Chapter 877: Raging Number 5 [Bonus - ]

Chapter 877: Raging Number 5 [Bonus Chapter]

The freezing wind howled through the crossbeams of the Spire, snapping the hem of Number 5’s robes like a black sail.

Three hundred feet below, the two sisters stood waiting on the scorched ground and up on the titanium ledge, the air had turned into an absolute dead zone.

Number 5 stood with her hands still half-buried in her sleeves and her mask craned up toward Kara at a stiff mechanical angle.

Kara didn’t budge an inch.

She stayed leaning on the railing with her chin propped on her gloved hand and her boots crossed at the ankles with her black hair tumbling over the lapels of her suit while she basked in the ocean breeze.

“Of course it floats,” Kara said, in the smooth effortless tone of someone explaining that water is wet. “Look at the horizon line… Look at how the water moves around the outer ring. It’s obviously floating… That’s why it’s called the Outer Threshold.”

Number 5’s fingers twitched violently inside her sleeves.

“What… in the name of every layer of the planet… are you talking about?” she hissed, her voice rattling against the porcelain. “The Outer Threshold is a geopolitical designation! It marks the boundary of the restricted ocean zone! It has nothing to do with buoyancy!”

Kara gave a slow pitying little shake of her head and clicked her tongue, the way a patient teacher might with a particularly slow student.

“Tsk. Come on, shorty,” she murmured, waving her fingers lazily at the grey sea. “Use your eyes… If it were stuck in the mud, they’d call it the Outer Foundation… Or the Outer Pillar… Words mean things… You build an island in the middle of a deep ocean trench, you make it float so the tides don’t drown the bottom floors… It’s basic design.”

Number 5 took a hard step forward. Her boots clanged against the metal grating, and her mask tilted up until it was inches from Kara’s shoulder.

“It is not floating!” Her voice jumped a full tone and the filters in her mask started to crackle. “It’s an artificial fortress! It’s anchored to the seabed by forty-eight reinforced shafts driven twelve miles through the ocean crust! It sits directly on top of the planetary Suppression Engines! What kind of idiot would think it floats?!”

Kara tapped her chin thoughtfully with her eyes lazily following a lone seabird gliding beneath the grey clouds and as Number 5 rattled off the shafts and the crust and the twelve miles of anchoring, a tiny gear turned somewhere behind Kara’s calm forehead.

She remembered the schematics she’d skimmed once, a long time ago, out of sheer boredom since she had found it in the World Vault.

’Ah…’ Kara thought, and her inner voice went very still. ’She’s right.’

It settled over her with perfect crystal clarity… The island was bolted into the bedrock and it didn’t have a single buoyancy chamber to its name.

…A lesser woman would have hesitated.

A normal person would have cleared her throat, laughed awkwardly and admitted she’d mixed something up but Kara had called the King of the World a coward to his face.

She’d flown across an ocean this morning with the specific and sacred goal of tormenting the woman standing beside her.

She was already two minutes deep into this bit, her feet were planted on the grating and backing down now was spiritually impossible.

’Too late,’ she decided. ’I’m too deep in…’

“Blueprints can be changed, shorty,” Kara said smoothly, without a single muscle in her face betraying that she was talking absolute garbage. “You really shouldn’t believe every memo your engineers hand you.”

“Memo?!” Number 5 sputtered, her small frame shaking with outrage. “I was there when the third foundation ring was poured! I signed the requisition orders for those anchors myself!”

“That was a long time ago,” Kara said, turning her head just enough to flash a small infuriating smirk. “Memory gets fuzzy… Sea air does terrible things to the brain.”

“My memory is flawless!” Number 5 snarled.

With a jerky frantic motion, she tore her right hand out of her sleeve and whipped out a sleek Council-issued phone with her thumb hovering aggressively over the scanner.

“One search on the Council registry will prove you wrong!” she barked, shoving the glowing screen toward Kara’s face. “The foundation schematics are on the internal network! I’ll pull up the cross-section right now and shove four billion tons of bedrock pilings down your arrogant throat!”

Kara didn’t flinch or even glance at it.

Her gloved hand lifted lazily, and one finger tapped the edge of the phone, pushing it gently back toward Number 5’s chest before the screen could unlock.

’I can’t allow that,’ Kara thought calmly then her eyelids drooped into a sleepy arrogant squint and her lips curled into a slow razor-sharp smirk.

“You’re that slow you need your phone…?”

Number 5 froze as her thumb stopped an eighth of an inch above the glass.

The silence that followed was so thick that the grating under their boots almost seemed to hum, and from somewhere behind the porcelain mask came a tiny strangled squeak.

“I… I’M slow?!” Number 5 choked out, trembling with the fury of a professor being told by a toddler that the sky was green. “You’re contradicting basic geography! You’re spouting complete nonsense! YOU made the claim! Then YOU prove it!”

Kara didn’t blink.

Slowly she closed her purple eyes and tilted her chin toward the dead grey sky with an air of deep serenity.

“I don’t need to prove it,” Kara said softly. “Because I have what?”

She raised her hand and tapped one finger against her temple.

TAP! TAP!

“…Sense.”

Every fuse in Number 5’s skull blew at the same time.

“WHAT?!”

The scream that tore out of her was barely human… It cracked off the titanium girders and rolled across the whole three-hundred-yard arena like an air-raid siren.

“WHAT DO YOU MEAN, SENSE?!” Number 5 shrieked, throwing away every last shred of World Council dignity she’d ever possessed.

She threw both hands in the air with her robes flapping around her shoulders like a pair of panicking crow wings.

She stomped on the grating, clang after clang, and flailed her arms, whipping her head from side to side so violently that the straps of her porcelain mask slipped and the whole thing twisted sideways and hung crooked off her face.

“Sense is not a law of physics!” she screeched, clawing at her own sleeves and spinning in a frantic little circle on the ledge. “Sense does not displace cubic miles of seawater! You don’t have sense, you have an empty hole where your brain should be! You are the most infuriating, shameless, delusional one-armed parasite that has ever drawn breath on this planet! I had a plan! I had THREE separate legal clauses ready to ruin your entire afternoon! And you stand here and tell me the island floats because you have SENSE?!”

Three hundred feet below, everything stopped.

On the dueling field, the senior magistrate froze with his staff raised above the bronze floor plate.

Across the terraces, the masked Council members slowly turned their heads upward, one after another, like a row of startled owls.

In the royal pavilion, Alexander turned his stern face toward the sky and blinked in total bewilderment.

…Even the King tilted his sapphire eyes up toward the top of the Spire, his heavy brows drawing together in genuine disturbed confusion.

In the middle of the field, Aki and Kiera, who’d been locked in a lethal unblinking staredown, both broke their stances at the same time.

Two blue heads tipped back in perfect unison as they stared up through the barrier dome at the tiny frantic black blur thrashing against the high railing.

“…Is that Number 5?” Kiera muttered, her murderous glare completely forgotten.

Aki squinted upward. She recognized the tall figure standing perfectly still beside the thrashing one, and she sighed.

’Of course,’ she thought. ’Of course it’s her…’

Across the eastern terrace, Number 7 sat motionless, watching the small masked woman flail like a headless goose while screaming at the sky.

Number 7 slowly lifted a hand and rubbed two fingers against their brow.

’Has she really gone senile this time…?’

Up on the ledge, Kara didn’t move an inch.

She stood at the railing with her hand resting lightly on the metal and looked down past the barrier dome at all the frozen upturned faces below.

Kara just took a breath and pushed the faintest thread of wind behind her voice, enough to carry it cleanly down to every seat in the arena.

“Look how she’s tweaking…”

The words drifted down through the quiet air like a stone sinking into milk.

Number 5 stopped mid-flail as her crooked mask slipped another fraction of an inch.

“I AM NOT TWEAKING!” she roared, her voice cracking into a jagged shriek.

With a noise like a furious mountain cat, she lunged at Kara with both hands stretched out like claws, going straight for her throat.

Kara didn’t even turn her head, she took one lazy half-step to the right and pivoted on her heel.

Number 5’s fingers clawed through empty air, and her momentum carried her straight into the top rail of the balustrade chest-first.

CLANG!

The metal groaned, and the impact knocked the air out of her small lungs as she grabbed the rail to keep from tipping over the edge.

Kara didn’t spare her a second glance.

With her empty sleeve pinned neatly against her suit and her hand tucked comfortably back in her pocket, she strolled toward the maintenance stairs with long satisfied strides with her cloak sweeping the grating behind her and a radiant grin spreading across her face.

’Perfect,’ Kara thought smugly as she started down the stairs. ’Now I don’t have to admit I’m wrong… plus I ragebaited her too, win for me!’

Behind her, alone on the windy ledge, Number 5 stayed draped over the railing.

Her fingers were locked around the cold metal and her small shoulders trembled with silent shock.

She stared down at the empty air with her mask hanging off one ear as the horrible truth washed over her like a bucket of ice water.

…Three sleepless nights of planning and she hadn’t even managed to say the first sentence.

Down on the field, the strange disturbance from the sky faded, and the cold heavy weight of the duel settled back over the arena.

The senior magistrate cleared his throat.

He raised his staff, its blue crystal pulsing, and slammed it down onto the bronze plate at the center of the field.

CLANG!

“The terms are set by the Council,” he announced, his voice booming across the dome. “No lethal strikes to the Core or the head… The duel ends on surrender, ring-out or incapacitation.”

Aki and Kiera turned back to face each other.

Whatever had happened on that roof, it was gone from both of their faces now… Kiera sank into a low crouch, and violet sparks began to crawl along her arms while Aki let her hands hang loosely at her sides and smiled.

The magistrate raised his staff one last time.

“Begin!”

The word hadn’t even finished echoing off the dome when the ground under Kiera’s boots exploded.

BOOM!

The scorched earth shattered and threw up a ring of black dirt and broken stone, and Kiera vanished.

Violet lightning ripped across her arms and legs and a howling spiral of razor-sharp wind wrapped around her body like a spinning drill as the two elements fused around her with a shriek that hurt to hear.

’Thunder Step!’

She crossed two hundred yards of open ground in less than a heartbeat.

One moment she was a crouching figure on the far side of the field… The next she was right inside Aki’s guard, the wind of her passage flattening the dust in a long cone behind her, her golden eyes burning with savage glee and her right fist wrapped in a boiling cage of lightning that screamed like a dying engine.

“Late bloomer!” Kiera sneered.

She drove the fist straight at Aki’s sternum.

CRACKLE!

Aki didn’t panic.

She didn’t reach for her Starlight… that stayed locked deep inside her where nobody could see it and she didn’t open the full abyss of her Destruction either, because she knew exactly what it would do.

One full wave of it and there’d be no duel at all, just another clean two-inch hole in the ground where her little sister used to be.

As much as Kiera deserved a lot of things, Aki wasn’t going to erase her in front of the whole Council so she trusted her body instead.

She slid her left foot back two inches and twisted her waist, and the lightning-wrapped fist whistled past her ribs so close that the heat scorched the silk at her collar.

At the same instant, a tiny pinprick of Destruction gathered on the knuckles of her right hand, no bigger than the head of a pin.

She slapped the flat of her hand against the side of Kiera’s armored forearm.

SNAP!

A tiny dark spark jumped from her skin and the lightning wrapped around Kiera’s arm simply ceased to exist.