Chapter 569: Devil [II / Bonus - ]

Chapter 569: Devil [II / Bonus Chapter]

FSH!

An administrative beacon flared from the shattered dust where Safira’s emergency transponder had been pulverized, registering the total death of the combatant.

Tariq did not move and he did not scream either.

He simply sat in the dust, staring down at the glass eye resting in his severed arm with his mind completely hollowed out by the horror.

Thirty feet above, Seraphina dropped lightly to the sand making her boots land with a soft crunch on the cooling shale.

She rolled her right shoulder, working out a small stiffness in her trapezius, and let out a long satisfied sigh that puffed into the hot wind.

"Ah..." Seraphina murmured softly, a genuine smile spreading across her porcelain face. "It has been quite a long time since I actually killed someone."

She paused as a sudden flush of pink bloomed across her pale cheeks.

Her ruby eyes darted nervously toward the hovering broadcast probes in the sky, her fingers coming up to tuck another lock of crimson hair behind her ear.

Her heart fluttered with sudden flustered anticipation.

’Will Silas find that cool...?’ Seraphina wondered, biting her lower lip with quiet girlish delight.

Behind her, the ruined dunes burned in silence.

The desert wind swept low over the vitrified basin, whining through the cooling cracks of the red glass crater like steam escaping an iron boiler.

Seraphina stood poised on the crystalline rim with her crimson hair settling against the dark leather mantle of her strike cuirass as the soft self-satisfied smirk playing across her lips suddenly wavered and went completely stiff.

She lowered her hand from her ear, the sudden rush of romantic vanity chilling down into an unpleasant prickle of real-world consequence.

’Wait,’ Seraphina thought, her jaw tightening. ’Silas wouldn’t like this.’

He looked like someone that hadn’t killed much, would he be able to understand this feeling...? Not at all!

’He is too soft in that regard,’ she realized with the warmth draining out of her cheeks. ’If he saw me shatter her like a cup, he’s going to scowl. He’s going to cross his arms and give me an unbearable lecture about respecting and not killing unnecessarily...’

Worse yet, the broadcast.

Over a billion people were watching this feed across every country district on Earth.

The optical lenses floating in the violet sky above weren’t just piping images to the high-ranking delegates in the Great Assembly... they were streaming directly into public viewing squares, private residences, everywhere that could view a stream.

’What if Silas’s younger sister is watching this right now?’

The thought struck her ribs like an unpadded sparring blow.

Seraphina knew Silas had family.

If that little girl was seated in front of a living room screen, watching her prospective future sister-in-law obliterate an opponent into thousands of bloody glass teeth on global television, would she be terrified?

Would she run to Silas in tears, telling him that his future consort was a bloodthirsty psycho who butchered people for sport?

The flush of pride vanished entirely as the bright cruel smile faded from Seraphina’s face, replaced by a cold irritated scowl.

’This entire mess could have been avoided if they had just surrendered or died cleanly on the initial drop,’ she rationalized, her ruby eyes narrowing into dangerous smoldering slits. ’Dragging this out makes it look untidy... It makes me look undisciplined.’

She turned her head slowly, looking down into the dust at the bottom of the slope.

Prince Tariq Al-Mansur knelt in the coarse grit with his hands gone.

The blackened cauterized stumps of his wrists hung limp against his thighs, leaking thin trickles of dark marrow that hissed and dried instantly against the hot sand.

His head hung low, his shoulders trembling in small violent spasms as his golden eyes stared through the single unblinking glass eye of Safira resting on his forearm.

Seraphina stepped off the glass rim, her combat boots crunching softly over the cooling shale as she stalked down toward him.

"Well, Prince?" she asked. "Are you just going to sit there in the dirt leaking on yourself, or are you going to stand up and avenge the woman you love?"

Tariq’s breathing hitched violently.

His bloodshot pupils dilated, trembling within the dark circles of his kohl-stained eyelids as he jerked his chin upward.

’How did she know...?’ Tariq’s mind raced in nauseating circles.

Their relationship had been a state secret.

In the rigid, dynastic hierarchy of the Sun Court, a royal prince of the direct bloodline was forbidden from taking the daughter of an administrative vice president as anything more than a low-ranking concubine.

They had hidden their vows behind the heavy tapestries of the eastern palaces for four years and they had never spoken of it aloud outside of ward-shielded chambers...

Seraphina’s smile returned, though this time it was lacking any sort of humor like a mocking line that cut straight to the bone.

"Oh, please," Seraphina scoffed, rolling her eyes with exasperation. "Do you think you two were subtle? The desperate screams? The way she melted her own marrow into the sand just to buy you ten seconds of breathing room? It was practically a doomed romance so come on... Get on your feet and prove that your feelings are worth something. Show me that you have half the spine my fiancé has."

Tariq’s jaw twitched, his teeth grinding together so hard a hairline fracture shot through his remaining molar.

"Your... fiancé...?"

"Silas," Seraphina said, pronouncing the name with the unquestioned gravity of the King reading a decree. "If I were the one lying shattered across this crater, Silas wouldn’t be sitting in the dust sniveling like an abandoned puppy... He would have torn this entire basin down to the bedrock by now. He would have dragged your corpse three leagues across the salt flats just to use your ribs as firewood and he wouldn’t hesitate for half a second. So what’s your excuse?"

Tariq trembled, the rage and humiliation boiling through his veins until his vision blurred red.

’Who is this Silas...?!’ Tariq screamed internally, his mind fracturing under the weight of the name. ’Who on this earth is she talking about?!’

Inside the Grand Assembly Chamber, the silence was suffocating.

Up along the high southern mezzanine, Matriarch Etilga Bloom sat rigid in her high-backed velvet chair with her lace-trimmed fan hovering an inch from her nose.

SMACK!

Etilga’s free hand rose, slapping her own forehead with an audible exasperated crack that turned the heads of three Albion ministers sitting two rows down.

’Is this girl completely out of her mind...?’ Etilga groaned internally, her fingers dragging down her temple in mortification. ’She is standing on a live, multi-continent broadcast feed, representing the honor of our bloodline before the High Council, and she is openly shouting the name of a commoner from Valoria City as if he were an anointed king... Does she want everyone to think House Bloom has lost its collective senses?!’

Etilga blew a slow hot breath through her nostrils, forcing her posture back into immaculate alignment.

Still... she had to admit, the execution had been magnificent.

The Matriarch’s fan dropped slightly, revealing her dark red lips curved into a sharp sneer.

She flicked her tongue lightly across her upper lip with her gaze sliding across the tiered chamber toward the delegation from Khemet.

Pharaoh-President Menes Al-Mansur sat completely motionless.

His heavy golden headdress hung slightly askew, his dark sun-weathered hands resting limp and open upon the celestial marble table.

The color had drained from his face, leaving him looking hollow and broken... the look of an monarch who had just watched his bloodline’s future shattered into decorative parlor glass before the eyes of the entire world.

’Magnificent,’ Etilga purred within the privacy of her thoughts, a shiver of dark sadistic pleasure running down her spine. ’That look... That beautiful, vacant stare of a man who has lost everything and finally accepted that the world does not care about his pride. That is the exact expression I want to carve onto Kara White’s face when I get some alone time with her.’

It was a look that always did something strange to her blood.

It was, in fact, one of the only reasons she had kept her own husband around for thirty years.

He had that exact same pathetic defeated look whenever she stripped him of his budget allowances.

Down in Sector Forty-Four, the temperature began to rise again.

FSSSSSSSSSH!

A tight whistling crown of incandescent crimson flame ignited around Seraphina’s right hand with the distortion bending the desert horizon behind her fingers as the air grew thin, smelling of pure heat.

Tariq did not look away.

The Second Prince of Khemet looked directly into the roaring core of her solar flame with his bloodshot eyes going wide and lacking a look of terror.

Seraphina paused with a flicker of genuine surprise catching in her chest.

’Look at that,’ she thought, her heart giving an involuntary thud. ’Not an ounce of fear... The boy has actually accepted his death.’

Her lips curled into an eager grin.

A warrior who looked into the furnace without closing his eyes was a warrior worth extinguishing.

It was an insult to keep him waiting.

"Good," Seraphina whispered, her core surging to deliver the final strike. "At least you’ll die like—"

WHOOSH!

The sand beneath Tariq’s knees simply vanished as his entire physical body liquefied into an explosive, churning vortex of abrasive silica, plunging straight down into the desert floor.

The violent displacement threw a blinding sixty-foot dust storm directly into Seraphina’s face, whipping coarse yellow grit across her eyes!

Seraphina blinked, spitting a mouthful of dry dirt with her fist still burning with unused fire as she stared at the empty hole.

"Are you serious?!" she screamed into the wind, her voice cracking with pure incredulous disgust. "You ran away?!"

Thirty yards away, beneath the crust of the earth, Tariq was tearing through the silica like a runaway bullet shell.

’Devil!’ Tariq’s mind screamed, panic and adrenaline flooding his channels with sickening force. ’She is not human! That woman is a primordial calamity stuffed into an aristocratic skin!’

He wasn’t suicidal.

That dead-eyed stare had not been acceptance... It had been the cold calculation of a predator waiting for the hunter to lower their guard.

He knew he couldn’t survive another direct physical exchange since his hands were gone and his armor was ruined but the desert was vast, and as long as he was moving through the silica, he still had a board to play.

RUMBLE-CRACK!

As he rocketed through the subterranean strata, Tariq poured every drop of his remaining ancestral mana into his severed limbs.

The loose sand flowing past his forearms was drawn inward by his will, compacting, calcifying, and fusing into dense five-fingered quartz appendages that snapped onto his wrist stumps with stone-on-stone clicks.

They weren’t real flesh, but they were reinforced with earth-mana and capable of channeling runic arts.

’I will avenge you, Safira...’ Tariq swore, his teeth grinding together in the dark.

He remembered the cool night breezes of the palace gardens, he remembered her fingers running through his hair under the shadow of the desert obelisks and he remembered the solemn unshakeable promise he had made beneath the stars that they would rule the Sun Court together, side by side, free from the shadow of his elder brothers.

’I cannot die here like a dog,’ he told himself with tears leaking from his eyes and washing into the sand. ’I wear her down... I set the snares... I bleed her core dry, and then I take her head.’

As he moved, his new quartz hands blurred, weaving somatic triggers through the silica strata.

Ten snares...

Twenty snares...

Quicksand traps, underground quartz spikes, inverted gravity wells... he laid them like mines behind his wake, priming the entire eastern corridor to detonate the moment heat brushed the surface.

He was three hundred yards out, preparing to loop around the northern bluffs to trigger the collapse...

CRACK!

The atmosphere above him ceased to exist as the air parted with a sound like ripping steel.

Every single grain of sand within fifty yards of the surface instantly calcified, flash-vitrifying into solid screaming green glass.

BOOOOOOOOOM!

A blinding meteor of pure silver-white fire crashed out of the sky as it obliterated the top thirty feet of the dune in an instantaneous, thunderous shockwave that tore the strata wide open.

Tariq was ripped out of the earth, launched twenty feet into the air by the concussive eruption and he hit the hard glass rim of the new crater, rolling violently across the superheated surface, coughing up dark lung-blood as his newly formed quartz hands scraped against the slick burning stone.

He forced his chin up, his eyes widening in paralyzed horror as standing ten paces away, floating three inches above the bubbling glass, was Seraphina Bloom.

Except she was no longer merely a prodigy of House Bloom.

She had fused.

Her vivid crimson hair had bleached into a celestial silver-white that drifted weightlessly around her skull like vaporized mercury.

Across the left side of her porcelain face, running down her jawline and burning across the bare skin of her neck, a jagged runic crest flared with radiance and the air around her wasn’t red anymore...

It was a pure white, crackling with thermal output so high that the air molecules themselves were weeping ionized plasma.

She had fused with the Primordial Fire Spirit and her regular output had just multiplied by ten.

Seraphina looked down at him through glowing silver irises, her voice carrying a deep resonance that sounded like two voices speaking in unison.

"Coward," she said softly.

The heat radiating from her skin alone began to vitrify the sand beneath Tariq’s knees.