Chapter 891: Request In The Rio Negro Garrison [Bonus - ]
Chapter 891: Request In The Rio Negro Garrison [Bonus Chapter]
By the time the sun was setting, the sky over Nova Manaus had turned a deep burning orange, and the lights of the towers were flickering on one by one across the water like stars waking up as Maya and Leona brought them across the river to the Rio Negro Garrison.
It was a huge fortified military base on the city’s western edge, sprawling over a peninsula of reclaimed land that jutted out into the river, with high concrete walls, watchtowers, barracks, airfields, motor pools and training grounds that stretched as far as the eye could see.
Floodlights were blazing to life across the whole complex, and in the distance, rows and rows of massive cargo freighters and heavy machinery sat parked on the airfield, being loaded under the lights.
“That’s the convoy,” Leona said, nodding toward it. “Heavy extraction rigs, drilling platforms, freighters, supply haulers… everything you’ll need for the Northern Corridor. They’ve been working on it day and night since the tournament ended, and the Marshal’s been checking on it twice a day like a mother hen…”
Kara looked out at the endless lines of machinery and let out a low whistle.
’Valeria wasn’t kidding about holding up her end of the deal,’ she thought. ’Look at all that… I might actually have to be nice to her now.’
They walked through the base past squads of soldiers drilling under the floodlights, rows of armored vehicles and the deep rumble of engines being tested in the motor pools, and every soldier they passed stopped and stared at the princess, at the one-armed Lord of Blessed Land and most of all at the tall barefoot woman in the black shirt, who was still eating a skewer she’d brought back from the market.
They reached the main training ground at the center of the base, a vast square of packed red earth ringed by stands and floodlights, where a few dozen soldiers were sparring in pairs, and Maya stopped walking.
She’d been quiet for the last hour, ever since the floating market, and Leona had noticed though she kept it to herself.
Now Maya stood at the edge of the training ground with her fists clenched at her sides, staring out at the red earth under the floodlights with her jaw set in the stubborn, burning way of someone who’d been chewing on something all day then she turned around, looked straight past Kara and Lara, stopped on Aki and snapped her fist across her chest so hard it thudded against her breastplate.
THUD!
“Princess Aki,” Maya said, her voice ringing out across the training ground. “I request a spar.”
“H-huh…?”
Within seconds, the whole training ground went quiet.
The soldiers who’d been sparring in pairs across the red earth lowered their fists and their practice blades one by one and turned to stare, a sergeant on the far side stopped mid-shout with his whistle halfway to his lips, and up in the stands, a handful of off-duty soldiers who’d been watching the drills leaned forward over the railings.
Maya stood at the edge of the ground with her fist still pressed against her breastplate and her dark eyes locked on Aki, who blinked back at her in open surprise.
“A spar?” Aki asked, pointing at herself as if there might be another princess standing behind her. “With me? You want to fight me, Lieutenant?”
“With you, Your Highness,” Maya said stiffly. “With all due respect… Last night, you took my third combat frame and told me I was too slow.”
Her fist tightened against her chest.
“I’ve been a soldier since I was sixteen. I hold a Purple Core at the peak of the Second Stage, I’m the High Marshal’s sister, and I have never once in my life been told I was too slow.”
She lifted her chin. “So I’d like to know if you were right…”
Behind her, Leona sighed very quietly and pinched the bridge of her nose.
“She’s been chewing on that all day,” Leona murmured to Kara. “I could hear her teeth grinding over the fish at the market, and I’m honestly surprised she held it in this long…”
Kara looked from Maya’s stiff, burning determination to Aki’s surprised face, and a slow grin spread across her lips.
“Well, princess?” she said. “Someone’s asking you for a dance. It’d be rude to say no, don’t you think?”
Aki looked up at her, then back at Maya, and Kara watched the surprise on her face shift and sharpen and settle into an expression that was just a little bit hungry… the same look she’d worn standing across the field from Kiera.
“I accept, Lieutenant,” Aki said with a smile. “But I should probably warn you first… I’ve been in a very good mood all day.”
Maya’s eyes narrowed.
“And what’s that supposed to mean? Is that a warning, Your Highness?”
“It means I’m going to enjoy this a lot,” Aki said sweetly.
A low murmur rippled through the soldiers, and someone in the stands let out a long whistle.
Lara, who was still working on the last of her market skewer, leaned toward Kara and lowered her voice.
“I’ll bet you three grilled fish on the little thing, handsome,” she murmured.
“I’m not betting against her,” Kara said. “I’m not stupid, Lara…”
“Then I’ll bet you something else.” Lara’s jade eyes glittered. “If the little thing wins, you tell me what you sleep in.”
Kara gave her a long flat look, and Lara smiled innocently and went back to her skewer.
The sergeant with the whistle cleared the ground with a few sharp barks, and the soldiers fell back to the edges and formed a wide ring around the packed red earth under the blazing floodlights.
Maya walked to the center and stripped off her olive uniform jacket, tossed it to one of the soldiers at the edge and stood there in her pale armor with her shoulders squared and her fists loose at her sides while the ground beneath her boots had already begun to tremble faintly.
Aki stepped out to meet her.
“Hmm…”
She’d taken the beetle pin off her collar and given it to Kara to hold, now she stood across from Maya in her blue dress with her hands relaxed at her sides and her royal-blue hair stirring in the warm night air.
Leona walked to the edge of the ring, folded her arms and raised her voice.
“Rules of the training ground,” she announced. “No lethal strikes and no strikes to the Core… The spar ends on surrender, ring-out or a call from the referee, which is me.” She glanced at Aki.
“And Your Highness… I’d prefer it if the lieutenant still had all her limbs when this is over. Her sister would make me fill out forms, and I really really hate forms…”
“I’ll be careful with her, I promise…” Aki said.
“Don’t be!” Maya growled, cracking her knuckles. “I didn’t ask for careful, Your Highness. Fight me properly, or don’t bother fighting me at all…”
Leona looked between the two of them, sighed one more time and raised her hand.
“Begin!”
Maya slammed her heel into the red earth, and the ground exploded.
BOOM!
’Tremor Wave!’
A wave of stone burst up out of the ground in front of her and raced toward Aki, a ripping roaring wall of rock and dirt ten feet high, tearing a deep trench through the training ground as it came.
Aki ran straight at it with her blue dress snapping behind her, and at the last second, she jumped.
She cleared the crest of the wave by a hand’s width, twisting in midair with her hair whipping around her, and landed lightly on the far side, already sprinting toward Maya across the torn-up ground.
Maya was waiting for her.
She’d known Aki would come over the top and she’d planned for it, so the moment Aki’s feet touched the earth, she stamped her heel down again.
’Stone Fangs!’
CRACK-CRACK-CRACK!
A ring of jagged stone spikes punched up out of the dirt in a tight circle around Aki’s feet, each one as thick as a man’s arm and sharp as a spear, snapping shut toward her like the jaws of a trap.
Aki flicked her hand, and a small dark flicker of Destruction danced across her fingertips.
The spikes in front of her simply ceased to exist, and the ones behind her clacked together on empty air as she darted through the gap she’d erased.
“I saw that coming too, Your Highness!” Maya snarled, already charging.
She came across the ground like an avalanche with her whole body sheathing itself in a shell of living rock as she ran, stone crawling up her arms and over her shoulders and across her chest in thick grey plates, until she reached Aki as a hulking armored figure half again her normal size, with fists like boulders.
’Mountain Shell!’
She swung, and Aki ducked so the stone fist whistled over her head close enough to stir her hair.
WHOOSH!
Maya’s other fist came hammering down, and Aki twisted sideways as the blow cratered the earth where she’d just been standing and threw red dirt high into the air in a huge plume.
KRA-KOOM!
Aki slipped inside Maya’s guard through the falling dust and drove her palm into the stone plate over Maya’s stomach with a tiny pinprick of Destruction packed into the heel of her hand, and the stone vanished in a perfect circle a split second before her palm hit the armor underneath.
THUD!
Maya grunted and slid back a full pace, but she kept her feet, and the stone was already crawling back over the hole in her shell and sealing it shut.
“Too slow, was I…?” Maya growled, baring her teeth.
“You’re getting faster,” Aki admitted, rolling her wrist. “But I can still see you coming from a mile away, Lieutenant…”
’She’s so different from the Tournament… she seems so confident too.’
“Then see this!”
Maya ripped her stone-covered hands upward, and the torn earth around them came with her, a thousand chunks of rock and gravel lifting off the ground and hanging in the air for one frozen heartbeat.
’Gravel Storm!’
She flung her arms forward, and the whole cloud came screaming at Aki like a shotgun blast, every pebble moving fast enough to punch through a steel door.
FWOOOSH!
Aki swept her palm across the air in front of her in a single smooth arc, and a thin curtain of Destruction unfurled from her fingertips like a ribbon of black silk.
Every stone that touched it vanished, hundreds of them winking out of existence in a soft eerie hush, until the last few pebbles clattered harmlessly to the dirt at her feet.
’So this is the power of Destruction…!’
Maya was already moving again, and she slammed both stone fists into the ground at once.
’Earthen Prison!’
GRRROOOOM!
The entire training ground lurched as huge slabs of red stone tore free of the earth all around Aki and rose up on every side, a ring of towering walls that slammed together over her head and sealed shut, trapping her inside a dome of solid rock twenty feet across.
The rumble died, and the dome sat there in the middle of the torn-up ground.
Maya stood beside it breathing hard, with sweat running down her face and her stone shell cracking and crumbling off her shoulders as her Core strained, and she grinned savagely.
’Got you,’ she thought. ’Let’s see you erase your way out of three feet of solid…’
The dome went quiet in a way she didn’t like, and then, from inside it, came a sound.
PING!
It was tiny and clear, like a single drop of water falling into a silver bowl, and a thin line of soft silver-white light appeared on the surface of the stone and ran straight down the middle from top to bottom.
SHING!
The dome split in half, and the two halves toppled outward onto the red earth with a crash that shook the floodlights.
Standing in the middle of the wreckage was Aki, unhurt and unruffled, with a slender six-foot sword of glowing crystalline starlight held loosely in her right hand and silver constellations drifting lazily across the red dirt around her feet.
Maya’s grin froze on her face.
’…Starlight?’ she thought numbly. ’She can use Starlight…? The stories say only the old elves ever…’
Aki smiled at her over the glowing blade.
“You asked me to fight you properly, Lieutenant,” she said softly. “So I will…”
She crossed the ground in a streak of silver with the starlight sword trailing a ribbon of drifting light behind it, and Maya threw up her arms and dragged a wall of stone out of the earth in front of her with a roar.
’Earthen Bulwark!’
SHING!
Aki cut through it, and the wall fell apart in two clean halves as she came through the gap.
Maya swung a stone fist at her head with everything she had left, and Aki leaned back to let it pass while the starlight blade flicked out in a short neat arc that sheared through the stone shell on Maya’s forearm without even touching the skin underneath.
The stone fell away in chunks, and Maya threw a left that Aki turned aside with the flat of the blade, then stamped her heel so a spike of rock lanced up at Aki’s ribs, and Aki stepped around it like someone stepping around a puddle on the street.
“You’re holding back!” Maya shouted, swinging again and missing again. “I can feel it, Your Highness! Stop holding back on me!”
“If I stop holding back, Lieutenant, Leona will have to fill out those forms,” Aki called, ducking under the blow with her blue hair flying. “And she already told us she really hates forms, so that wouldn’t be very nice of me…”
Maya was breathing in ragged gasps now.
Her Core was screaming, her stone shell was cracked and crumbling everywhere and her arms felt like lead, while the First Princess of the World danced around her in a blue silk dress with a sword made of starlight, barely even sweating.
’She’s playing with me,’ Maya realized, and the thought hit harder than any punch. ’She’s been playing with me this whole time…’
Something hot and stubborn flared up in her chest.
’Then I’ll make her try.’