Chapter 576: Your Next Line Is...?

Chapter 576: Your Next Line Is...? [Bonus Chapter]

A sound broke through the quiet desert air but it was not the sound of wind and it was not the sound of sliding sand either.

It was the high-pitched screaming whistle of atmospheric pressure collapsing in on itself and Genevieve’s boots froze while a cold primal dread seized her spine, locking her joints in place.

’It can’t be...?’

Slowly like a robot, she turned her head back toward the fallen body and in the red dirt thirty paces away, Tyon Bloom was pushing herself upright.

Her fingers clawed into the coarse sand, dragging her battered bleeding torso off the ground.

The left side of her face was a ruined blackened crater of charred meat and exposed bone, but her remaining right eye which looked wide and was burning with a terrifying unholy luminescence locked dead center onto Genevieve’s face.

"Mm?"

At first, she looked very confused... Perhaps she couldn’t understand what was going on or she didn’t recognize Genevieve, however that changed after.

"AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"

And then... her flames ignited.

BOOM!

They were no longer the coarse orange-red flames of a common magic user.

Dancing within the roaring fire, long spiraling wisps of deep, incandescent blue began to bleed into the crimson as the temperature shattered the ceiling in a single second.

CRRRRRRRK!

The loose sand within twenty yards of Tyon’s boots instantly liquefied, fusing into a smooth bubbling sheet of glowing red glass and Genevieve’s pupils shrank to microscopic pinpricks.

’What... what is this?!’ Genevieve’s mind screamed, taking an involuntary stumbling step backward. ’Her output... it’s multiplying! The wounds... she’s getting stronger because she was maimed?!’

That was the dark, ungodly secret of Tyon Bloom’s cultivation.

She was not a pampered prodigy like Seraphina, blessed with an ancestral Primordial Spirit from childhood... Tyon was like a dog.

She had survived the volcanic trenches by cultivating an ancient masochistic bloodline art that Lady Etilga had personally beaten into her marrow.

Her core was forged through mortal agony.

Etilga Bloom had dragged Tyon to death’s door dozens of times in the private torture chambers beneath the capital manse... breaking her bones, burning her flesh, severing her tendons and forcing her soul pathways to adapt to terminal trauma.

The closer Tyon stood to the grave, the hotter her flames burned.

When she was whole, she was an unremarkable Second Stage brawler.

When she was critically maimed... When half her face was burned away and her blood was flooding her lungs, her soul-fire could reach temperatures that rivaled Seraphina’s own output.

Tyon hoped for one thing in this miserable blood-soaked life... to impress Matriarch Etilga enough to be granted a low-tier elemental spirit.

With a spirit bonded to her soul, her power would stabilize.

Her family would be elevated from the ash trenches to the main house and her younger brothers would never have to eat boiled leather again...

She would tear through the gates of hell itself to make that happen.

"You..." Tyon croaked, her voice a terrifying roar that sounded like cracking stone, "...talked too much."

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

Tyon detonated as two massive, roaring wings of blue-and-crimson flame erupted from her shoulder blades, propelling her vertically into the sky.

She achieved sustained high-speed flight through pure brute-force combustion, rocketing through the air at high speeds and Genevieve’s composure completely shattered.

"Fall back!" she screamed to herself, frantically whipping both hands forward!

She threw six alchemical canisters into the air, detonating them simultaneously to create a massive three-hundred-foot wall of corrosive green mist between them.

WHOOOOOOSH!

The blue-flame comet tore through the green mist without slowing down as the three-thousand-degree heat incinerated the chemical compounds before they could even react, flash-boiling the moisture in the air into dry plasma.

Tyon descended from above like an executioner’s axe.

BOOM!

Her fist, wrapped in dense, howling blue fire, crashed down toward Genevieve’s skull.

’N-no...’

Genevieve crossed her arms, desperately manifesting a defensive mana barrier, while simultaneously revealing her final secret trump card.

’I d-don’t want to d-die... die!’

SWOOSH!

A violent high-velocity current of emerald wind-mana erupted from Genevieve’s boots and sleeves.

She had never been purely an alchemist... Her true hidden elemental affinity was Wind.

WHOOSH!

She used the air currents to warp her trajectory, sliding three inches to the left to let Tyon’s fist crater the bedrock.

BANG!

The earth fractured, but Tyon did not miss a beat.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!"

She was crashing out, operating on pure berserker instinct as she threw a savage point-blank backhand with her knuckles catching Genevieve across the ribs.

CRACK!

"Augh..."

Genevieve gasped as two ribs snapped, but she channeled her wind-mana into her stiletto, driving the silver blade straight into Tyon’s right thigh.

SHLICK!

Tyon didn’t even flinch, hell she didn’t look down at the blade buried four inches in her meat.

"Th-thank you."

It made her stronger...

WHOOSH!

She grabbed Genevieve by the throat of her teal coat with her burned, blackened left hand, yanking the Europa noblewoman forward until their faces were inches apart.

Tyon’s single right eye blazed with manic bloodthirsty triumph.

"Die," Tyon whispered as she shoved her right palm dead center into Genevieve’s sternum.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

A point-blank catastrophic explosion of blue-and-crimson fire detonated directly between them!

The concussive blast blew Genevieve backward across eighty yards of sand with her teal coat was completely incinerated away, her skin covered in severe blistering burns and her breathing cut off as she hit the earth, tumbled across the shale as she went completely limp, knocked out cold.

VUUUUUM.

An administrative light flared over Genevieve’s fallen body, registering critical combat incapacitation.

Tyon stood in the center of the smoking glass crater with her chest heaving in violent, agonizing gasps.

Blood was pouring from her mouth, her thigh, and her burned skull, but she threw her head back toward the purple sky and let out a deafening roar of victory.

"I DID IT!" Tyon screamed with her voice cracking. "LADY ETILGA! WITNESS ME!"

She was dying.

Her soul channels were screaming under the catastrophic strain of the blue flames, but her heart was soaring... She had broken an elite scion of the Directorate and her family’s ascension was within reach.

Suddenly...

The crunch of loose gravel broke through the quiet.

Tyon snapped her head toward the sound with her single eye narrowing through a curtain of blood.

Standing twenty paces away, picking his way across the cooling shale, was a young man.

Jax Sterling-Cross wore only a torn soot-stained combat tunic, his left forearm tightly wrapped in coarse field linen that leaked small traces of green salve.

He was limping slightly with his posture loose and his face pale as he looked between the charred crater and the unconscious blistered body of Genevieve de Montmirail.

Jax took one look at Tyon’s smoking, half-incinerated skull and visibly flinched with his jaw dropping.

"What in the actual hell...?" Jax stammered, taking a stumbling step backward and pointing a trembling finger at her face. "Are you... are you even human?"

Tyon looked at him like a wolf looking at a crippled sheep.

’Prey,’ she thought instantly.

He was wounded as his mana was fluctuating erratically.

He carried no heavy armor either, and his presence was pathetic compared to the Europa scion she had just broken.

...He was an easy effortless harvest to cap off her glory.

Tyon grinned, her charred lips splitting and weeping dark blood.

"Turn around and run, little boy," Tyon rasped, her voice dripping with sadistic promise. "Or I’ll turn your bones into glass too."

She reached down with her left hand, grabbing the hilt of the broad-cleaver resting in the dirt.

Without hesitation, Tyon drove the serrated blade two inches deep into her own left shoulder.

CRUNCH!

Blood geysered from the wound, splashing across the glass as Tyon staggered with her knees buckling under the fresh wave of agony, but her single eye flared with terrifying ecstasy.

"He... he..."

WHOOSH!

The crimson fire around her body vanished completely.

In its place, a pure, blinding mantle of deep celestial cobalt-blue flame erupted from her flesh.

The temperature soared to staggering heights, flash-vitrifying the surrounding fifty yards of sand into a lake of translucent green glass in less than a second.

...She had brought herself to the threshold of death.

’This is the limit of my power.’

She felt so strong, she was going crazy... perhaps it was the chemicals, but she felt like she was high

Jax looked at the screaming wall of blue fire with his eyes wide then, his trembling stopped.

His lopsided lazy smirk returned to his face as he dropped his weight into a loose unorthodox street-boxing guard, bouncing lightly on the balls of his boots.

"You know," Jax said, "you really shouldn’t stab yourself like that... Tetanus is a serious hazard."

"DIE!" Tyon roared, lunging forward with high speed.

She covered the distance in heartbeats as her fist of pure blue flame aimed straight for his sternum but Jax didn’t dodge left or right.

"Your next line is," Jax announced, pointing his unbandaged right finger directly at her face, "’I’ll turn your ash into fertilizer!’"

Tyon’s mouth opened mid-lunge.

"I’LL TURN YOUR ASH INTO FERTI—WHAT?!"

She choked on her own syllable.

The absurd shock of hearing her exact internal thought predicted out loud caused her neural pathways to stutter for a microsecond as her forward momentum hitched and her elbow dropped by two inches.

CLACK!

In that microscopic window of hesitation, Jax’s right hand didn’t throw a punch.

He reached into his combat belt, pulling out a single palm-sized star-iron canister... the exact same high-density coagulant salve he had used on his arm earlier.

With the casual flick of a bar patron tossing a coaster, Jax hurled the brass tin straight into the roaring blue flames coating Tyon’s fist.

TZZZZZZZZZZZZ-BOOM!

The high-density alkaline salve, formulated with volatile mountain mint and heavy mineral salts, met the four-thousand-degree cobalt fire.

The chemical reaction was catastrophic...

The alkaline compound expanded into an instantaneous opaque cloud of thick choking white foam that completely smothered the fire on her right arm, sealing her knuckles in a crust of hardened lime.

"What is this shit?!" Tyon roared, thrashing her arm to break the crust.

"And your next line is," Jax shouted, sliding effortlessly beneath her wild left hook, "’You cowardly little trickster!’"

"YOU COWARDLY LITTLE TRICKST... HOW DO YOU KEEP DOING THAT?!" Tyon screamed, her single eye bulging with fury.

She was completely insane... Her spatial awareness was gone, her balance ruined by the rage boiling through her veins.

Still, Tyon raised both arms to unleash a radial burst of blue flame to incinerate the entire area.

’I’ll just extend all of my pow—’

TUG!

Tyon’s boots suddenly refused to move as she looked down.

Crisscrossing the smooth glass floor between her legs was a complex, interlocking web of thin translucent wires!

It was the linen bandage Jax had supposedly ’wasted’ earlier!

When he had walked across the clearing limping, he hadn’t been stumbling... he had been unspooling sixty feet of star-iron thread he had carefully woven into the linen, anchoring the lines to the jagged edges of the vitrified glass.

The moment Tyon stepped into the center of the crater, she had walked right into the web.

YANK!

Jax pulled the master knot wrapped around his pinky finger and the tension snapped tight as the star-iron wires caught Tyon behind both ankles, violently yanking her feet out from under her!

"GAH!"

Tyon’s center of gravity collapsed.

Her body tipped horizontally in mid-air, completely helpless with her blue flames sputtering as her core momentarily lost connection with the earth.

Jax stepped in as he swung his heavy, brass-plated field canteen... filled to the brim with three pounds of undiluted desert sand in a clean rotational horizontal arc straight into the side of her unburned right temple.

BONK!

The sound was insultingly hollow as Tyon’s single eye rolled back into her skull.

The blue flames instantly vanished, popping out like a blown candle and her body hit the vitrified glass with a limp unceremonious thud, completely knocked unconscious.

Silence descended over the desert basin as the wind whistled softly through the cracked glass.

Jax Sterling-Cross stood in the center of the carnage, holding his dented canteen by the strap, looking down at the two unconscious, elite scions lying at his boots.

He blinked once.

He blinked twice.

He took a slow deep breath, looking around at the empty, smoking wasteland in genuine bewilderment.

"..."

Jax scratched the back of his neck with his bandaged hand, staring at the sky.

"Eh..." Jax muttered aloud.

"...I won?"