Chapter 581: Compression [Bonus - ]

Chapter 581: Compression [Bonus Chapter]

She didn’t reach for an arrow.

WHOOSH!

Aki clenched her right hand into a fist as the other glove began to flare with a crimson-orange radiance.

’Have this one!’

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

A roaring torrent of high-power elemental fire erupted from her open palm, tearing across the ten paces like an erupting volcano.

The heat was immense, flash-scorching the sand and turning the air into a shimmering distorted furnace but Jax’s lazy smirk didn’t waver.

He didn’t try to block the fire.

The microsecond her glove flared orange, Jax fell backward like a cut timber.

He used Kira’s weight on his shoulder as a counter-balance, dropping flat against the reverse slope of the dune and letting the three-thousand-degree torrent of flame roar harmlessly over his head...

The heat wave washed over the crest, but Jax was already moving!

He kicked off the sandstone, sliding forty yards down the loose yellow silt like an alpine skater, using the smoke and the distortion of Aki’s own blast to completely break line of sight.

"Hey! Get back here!" Aki yelled, coughing through the hot smoke and then she stepped forward to give chase...

TUG!

Her right wrist refused to move.

Aki froze as she looked down at her arm.

Wrapped tightly around her leather bracer was a translucent thread of star-iron wire.

’When did he—?!’

Before she could channel her wind to sever the cord, her body shifted forward by an inch.

SNAP-SNAP-SNAP-SNAP!

The movement triggered a horrific interlocking chain-reaction.

From four concealed anchor points buried beneath the sand, dozens of pre-rigged star-iron wires whipped out of the silt...

They coiled around her ankles, snapped across her waist, pinned her elbows to her ribs, and locked her wrists together in an immaculate suffocating web of high-tension wire!

Aki was rendered utterly immobile!

She stood frozen on the face of the dune, bound like a decorative holiday roast with her composite bow pinned uselessly against her spine.

"Mmmph!" Aki growled, her cheeks puffing out into an enormous furious pout as she thrashed against the wires but the star-iron didn’t budge.

The harder she pulled, the tighter the knots bit into her armor.

Down at the base of the gully, Jax slid to a smooth halt behind a shelf of fractured basalt.

He gently set Kira down against the stone, shaking the sand from his hair with a satisfied grin.

Kira groaned softly with her eyelids fluttering open as she reached up, clutching her swollen jaw with a weak trembling hand, her dark eyes blinking through the haze of unconsciousness.

"Ugh..." Kira croaked, spitting a drop of blood. "Did we... did we leave this place yet...?"

"Not yet, sleeping beauty," Jax whispered, crouching beside her and peering over the rock. "Keep your head down. The Princess is currently throwing a royal tantrum on the slope."

Kira forced herself upright, her gaze tracking up the dune to see Aki trussed up like a netted fish.

She looked at Jax, her brow furrowing in genuine confusion.

"How... how the hell did you tie her up?" Kira rasped. "She was hovering forty feet in the air and she has wind-mana!"

Jax tapped the side of his nose, his grin widening with pure smugness.

"Simple arithmetic, my dear Kira," Jax whispered with theatrical gravity. "When she jumped off that boulder, she kicked up a dust vortex. I simply palmed three micro-spools of star-iron thread into the rising wind... The wind she generated to stabilize her descent actually drew the lines right into her own blind spots then, when she fired that big dramatic fireball, the expansion expanded the air pressure, forcing the anchor pins deep into the bedrock! She literally tied her own knots!"

Kira stared at him with complete deadpan disgust.

"That is the biggest load of horseshit I have ever heard in my entire life," Kira muttered. "You just dropped a spool in the dirt and she stepped on it, didn’t she?"

"Details, details," Jax waved his hand dismissively. "The point is, we have superiority—"

CRACKLE!

The air above the dune suddenly turned cherry-red.

BOOOOM!

The star-iron wires were vaporized as Aki tore through the following firestorm like an enraged little demon with her azure hair whipping wildly as her gloves roared like superheated plasma!

"Hey, get back here!"

She descended from the sky like a falling meteor, her face completely flushed with murderous embarrassment.

"JAX STERLING-CROSS!" Aki’s voice echoed across the canyon and Jax’s jaw dropped.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa!" Jax yelped, scrambling backward on his hands and knees. "Kira! Spirits! Deploy the beasts! Put up a wall!"

Kira looked down at her empty palms with her voice cracking.

"They’re dead, you idiot! I told you, my soul-well is completely drained! I don’t have a single lizard left!"

"Fuck!" Jax barked!

He scrambled to his feet, thrusting both palms forward toward the descending fireball as his internal core surged, finally revealing his native elemental signature.

FWOOSH!

Dense pressurized torrents of water mana erupted from Jax’s hands as he unleashed five high-velocity water blades, screaming through the air like spinning hydraulic saws aimed straight at Aki’s trajectory.

’Is that how it is...?’

Her azure eyes tracked the water blades with a cold look in her eyes.

SWISH! SWISH! SWISH!

Aki twisted her body in mid-air with liquid elegance as she slipped between the five water blades by inches, letting the high-pressure spray mist harmlessly against her leather cuirass, before detonating a final concussive wind-burst beneath her heels.

THUD!

She landed three paces in front of Jax, the concussive landing throwing a ring of sand across his boots and Jax froze.

His hands were still raised with his core flickering and his eyes were wide as he looked into Aki’s furious unblinking glare.

He swallowed hard, forcing his mouth into a trembling, nervous smile as he lifted his right index finger, clearing his throat to deploy his ultimate psychological defense.

"Your next line is," Jax bluffed, pointing at her chest, "’Surrender now, or I will have no choice but to use force!’"

Aki did not speak.

"..."

She stood completely motionless.

Jax blinked.

"Uh... wait. Aren’t you going to say it?"

"..."

Aki maintained dead suffocating silence and beneath her cold exterior, her mind was working at high speed.

’How do I get revenge on this clown?’ Aki thought, her azure eyes narrowing into dangerous slits.

She had watched him fight and she had felt his tricks... It was safe to say that she had deciphered his entire methodology.

Jax Sterling-Cross was not a bumbling idiot... he was a brilliant, psychological combatant.

He didn’t rely on overwhelming mana or high-tier martial arts as he thrived entirely on his opponent’s confusion, frustration, and predictable emotional reactions.

He baited high-borns into shouting standard noble lines, guessed those lines through basic behavioral reading, and used their momentary shock to deploy cheap mundane traps.

Apart from his dirty tricks and his sliver of water-mana, he had virtually nothing left in the tank.

A slow terrifying grin began to spread across Aki’s delicate face as she raised her right hand, pointing her glove straight at his forehead.

She puffed out her chest, mimicking his exact insolent posture, and raised her voice in a loud dramatic declaration.

"Your next line is...!"

Jax blinked and Kira blinked as well as Aki’s mouth stayed open.

Her mind suddenly went terrifyingly blank.

’Wait,’ Aki panicked internally, her pulse stuttering. ’What was he going to say?! What does an Australis scion even say when they’re cornered?!’

The silence stretched for one second... Two seconds... Three seconds...

Aki’s cheeks puffed out like a pair of ripe plums with her face turning violently red from forehead to collarbone.

"Uh..." Aki squeaked as her voice cracked. "Uh... uh..."

Jax and Kira stared at her in utter bewilderment and Jax’s left eyebrow twitched as a small involuntary snort escaped his nose.

PFFFFT!

Jax started to chuckle.

"Did you... did you forget your own line, Princess?"

That snicker was the fatal mistake as the embarrassed flush on Aki’s face instantly vanished, replaced by an expression of pure malice.

Her azure hair floated upward as her gloves detonated with terrifying fury.

"YOUR NEXT LINE IS SCREAMING IN PAIN AT BEING BURNED ALIVE!" Aki shrieked at the top of her lungs.

Jax’s smile died and Kira’s eyes bulged.

"Huh?!" both Australis scions shouted in unison.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

Aki unleashed everything as a wall of roaring superheated crimson-and-white solar fire detonated from her glove.

The cataclysmic inferno completely swallowed the rocky area, vaporizing the basalt, flash-boiling the sand into an ocean of green glass, and tearing a screaming mushroom cloud of black soot and fire into the sky.

WHOOSH!

Inside the heart of the explosion, two emergency transponders detonated simultaneously with a bit of light.

The physical bodies of Jax Sterling-Cross and Kira Bennett dissolved into millions of shimmering ethereal white particles, shooting vertically into the purple stratosphere as the World Council’s extraction protocol ripped them clean out of the realm.

BZZZZZZZZT!

From the floating optical relays, the mechanical voice chimed with authority.

"Notice of Elimination."

"The representatives of the Commonwealth of Australis have suffered catastrophic combat trauma... The Commonwealth of Australis is officially eliminated from the tournament bracket."

Aki stood in the center of the roaring crater, panting heavily with her face covered in black soot and her chest heaving as she lowered her smoking glove.

Before she could even catch her breath—

BZZZZZZZZT!

A second administrative chime echoed across the entire Sector Forty-Four.

"CRITICAL ANNOUNCEMENT."

"The Primary Representative of the Crown, Crown Prince Alexander of House Castellian, has suffered decisive defeat and incapacitation. Crown Prince Alexander has been extracted from the field..."

Silence fell over the world.

Alexander? The Crown Prince? The undisputed Fourth Stage titan who had accepted star-iron suppression rings just to mock those of the lower stages?

Defeated?

In every surviving warrior’s mind, a single terrifying name surfaced simultaneously.

’Kara White...’

Had the mysterious Lord of Blessed Land already reached him? Had she hunted down the Prince of the World and crushed him beneath her power?

Before anyone could process the earth-shattering news, the broadcast relay chimed for a third time.

"The two-hour preliminary engagement phase has concluded."

"Territory compression protocol is now active... All surviving participants will be immediately transported to the Central Ring for the final resolution."

WHOOSH!

A suffocating pressure seized the fabric of space and the familiar, nauseating sensation of long-distance spatial displacement gripped Aki’s stomach but this time, she didn’t close her eyes.

’I don’t want to faint again...’

Aki circulated her compressed mana through her temporary pathways, preparing herself for the teleportation that was about to happen.

WHOOSH!

The desert vanished in a flash of blinding white light and when reality snapped back into focus, Aki didn’t stumble.

She didn’t feel dizzy either.

Her boots touched down firmly upon an immense circular plateau of polished black star-iron that hovered thousands of feet above the shattered landscape... the Central Ring.

She looked around and the field was decimated.

Fifty paces to the north, Devan Varma was still sitting cross-legged upon a raised dais of scorched basalt.

His muscular bronze chest was unmarked with his arms crossed over his coiling gold nagas and his eyes closed in deep undisturbed meditation.

Near the base of his dais sprawled face-down in the dirt, was Ananya Rao... she was completely unconscious, her gold beads scattered across the stone and her skull swollen where Leona and Isolde had brutally double-teamed her before the compression.

Standing twenty paces away, Leona leaned heavily against her trench-machete, breathing hard, while Isolde stood beside her, coldly wiping blood from her silver parrying daggers.

Then... Aki’s gaze drifted toward the western edge of the ring.

Her breath caught in her throat.

Sitting casually on a low star-iron bench, propping her chin up with one hand, was Kara.

The Lord of Blessed Land looked offensively relaxed.

’Was she... sleeping?!’ Aki thought, her jaw dropping in disbelief.

Sitting twenty paces behind Kara were Valerius Sterling and Rook Sterling.

Valerius was fully armored now, though he still looked vaguely bored, while Rook was busy organizing his reconnaissance plates.

Suddenly, the air temperature across the entire platform spiked violently.

CRRRRRRRK!

Aki spun on her heel with her boots shifting back as she raised a guard and stepping onto the eastern edge of the star-iron ring was a woman.

Her hair was no longer crimson... it flowed in long weightless waves of celestial silver-white that drifted against the thermal updrafts like vaporized mercury.

A runic crest burned with radiance along the left side of her porcelain jaw.

The heat radiating from her skin alone was so much that the polished star-iron beneath her boots was groaning, the fine sand drifting across the platform flash-vitrifying into sheets of translucent green glass with every step she took.

Seraphina Bloom.

Aki instinctively cleared out of her path with a cold shiver running down her spine.

’Is that... Seraphina...?’ Aki thought, her azure eyes wide with awe. ’She looks completely different. What level of fire is that...?’

Seraphina’s chest heaved slightly beneath her scorched cuirass.

She was exhausted.

The brutal high-intensity battle against Alexander had pushed her core to its limit, and she knew her Primordial Spirit fusion had less than two minutes remaining before the backlash set in.

Yet, she held her head high, her glowing silver eyes sweeping across the surviving fighters with cold disdain.

"So," Seraphina drawled, her melodic voice carrying a dual-toned spirit-resonance that echoed across the platform. "You’re the ones who survived, huh?"