Chapter 580: Aki Joins Violence [II / Bonus - ]

Chapter 580: Aki Joins Violence [II / Bonus Chapter]

The Princess’s midnight-blue combat tunic fluttered against her slender frame with the void-black fabric drinking in the harsh desert glare.

Her azure hair whipped around her temples like silk ribbons, framing a face that was remarkably calm, though her jaw was clamped with the nervous electric tension of someone whose pulse was hammering at two hundred beats a minute.

In her hands, the limbs of her composite star-iron bow were drawn to maximum deflection.

A single needle-thin arrow of compressed, high-frequency emerald wind-mana was nocked to the braided string, humming with a frequency that made the enamel of Kira’s molars throb.

The glowing broadhead was aimed dead center at the hollow of Kira’s throat.

Kira’s knuckles whitened with her hands instinctively dropping into a defensive posture.

’Damn it,’ Kira’s mind raced, her core channels aching with cold empty fatigue. ’This is the worst matchup.’

Her Spirit Beast manipulation relied on surprise, depth, and misdirection.

When an opponent knew she was a summoner... when they had already watched her Dune-Crusher Scyllas get pulverized by an Amazonian siege-strike, the elemental advantage evaporated.

You couldn’t spring a trap on a woman who refused to touch the ground.

’Four,’ Kira calculated with bitter precision. ’I have four bonded spirits left in my soul-well.’

Dozens of lesser beasts had already been snuffed out across the northern sector.

On any normal campaign in the red wastes of Australis, she would have stopped, poured water onto the earth, and sung the guttural mourning dirges for the bonded souls she had lost but out here? In this slaughterhouse? Mourning was a luxury reserved for the dead.

She needed to survive.

She needed to drag her delegation across the finish line, if only to claim the amount promised by Australis’s President yet, Kira wasn’t blind.

’What chance do we actually have to take the crown?’ she thought with cold despair pooling beneath her breastbone.

She had been the Commonwealth’s primary offensive anchor, and her highest-tier beasts had been swatted out of existence like midges against an iron wall.

...Then Jax?

Jax was a marvel of low-rent improvisation, but there was a hard immutable ceiling to how much bullshit a man could spin when facing monsters who turned square miles of rock into boiling glass.

Still, Kira had not crawled out of the salt marshes of the southern rim just to roll onto her back and present her throat to a pampered royal.

CRACK!

Kira dropped her weight six inches with her thighs coiling like tempered springs and her tattooed forearms rising into a low-slung outback claw-guard.

Up in the air, Aki observed the shift but the Princess didn’t speak.

’Oh...?’

She simply tilted her chin with her azure hair whistling in the whistling desert gale, and gave a single firm nod.

WHOOSH!

A vibrant jade-green luminescence ignited within Aki’s azure irises, bleeding outward along the delicate contours of her eyelashes...

The wind-channels woven into the midnight-blue leather of her gloves flared to maximum saturation, venting fine micro-pressurized jets of air that hissed like coiled serpents around her wrists.

TWANG!

The star-iron bowstring snapped and the emerald wind-arrow tore through the twenty-foot gap with high speed.

WHOOOOOSH!

Kira didn’t try to track the projectile with her eyes, instead the second the bowstring hummed, she threw her entire torso horizontally across the face of the dune.

BOOM!

The wind-arrow struck the sand where her chest had been a fraction of a second earlier and the compressed mana detonated upon contact, blowing a six-foot crater into the dune and showering Kira’s back in stinging superheated grit.

Kira used the concussive expansion of the blast to accelerate her roll, snapping both hands together in a brutal twin-palm mudra.

"Blood-Stalker Pack!"

RUMBLE-SNAP!

The sand directly in front of her tore open!

Two massive canine constructs... Chitin-Plated Dune Jackals, their bodies woven from dark compressed earth-spirit mana and tipped with three-inch bone fangs erupted from the silt.

’Are they going to lunge at me...?’ Aki thought.

They didn’t lunge at the sky though, the monsters bounded off the sand, crossing their trajectories to create a double-helix pincer leap aimed straight at Aki’s descending form.

"Heh."

Aki was falling, but she wasn’t falling helplessly.

Her right hand released the bow, letting the star-iron weapon hang across her back by its braided leather sling, while her gloves ignited with emerald combustion.

WHOOSH!

She detonated a directional air-burst beneath her left heel, violently pivoting her body horizontally in mid-air as the first Dune Jackal snapped its jaws on empty air, its teeth clacking together like iron traps inches from her shoulder.

Aki didn’t let it pass.

As the beast cleared her flank, her right boot... reinforced with a dense razor-sharp edge of compressed wind-mana snapped out in a vicious, sweeping roundhouse kick.

CRACK!

The kick caught the Spirit Beast dead in the jaw and the concussive force shattered the construct’s bone-plated skull into flying calcified shards, dispersing its spiritual core into a cloud of dying yellow dust.

Before the second Jackal could re-orient its airborne arc, Aki brought her hands together.

"Disperse!" Aki gasped.

POW!

A twin-palm blast of pressurized wind erupted from her gloves, catching the second beast squarely in the ribs.

The concussive force sounded like a muffled thunderclap, blowing the construct backward forty yards where it tumbled and dissolved against the face of the opposite dune.

Aki hit the sand on the balls of her feet with her boots sinking three inches into the soft yellow silt.

Her heart was hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird.

’I’m doing this,’ she realized, a sudden cold jolt of adrenaline prickling across her scalp. ’This is real... No one is standing in front of me...’

WHOOSH-SHLICK!

Kira burst through the cloud of settling spirit-dust like a feral cat.

Her fingers were curled into rigid, iron-like talons with her fingernails elongated and hardened by dense earth-mana into three-inch quartz claws as she threw a savage diagonal claw-swipe aimed straight for Aki’s eyes.

"Oop!"

Aki leaned her upper body backward with the razor-sharp quartz claws whistling a quarter of an inch past the tip of her nose.

Kira’s follow-through was relentless as she stepped deep into Aki’s guard, driving her left elbow up toward the Princess’s chin.

SMACK!

Aki brought her left forearm up, intercepting the elbow with a desperate unrefined block.

"Ugh..."

The blunt impact sent a dull numbing shockwave up Aki’s arm, but instead of retreating, Aki’s eyes flared as she drove her right palm straight into Kira’s solar plexus, releasing a microscopic point-blank jet of pressurized wind.

WHAM!

The air-burst blew the oxygen clean out of Kira’s lungs as Kira gagged with her footing slipping backward across the loose silt, but the Australis scion threw her weight sideways as her right leg whipped around in a low, sweeping kick that caught Aki behind the left ankle.

THUD!

Aki’s balance broke and both women crashed hard into the sand, rolling down the thirty-degree slope of the dune in a tangled chaotic blur of limbs, leathers, and flying grit!

CRUNCH! SMACK!

Kira threw a short brutal right cross that grazed Aki’s cheekbone, splitting the skin and drawing a bead of red.

Aki’s teeth snapped shut, once again, the stinging pain didn’t make her panic but it made her vision go crystal-clear.

As they tumbled to the base of the dune, Aki planted both hands in the sand, torqued her hips with desperate agility, and planted both heels firmly into Kira’s chest.

WHOOOOOOSH!

Aki channeled an explosive wind blast through the soles of her boots and Kira was launched eight feet vertically into the air as the Princess rolled onto her feet, surging upright before Kira could hit the ground.

Her midnight-blue gloves roared with emerald luminescence and she stepped in.

"Hah!"

The Princess struck first with sharp piston-like left jab to the floating ribs.

THUMP!

"Ugh..."

Then she followed up with a snapping right cross to the collarbone.

CRACK!

’Just get knocked out already!’

Aki spun her body with wind magic in order to land a spinning back-kick that connected squarely with Kira’s sternum.

BOOM!

And finally, as Kira’s body began to pitch backward, Aki gathered every remaining drop of her wind-mana into her right fist, planting her front foot so deeply into the bedrock beneath the silt that the stone cracked.

She drove the straight right dead center into Kira’s jaw.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The detonation blew the surrounding sand outward in a ten-foot ring as Kira’s eyes rolled back into her head with the last of her consciousness erased in an instant.

Her body went completely limp, flying backward fifteen yards before skipping across the hard shale and coming to a motionless, sprawling halt in the dust.

Aki stood with her right arm fully extended with her chest heaving in violent agonizing gasps.

"Haaah... Haah... Haah..."

She doubled over, resting her hands against her knees, wheezing as hot air tore through her raw throat.

Blood dripped from her split cheek, landing in tiny dark circles on the yellow silt.

’It’s... so exhausting,’ Aki thought, her vision swimming with gray spots. ’To keep hitting someone... to keep forcing yourself forward when every nerve is screaming to stop... How do Maya and Silas do this every single day?’

Before she could wipe the sweat from her eyes—

PING!

The fine hairs on the back of Aki’s neck snapped upright as her internal alarms went off like a ringing bell!

Without a second of conscious thought, Aki detonated an emergency wind-burst beneath her soles, launching her body twenty feet straight up into the air.

SWOOSH-CLACK!

A low whistling arc of razor-sharp star-iron wire snapped across the empty airspace where her knees had been standing half a heartbeat earlier as Aki landed lightly atop an isolated sandstone boulder with her chest heaving and her azure eyes immediately tracking down toward the canyon floor.

Approaching from the eastern rise, stepping with a slow exaggerated limp, was Jax Sterling-Cross.

His soot-stained combat tunic was torn open, his left forearm tightly bound in dirty field linen that still carried the pungent minty reek of alchemical salve.

His hair was a wild, windblown mess, but his face carried an expression of mild curiosity as Aki’s hand drifted back to her bow and her heart gave a hard triumphant thud.

’I took out Kira,’ the thought flashed through her mind. ’If I take him out right now... Australis is eliminated. That’s an entire sovereign delegation wiped off the board by my hands...’

The exhilaration surged through her channels, washing away the ache in her lungs as she drew three star-iron arrows from her quiver simultaneously, nocking all three to the bowstring in an interlocking fan!

WHOOSH!

She poured her emerald wind-mana into the shafts as the arrows began whining with high-speed rotational torque!

TWANG-TWANG-TWANG!

She released.

Three screaming streaks of jade-green light plunged out of the sky, forming a lethal triangular bracket designed to leave zero escape.

"Uhh..."

Jax took a casual half-stumbling step to the left, tilted his chin backward by three inches, and hopped lightly off his right heel.

THWIP! THWIP! THWIP!

The three arrows buried themselves feathers-deep into the sandstone boulder behind him, missing his flesh by millimeters and Aki blinked with her mouth falling slightly open.

’How...?’ her mind stuttered. ’He didn’t even accelerate his core! He just... walked through the trajectory?!’

Jax didn’t look up at her.

He casually sauntered over to where Kira lay motionless in the dust as he bent down, effortlessly hoisting the unconscious summoner over his broad shoulder like a sack of grain, before finally lifting his eyes to meet the First Princess’s gaze.

"You know," Jax drawled. "it’s extraordinarily rude to shoot at a man while he’s rescuing his comrade. Didn’t they teach you royal manners in that fancy palace?"

Aki dropped off the boulder, landing on the sand ten paces away, her bow lowered as her jaw went tight with mounting irritation.

"Drop her and yield, Jax," Aki demanded, forcing herself to sound like an authoritative royal. "You’re injured, your partner is down, and you have nowhere left to run."

Jax let out a short snort.

"Your next line is," Jax announced, pointing his unbandaged right index finger dead at her nose. "’Please stand down, I do not wish to hurt you any further!’"

Aki’s mouth opened, completely on instinct.

"Please stand down, I do not wish to hurt you any furth—"

She choked on the syllables with the words cutting off with a sharp sound as her eyes went wide as saucers.

A violent burning crimson flooded up her neck, rushing all the way to the tips of her ears.

’H-How did he do that?!’ she panicked internally, her heart practically leaping into her throat.

Her cheeks puffed out into an enormous mortified pout with her small hands trembling around her bow.

"See?" Jax grinned, his eyes crinkling with shameless smugness. "Predictable! You royals always talk like you’re reading straight out of an etiquette manual... It’s always ’please this’ and ’I do not wish that.’ Have you ever had an original thought in your life, Princess?"

"B-Be quiet!" Aki squeaked, her face flaming as her composure shattered into flustered chaos.