Chapter 578: The Fourth Rotation [Bonus - ]

Chapter 578: The Fourth Rotation [Bonus Chapter]

Gareth’s laughter was loud and utterly unfazed.

"A spirited one!" he boomed. "I wouldn’t have it any other way! But first... let’s see if that pretty granite shell can hold up against proper Albion steel!"

WHOOOSH!

Gareth roared as his Second Stage Purple Core flared with an incandescent silver light.

His flesh, his skin, and the hair along his arms underwent an instantaneous metallic transmutation.

The ruddy human tone vanished, replaced by the cold, unyielding luster of solid polished steel... His skin didn’t simply look metallic, it adopted the exact density, shear resistance, and thermal tolerance of high-grade star-iron as he raised his left hand, extending his palm flat toward the sky.

PING-PING-PING-PING-PING!

His Inventor opened directly above his open hand warped with a pale-blue light.

From the spatial pocket, a dozen heavy, star-iron weapons began to cascade out into the daylight.

Broadswords, spiked war-picks, serrated trench-axes, and heavy throwing spathas tumbled through the air though they were not falling to the dirt, but locking into a floating circular orbit around his frame!

Gareth was not merely an armored swordsman... He commanded the rare affinity of Metal Magic!

’What a pain in the ass... It’s as the research said.’

The floating arsenal began to spin, rotating around his steel-clad body with the deafening high-pitched screech of an active buzzsaw.

The displaced air whistled like screaming shrapnel as he lowered his primary blade, pointing the fractured tip dead center at Maya’s heart.

"Come, my lovely!" Gareth roared, his voice sounding metallic and booming. "Show me if your earth can break the crown’s iron!"

BOOM!

Gareth launched forward.

His steel boots pulverized the bedrock as he charged, tearing across the fifty paces at terrifying speed with the cloud of orbiting star-iron blades surged forward with him, screaming through the air like an undulating swarm of metal hornets.

Maya took a slow deep breath through her teeth.

The blades whistled through the air with their razor edges reflecting the harsh sunlight, but her focus did not waver.

The world seemed to slow down as the chaotic noise of the battlefield faded into a low thrum.

’I will win,’ Maya thought, the image of her older sister flashing brightly behind her eyes.

Her older sister had not wanted to be the President... she wanted to enjoy her life however a leader was needed and since their father had no sons and she had not been of age that time, her sister had risen into power.

Valerie left everything related to having a normal life behind to make sure that not only would she protect the country but her as well and Maya was going to repay the favor as quickly as she could.

’As long as I can stand, my sister will have her life back.’

STOMP!

Maya’s right boot hammered down into the earth.

...The Third Rotation

BOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

She didn’t punch forward this time, instead Maya drove the rotational energy directly down into the bedrock!

The thirty feet of hard clay and quartz sand separating them violently detonated upward in a colossal curtain of pulverized rock and yellow silt that rose forty feet into the sky.

The erupting wall of earth completely obliterated Gareth’s line of sight, creating an opaque smokescreen between their trajectories.

"Cheap trick!" Gareth laughed from behind the dirt wall.

He didn’t slow his charge, instead with a sharp mental command, he snapped his fingers.

SWOOSH-SWOOSH-SWOOSH!

The orbiting swarm of star-iron weapons surged forward, penetrating the earthen curtain like a volley of ballista bolts, blind-firing across every square foot of the corridor to shred whatever was waiting on the other side.

The blades tore through the dust—

CLANG! CRASH!

Nothing was there.

Through the thinning haze of yellow dust, Maya did not appear on the ground...

She had used the concussive upward eruption of her Third Rotation to launch herself twenty feet horizontally through the cloud.

WHOOSH! 𝑓𝑟ℯℴ𝓂

’I only have one chance to land the Fourth rotation in a way he can’t defend.’

She had to make it count...

Maya descended from his high-right flank and her hands were not empty, but grasping two jagged five-foot slabs of dense compressed granite she had ripped directly out of the bedrock during the detonation.

"Ah–?!"

Gareth’s eyes snapped up just in time to see the stone slabs swinging down like twin guillotines.

WHAM! CRASH!

Maya slammed the massive granite slabs into both sides of Gareth’s steel-clad skull simultaneously.

The concussive force of the stone-on-metal collision sounded like two church bells colliding at high speeds as the granite slabs shattered into millions of flying fragments against his steel skin, but the blunt force was immense as it bypassed his armor and rattled his brain inside his skull.

"Ugh..."

Gareth staggered, his vision exploding into white stars and his ears ringing with high-pitched feedback!

"You little—!" Gareth snarled, swinging his heavy broadsword in a desperate blind backhand arc.

SHLICK!

Maya twisted her torso in mid-air, but she couldn’t completely clear the trajectory as the fractured tip of the star-iron broadsword tore across her left flank, cleaving through the void-ivory cuirass and carving a deep four-inch gash through her ribs.

"Ugh..."

Hot crimson blood sprayed across the sand, hissing against the hot shale.

Simultaneously, two of Gareth’s orbiting throwing spathas answered his mental recoil, whipping around from behind and piercing straight through Maya’s right thigh and left shoulder.

THUNK! THUNK!

"Gah!" Maya grunted, her boots hitting the sand as agony flared through her nervous system.

The protective layers of pressurized earth dust she had coated over her skin shattered and washed away in the spray of her own blood as her true state was laid bare... Her clothes was soaked in red, her breath coming in suffocating gasps and her internal channels weeping from the strain of the Earthborn state.

Gareth shook the dizziness from his head, his steel-skinned face contorting with triumphant blood-slicked fury.

"Got you!" Gareth roared, pulling his broadsword back with both hands for a downward bisection stroke. "Now yield, you stubborn—"

He never finished the word.

Maya stepped straight into the descending sword, letting the cross-guard strike her bruised collarbone, closing the final two inches of distance between their chests.

’Finally...’

Her amber eyes were ablaze with terrifying finality.

During the entire exchange... during the stone-slab strike and during the mid-air clash, she hadn’t just been throwing blunt mass.

With every shard of granite that had struck his chest, she had been embedding quartz seeds directly into the microscopic fissures of his steel-transmuted armor and she had found the flaw.

Right over his heart, where the star-iron grain was uneven...

’The Fourth Rotation,’ Maya thought, her heart giving one final thud.

She coiled her left hip, dragged the deepest frequency of the sovereign realm up through her shattered thigh, and drove her bare, blood-slicked palm dead center into the fractured point on his chest.

...The Fourth Rotation!

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The sound was similar to the sound of a mountain collapsing under its own weight.

The entire force of the rotation was focused into a single microscopic square inch of Gareth’s breastbone.

CRRRRRRRRACK-SHATTER!

Gareth’s steel-transmuted skin completely fractured and shattered as a spiderweb of jagged black cracks tore across his entire chest, the structural integrity of his metal shattering like a plate of brittle glass.

"BLUURGH!"

A massive geyser of dark blood erupted from Gareth’s mouth, painting the sky crimson as his sternum caved inward by three inches.

His eyes bulged in pure agony as the shockwave tore straight through his heart and spine, exiting out his back in a conical spray of torn muscle and shattered armor.

WHOOOOOOSH-BANG!

Gareth was launched backward like an artillery shell fired from a siege mortar as he cleared seventy yards of airspace in less than a second, his limp bleeding body skipping violently across the rocky basin... bouncing off boulders, shattering shale shelves, and leaving a continuous fifty-yard smear of crimson across the desert floor before finally coming to a halt, twitching in a pool of his own blood.

...He didn’t move again.

His core flickered and dropped to critical, it was at a state where it was barely sustaining the thread of his life.

On the other side of the canyon, Maya Da Silva stood motionless as the Earthborn state collapsed.

SNAP!

The internal pressure she had been holding back finally broke its banks as a massive rush of dark blood poured from Maya’s mouth, her nose, and the corners of her eyes.

Her vision faded into pitch-black nothingness.

’I... I did it...’

Her knees buckled and her broad muscular frame tipped forward, hitting the coarse red sand face-first with a dull heavy thud.

She lay still beside the shattered granite, the desert wind slowly dusting her dark hair in yellow silt.

Two hundred paces to the east, in the shadow of a jagged basalt overhang, another war was raging.

CLANG! CLINK! SCREEEEECH!

"Fuck you!"

The sound of grinding steel was deafening, ringing with high-frequency friction that threw showers of white-hot sparks against the dark rock walls.

Leona Vivnr’s jaw was clamped tight with her teeth aching from the relentless pressure as she parried a high-low combination from Isolde Vivnr.

WHOOSH! WHOOSH!

Leona’s deep-sea trench-machete moved in tight defensive movements... They were short deflections designed to absorb hits without exposing her ribs but Isolde was like a phantom.

"Stop leaving yourself wide open!"

The second scion of the Albion Concordat moved with terrifying elegance, her twin, silver-plated parrying daggers spinning between her slender fingers like humming propeller blades.

SWISH-SHLICK!

Isolde slipped inside Leona’s guard with the serrated tip of her left dagger carving a shallow three-inch line across Leona’s forearm, while her right blade lunged for the soft hollow of Leona’s throat.

’Fucking annoying woman...’

Leona didn’t blink.

She dipped her chin, catching the pommel of the dagger against the reinforced rim of her leather gorget, while her right boot snapped upward in a vicious short-range front kick aimed straight for Isolde’s kneecap.

SMACK!

Isolde checked the kick with the heel of her boot, spinning three hundred and sixty degrees on the ball of her left foot and using the momentum to drive a spinning elbow strike toward Leona’s jaw.

BANG!

Leona threw her left forearm up to block the elbow, the impact sending a dull concussive jolt through her shoulder, but she used the close proximity to channel her Second Stage core.

WHOOSH!

A sharp pressurized blade of emerald wind-mana erupted from the edge of her machete, forcing Isolde to leap backward three paces with her dark blue duel-leathers fluttering in the displaced gale.

Both women landed in low crouches with their breath misting a bit in the hot stagnant air of the overhang.

Leona’s eyes flicked over Isolde’s shoulder, looking toward the far side of the canyon where the concussive booms of Maya’s battle had just fallen dead silent.

Her heart gave a hard anxious thud against her ribs.

’Maya...’ Leona thought, her knuckles whitening around the grip of her trench-machete. ’The mana signature just vanished... Did she take Gareth out, or did he—’

"Eyes on the steel, cousin," Isolde’s voice sliced through the tension as she twirled the matched daggers across her knuckles with not a single hair out of place as her pale immaculate features were set in an expression of icy superiority.

"Looking away during a duel with direct Albion blood is an extraordinarily fast way to lose an ear," Isolde continued, stepping forward with slow confidence. "Though I suppose I shouldn’t expect battlefield etiquette from the branch of the family that was exiled to the fishing docks of Amazon... How is the salt trade these days, Leona? Still smelling of dead cod and cheap grog?"

Leona’s hazel eyes narrowed into dangerous slits.

"My branch earns our bread with calloused hands, Isolde," Leona spat, shifting her center of mass into a low-slung trench-fighter’s guard. "We don’t sit in high towers letting our cousins do the bleeding while we paint our nails and polish parrying daggers. Let’s see how well that blood holds up when I drive six inches of scrap-iron through your pretty teeth..."

WHOOSH!

Leona exploded forward but she didn’t use refined dueling forms.

’I’m sure she can read them...’

So she fought like an oceanic privateer in a boarding action... She closed the distance with violent erratic footwork, her trench-machete chopping downward in heavy cleaving diagonals that carried the full weight of her shoulders.

CLANG! CLANG! BANG!

Isolde parried with terrifying precision as her daggers moved in interlocking crosses but Leona wasn’t fighting with just her blade.

As Isolde deflected a descending chop, Leona’s left hand shot out like an iron clamp, snatching Isolde by the lapel of her leather coat.

"U-ugh?!"

Leona yanked her forward and slammed a brutal headbutt straight into Isolde’s cheekbone.

CRACK!

Blood sprayed from Isolde’s nose, but the Albion noblewoman didn’t cry out.

With feral grace, Isolde drove her right knee violently into Leona’s solar plexus, simultaneously reversing her grip on her left dagger and burying the hilt straight into Leona’s collarbone.

WHAM!

Both women broke apart, skidding across the shale with blood dripping from their faces and their hearts hammering against their ribs at the wild ecstasy of pure violence.

’I’ll surely take her down next time.’ The both of them thought at the same time.

It was a magnificent breathless clash of bloodline against bloodline—

BOOM!

A massive armored body came tumbling out of the upper canyon, skipping across the rocks between them.

Gareth Pendelton’s shattered bleeding frame rolled across the sand, coming to a halt directly in the center of their duel, coughing up thick, dark blood as his chest was crushed inward like a broken barrel.

"Huh...? Gareth?"

Isolde froze, her eyes widening in disbelief as she looked at the man lying broken in the dirt.