritted her teeth, her crimson eyes flashing with wild, desperate rage. She didn’t try to lift her physical arms against the gravity well. Instead, she ignited her blood core!

**"Crimson Spikes: Blood Reign!"**

The pool of spilled blood from the mages she had killed earlier erupted upward from the seabed! Thousands of thick, jagged spears of solid red bone shot out from the mud, blasting upward to impale Thorne from below and force Kaelen and the twins to leap backward, breaking the gravity seal.

Yua scrambled backward, coughing up a dark clot of blood as she stood up. She knew she couldn’t win a drawn-out physical contest against five high-tier specialists working in perfect unison. She needed sustenance. She needed raw blood to repair her cracked core and replenish her stamina.

Her eyes locked onto Kaelen, who was nearest to her, recovering his balance after dodging the blood spears.

*I just need one strike,* Yua thought, her teeth bared. *One bite, and his blood will refuel my core!*

She blurred forward, using the last burst of her pureblood speed to bypass his rapier. She slammed her shoulder into Kaelen’s chest, wrapping her arms around his torso like an iron vise. She opened her mouth wide, her curved, venomous fangs gleaming in the dark water, and plunged them straight into his jugular vein!

*STAB!*

Her fangs bit deep into his flesh, puncturing the heavy artery in his neck.

Yua immediately expanded her blood-absorption channels, preparing to drain his vital life force—

Nothing happened.

No warm, iron-rich liquid hit her tongue. No surge of life force flooded into her dying core. Instead, a cold, bitter, and intensely volatile fluid filled her mouth—a substance that tasted like burning liquid copper and raw ozone!

"Gah! Cough! AAAAH!"

Yua violently recoiled, tearing herself away from Kaelen and falling onto her hands and knees in the mud. She spat wildly, vomiting up the strange, glowing blue fluid she had just sucked from his neck. The liquid hissed as it touched her lips, burning her skin like pure acid!

She looked up, her crimson eyes wide with utter horror, disbelief, and sheer disgust. "What... what is that?! What did I just drink?!"

Kaelen didn’t even reach up to cover the bleeding puncture marks on his neck. He stood there, looking down at her with a calm, amused smirk as two tiny droplets of glowing, neon-blue fluid trickled down his collar.

The other four members of The Root began to laugh—a low, cruel sound that echoed mockingly through the dark canyon.

"Confused, little leech?" Vesper asked, stepping forward, her single eye gleaming with dark amusement as she adjusted her eye-patch. "Did you truly think the council’s highest executioners would enter a domain ruled by a vampire and an ocean queen without taking proper precautions?"

Yua stared at Kaelen, her lower lip trembling slightly as her mind struggled to comprehend what her senses were telling her. "His... his neck... there’s no blood in his veins. It’s... it’s pure mana!"

"A gruesome idea, isn’t it?" Lyra giggled, leaning lazily on her obsidian staff beside her twin sister Mirei.

"Before we departed the Clover Spire for this deployment," Mirei chimed in, her voice sounding identical to her sister’s, "we underwent the Fifth Archon’s ritual of Transfusion. Our physical blood was drained entirely from our bodies, every last drop... and replaced with high-density, liquidized spell-mana."

Yua’s breath caught in her throat. Her face turned even paler than its natural marble shade.

"Drained... your blood...?" Yua whispered, her voice shaking in genuine horror. "To live without blood... to replace your very life essence with artificial magic... that’s insane! It’s an abomination! How can you even survive like that?!"

"Survive?" Thorne barked out a harsh, mocking laugh, slamming his gauntlets together again. "We don’t just survive, leech. We thrive! You vampires rely on blood to fuel your little tricks. But against us? You are biting a stone. You cannot drain what does not exist!"

Kaelen ran a finger over the puncture holes on his neck, wiping away the blue fluid and casually smearing it over his jaw. "Your primary weapon is completely useless against us, Princess. Every time you bite one of us, you aren’t feeding—you’re swallowing pure, unrefined spell-poison that will burn your internal core to ash from the inside out."

Vesper raised her right hand, her fingers curling as a massive, intricate circle of white light materialized behind her back, flanked by the twin staves of Lyra and Mirei.

"You are an obsolete species, Yua Nua," Vesper said coldly, her eye-patch catching the glare of the magic circle. "Your instincts are your weakness. And now... you have nowhere left to feed."

Yua sat in the cold mud, her fingers digging deep into the stone floor as the acid-like blue fluid burned her throat, staring at the five bloodless executioners who stood between her and the Serpent’s Maw.