Chapter 878: Aki Is Feeling Vengeful? [Bonus - ]
Chapter 878: Aki Is Feeling Vengeful? [Bonus Chapter]
The lightning vanished without a hiss or a single stray spark, erased so cleanly that Kiera’s bare white gauntlet was left hanging in the empty air.
Kiera’s golden eyes flickered.
For one split second, pure bewilderment crossed her face. Her lightning, the pride of her Yamato training, had been snuffed out like a candle dropped into a bucket of water the instant it touched her sister’s skin.
’What…?’
But Kiera was no amateur so she didn’t stumble or pull back to think about it.
The moment her right hand was neutralized, her left leg was already swinging up in a vicious roundhouse aimed straight at Aki’s temple.
The wind around her hips roared to life and poured down into the sole of her boot, sharpening into a curved blade of compressed air.
’Gale Fang!’
The kick tore through the air with a blade of wind riding its edge, sharp enough to cut through a steel girder.
SWOOSH!
Aki snapped her left forearm up and met it head-on.
THUD!
The impact shook the ground and threw a ring of dust across the blast-curbs.
Aki’s new bones held firm against the weight of it, and her arm didn’t budge an inch.
’Heavy,’ she thought, feeling the sting race up to her elbow. ’That feels good…’
Kiera didn’t even put her foot back down.
She spun in midair off the rebound of the block, twisting her whole body around, and brought her right heel crashing down toward Aki’s collarbone in a brutal axe kick.
“Father’s mistake!” she snarled as fresh violet lightning flared along her calves. “You think playing in a trial for a week makes you a warrior?! You’re still the useless one who stood in the corner smiling while everyone pitied you!”
Aki dropped low.
The axe kick slammed into the dirt beside her shoe and shattered the spirit-stone into jagged shards.
CRASH!
Aki came up out of her crouch already moving, driving a short vicious elbow at Kiera’s ribs with a razor-thin film of void-static coating her arm.
Kiera twisted violently in midair and let the wind throw her three feet backward, barely clearing the arc. The edge of her combat suit brushed the dark static as it passed, and an inch of reinforced ballistic fabric silently disappeared, leaving a perfectly smooth crescent cut out of her side.
She landed on the balls of her feet, skidding across the crushed stone with her breath coming fast and sharp.
She looked down at the missing fabric at her waist.
And she understood.
Aki was holding back.
Her elder sister had the power to wipe her off the face of the earth, and she was deliberately keeping it on a leash, trading blows like this was some sparring match.
The insult burned hotter than any lightning Kiera had ever called.
’She’s going easy on me,’ Kiera’s thoughts screamed, her jaw clenching so hard it ached. ’On ME…’
“Are you mocking me?!” she spat.
“I’m being nice,” Aki said, rolling her wrist. “You should be grateful, little sister. If I stopped being nice, there wouldn’t be enough of you left for Father to scold.”
Kiera’s face twisted.
“DIE!”
She blurred again.
This time she didn’t move in straight lines. She turned into a howling storm of violet light and cutting wind, darting across the scorched earth in jagged zig-zags that left flickering afterimages hanging in the air behind her.
She came in from the left with a palm strike laced with pressurized air.
Aki pivoted and slapped it aside, and a flicker of destruction erased the blade of wind before it could bite.
FWIP!
Kiera dropped low and swept a lightning-charged leg across the dirt at Aki’s ankles.
Aki jumped clean over it with her blue dress billowing, and drove her heel down toward Kiera’s shoulder.
“Ugh—!”
Kiera threw herself onto her back, planted both palms in the dirt and blasted wind straight into the ground, rocketing herself backward and rolling back to her feet just before Aki’s heel cratered the stone where she’d been.
CRUNCH!
Kiera charged straight back in and snapped a lightning jab at her face, and Aki swatted it aside with the back of her hand.
CRACKLE!
Kiera didn’t stop.
She whipped her other hand across in a flat arc and a blade of wind came screaming at Aki’s throat however Aki caught it with two fingers and erased it in a puff of destruction before it could touch her skin.
’She just keeps on spamming it…’
FWIP!
Kiera spun on her heel and threw a back-fist crackling with violet sparks, and Aki leaned back and let it pass an inch from her nose. A strand of her blue hair drifted down between them, sliced clean through.
’Fast,’ she thought, her blood singing. ’She’s so fast… I love it.’
She was grinning.
Every strike that came at her was faster and meaner than the last, and every single one made her want to hit back harder.
All those years of standing in the corner… All those years of smiling politely while people whispered about her… All those times after the summit, picturing Kiera sitting on that knee, and now here she was, right in front of her, close enough to touch.
’Come on,’ Aki thought. ’Give me more… Give me everything you’ve got so I can take it away from you.’
Every time Kiera threw a bolt of lightning or a shearing gust of wind, Aki’s hands moved with calm terrifying precision, catching each strike with tiny pops of Destruction and snuffing it out before it could build.
She held her ground through dozens of high-speed exchanges, and not one drop of sweat touched her brow but Kiera’s speed was real.
She’d spent most of her life in the mountains of Yamato doing nothing but fighting, training her body to react to the tiniest twitch of an opponent’s muscles, and she was watching…
She saw the rhythm.
She saw that Aki needed half a heartbeat to bring the destruction to the surface of her skin, and that she was using her eyes to place each tiny erasure so Kiera gave her something to look at.
She lunged in shoulder-first with a huge crackling ball of purple lightning swelling in her left palm, and shoved it straight at Aki’s face.
Aki raised her right hand to erase it—
The ball was hollow.
It was a thin empty shell of lightning with nothing inside it, and before Aki’s destruction could touch it, Kiera let it collapse and dropped her whole body to the dirt.
A burst of wind shot her forward, sliding beneath Aki’s raised arm like an oiled snake, and she popped up on Aki’s right side… right in her blind spot.
Her right fist was clenched tight with no lightning at all, just every ounce of muscle and Yamato training she had.
WHAM!
Kiera’s fist cracked cleanly across the side of Aki’s jaw.
The sound echoed through the arena like a sledgehammer hitting an oak beam.
Aki’s head snapped sideways and her balance broke, and the force of it threw her off her feet.
She skidded twenty yards across the scorched ground with her heels carving two smoking ruts in the earth before she dug her palms into the dirt and dragged herself to a stop near the northern blast-curb.
A thin trickle of bright red blood ran from the corner of her lip and dripped onto the blue silk at her collar.
Silence fell over the field.
In the center of the arena, Kiera stood with her feet planted wide and her high ponytail swaying against her neck with the wind curling gently around her boots.
She was breathing hard.
There was dust on her cheek and a smooth crescent missing from her suit but she was standing and Aki was on her knees, and that was all that mattered.
Slowly, Kiera raised the back of her gloved hand and wiped a smear of dust and sweat from her upper lip.
Her golden eyes burned with cruel satisfaction as she looked across the field at her sister kneeling in the dirt.
’There,’ she thought. ’That’s where you belong…’
She let the moment stretch, savoring every second of it, letting the whole Council see exactly who was standing and who was not.
“Is that all the trial gave you, big sister?”
Aki stayed low against the scorched earth for two beats of her heart with her fingers spread flat on the cracked basalt.
The grit bit into her palms, and the left side of her jaw throbbed with a clean hot ache.
It was the honest sting of an actual punch, thrown by someone who actually wanted to hurt her, and somehow that made it the best thing she’d felt all morning, well aside being carried by Kara of course.
’I think I got too caught up in my thoughts… It’s my first time actually being this vengeful, is this what Ther’Abella feels after Silas bullies her all the time?’
A soft breathy sound slipped out between her teeth then another.
Aki pushed herself up off the ground in one smooth motion.
She rolled her shoulders and shook the dust off her dress, then lifted the back of her hand and casually wiped the blood from the corner of her mouth with her thumb and she laughed.
It came bubbling up out of her throat, warm and bright and thrilled, with nothing frightened in it at all.
“Is that all?” Aki said, tilting her head, her blue eyes sparkling. “You put a fake lightning ball, a wind slide and a full-body pivot into that punch, Kiera… and my jaw didn’t even click.”
Across the field, Kiera’s golden eyes narrowed into thin lethal slits.
She didn’t laugh. A vein pulsed at her temple, and her breath hissed through her teeth like steam escaping a cracked pipe.
“Arrogant little…” she snarled, dropping her hips into a low predatory crouch. “You took one clean hit and now you think you’re made of iron? Let’s see how much you laugh when I snap your collarbone!”
The ground under her boots exploded.
’Gale Step… Twin Surge!’
Two howling torrents of compressed air wrapped around her shins and fired her forward like a bullet, leaving smoking craters in the stone where she’d been standing.
WHOOSH!
She appeared two feet to Aki’s left with her body already twisting, her right arm cocked back with violet lightning racing from her shoulder down to her fingertips and gathering into five shrieking needle-sharp talons of crackling plasma.
’Thunder Claw!’
CRACKLE!
The talons drove straight at the soft pocket under Aki’s arm where no armor could ever reach.
Aki had spent her time in the Sovereign Realm reading strikes from creatures whose joints bent the wrong way and even plants as well…
Kiera was fast, frighteningly fast, but she was still human. Her hips shifted before her weight moved while her shoulder dropped a hair before her elbow straightened.
Aki read the line of the strike before the lightning had even finished gathering.
She pivoted on the ball of her right foot and turned her body ninety degrees.
The talons ripped through the air where her ribs had been half a heartbeat earlier, the heat singeing the edge of her sleeve, and in the same breath, Aki’s right hand drove forward in a short brutal palm strike with a tiny dense pebble of mana packed into the heel of it.
’That one’s for the lap…’ she thought, grinning with her teeth.
THUD!
The power snuffed out the lightning on Kiera’s arm, and the raw strength of Aki’s rebuilt muscles slammed into her shoulder like a battering ram.
POP!
Kiera’s shoulder tore out of its socket with a sickening crunch, and a sharp choked gasp burst out of her.
The force of it spun her all the way around in midair, but her Yamato instincts kicked in before the pain could take hold.
As she turned, she lashed her good left heel backward in a blind mule kick and blasted wind through the sole of her boot, rocketing herself away from Aki’s reach.
BOOM!
The blast threw Aki’s blue hair back over her shoulders and forced her to plant her feet against the shockwave.
Kiera landed thirty paces away on the balls of her feet, skidding across the scorched basalt.
Her right arm hung limp and wrong at her side.
“Does it hurt?” Aki called across the field, flexing her fingers. “I’m sorry, little sister. I’d say it was an accident, but I’d be lying… I’ve wanted to do that since the moment I saw you.”
Kiera stared at her.
For the first time since the duel began, something flickered behind her golden eyes that wasn’t contempt… It was small and gone almost instantly, but Aki saw it.
Fear.
’There it is,’ Aki thought, and her smile widened.
Without a word or a whimper, Kiera turned and slammed her dislocated shoulder against the titanium blast-curb behind her.
CRUNCH!
The joint forced itself back into its socket with a wet snap.
Kiera’s face had gone pale and sweat was beading on her forehead, but her golden eyes burned with pure murderous hatred.
She didn’t even stop to breathe.
The Second Princess crossed her forearms in front of her chest and clawed her fingers into the air, and twin cyclones of screaming wind began to spin up around her elbows, roaring like a pair of typhoons.
“You dare touch me with that filthy hand?!” Kiera shrieked, her voice cracking off the barrier dome. “You were nothing three weeks ago… You were an empty Unawakened leftover that Father couldn’t even stand to look at!”