Chapter 571: A Force Of Nature [Bonus - ]

Chapter 571: A Force Of Nature [Bonus Chapter]

Seraphina let out a loud mocking scoff.

"Are you an idiot, Valerius?" she sneered. "What good is a verbal agreement in the middle of a succession exhibition...? If I promise with my mouth, what stops me from turning around and melting your coconut the second we step outside this blue circle?"

Valerius smiled, pointing a single finger up toward the floating lenses hovering outside the cerulean barrier.

"Because of that," Valerius said, his voice dropping into a quiet remarkably shrewd tone. "Over one billion active viewers. Every high magistrate, every corporate guild master, and every sovereign monarch is watching this exact frame... If the proud heir of House Bloom makes a solemn, public pledge on a live global feed and breaks it five minutes later like a petty cutpurse, your mother’s reputation will be dragged through the mud for the next twenty years as the public will assume your entire clan’s word is worthless and Etilga Bloom would rather swallow broken glass than let the world think her house lacks honor."

Seraphina stared at him with her jaw locking tight.

’Clever bastard,’ she thought, her teeth grinding together.

He had calculated the political pressure perfectly.

In private, she would have broken his nose and taken the map without a second thought but here? Under the gaze of the World Council? Her mother would skin her alive if she publicly demonstrated bad faith.

"Fine," Seraphina spat, snatching the photograph from his hand with a sharp violent yank. "House Bloom will not touch the Sterling dogs. Happy?"

"Ecstatic," Valerius beamed, raising his coconut in a cheerful toast. "Pleasure doing business with you, Lady Sera."

Seraphina spun on her heel, marching toward the edge of the cerulean barrier.

As she crossed the threshold into the open desert, she raised her left hand over her shoulder, extending her middle finger straight toward his face without looking back.

"Fuck you, Val," she called out over the wind.

BOOOOOOM!

The instant her boots cleared the Safe Zone, the mana suppression dropped and dense roaring crimson flames detonated from the soles of her combat boots.

The propulsion blasted her thirty feet into the air, clearing the low sandstone ridges in an explosive arc-like leap,

She hit the crest of a massive dune two hundred paces out, her boots carving lines through the sand before she pushed off again, rocketing forward like a red comet skipping across the desert floor.

She couldn’t sustain true flight like a Wind caster, but her explosive flame-boosted bounds covered hundreds of yards per second, tearing a straight smoking line toward the western mesa.

Back inside the cool, breezy oasis, Valerius took another slow sip of his coconut water through the reed straw.

He looked out through the blue barrier, watching the distant plume of red smoke disappear into the jagged basalt towers.

’I wonder how her scrap with the Crown Prince is going to turn out,’ Valerius mused with an amused grin touching his lips. ’Alexander is an arrogant psychopath, but Sera is a force of nature... I’ll make sure to watch the full broadcast highlights once I get back home.’

...

Four miles to the west, nestled within the deep shadow-choked throat of a narrow granite ravine...

The massive basalt towers flanking the pass rose three hundred feet into the purple sky, blocking out the harsh glare of the upper rift and casting the canyon floor in perpetual gray twilight.

Leaning casually against the flat face of a colossal cracked granite monolith was Crown Prince Alexander.

His immaculate blue hair was swept back from his brow with his regal high-bridged features completely composed.

He wore the tailored deep-indigo combat tunic of House Castellian, trimmed with gold thread and imperial star-iron filigree and clamped tightly around both of his forearms were the heavy void-black Star-Iron Suppression Rings...

The restraints that forcefully choked down two-thirds of his internal mana channels, artificially restricting his native Fourth Stage power to the Second Stage.

He held a slender polished combat rapier in his right hand, using the point to lazily carve intricate runes into the bedrock between his boots.

Despite that, Alexander did not look up when the wind shifted.

THUD!

Seraphina dropped out of the sky, landing heavily in the center of the ravine twenty paces away with her boots kicking up a sharp cloud of dry shale.

Alexander’s rapier paused mid-stroke.

He slowly lifted his chin, his cold eyes sliding over her soot-stained armor and windblown crimson hair with detached boredom.

"Turn around and walk away, girl," Alexander said. "I have zero interest in squandering my stamina on secondary house squabbles... If you leave now, I will allow you to keep your transponder intact until the final compression."

To punctuate his command, Alexander’s suppressed Second Stage core surged.

WOO!

A suffocating aura of heavy blue mana rolled outward from his frame, flattening the loose dust across the ravine and pressing against Seraphina’s shoulders with the weight of an iron ceiling.

It was a demonstration of dominance... the kind of overwhelming spiritual pressure that normally brought lesser nobles to their knees but Seraphina didn’t move.

"Heh."

Instead, her lips slowly peeled back into a wide, venomous, utterly feral smile.

"You think you’re scary, Alexander?" Seraphina whispered.

WHOOOOOSH!

Seraphina Bloom released her core.

A violent pillar of incandescent crimson and solar-white flame erupted from her frame, roaring straight up toward the basalt cliffs.

The staggering power of her spiritual pressure violently shattered Alexander’s blue aura like brittle glass, blowing the royal pressure completely out of the canyon.

The concussive expansion struck the bedrock, spreading deep jagged fissures through the stone that tore twenty yards across the ravine, splintering the monolith behind his back.

Alexander’s pupils violently contracted.

’Huh...?’

His teeth clamped shut with an audible sound with his knuckles whitening around the hilt of his rapier as the suffocating heat wave washed over his face, singeing the tips of his blue hair.

’What...?!’ Alexander’s mind staggered in shock. ’This presence... this heat... she’s commanding output beyond a standard Second Stage!’

Through the swirling wall of roaring crimson embers, Seraphina took two slow steps forward.

Her ruby eyes locked onto his pale arrogant face, burning with unapologetic contempt.

"Hey, Your Highness..." Seraphina drawled, her voice cutting through the roar of her flames like an executioner’s axe.

"Aren’t you about five years too late to be fighting in this tournament?"

Alexander’s jaw twitched violently with his composure cracking down the middle which only grew worse as Seraphina’s grin widened.

"...You fucking bum."

The insult hung in the narrow throat of the basalt ravine, refusing to dissipate against the dead air.

Alexander’s left eye twitched.

The detached languid boredom that had armored his handsome features completely shattered, peeling back to reveal a vein throbbing violently at the edge of his blue hairline.

The knuckles of his right hand turned the color of bleached bone around the hilt of his rapier with the leather wraps groaning under the sudden clamp of his grip.

SHIIIING!

He put the blade back and drew the blade from its scabbard with a slow deliberate scrape of polished star-iron.

"You insolent loudmouthed little bitch," Alexander snarled, his voice dropping into a low rasp that shed every pretense of restraint. "You think having a famous mother and a dead spirit inside your soul gives you the right to bare your teeth at the crown? I accepted these suppression rings to humiliate Blessed Land on equal footing, not to be lectured by an overbred brat from House Bloom... You want a challenge? Fine. I will carve that smug, filthy tongue right out of your skull and pin it to the monolith."

Seraphina did not back down. She took a slow, deep breath through her nose, drawing the stagnant canyon air into the furnace of her lungs.

HSSSSSSSS!

The ambient temperature within a forty-yard radius spiked instantly, leaping from the dry chill of the shadowed canyon to an oppressive suffocating furnace blast.

The loose pebbles and fine shale resting near the soles of her combat boots began to smoke, their edges glowing cherry-red as radiant waves bled from the seams of her midnight strike cuirass.

"Let’s be clear about one thing, Your Highness," Seraphina said. "On a normal day, out in the open world, with your Fourth Stage core completely unlocked? You would beat me into the dirt... I am not an idiot. I know where I stand on the global ladder, and I haven’t reached the threshold of yours yet."

She tilted her chin up, looking straight into his cold sapphire eyes with her mouth curling into that same razor-sharp mocking smile.

"However... down here? Locked inside those pretty little black cuffs? Restricted to the exact same Second Stage output as the rest of the children?"

Her ruby eyes narrowed, burning with malice.

"If you don’t come at me with every single scrap of power your choked-down channels can push out... if you hesitate for even a tenth of a second because of your precious royal pride, I’m afraid this fight is going to end before you can even remember how to beg."

Alexander’s jaw clicked shut as he didn’t answer with words.

He moved instead.

BOOM!

The granite bedrock beneath the Crown Prince’s heels shattered into powder under the explosive release of his suppressed Second Stage core.

He crossed the twenty-pace gap in the span of a single heartbeat, moving at a linear velocity that defied the natural limits of the physical body.

His indigo combat tunic turned into a dark blur, cutting through the stagnant heat haze with terrifying perfection as the tip of his rapier became a needle-point of screaming condensed royal-blue mana, aimed dead-center at the soft hollow of Seraphina’s throat.

It was a thrust executed with the flawless machine-like precision of the Castellian swordsmen of the past... filled with a lethality designed to end the exchange before the opponent’s nervous system could fire a defensive reflex.

Yet, Seraphina’s ruby eyes simply flashed and her core violently contracted.

’...’

Alexander’s combat instincts honed by thousands of hours of life-and-death drills suddenly screamed an emergency alarm behind his temples.

His pupils contracted as he registered the sudden catastrophic drop in local atmospheric pressure and without a second of hesitation, the Prince aborted his linear charge.

He planted the toe of his front boot, torqueing his hips with brutal agility, and propelled himself forty feet straight up into the air.

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

In the exact footprint where Alexander had been lunging half a heartbeat earlier, the earth detonated into an inferno.

A massive spiraling cage of superheated crimson fire erupted from the bedrock, wrapping around Seraphina’s silhouette like towering, interlocking petals of solid flame.

The construct twisted upward with hydraulic violence, forming the tightly shut bud of a monstrous primordial flower made of roaring flames.

High in the air, Alexander looked down as he reached the apex of his leap with a cold drop of sweat rolling down his temple and instantly vaporizing in the rising heat.

’If that swallowed me...’ his mind calculated with sudden clarity, ’if I had committed to the thrust and let that cage close around my limbs, the kinetic heat alone would have melted the meat off my ribs before my defensive aura could stabilize.’

Down below, the phenomenon evolved.

WHOOM!

The deep roaring crimson of the closed flower petals began to shift as the outer edges hissed, the combustion accelerating past three thousand degrees as the fire began to bleed, purify, and bleach itself into a celestial silver-white.

The heat radiating from the construct was no longer volcanic... it was stellar.

Alexander descended, his boots touching down thirty paces away on the sun-baked sand at the base of the canyon wall.

CRRRRRRRK!

The instant his boots made contact with the earth, the ground beneath him groaned as the sand had ceased to be loose silt.

The radiant temperature bleeding off the white construct had vitrified the top six inches of the ground, turning the earth around him into a brittle fractured crust of smoking, translucent green glass that cracked like thin ice beneath his weight.

The Prince stared across the clearing, his heart hammering against his ribs.

Slowly and gracefully, the tightly coiled petals of the massive silver-white flower began to peel backward.

FSSSSSSSSSH!

The fire did not rage wildly anymore, it folded outward like delicate, luminous silk with each massive petal weeping trails of white plasma as it opened to reveal the figure standing at its center.

Seraphina emerged from the core of the bloom.

Her crimson hair had fully transformed, burning with the weightless radiance of pure liquid silver that floated softly in the heat.

The runic mark carved into the left side of her face burned with cold unearthly light, tracking down the curve of her jawline and disappearing beneath the high leather collar of her cuirass.

She stood balanced lightly on the balls of her feet with her single-edged hunting dagger resting in a loose casual reverse-grip in her right hand, her ruby eyes glowing with the untamed fury of the Primordial Fire Spirit fused directly to her marrow.

Alexander’s throat went bone-dry.

’This isn’t an Awakened trait,’ his mind screamed with his grip on the rapier tightening until his knuckles ached. ’She’s channeling a tenfold multiplier right now! I cannot let her dictate the pace... I really need to—’

BOOM!

He didn’t get to finish the thought as the ground beneath Seraphina’s boots didn’t just vanished!

A shockwave of silver-white fire roared out from beneath her soles, launching her forward like an artillery shell fired at point-blank range.

Alexander’s regal face twisted with grim desperate focus but he didn’t run.

He slammed his left hand into a complex somatic seal with his suppressed Second Stage core burning red-hot against the restrictive bite of the Star-Iron Suppression Rings clamped to his forearms.

"Great Vaultl Of Water!"

RUMBLE-CRASH!