Chapter 573: Imminent War [Bonus - ]

Chapter 573: Imminent War [Bonus Chapter]

"Stay sharp," Maya cautioned, turning her head to meet Aki’s gaze. "I don’t like the feel of this flat... It’s too quiet. A lone, bleeding scion sitting inside an open-air Safe Zone is the oldest bait-trap in the manual so keep your reins gathered."

Aki nodded, her jaw setting with quiet resolve.

"Understood."

They urged the mounts forward, descending the reverse slope of the ridge and cutting through the mouth of a dry wash to close the distance.

They slowed their advance two hundred yards out, using a series of fractured shale shelves to break their line of sight.

Aki’s gaze swept across the sweeping yellow dunes flanking the blue dome.

The sand was immaculate as there were no tracks, no disturbed silt, and no obvious mana signatures bleeding into the sky.

Yet the hair on the back of Aki’s forearms stood straight up.

’There has to be someone here,’ Aki thought, her pulse picking up a steady rhythm against her ribs. ’A Safe Zone in the open desert is a focal point so everyone knows the timers. If Jax was chased here, whoever burned his armor wouldn’t just turn around and walk away to let him recover.’

She looked around, her eyes darting between the empty ridges with an expression of open puzzled frustration.

Where were they hiding? In the rock? Under the silt?

Maya caught the look on Aki’s face and let out a soft chuckle beneath her breath.

"Don’t strain your neck, Princess," Maya said, the corner of her mouth twitching with quiet amusement. "You look like a barn owl trying to spot a mouse in a wheat field. Hold your reins..."

Maya swung her leg over the back of her mount, her combat boots hitting the coarse sand with a solid muted crunch.

She rolled her broad shoulders, the void-ivory plates along her collar shifting smoothly over her linen tunic.

"The surface can lie," Maya said, rolling her neck until the joints popped with dull wet thuds. "The earth doesn’t... If there’s steel or bone waiting in these dunes, the bedrock knows about it."

Aki watched her carefully.

She raised her right hand, tapping into the Star-Iron necklace resting against her chest.

VUUUM!

A fine microscopic trickle of water-mana, refined and compressed through her temporary pathways, flowed upward through her carotid channels and into the fluid membranes of her eyes.

Her vision sharpened instantly.

The harsh, blinding glare of the desert sun softened, the heat mirages pulling back like thin gauze, allowing her to see the micro-currents of atmospheric density curling over the sand.

Something heavy was hanging in the air just ahead like a stagnant pressure waiting to snap.

Maya took two paces forward, stepping out onto the open flat.

She closed her eyes and then drew a slow deliberate breath through her nose with her chest expanding beneath her cuirass.

"Haah..."

Her Second Stage Purple Core flared with a deep violet hum.

THUD!

Maya took a single, deliberate step forward, planting the heel of her heavy combat boot into the crust of the desert floor.

For one fraction of a second, the world seemed to lose all color as the yellow of the sand, the blue of the sky, and the purple hue of the distant clouds drained away into a cold monochrome slate.

RUMBLE!

A subtle high-frequency vibration tore outward from her heel in a perfect, three-hundred-and-sixty-degree radial wave.

The shockwave traveled through the dense granite beneath the dunes, mapping every void, every hollow, and every foreign mass resting within four hundred yards.

Maya’s eyes snapped open, her amber-brown irises flashing with sharp clarity.

"We’ve got guests," Maya barked with her jaw snapping tight. "Three signatures. Two on the eastern ridge, one below the—"

PING!

A sharp snap cut through the air from five hundred yards to the north!

A single blinding streak of high-velocity crimson light tore through the desert air, cutting through the atmosphere with a screaming shriek.

’The hell...?’

It most definitely wasn’t an ordinary round, the projectile was sheathed in a boiling reactive crimson aura that left a spiraling trail of green noxious smoke in its wake.

The round covered five hundred yards in less than a quarter of a heartbeat and Maya didn’t even have time to turn her hips.

Her instincts, honed through years of warfare, took over entirely.

SNAP!

She thrust her left hand forward with her fingers clawing at the empty air.

"Granite Gauntlet..."

The loose sand and rock around her forearm liquefied, rushing upward in a violent spiraling cyclone that solidified into a massive, three-foot-thick gauntlet of dense compressed stone wrapped around her arm.

CRACK!

The high-velocity round slammed directly into the palm of the stone gauntlet and Maya’s boots were driven four inches into the bedrock by the impact with the shockwave blowing the sand away from her knees in a violent circle.

The bullet didn’t ricochet.

The moment its kinetic momentum halted, the crimson core of the projectile flared with unstable intensity.

’It’s a primer!’ Maya’s mind screamed and thirty feet back, Leona’s combat instincts fired simultaneously.

WHOOSH!

Leona didn’t waste a syllable.

She lunged horizontally off her wolf, her right arm wrapping around Aki’s waist with bruising force, yanking the First Princess clean out of the saddle as she detonated a pressurized burst of jade wind-mana beneath her boots.

They were thrown backward twenty yards through the air.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The bullet detonated with the concussive fury of an artillery shell as a massive twenty-foot fireball of superheated crimson combustion erupted from Maya’s palm, instantly consuming the three Dune Wolves where they stood.

The concussive blast shredded the beasts into bloody mist and flying ash before they could even let out a dying howl.

"MAYA!" Aki screamed through the rushing wind, her eyes wide with horror as Leona hit the dirt and rolled, shielding the Princess with her own armored back.

The black smoke boiled upward smelling thick and foul while carrying the suffocating acidic reek of chemical defoliants.

SWOOS!

From the heart of the smoke cloud, a silhouette vaulted backward.

Maya hit the sand twenty paces back, skidding on the heels of her void-ivory greaves, leaving two smoking trenches through the clay.

The three-foot stone gauntlet covering her left arm was completely gone, shattered into blackened gravel and powdered shale but her actual arm... her bare flesh and her leather bracer was completely intact, protected by the sudden last-second crystallization of her earth-skin.

She shook her hand, wincing slightly as small flecks of a corrosive, bubbling green liquid sizzled against her leather wraps.

"Fucking disgusting..."

She flicked her wrist, shedding the acid onto the sand, where it hissed and ate three inches into the rock in seconds.

’They were waiting for us,’ Maya thought with her breath turning heavy and her amber eyes burning with cold venomous fury. ’And I know the exact bitch who cooked this venom.’

A chemical-reactive shell followed by an airborne vapor of flesh-eating acid.

In the entire roster of the World Council delegations, only one person fought with that specific disgusting blend of alchemical sadism... Genevieve de Montmirail.

Yet as Maya took a defensive crouch, her brow furrowed.

’That shot didn’t have enough mass to pierce an elite earth-shaper,’ she analyzed in a fraction of a second. ’The angle was off and she didn’t aim for my skull or my core. She aimed for the ground between our mounts...’

The realization hit her like ice water.

’The shot wasn’t meant to kill us. It was a beacon. It blew our cover and pinned our coordinates for every hunter within three miles!’

WHOOSH! WHOOSH! WHOOSH!

The desert air on their northern flank tore open with high-speed movement as Maya’s head snapped toward the smoke cloud.

Through the thinning curtain of black soot, a tall slender silhouette moved through.

"Up!" Maya roared, slapping both palms flat against the desert floor.

"Bulwark!"

RUMBLE-CRASH!

A four-foot-thick eight-foot-tall slab of solid compressed granite tore out of the bedrock between them, rising like a fortress gate!

BOOOOOOM!

A single silver-wrapped thrust from a fluted military rapier slammed dead-center into the granite slab.

The stone completely shattered into thousands of flying fragments under an explosive burst of pale-blue mana and through the exploding rubble, Lucian de Montmirail surged forward like a striking viper!

The primary sword-scion of the Europa Directorate wore a double-breasted coat of midnight-teal, trimmed with silver braid and reinforced with flexible titanium mesh.

His pale sharp-featured face was cold, his ice-blue eyes fixed dead on Maya’s throat as his rapier whistled through the flying stone shards with machine-like lethality but Maya didn’t give ground.

She twisted her hips, her left arm sweeping upward as she pulled three jagged shards of broken granite from the air, transmuting them into stone daggers that shot straight at Lucian’s eyes.

CLANG! CLANG! CLINK!

Lucian’s rapier moved in blinding arcs, parrying all three stone daggers in three-tenths of a second, but the microscopic delay forced him to abort his lunge.

He bounded backward ten paces with his polished leather boots touching the sand without making a sound and his blade settling into an immaculate textbook high-tier dueling guard.

"Pesky little dogs," Lucian said, his voice carrying the smooth, haughty drawl of an aristocrat brushing a cobweb from his lapel. "You survived the drop and you survived the northern berserkers... Admirable grit for low-born Amazonians but your run ends here."

Before Maya could retort, a low vibration rumbled beneath the sand dunes eighty paces to the east.

From the crest of a high yellow dune, Kira Bennett rose slowly from the sand like a specter.

The second representative of Australis wore weathered sand-bleached leathers with her arms bare and covered in intricate spiraling tattoos depicting predatory marsupials and oceanic leviathans.

Her coarse sun-streaked blonde hair was tied back in a messy knot, and her dark eyes were alight with wild feral cunning.

Her hands were locked in an intricate three-stage somatic mudra, her core glowing with a sickly yellow-green resonance.

Beneath the sand, thirty feet directly beneath Lucian’s boots and thirty feet beneath where Aki and Leona were standing... shifting shapes were coiled, waiting for the signal to tear through the crust and drag them into the dark.

Kira’s lips pulled back into a wide, predatory sneer.

"You talk too much, Europa boy," Kira whispered with her fingers shifting to spring the trap...

Lucian didn’t even turn his head.

"I can hear your beasts breathing through the quartz, Australis savage," Lucian called out. "If you think two underground sand crawlers are enough to catch an officer of the Directorate off-guard, your education was even cheaper than your boots..."

Kira’s sneer froze with her jaw clenched tight and her knuckles whitening around her somatic seal.

CLACK! CLACK!

From the rocky bluffs seventy paces to the north, two more figures stepped into the harsh sunlight.

The representatives of the Albion Concordat.

Gareth Pendelton stood with a broad arrogant smile plastered across his ruddy handsome face.

He wore the traditional scarlet-and-white dueling tunic of Albion’s Royal Guard, a heavy star-iron basket-hilted broadsword resting casually across his shoulder.

Beside him, leaning with her hip against a cracked granite pillar, was Isolde Vivnr with her slender frame encased in dark blue duel-leathers, a pair of matched silver-plated parrying daggers spinning lazily between her fingers.

"Well, well, well," Gareth chuckled, his rich voice booming across the quiet basin. "Look at the gathering... Australis in the sand, Europa on the flats, and the little runaway Princess caught right in the crosshairs. What a splendid little slaughter this is going to be."

Isolde didn’t smile.

She blew a loose strand of fair hair from her forehead as her cold blue eyes scanned the gathered fighters with boredom.

"Can we just get this over with, Gareth?" Isolde muttered, her voice sounding flat and irritable. "It’s forty degrees out here, my boots are full of silt, and the broadcast relays are hovering right over our heads... Kill who you need to kill so we can get out of here before the tea goes cold."

Gareth turned his head, his smile widening with disappointment.

"Oh, come now, Isolde! Where is your sporting spirit? Don’t you appreciate a proper, old-fashioned royal melee? It’s not every day you get to cross steel with three different continental bloodlines on the same patch of dirt!"

Before Isolde could reply, the air along the western ridge suddenly grew impossibly hot.

HSSSSSSSS!

The loose sand on the western rocks began to smoke.

Stepping onto the highest promontory overlooking the Safe Zone, two figures descended like gods descending to a mortal arena.

The representatives of the Indus Sovereignty.