Chapter 884: Meeting Da Silva Again [Bonus - ]

Chapter 884: Meeting Da Silva Again [Bonus Chapter]

Her teeth closed gently around the edge of his earlobe, playful and unhurried, and a satisfied hum rumbled out of her throat right against his skin.

Silas raised one eyebrow at the white sky.

’…She’s stopped fighting?’ Silas thought.

He could have thrown her off with a flick of his hips but instead, he lay there with his hands resting at her waist and let her have her moment since he was curious what this meant.

’Is there a reason she’s nibbling my ear too…?’

Three paces away, Aki snapped.

She stood frozen with her hand completely gone from her eyes now, staring at the naked centuries-old jungle woman straddling Silas’s hips and chewing on his ear like he was a piece of fruit.

Her face went past crimson and into a strange deathly calm as her blue eyes darkened.

At the edges of her irises, Destruction began to gather.

’No,’ Aki thought, and the thought was very quiet. ’Absolutely not…’

The air around her went heavy and cold.

The white floor beneath her feet began to darken, the pale shimmer curdling into a spreading stain of black that crawled outward in every direction like ink dropped into milk.

She raised her hand.

“Get,” Aki said, her voice trembling with pure furious embarrassment. “OFF HIM!”

She let it go.

Destruction poured out of her palm in a silent black wave, and wherever it touched the white, the white simply ceased to be.

Huge jagged holes tore open in the Domain, gaping wounds of nothing that spread outward in branching cracks, and the whole endless space shuddered and groaned around them like the inside of a bell being struck.

GROOOAN!

Lara’s head jerked up from Silas’s ear.

For one instant, her concentration broke.

Her jade eyes flicked toward the furious naked princess and the spreading black cracks, and her hand slipped off Silas’s chest… and in that same instant, from somewhere outside the Domain, something hit it from the other side.

KRAKOOM!

A huge crack split across the white sky.

A blade of pure force punched straight through it from the outside, and the two blows, Aki’s Destruction from within and the strike from without, met in the middle.

…The Domain shattered.

CRASH!

The white exploded into a billion glittering shards that fell away like breaking glass, and the world came rushing back all at once.

Heat slammed into them.

The roar of insects, the smell of mud and rot and river water, the green gloom of the canopy and the thin spears of sunlight all crashed back into place in the space of a heartbeat.

Silas felt the disguise snap back over his body like a coat thrown over his shoulders.

His height dropped, his face softened, his left arm vanished into an empty pinned sleeve, and the black suit and long cloak settled over him as if they’d never left.

Kara blinked up at the canopy and she was lying flat on her back in the riverbank mud.

Lara was still sitting on her hips, fully naked with both hands flat on Kara’s chest and her locs hanging down around them both.

Aki, fully dressed again in her blue silk, had flung herself across the mud at the last second and was clinging to Kara’s leg with both arms, glaring up at Lara like a furious little guard dog.

The three of them lay there in a heap tangled together in the brown mud of the riverbank.

The crocodilian, still on the bank, took one look at them and quietly slid back into the river.

’E… eh? Don’t look at me like that!’

Above them, someone cleared her throat.

Kara tilted her head back.

Standing over them, with one hand still raised from where she’d struck the Domain from the outside and faint golden mana still smoking off her knuckles, was a tall woman in a dark olive uniform with a raven-black ponytail and a jagged scar running down from her left ear into her collar.

Behind her stood a stiff young woman with an athletic build, a slender one with cornrows, and a full squad of Amazonian soldiers in jungle armor, every one of them staring at the scene in the mud with their mouths hanging open.

High Marshal-President Valeria Da Silva looked down at the First Princess of the World clinging to Lord Vespera’s leg, at Lord Vespera lying in the mud, and at the naked protector of the forest straddling Lord Vespera’s hips.

She was quiet for a very long moment.

“…Why,” she said slowly, “are the three of you spread out like this?”

For three long seconds, nobody on the riverbank moved.

The Amazonian soldiers stood frozen behind their High Marshal with their rifles half-raised, their eyes flicking between the mud, the naked woman and the Lord of Blessed Land pinned flat beneath her.

One of them, a young private near the back had gone so red under his helmet that he looked like he was about to pass out then Lara sighed like someone whose favorite meal had just been taken away.

“Valeria,” she said, without turning her head. “You always did have terrible timing…”

She pushed herself up off Kara’s chest with slow lazy grace, rising to her full height in the dappled sunlight with her locs swaying down her bare back and her gold beads clicking softly, and she didn’t bother to cover a single inch of herself.

She just stretched her arms over her head, rolled her neck until it popped and strolled back to the root where her staff had reappeared, picking it up as casually as someone collecting an umbrella.

The young private near the back let out a faint whimper and stared very hard at the sky.

Kara lay in the mud for one more second, staring up at the canopy.

’I’ve been pinned by a naked jungle goddess, rescued by a jealous princess and found by a head of state,’ she thought, ’all before lunch…’

Then she sat up.

Aki was still wrapped around her leg like a vine with her cheeks blazing and her glare fixed on Lara’s retreating back with the burning intensity of a girl who had seen far too much in the last five minutes and intended to hold a grudge about it for the rest of her life.

“Aki,” Kara said gently. “You can let go of my leg now…”

“No,” Aki said.

“She’s over there now though so you don’t need to worry.”

“I don’t care. She might come back!”

“Little bird…?”

The voice came from above them and Aki’s head jerked up.

Valeria Da Silva had lowered her hand.

The faint golden mana still smoking off her knuckles flickered and died, and the hard iron-fisted expression of the High Marshal of Amazonia cracked straight down the middle as she stared down at the girl in the mud.

She took a step closer, then another with her boots sinking into the soft riverbank and her sharp feline eyes went wide.

She could feel it.

The dense power coming off Aki’s small frame, the thrum of a fully awakened Core where there’d been nothing at all the last time they’d met and beneath it, a faint pressure that made the hairs on the back of Da Silva’s neck rise.

It was the same pressure she’d felt only once before in her life, sitting across the Grand Table from the King of the World.

“Aki,” she breathed. “Your Core… you awakened?”

Aki finally let go of Kara’s leg.

She scrambled up out of the mud, her blue dress streaked with brown, her hair a wild tangled mess and her face still flushed, and for a second she just stood there looking up at the tall scarred woman who’d answered her late-night messages for two years when nobody else in the world would then her eyes filled up, and she threw herself forward.

“Valeria!”

Da Silva caught her.

She wrapped her strong scarred arms around Aki and held her tight against her olive uniform, mud and all, with one big calloused hand cradling the back of Aki’s head.

The soldiers behind her looked at each other in total disbelief… None of them had ever seen the High Marshal hug anyone.

“I did it, Valeria,” Aki said into her shoulder, her voice wobbling. “I cleared my trial. I’m a Lord now, A real one…”

“I can feel it, little bird,” Da Silva murmured, and her rough husky voice had gone strangely soft. “I can feel every bit of it… Look at you. Look at what you’ve become.”

She pulled back just far enough to look Aki in the face, her eyes searching every inch of it, and something in her chest twisted hard.

’Well I’m glad…’

There was a sting at the back of her eyes, and Da Silva refused to acknowledge it.

“I’m proud of you,” she said gruffly instead.

Aki beamed at her through her tears, bright as the sun. Behind them, Kara climbed to her feet and brushed the mud off her black suit with her one hand, which mostly just smeared it around.

Da Silva looked up and the softness left her face like a door closing.

Her feline eyes locked onto the tall one-armed woman standing in the mud, and her jaw tightened.

The last time she’d stood this close to Lord Vespera, she’d been standing on a polished doorstep in her best uniform, halfway through a formal introduction, with a heavy oak door slammed shut three inches from her nose.

She hadn’t forgotten and she was never going to forget however Kara smiled at her looking cheerful.

“Valeria! It’s been a while. You look well.” She tilted her head thoughtfully, her eyes twinkling. “You’re not going to knock this time, are you? There aren’t any doors out here for me to close, so you’re quite safe.”

Leona made a small choking sound behind her hand while Da Silva’s eye twitched.

“You,” she said, very evenly, “slammed a door in my face, Lord Vespera. In the middle of my salute, with my own officers standing right behind me watching it happen.”

“I did,” Kara agreed cheerfully, without a single trace of shame, brushing a clump of mud off her sleeve. “It was a very nice door, too. Solid oak and you looked very official standing there with your fist on your chest… honestly, it’s one of my favorite memories.”

Da Silva stared at her, and something hot climbed up the back of her neck.

She’d been shot at, stabbed and nearly eaten by river leviathans however none of it had ever gotten under her skin the way this one-armed woman did with a single smile… and that was the problem.

Because it wasn’t only anger climbing up her neck.

Kara stood there in her ruined suit, covered in mud from the knees down, her black hair tangled and a leaf stuck behind one ear, and she still looked like she owned the whole jungle.

She’d walked out of a broken Domain without a scratch on her… she’d also talked back to the King of the World and lived.

There was something in the easy careless way she carried herself, the shameless confidence of it, that made Da Silva’s pulse do something embarrassing.

’Damn it,’ she thought. ’Not again…’

She’d spent twenty years surrounded by soldiers and politicians, and not a single one of them had ever made her feel like this.

She’d once joked that if she could find a man with half the balls of this woman, she’d have been pregnant five years ago but it didn’t seem like much of a joke anymore.

Da Silva cleared her throat sharply and squared her shoulders.

“Welcome to the Federal Union of Amazonia, Lord Vespera,” she said, with icy formality, as if the words cost her something to say.

“Thank you, Valeria,” Kara said warmly, and smiled at her like the door had never happened at all.

Behind Da Silva, the stiff young woman with the athletic build stepped forward and slammed her fist across her chest.

THUD!

“Lieutenant Maya Da Silva!” she barked. “Purple Core, peak Second Stage, Earth affinity! It’s an honor to see you again, Lord Vespera!”

The slender woman with the cornrows stepped up beside her and gave a much quieter salute, her hazel eyes flicking from the mud to Kara to the naked woman leaning on her staff with a faint dry curve at the corner of her mouth.

’Why are they reintroducing themselves… We met not too long ago?’ Kara blinked, or did they think that she had a poor memory…? ’Well I did forget them…’

“Captain Leona,” she said. “Blue Core, Wind and Water. Also honored.”

She paused. “And slightly confused, if I’m being honest, ma’am.”

“…About what?”

“About why the three of you were wrestling in the mud with the Forest Mother.”

Beside her, Maya was still standing at rigid attention, but her eyes kept drifting to Kara with an expression that hovered somewhere between awe and hero worship.

She’d worn the armor Lord Vespera had given her in the tournament every day since, polishing it every night until it shone, and seeing the woman who’d made it lying in the mud under a naked jungle legend was doing something very strange to her worldview.

’She’s even more impressive up close,’ Maya thought, swallowing. ’Even covered in mud… Don’t stare, Lieutenant… Do not stare.’

She stared while every soldier on the riverbank flinched at the name.