Chapter 875: Show Of Destruction [Bonus - ]
Chapter 875: Show Of Destruction [Bonus Chapter]
Aki lifted her right arm.
She didn’t draw a spell circle or chant a single word, and she didn’t brace her feet in some aggressive stance like a warrior… She was much calmer.
“Ah…”
The First Princess simply held her small pale hand out toward the three-ton slab of star-iron with her fingers relaxed and her palm turned flat toward the metal.
For half a second, nothing happened then the light in the Great Assembly Chamber began to die.
The overhead lights stayed on, but their glow bent and stretched toward her, dragged in toward her body as if space itself were sinking into a drain with no bottom.
The temperature crashed so hard that frost spread across the edges of the Grand Table, crawling over the grey granite in white feathery lines, and the air turned black and heavy with an old terrible weight that made the hair on every arm in the room stand on end.
…Deep in Aki’s eyes, the clear blue began to curdle.
At the edges of her irises, threads of void-light gathered, a dark purplish-black static that crackled silently across the whites of her eyes that was colder than the space between stars.
Aki flexed her index finger by three millimeters and the dark static leaped from her hand.
No explosion followed, no shockwave rattled the walls, no fire flashed and no cloud of metal dust went up, and for one strange moment the room was unnaturally quiet then the star-iron slab was simply gone.
Where five feet of rune-shielded meteoric metal had stood half a second earlier, there was nothing.
The bronze base, the shock absorbers and the armor plating had all been erased from the world down to the last atom…
All that remained was a clean circular hollow cut two inches into the obsidian with its edges so perfectly smooth they looked like they’d been carved by a god.
Aki lowered her hand.
The black static curled back into her skin like retreating smoke, and the void-light faded from her eyes, leaving them clear and calm again.
She smoothed her silver overskirt and folded her hands neatly in front of her waist, as relaxed as a woman who’d just poured herself a cup of tea as the chamber went dead silent.
’Now I didn’t even use it at full power… I’m satisfied with this level of mastery at base.’
It was so quiet that a single drop of condensation falling from a vent fifty feet overhead sounded like a hammer hitting an anvil.
The masked Council members sat frozen in their chairs.
The magistrates along the walls stood with their arms locked at their sides, the polished steel of their masks reflecting the empty hole in the floor.
Down the table, Crown Prince Alexander had gone completely white.
The color drained out of his face until his skin looked like wet chalk, and his sapphire eyes bulged as he stared at the empty space where the slab had been.
His hands began to tremble on the granite and his mouth opened, but nothing came out.
He’d spent his whole life in the field… He’d broken his bones in northern blizzards, slaughtered beasts in the deep rifts and bled until his armor rusted, all for one desperate chance at their father’s power.
He’d pushed his Purple Core until his channels scarred, begging for a single ember of it but he’d never touched it, not even once… now his useless younger sister had just erased three tons of star-iron with a twitch of her finger.
On the dais, the King of the World sat motionless.
His sapphire eyes, usually as flat and unreadable as frozen sea, had gone wide as his large hand tightened slowly around the armrest of the star-iron throne.
CREAK! GROAN!
The metal shrieked as it gave way.
The star-iron armrest buckled inward under his palm, dented by the sheer unthinking strength of his grip, and his knuckles went white as bleached bone.
His breath hitched, his chest rose and fell beneath the navy coat, and with his eyes glued to the clean hole in the floor, the King began to rise from his seat.
He didn’t move Kiera off his knee.
The World King just stood up with her still perched on it, lifting three inches off the cushions in an awkward lopsided half-crouch that nobody in the world had ever seen from him and for one unguarded second…
The stone mask cracked wide open.
A sudden almost giddy light flashed across his face, it was filled with a blazing flare of pure fatherly triumph that bordered on madness.
The pride on his face was blinding then he caught himself.
“Ah…”
He realized every masked face in the room was watching him, and his jaw snapped shut.
The giddy light vanished from his eyes, and the cold granite mask slammed back into place.
He lowered himself back onto the throne with his spine rigid, as if he’d never moved a muscle. He adjusted the lapel of his coat, smoothed his hand over the dented armrest and rested his chin on his fist again.
The World King then looked down at Aki.
When he spoke, his voice was flat and dry, like a bored clerk reviewing a tax form.
“…Pretty good.” the King said.
The words hung in the frozen air.
Two words, delivered with all the enthusiasm of a man tasting slightly over-salted chicken…
At the back of the chamber, leaning against the rear pillar with her ankles crossed, Kara’s shoulders jerked.
’What bullshit…’
She’d seen the whole thing.
The fingers crushing the armrest, the eyes going wide as saucers, the half-stand with his favorite daughter dangling off his knee like an oversized brooch, and that split second of hysterical giddy joy that had practically lit up the ceiling before he slammed his armor back on.
Kara bit the inside of her cheek so hard she tasted blood.
Her lips pressed into a tight trembling line, and she fought with every ounce of her soul not to burst out laughing in front of the entire World Council.
’Pretty good, he says…’ she thought, her purple eyes watering. ’Pretty good! The man nearly had a stroke on his own throne! He crushed his chair with his bare hand! His fingers are still shaking, and he’s sitting there like he just watched someone flip a pancake… Oh, you stubborn old bastard. I’m never letting you live this down.’
She covered a snort with a polite little cough and shifted against the pillar, thoroughly enjoying herself.
Down at the table, Alexander looked like he’d been hit by a rail-cannon.
His eyes were hollow.
All those years of campaigns, of drilling legions and standing at attention in freezing rain, waiting for one word of praise from that throne… and his father had never dented an armrest for him, now Aki had gotten it with a flick of her finger.
His nails dug into the granite until the stone scratched under his gloves.
On the dais, the sweetest face in the room had stopped smiling.
Kiera sat on her father’s knee, but the doting warmth that usually lit up her features had frozen into a thin brittle mask and her golden eyes were locked on the empty hole in the floor.
…She knew Destruction.
She’d watched her father use it in this very room three weeks ago, watched a woman erased so completely that there wasn’t even a stain left behind.
You couldn’t block it or parry it and you couldn’t deflect it with wind or ground it with lightning however Aki had it.
The useless sister… The family embarrassment everyone had been so sure she would replace… Where did it all go wrong?
’N-noo…’
Kiera’s breath hissed quietly through her teeth.
Her hand on her father’s coat tightened, her fingers curling into the navy wool… and then they let go.
With smooth boneless grace that carried none of her earlier playfulness, Kiera slid down off her father’s knee as her slippers touched the basalt.
TAP!
She took three slow measured steps down the stairs of the dais with the amethyst tulle swirling around her ankles, and the sweet innocent daughter evaporated with every step.
By the time she reached the bottom, her golden eyes were burning with a sharp focus that was akin to the look of a beast that had just realized another beast had walked into its territory.
She stopped ten paces from the edge of the hole with her gaze fixed on Aki’s calm face, and tilted her head.
Her voice came out honeyed and terrifyingly polite.
“Father,” she said sweetly, “may I test my elder sister for myself?”
The request drifted through the frozen air like the chime of a wind bell hanging over an open grave but Aki didn’t move.
She stood thirty paces away with her hands folded over her overskirt and waited.
’I see… Is that what she’s trying to do…?’
On the throne, the King sat perfectly still.
His eyes drifted from the hole in the floor to the slim figure of his younger daughter standing at the foot of the stairs.
He didn’t indulge in family drama in front of the Council and he certainly didn’t approve unscheduled duels between his children in the middle of a charter hearing but deep in his chest, the spark had caught.
He’d accepted long ago, with cold bitter resignation, that the power in his blood would die with him.
He’d watched Alexander break himself against the ice and watched Kiera show off her lightning and wind, and neither of them had ever come close and then his eldest daughter had walked in and erased three tons of iron without breathing hard.
He needed to see it again.
’I need to see if she can truly fulfill my goals…’
He needed to see how she moved when someone pushed back, whether her channels held when an opponent closed the distance, and whether that destruction was a single lucky trick or the real thing.
“The Council,” the King said, his deep voice echoing off the obsidian, “grants permission.”
The senior magistrate stepped forward and struck his staff against the floor.
CLACK!
“A demonstration duel requires the consent of both participants,” he droned. “Princess Aki, as the claimant under verification, you have the right to decline without any effect on your—”
“…I accept.”
The words sliced through his speech like a razor through silk asnd Aki didn’t hesitate for a fraction of a second.
She didn’t look back at Kara or glance at the Council.
A sharp brilliant smile bloomed across her face, so radiant and so completely free of doubt that the magistrate actually stumbled half a step backward.
’I accept,’ Aki thought, and her heart was pounding with a fierce hungry rhythm. ’I accept before you can change your mind, little sister…’
Three weeks ago, she’d stood in this room as the useless one.
She remembered every second of it.
The pitying looks from across the table, Kiera walking out of the shadows with her golden eyes and her Purple Core, and the whole Council realizing in a single breath that the First Princess had just been replaced.
Her father saying “Kiera Zel Castellian” and letting that middle name land on the floor like an anvil, the one he’d quietly taken off Aki’s papers when she turned sixteen.
She remembered Kiera curtsying and saying she was used to sitting on cold stone and she remembered her father patting his knee.
“Come here… Sit.”
Aki had stood there and smiled through all of it while it ripped her chest open, because one twitch of her face would’ve sent her even further down into his bad side.
She didn’t have to smile through anything anymore, now her eyes flashed with a terrifying hunger.
’You sat on his knee in front of the whole world while I stood there with nothing,’ She thought, and the thought tasted sweet. ’You looked down at me like I was a piece of furniture they forgot to throw out… Come down to the dirt, Kiera… Let’s see how sweetly you smile when I put you in it.’
Across the hole in the floor, Kiera’s golden eyes narrowed by half a millimeter.
The polite little smile stayed frozen on her face, but the air around her shoulders started to hum with a faint high-pitched tension and tiny threads of violet static crawled across the backs of her knuckles before she could stop them.
At the back of the room, Kara’s eyebrows rose.
’Oh,’ she thought, looking at the hungry gleam in Aki’s eyes. ’Oh, she’s been waiting for this…’
She’d never seen that look on Aki’s face before… It was wild and bright and just a little bit scary, and Kara found that she liked it very much.
The magistrate cleared his throat with a grating metallic sound.
“The challenge is ratified by the throne,” he announced, raising his staff. “The Council will reconvene at the dueling grounds below the Spire. Participants, prepare yourselves…”
Kiera turned on her heel and swept back up the stairs toward her father without another word.
Aki didn’t watch her go. She was already smiling at the empty hole in the floor, flexing the fingers of her right hand one by one.
’Finally…’