Chapter 577: Earthborn [Bonus - ]

Chapter 577: Earthborn [Bonus Chapter]

The shattered spine of the dune groaned as tons of dry powdery quartz slipped downward in a continuous yellow cascade.

Beneath the suffocating drift fifty paces from the fractured bedrock rim, a single hand clawed through the silt.

The glove of silver-plated mesh was torn to ribbons with the skin beneath blackened and scraped down to raw dermis by the friction of his three-hundred-yard movement through the earth.

Lucian de Montmirail dragged his torso out of the crater, his breath tearing from his throat in a series of wet rattling heaves.

"Gah—!"

He spat a thick glob of arterial crimson onto the sand with his vision swimming in sickening rings of yellow and gray.

Every breath felt like dragging a rusted saw across his pleural lining... at least three ribs on his left side were completely stove-in, the fractured bone fragments clicking against one another with a dull sickening friction every time his diaphragm expanded.

His tailored teal coat... the pride of the Montmirail line was reduced to scorched rags clinging to his titanium mesh undergarment.

’What in the name of the High Council was that...?’ Lucian thought, his fingers trembling violently as they dug into the shale for purchase.

His teeth ground together with a harsh ceramic scrape.

’Was that pure kinetic dispersion? A pressurized air vortex? An unregistered wind-compression art...?’

His mind frantically cycled through the combat dossiers of the Amazonian border regiments.

There was no record of a brute-force brawler producing a directional shockwave that could bypass a master’s parrying power and obliterate sixty yards of bedrock without an incantation.

"Filthy... border animal," he hissed through blood-stained teeth.

His right hand fumbled at his waist, reaching for the reinforced brass clasp of his survival kit.

His thumb hooked into the leather strap, dragging out a cylindrical glass phial filled with glowing luminescent green fluid... a military-grade cellular reconstructive tonic synthesized in the central laboratories of the Europa Directorate.

’Once the marrow stitches... once my thoracic wall seals...’ Lucian’s eyes burned with cold malice as he brought the phial toward his mouth, ’I will dismantle that Amazonian bitch piece by piece. I’ll peel the tendons from her wrists before the broadcast relays can cut the feed and I’ll make her understand the gap between low-born clay and direct Europa blood—’

A shadow fell over his face and Lucian froze with the glass phial hovering half an inch from his split swollen lips.

The harsh glare of the twin suns vanished, eclipsed by a massive high-velocity mass dropping vertically out of the sky.

He didn’t even have the luxury of turning his neck.

A figure was descending from the heavens like a falling siege engine... not aimed at him, but dropping along a trajectory toward the shallow ridge thirty paces behind his crater.

Lucian turned his head by two inches, his blood-filmed gaze catching sight of Maya Da Silva standing on the rim above.

The Amazonian woman looked at him.

Her amber eyes were cold, completely indifferent to his existence with her lips curled into a mocking smirk that cut deeper than any blade.

She looked at him the way a laborer looked at a crushed beetle on a threshing floor.

Then, the sky split.

BOOOOOOOOOM!

Gareth Pendelton made landfall.

The Royal Scion of the Albion Concordat didn’t bleed off his kinetic momentum with wind-dampening runes or feather-fall charms, instead he slammed into the earth with the violence of a two-ton iron meteor.

The point of impact was less than three paces from Lucian’s exposed flanks.

The displaced shockwave that followed tore the granite shelf apart as a circular crater twelve feet deep detonated outward with the concussive backdraft catching Lucian’s broken body dead-center.

CRACK-CRUNCH-SHATTER!

The sickening sound of Lucian’s remaining ribs, pelvis, and collarbones snapping under the atmospheric overpressure sounded like dry firewood being trampled by a war-horse.

Lucian didn’t even get to release a scream.

The air in his lungs was driven out in an instantaneous red fog, his eyes rolling back until only the blood-veined sclera showed.

WHOOSH!

The administrative transponder pinned to the shredded lapel of his teal coat flashed with a white light.

The World Council’s spatial extraction protocol engaged with an authoritative, metallic chime.

Lucian’s limp, mangled form dissolved into millions of shimmering, ethereal white particles, shooting vertically into the stratosphere alongside the distant particles of Genevieve.

BZZZZZZZZT!

From the floating optical relays suspended above the canyon, the cold voice echoed across Sector Forty-Four:

"Notice of Elimination."

"The representatives of the Europa Directorate have suffered critical combat incapacitation and collapse... The Europa Directorate is officially eliminated from the tournament bracket."

Gareth Pendelton stood in the smoking pit of his own making with his heavy combat boots buried ankle-deep in crushed quartz.

He didn’t spare a single glance for the white particles drifting into the sky.

"Heh..."

He carried his massive basket-hilted star-iron broadsword rested horizontally across the back of his neck with his hands draped casually over the cross-guard.

His scarlet-and-white dueling tunic was dusted with pale sand, but his ruddy, square-jawed face was glowing with genuine joy.

He slowly pivoted on his heel, his sharp blue eyes locking onto Maya Da Silva standing twenty feet up the slope.

"Well, now," Gareth grinned, his rich voice cutting through the settling dust. "That was rather unceremonious for a Montmirail, wasn’t it?... Though I suppose I should thank you for softening the meat before I arrived—"

His voice died in his throat.

WHOOSH!

Gareth’s combat instincts, honed by fifteen years of brutal dueling academies in the high towers of Albion screamed an immediate red-line warning behind his temples.

Maya had not waited for him to finish his sentence.

She had already dropped her hips with her heavy leather boots sinking into the bedrock and her right fist coiled back against her ribs.

’Huu—?’

Gareth attempted to spring backward to establish dueling distance, but the moment his heels pressed into the dirt, his eyes widened in disbelief.

The air surrounding Maya wasn’t behaving like the regular one he knew at all...

It was coiling, bending, and undulating in serpentine spirals... not like wind, but like invisible tectonic plates sliding over one another.

The gravity within three yards of her knuckles warped, pulling the loose shale into a high-speed orbital spin that hissed like a nest of vipers.

’She has an air affinity?!’ Gareth’s mind panicked for a fraction of a heartbeat. ’No... that isn’t wind! That’s displacement!’

Maya’s amber eyes flared with a terrifying luminescence.

BOOOOOOOOOOOM!

She struck the open air.

The blow didn’t connect with physical meat, but the atmospheric medium detonated with the exact same violence that had shattered Lucian de Montmirail’s chest.

A concentrated cone-shaped shockwave of compressed force ripped through the canyon, carrying pulverized earth-pressure straight toward Gareth’s face but Gareth didn’t try to dodge.

There was no dodging a wave that covered thirty paces of width in a millisecond.

"Crucible Wall!" he roared.

He whipped his massive broadsword off his neck, planting the flat of the three-foot star-iron blade directly against his forearms, locking his elbows against his ribs, and driving his boots six inches into the living stone.

CRASH-BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The air hammer slammed into the blade and Gareth’s boots became plows.

He was hurled backward fifty yards across the canyon floor, his soles tearing two smoking, three-foot-deep trenches straight through the solid granite bedrock.

The concussive pressure rattled through the star-iron steel, traveling through his forearms and slamming into his shoulder joints with terrifying force!

POW-POW!

The sound of his radius and ulna dislodging from their wrist sockets echoed beneath his tunic with small sprays of capillary blood bursting through the pores of his forearms.

"RAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!"

Yet, with a savage animalistic roar, Gareth twisted the flat of his blade by five degrees.

SCREEEEEEECH!

He didn’t try to absorb the entirety of the strike... that would be suicide so instead, he parried it!

The massive concussive cone was split down the middle by the star-iron edge with the deflected pressure roaring past his flanks and slamming into a towering eighty-foot sand dune behind his left shoulder.

KER-BLAM!

The massive dune ceased to exist as the eighty-foot mountain of yellow silt was blown into an expansive cloud of microscopic dust that darkened the sun across the entire northern quadrant.

Gareth came to a halt fifty paces out with his chest heaving and his boots smoking where the friction had burned through his leather soles.

His hands were shaking violently around the grip of his broadsword with his wrist bones clicking as his core frantically worked to re-seat the dislodged joints.

He stared across the clearing at the Amazonian woman with his breath catching in his throat.

’How in the seven hells did she generate that kind of directional torque without a runic circle...?!’ Gareth thought with sweat mixing with the grit on his forehead. ’That wasn’t a standard spell at all... What is that?’

Twenty paces away on the shattered ridge, Maya Da Silva remained in her follow-through stance.

Her right knuckles were smoking thin wisps of brown mana that smelled of crushed granite and copper an beneath her void-ivory cuirass, her teeth were clamped together so hard her jaw muscles felt like petrified wood.

’This state... is hell to maintain,’ Maya thought with a sharp cold sweat beading beneath her leather wraps.

Inside her chest, her internal organs were screaming.

She could feel her liver, her spleen, and the lining of her lungs being squeezed as if wrapped in wet rawhide.

Her Second Stage Purple Core wasn’t merely circulating mana through her meridians... it was dragging the tectonic weight of the sovereign realm’s crust directly into her marrow.

This was the forbidden technique she had forged in the blood-soaked trenches of the southern perimeter... Earthborn.

By forcing her core to sync its vibration frequency with the deep tectonic plates of the earth, she turned her physical flesh into an extension of the planetary bedrock.

In the Earthborn state, her physical acceleration multiplied threefold, her muscle density bypassed the limitations of mortal bone, and her strikes ceased to be regular punches... they became similar to tectonic faults.

’The drawback is devastating,’ Maya analyzed with cold detachment, feeling a thin hot trickle of blood begin to slide down the inside of her left nostril.

Once Earthborn was active, she couldn’t cast complex external earth spells.

She couldn’t raise massive stone walls, she couldn’t sculpt intricate sand traps, and she couldn’t summon earthen golems.

The overwhelming power of this form choked out her precision so instead, she became hyper-attuned to the world’s rotation.

She could feel the minute microscopic rotational drag of the tectonic plates beneath her feet... the immense perpetual energy of the earth grinding against itself.

Those devastating, air-shattering punches weren’t powered by her own stamina... they were released by cycling the rotational force up through her heels, coiling it through her hips, and discharging the inertia outward through her knuckles in a single catastrophic burst.

Maya called them, the Rotations.

She had used the First Rotation to execute the Spirit Beasts and blast Lucian through the sand dune.

She had used the Second Rotation to shatter Gareth’s defensive perimeter.

’I have two more strikes left in this body,’ Maya thought with her vision blurring slightly before her will snapped it back into focus. ’Two more Rotations, and my core will collapse from the internal compression... If I push past the Fourth, I will tear my own heart in half.’

She didn’t let a single flicker of weakness reach her face.

FSSSSSS!

With a subtle internal circulation of her remaining mana, Maya forced a fine layer of pressurized earth and quartz dust to bleed outward through the pores of her skin.

The brown mineral dust settled instantly over her face and neck, forming a hardened crystalline shell that absorbed the trickle of blood from her nose and sealed the hairline fractures along her cheekbones before Gareth’s eyes could register them.

To the scion of Albion, she looked completely untouched... Maya was sure she looked like an invincible monolith carved from living granite.

The psychological warfare was paramount.

The more effortlessly she appeared to command this cataclysmic power, the more hesitant, defensive, and vulnerable he would become.

Across the trench, Gareth Pendelton looked down at his broadsword.

His blue eyes narrowed.

Running along the thick star-iron spine of his ancestral weapon, three jagged hairline fractures had appeared, weeping tiny sparks of displaced mana.

A slow low laugh rumbled in his chest.

He didn’t panic at all as the smile returned to his face.

"Magnificent," Gareth said, rolling his shoulders until his dislodged wrist joints snapped back into their sockets with loud wet clacks. "Truly magnificent! To crack star-iron with the displaced air of a bare fist! What a savage you are, Da Silva!"

Maya did not reply as she kept her chin lowered with her amber eyes tracking the micro-twitches of his shoulder blades.

Gareth tilted his head, his gaze drinking in her broad muscular silhouette, the sharp curve of her jaw, and the fierce pride burning in her eyes.

"You know," Gareth said, his voice carrying a smooth confidence that echoed across the rocks, "when this tournament concludes and Albion claims its rightful seat as the winners, I think I’ll bypass the usual ceremonies... I think I’ll take you back to the capital of Albion as my wife."

Maya’s left eyebrow twitched as she rolled her eyes with slow bored contempt.

"I’d rather marry a dead mule," she rasped.