Chapter 882: The Amazonia Forest [Bonus - ]

Chapter 882: The Amazonia Forest [Bonus Chapter]

WHOOSH!

Kara’s cloak cracked like a whip in the howling wind as she flipped upright in midair, and a dense cushion of compressed air bloomed beneath her boots so suddenly that her whole body jolted to a stop.

Ten feet below her, Aki was still screaming.

Kara dove, hooked her one arm around Aki’s waist and yanked her up against her side, and the wind folded around both of them into a calm quiet bubble that cut the roar of the sky down to a soft whisper.

“AAAAAH… ah… huh…?”

Aki’s scream trailed off into a confused little squeak.

She clung to Kara’s lapel with both hands, her blue hair a wild tangled mess around her face and her heart pounding so hard that Kara could feel it through her ribs, and she slowly looked down at the endless green ocean of treetops hanging ten thousand feet beneath her shoes.

“We… we stopped,” she breathed.

“We stopped,” Kara agreed, patting her back with the flat of her gloved hand. “You can let go of my collar now, sweet Aki… You’re going to rip the buttons off.”

Aki didn’t let go. If anything, her fingers dug in a little tighter.

Kara let her be and turned her gaze down toward the hazy green horizon, where thin threads of mist rose out of the canopy like smoke from a thousand quiet fires.

She blinked once slowly.

’What was that about…?’

She replayed it in her head.

The suspicious sweetness, the polite little tilt of the mask, the offer of free plane tickets… and then the snap, and then nothing but open sky and a long drop.

’Was she just trying to catch me off guard…?’ Kara thought, frowning faintly. ’If she wanted to prank me by teleporting us to Amazonia, then why even bother? I can fly… She knows I can fly… Dropping me out of the sky is like trying to drown a fish.’

A slow crooked smile crept across Kara’s lips.

’Well. Two can play that game, shorty…’

She let the wind ease her down toward the canopy in a long lazy spiral with her black cloak trailing behind her like a banner, and hummed under her breath.

“I hope she liked my parting gift~” Kara said cheerfully.

Aki finally lifted her face out of Kara’s collar and blinked up at her with wide blue eyes.

“Parting gift…? What parting gift? Kara, what did you do?”

Kara just smiled wider and didn’t answer.

…

Two thousand miles to the north, the cold black water off the western edge of the Citadel of the Outer Threshold churned and foamed against the basalt breakers.

And in the middle of it, flailing wildly between two crashing swells, was a very small figure in very heavy midnight-silk robes.

SPLASH!

SPLASH!

“BLBLBLBL… KARA… WHITE…!”

Number 5 kicked and thrashed and clawed at the waves, her soaked robes dragging at her like lead weights and her hood plastered flat against the back of her head.

She’d snapped her fingers and felt the sweet glorious rush of finally winning… and in that very same instant, a cold rough hand of air had wrapped around her own body and flung her straight off the edge of the landing platform into the ocean.

’She did this,’ Number 5 seethed, spitting out a mouthful of brine. ’She saw the snap coming and she threw me in the sea at the exact same time… That one-armed, smirking insufferable… In front of my own platform… In the middle of the Council’s own waters…’

Another wave smashed into her face.

SPLOOSH!

“BLARGH…!”

That was enough.

She jammed two trembling fingers together, and with a sharp warp of space, she vanished out of the water.

POP!

Number 5 reappeared on the landing terrace in a burst of salty spray, dripping from every inch of her robes.

Water streamed off her sleeves and poured out of the hem of her hood in little waterfalls, and a long strand of green seaweed dangled from the edge of her mask and flopped against her chin.

Slow deliberate clapping echoed across the platform.

CLAP! CLAP! CLAP!

Number 5 froze.

Leaning against the doorway of the transit hall with their arms folded and their mask tilted at an angle that somehow radiated pure, unfiltered amusement was Number 7.

“Well,” Number 7 said, their voice dry as sand. “That was a very interesting way to see off our guests. Was the swim part of the plan, or did you improvise…?”

“Shut up,” Number 5 hissed.

“I only ask because you were gone for a while,” Number 7 went on calmly. “First you were screaming on the roof then you were tweaking on the railing, if I’m using the word correctly and now you’re decorating the landing pad with seaweed. It’s been a very full day for you.”

Number 5’s whole body went rigid, and behind the dripping porcelain mask, her face burned so red she was sure the heat would boil the seawater right off her skin.

“I am going to kill her,” she whispered, her voice shaking with pure, dripping rage. “I’m going to find a clause. I’m going to find a loophole. I’m going to file so much paperwork against Blessed Land that Kara White drowns in it, the way she drowned me…”

“You didn’t drown,” Number 7 pointed out. “You’re standing right here…”

“KARA WHITEEEEE!”

Her shriek echoed off the walls of the Spire and rolled out across the black ocean, and somewhere far below, a flock of seabirds burst off the breakers in alarm.

…

[Back In Amazonia]

Kara touched down on a thick moss-covered riverbank beneath the canopy with a soft thump of her boots, and the bubble of wind around them unfolded and drifted away.

The heat hit them like a wall.

Under the trees, the air was thick and so humid that it clung to their skin like a damp sheet.

Huge trunks wrapped in creeping vines rose all around them like the pillars of some ancient cathedral with their branches knitting together a hundred feet overhead into a roof so dense that only thin spears of golden sunlight slipped through.

A wide brown river slid lazily past beside them, and the whole forest hummed with the endless buzz and chirp of hidden things.

Aki stepped off Kara’s arm onto the soft moss, staggering a little as her legs remembered what solid ground felt like as she turned in a slow circle while her eyes went wide with wonder.

“I’ve only ever seen pictures of this place, and they don’t do it justice at all… Father would never have let me come,” she murmured, then glanced back at Kara with a spark in her eyes. “Do you know what this place used to be, Kara? Before everything changed?”

Kara tilted her head, and Aki’s eyes brightened with the sudden, eager glow of someone who’d spent a very long time reading about things she wasn’t allowed to go see.

“Before the reformation of the world, when the monsters first came pouring out and attacked everything, this was called the Amazon Forest…” Aki explained, her voice warming as she gestured up at the towering trees. “It was the biggest rainforest on the planet, and it held some of the most dangerous animals in the world… jaguars, giant snakes, poisonous frogs, river fish that could strip a cow to the bone in a minute.”

She stepped closer to the edge of the river and peered down into the murky brown water with fascination.

“Then the world broke, and after the Second King’s era, when the Suppression Engines were built, something strange happened here… The monsters that came through started crossbreeding with the animals that already lived in the forest. The old creatures mixed with the new ones, generation after generation, until the whole jungle was full of things that were half beast and half monster.” Aki looked back at Kara with a small serious smile. “That’s when they started calling it Amazonia… The really powerful monster-animals were hunted down and killed a long time ago, but there are still a lot of dangerous ones left out here. That’s part of why Valeria’s people are so strong… They grow up next to all of this.”

Kara listened with a fond amused smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.

“Look at you,” she drawled. “My sweet little Aki, the walking encyclopedia. Did you memorize the whole library, or just the parts with monsters in them?”

Aki flushed pink and puffed up her cheeks in protest.

“I was locked in a palace for most of my life with nothing to do but read, Kara. Of course I know things…”

“Mm and you never once thought of reading about dresses or royal etiquette instead?”

“I read about those too,” Aki muttered. “They were boring.”

Kara laughed, the sound rolling warm and easy through the humid air, and turned her face up toward the dense green ceiling of the canopy.

“Well, if this place is full of nasty little surprises, we’d better make sure the right person knows we’re here before something tries to eat you.” She raised her one hand toward the sky, and a dark knot of wind and shadow began to churn above her palm. “Let’s let Valeria know we’ve arrived…”

The knot swelled, spun faster and faster, and then shot straight up through the canopy like a rocket.

FWOOSH!

It punched through the leaves a hundred feet overhead and burst high above the treetops with a deafening rolling detonation.

KABOOOM!

The whole jungle flinched.

Birds exploded out of the treetops in shrieking clouds, and somewhere deep in the forest, something enormous let out a startled bellowing roar.

A ring of black smoke and shadow spread across the sky above the canopy like a huge dark flower, impossible to miss for miles in every direction.

Aki covered her ears with both hands and stared up at Kara in horror.

“Kara! That was so loud! You probably woke up half the forest!”

“That was the idea,” Kara said, brushing a leaf off her shoulder. “Now she knows exactly where we are… Come on, let’s head further in and meet her halfway.”

They set off along the riverbank, picking their way over twisting roots and patches of slick mud and Aki kept falling behind every few steps.

The third time she stopped, Kara turned around to find her crouched beside a rotting log with her nose six inches from a beetle the size of a fist.

It had a shell that shimmered blue and purple like oil on water, and Aki was watching it crawl over the bark with an expression of delight.

“Kara, look at this one,” she whispered, not wanting to scare it. “Its shell changes color depending on the angle… And did you see the ones with the glowing antennae back there? I think I like bugs… Just a little. They’re so strange and pretty, and every single one of them is different.”

Kara stared down at the First Princess of the World crouching in the mud in her silk dress, cooing at a giant beetle.

“Aki,” she said slowly, “you do realize this isn’t exactly something a princess is supposed to do, right? Normal princesses scream and climb on chairs when they see a bug…”

“I’m not a normal princess,” Aki said primly, still watching the beetle. “I punched my sister in the face after she surrendered, plus I rejected the middle name too.”

Kara opened her mouth, closed it, and burst out laughing.

“That’s fair,” she conceded, still chuckling. “That’s very fair.”

Aki finally straightened up, brushed off her knees and stepped toward the edge of the river to get a better look at a cluster of glowing water lilies.

The surface of the water bulged and Kara’s eyes snapped toward it.

SPLAAASH!

The river exploded.

A massive scaled head burst out of the brown water in a geyser of mud and spray, a crocodilian monster as big as a city bus with jaws lined in jagged yellow teeth as long as Kara’s forearm.

Its eyes glowed a sickly yellow as it lunged straight at Aki with its jaws flung open wide enough to swallow her whole.

…Kara moved first.

She was beside Aki in a blur of black wool, her arm already around Aki’s waist, and she threw them both sideways in a burst of wind as the monster’s jaws slammed shut on empty air where Aki had been standing half a heartbeat earlier.

CRUNCH!

They skidded to a stop twenty feet away on the moss.

Aki was white as a sheet and clutching Kara’s sleeve, and the crocodilian thrashed in the shallows with its huge tail churning the river into brown foam as it whipped its head around to find them again.

’Rude…’ Kara thought.

She set Aki down behind her, raised her hand toward the river and closed her fingers into a fist.

The water obeyed.

The whole river around the monster heaved upward in a churning column, wrapping around its armored body like a giant fist of liquid, and with a violent twist of Kara’s wrist, it ripped the beast straight out of the water and hurled it onto the bank.

WHAM!

The crocodilian crashed into the mud in a shower of torn roots with its stubby legs kicking at the air.

It roared in fury and twisted itself upright, but Kara was already walking toward it with a dark gleam in her purple eyes as dark water that was still swirling around her fingertips gathered into a single lethal spear of pressurized river.

“Sorry, big guy,” she said lightly. “But you tried to eat my princess.”

She drew her arm back for the final strike—

“Stop…”

The voice rang out through the trees, deep and so commanding that the whole jungle seemed to fall silent around it.

Kara paused with her hand still raised and turned her head.

Standing on a thick root at the edge of the clearing was a woman.

She was tall… taller than Kara by a good few inches, perhaps as tall as Silas in his own body.

Her skin was a deep rich dark brown that glowed in the thin spears of jungle sunlight and she was beautiful in a sharp dangerous way, with high cheekbones and steady dark eyes that didn’t so much as flicker at the sight of a one-armed stranger and a furious river monster.

She also wasn’t wearing a single stitch of clothing… She stood there completely bare beneath the canopy with nothing but a few beads strung around her wrist and a smear of river mud along her calf, as calm and unbothered as if the jungle itself were all the clothing she’d ever needed.

’Oh,’ Kara thought, blinking once. ’Oh… Okay then.’

Behind her, Aki made a tiny strangled noise and slapped both hands over her own eyes.

In her right hand, she held a long wooden staff carved with curling patterns, and the gemstone set into its tip was glowing a soft, pulsing green.

She didn’t look at the crocodilian though, she looked straight at Kara and the glow on her staff grew brighter and brighter, until it lit the whole clearing a deep emerald green.

“You poacher… You won’t be forgiven.” The woman said. “Domain.”

With that, the whole world turned white.