Chapter 879: Say It, Little Sister [Bonus - ]
Chapter 879: Say It, Little Sister [Bonus Chapter]
The wind around Kiera’s arms thickened and turned an opaque storm-grey, howling at three hundred miles an hour.
’Vortex Lance!’
SHWIP!
Three spinning javelins of solid compressed air tore out of the cyclones and screamed across the arena, ripping deep trenches through the stone as they closed in on Aki from three different directions.
Aki laughed out loud.
’Leftover, she says…’ she thought, and her heart was singing. ’Then let’s see how the leftover feels when it breaks your ribs.’
She sprinted straight into the attack without weaving or backing off an inch.
She met the first javelin dead center and snapped her left hand out to swat the tip of the spinning vortex with her bare palm.
A tiny flicker of destruction bloomed across her knuckles, and the three-foot spear of pressurized wind simply stopped existing, dissolving into nothing right in front of her fingers.
The second javelin came in low at her knee.
Aki vaulted clean over it in a tight acrobatic flip, and it passed an inch under her shoes before slamming into the far blast-curb and turning a chunk of concrete into dust.
KRAKOOM!
The third one came for her throat as she landed.
Aki didn’t even bother with magic… She brought her right forearm down like an axe and smashed straight through the shaft of the lance with raw strength alone.
CRACK!
The javelin burst apart into harmless scattered gusts that whipped her royal-blue hair into a wild halo around her face as her shoes touched the dirt.
She closed the distance before Kiera could even start her next spell and Aki appeared inside her guard with her blue eyes blazing.
“Leftover?” She whispered, sweet as honey and terrifyingly close. “Let’s see about that.”
Up above, Kara felt a chill run down her spine as she blinked.
’Aki is acting pretty terrifying… Is Ther’Abella rubbing off on her?’ Kara thought, Elowynn was definitely not acting like this. ’Or Brida…? I know I told Brida to go over and teach them about fighting but still, isn’t this a bit too much…?’
She stepped into the pocket and drove her left fist straight into Kiera’s solar plexus.
’That one’s for every pitying look you enjoyed at the summit…!’
WHAM!
The air exploded out of Kiera’s lungs in a wet ragged spray. Her eyes bulged, and the white chestplate of her combat suit cracked straight down the middle under the weight of the blow.
Kiera stumbled backward with her mouth gaping in a silent airless gasp with her heels dragging through the dust however Aki didn’t let her fall.
She stepped in, caught Kiera’s collar with her left hand and yanked her younger sister violently forward, straight into a savage rising knee.
’And that one’s for sitting on his knee while I stood there with nothing…!’
CRUNCH!
The knee slammed into Kiera’s breastplate with a sound like a shell going off in a tunnel.
Kiera shrieked as the blow lifted her off her feet and launched her twenty feet into the air.
She tumbled through the grey sky, spinning wildly, then crashed into the scorched earth, bounced twice across the jagged stone like a ragdoll and rolled onto her stomach.
COUGH! COUGH!
“Gah–!”
She pushed herself up on shaking blood-stained hands.
Her ponytail had come completely undone, and her blue hair hung in tangled filthy clumps across her bruised sweaty cheeks.
Her white armor was cracked across the chest and smeared with soot and blood, and every breath came out in a ragged whistling wheeze.
Her golden eyes weren’t just furious anymore.
They were unhinged… wild and manic and drowning in the unbearable humiliation of being taken apart, piece by piece, by the sister she’d mocked in front of the whole world with her appearance not too long ago.
Aki stood ten paces away and watched her get up without chasing her.
She just waited, rolling her shoulder and shaking out her fist, with her chest rising and falling in slow easy breaths.
“Get up, Kiera,” she said softly. “I’m not finished.”
“No…” Kiera hissed, her nails clawing through the dirt as she dragged herself upright. “No… NO! I am the prodigy of Yamato! I was raised in those mountains! I bled for every scrap of this power…You will NOT look down on me!”
She threw her head back toward the barrier dome and her core screamed.
Every drop of mana left in her body came roaring up to the surface all at once, in a single act of pure desperate violence, and the air within sixty yards of her went dead still then the storm detonated.
Thick jagged pillars of violet lightning erupted from her skin and arced forty feet into the air, striking the ground over and over in deafening succession.
KRAKA-KRAKA-KRAKOOM!
The wind howled around her in a screaming vortex that tore up chunks of basalt as big as car tires and ground them into powder inside the gale.
The two elements twisted together and fused into a huge boiling drill of black and violet plasma that stretched from the dirt to the very top of the barrier dome.
The dome groaned.
CREEEAK!
The hexagonal grid overhead shuddered and flashed warning amber, and the dampening pylons around the arena began to whine under the spike in pressure.
Kiera stood in the eye of the tempest with blood running from her nose and her face twisted into a feral murderous snarl, and she raised both hands toward the sky.
’Yamato Secret Art… Grand Tempest!’
The drill of lightning and wind roared to its full height and began to bend downward, chewing through the bedrock and turning stone to vapor as it went.
“DIE, YOU USELESS BITCH!” Kiera screamed, and brought both hands crashing down.
The tempest fell toward Aki like a collapsing mountain, swallowing the whole northern half of the arena in a single blinding wall of light and noise.
Aki stood thirty paces away and looked up at it as a slow breathtaking smile spread across her face.
’Now,’ she thought. ’Time for the surprise.’
For one tiny second, with the world roaring down on top of her, she wasn’t thinking about Kiera at all.
She was thinking about a tall figure leaning on a railing somewhere high above her, the one who’d tucked her hair behind her ear in that dusty tunnel and told her to have fun.
She’d spent the whole time picturing the look on Silas’s face when he finally saw this and she’d practiced it until her fingers bled just to see that look.
’Watch me,’ she thought, and her heart gave a hard happy thump. ’Please be watching…’
She reached into the empty air in front of her chest.
She didn’t pull from the earth or the sky. Aki reached into the hidden place inside her soul, into everything Ther’Abella had carved into her during those long brutal secret lessons under the misty trees of Aki’s Wonderland, all the nights the stern elf had made her try again and again until her fingers bled.
Aki opened her hand.
PING!
The sound was tiny and pure, like a single drop of water falling into a deep silver well, and somehow it cut straight through the roar of the tempest.
…And between Aki’s fingers, light was born.
Silver-white and soft and cold, nothing like the harsh glare of lightning or the dull yellow of ordinary mana.
Starlight.
It condensed out of nothing and flowed between her slender fingers like liquid mercury, humming with an deep harmony, spinning and twisting and hardening with perfect geometric precision.
In a single heartbeat, it took shape as a six-foot double-edged longsword of solid crystalline starlight settled into Aki’s hand.
The blade was half-transparent, glowing from within with a slow pulse that threw drifting silver constellations across the scorched dirt, and down the center of it ran a line of elven runes humming with quiet power.
Aki wrapped both hands around the silver hilt and stepped straight into the path of the tempest.
’Starlight Cleave!’
A crescent of pure blinding silver tore off the edge of the blade and met the howling drill of lightning and wind dead center.
FHWIP!
The silver arc cut straight through the heart of Kiera’s strongest technique like a hot wire through soft wax.
SHING!
The tempest split in half.
The wind collapsed outward, the lightning sheared away into harmless sparks that fizzled into the dirt, and the whole towering wall of plasma broke apart into drifting dying embers that floated down across the arena like falling snow.
The field went completely silent.
Kiera stood frozen with her hands still raised. Her eyes were bulging, her mouth hung open, and her knees were shaking under her torn combat suit.
The glowing silver blade in Aki’s hands reflected in her golden eyes.
’Starlight…?’ her mind screamed. ’That’s… that’s impossible… She can use Starlight…? Nobody on Earth… THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE!’
High above the field, alone at the railing of the highest ledge on the Spire, Kara went completely still.
She’d come straight back up after leaving Number 5, because there was no way she was missing this and the instant that silver-white blade took shape in Aki’s hands, her gloved fingers clamped down on the titanium rail so hard the metal dented under them.
Her purple eyes went wide.
’Wait…’ she thought, staring down through the barrier at the glowing runes along the blade. ’Wait, wait, wait… that’s Ther’Abella’s…’
The shape of it, the balance, the runes down the center… there was no mistaking it.
’That elf has been teaching her behind my back?!’ Kara’s thoughts spun in frantic loops. ’That stuck-up, usurper-hating, glaring-at-me-every-single-morning elf?! While I was running around dealing with everything else, those two were sneaking off into the trees making starlight swords?!’
She stood frozen on the ledge for two long stunned seconds then, slowly, the corners of her mouth began to curl.
The smile kept growing until it was a wide dazzling grin that split her face from ear to ear, and a rich delighted laugh rumbled up from her chest.
’So that was your surprise, little princess,’ Kara thought, shaking her head as she leaned out over the railing. ’You sly, brilliant, beautiful little thing… You kept that hidden from me the whole time.’
Down on the scorched earth, Aki didn’t stand around waiting for anyone to admire the view.
The moment the tempest split, she moved.
She shot across the thirty yards between them on nothing but the speed of her new body with her blue dress snapping behind her and the starlight sword trailing a ribbon of silver through the air.
Kiera saw her coming and tried to lift her cracked left gauntlet, scraping together the last dregs of her mana into a thin shaky shield of wind.
’Gale Wall—!’
It never finished forming…
Aki flicked the tip of the starlight blade through it, and the half-born shield came apart like wet paper.
FSSHH!
Kiera stumbled backward.
She threw a desperate lightning jab with her good hand, but there was almost nothing left in it, just a weak fizzle of violet sparks.
Aki didn’t even block it. She let it crackle harmlessly against her shoulder and kept walking forward.
“Is that all?” Aki asked sweetly. “I thought you were the prodigy of where you came from…”
“Shut up!” Kiera screamed, swinging wildly.
Aki ducked under the punch.
She shifted the glowing blade into her left hand, stepped deep into Kiera’s guard and brought her right palm up in a blinding open-handed strike straight into Kiera’s chin.
CLACK!
Kiera’s head snapped back and her teeth clicked together, and for half a heartbeat her vision went black.
Before she could stagger away, Aki’s right foot swept in behind her calves.
Aki drove her forearm across Kiera’s collarbone and turned her hips, using every last ounce of Kiera’s own stumbling momentum against her in one smooth merciless throw.
WHAM!
Kiera’s back slammed into the scorched basalt.
The impact cracked the stone beneath her and knocked the last bit of air out of her lungs in a ring of black dust.
She bounced once and lay sprawled across the dirt with her limbs limp with her mana completely drained and her vision swimming in broken circles of grey and gold.
Kiera tried to move a finger but before she could, a cold humming presence settled over her throat.
Aki stood over her.
Her long blue hair hung smoothly down her back, her chest rose and fell in slow calm breaths, and the only marks on her were a scorched collar, a singed sleeve and a thin line of dried blood at the corner of her mouth.
Resting half an inch above Kiera’s throat was the glowing tip of the starlight sword, colder than deep space and humming so close to her skin that the tiny hairs along her jaw stood on end.
Kiera stared up at it then she stared up at her sister’s face, and what she saw there made her blood run cold.
’She’ll do it,’ Kiera realized, and her whole body went numb. ’If I don’t… she’ll actually do it.’
Aki looked down at her younger sister sprawled in the dirt, and a slow honey-sweet innocent smile spread across her face.
Aki pointed the tip of her starlight blade at Kiera’s throat and smiled sweetly down at her.
“Say it, little sister.”