Chapter 582: Devan Is A Fraud...?

Over where she was on the field, Kara slowly stood up.

"Haah..."

She rolled her broad shoulders, arching her back with a long lazy stretch that popped several vertebrae.

’What a nice nap.’

She lifted her right hand, offering Aki a small casual wave.

"What’s up, Aki?" Kara called out. "I’m glad you’re still alive."

Aki’s cheeks flushed a bright delicate pink as she quickly dropped her gaze, coughing into her fist to hide her embarrassment.

’I’m glad you’re alive too...’

Seraphina’s glowing eyes snapped toward Kara and a sharp focus sharpened her gaze.

Her core flared, feeling the immense ocean of gravity and gold-core mana humming beneath the woman’s skin.

’As expected,’ Seraphina thought with her teeth setting. ’She’s stronger than me. In raw unsuppressed output, she’s far beyond what I can reach without the Spirit.’

Seraphina took a half-step forward, ready to issue a challenge... She was going to face Spirit backlash shortly but still, she was going to put her full body into it.

’I want to test the limits of her power...’

Then...

Seraphina paused as her silver eyebrows twitched.

Her gaze slid from Kara’s face, dropping three inches down to the woman’s exposed throat.

’Isn’t that...?’

Seraphina’s breath caught in her throat as resting against Kara’s collarbone was a necklace.

Seraphina blinked once and she blinked twice. She rubbed her eyes with the back of her glove, wondering if the exhaustion was finally causing her eyes to hallucinate.

’It must be...’

However it wasn’t a hallucination.

’I bought that necklace for Silas at the Obsidian Sanhedrin,’ Seraphina’s mind screamed with her jaw locking rigidly.

It was on the double date with Harper... she had purchased this for him because it looked beautiful and complimented him nicely and she also made him promise to not take it off.

’It’s the exact same piece,’ she analyzed frantically. ’Even the lines I carved into the rear clasp while he was looking awa... they’re right there!’

A cold suffocating silence descended over Seraphina’s thoughts.

’O-oh...’

The puzzle pieces, which had seemed so absurdly disjointed for a long time, violently snapped together with the clarity of a lightning strike.

The mysterious prodigy from Blessed Land... and the mysterious feeling she felt when she was with Silas.

’It’s Silas,’ Seraphina realized with her heart thumping violently against her ribs. ’This isn’t a rival... This is Silas in a female disguise.’

Her knuckles whitened until the skin threatened to tear as her teeth ground together with a harsh audible scrape that turned the heads of Leona as well as Isolde.

’I...’

She wasn’t angry that he had kept it a secret from her.

Seraphina was a high-tier noble so she understood secrets. She knew she hadn’t earned his complete unreserved trust yet as in a world of political assassinations and bloodline purges, a man who showed all his cards was a man who died in an alley.

She understood the logic and she accepted the secrecy.

’But...’

Seraphina’s ruby-silver eyes drifted down by three more inches, locking dead center onto Kara’s chest.

’WHY?!’ Seraphina screamed in the privacy of her own soul. ’WHY IN THE SEVEN HELLS DOES HIS FEMALE DISGUISE HAVE BIGGER BREASTS THAN MINE?!’

"Fuuu... Fuuu... Fuuu..."

’It looks like she’s about to explode, is something wrong?’ Silas thought inwardly as he blinked, she couldn’t be annoyed just from looking at Kara’s face right. ’I can’t be that beautiful that I’m making her insecure just looking at me right...?’

Seraphina took a slow deliberate breath, letting the roaring pressure coiled within her ribcage settle down by a fraction.

The initial wave of murderous petty outrage gradually subsided, replaced by a cold calm.

She smoothed the charred leather edge of her cuirass, folding her arms over her chest with an icy sharp-edged composure.

’Look at the positives,’ she told herself, clamping down on the frantic urge to rip the star-iron ring in half with her bare hands. ’Just breathe and look at the bloody positives.’

Silas was alive.

Silas was standing fifty paces away under the broad daylight of Sector Forty-Four, completely intact, bearing the banner of Blessed Land without a single broken bone.

He had slipped past the watchful scrying eyes of the World Council and outmaneuvered even her Mother’s web of informants in the city.

It was brilliant and it was infuriating as well.

’Just like Silas is...’

Once again, she understood secrecy since her mother had drilled it into her marrow since she could walk... an exposed weapon invited counter-measures, and a noble who showed all his cards was dead before his first campaign so she didn’t fault the logic.

’That does not mean I will forgive him for this,’ Seraphina thought, her jaw tightening until the enamel ground audibly together.

Her silver eyebrows twitched, her eyes drifting downward again toward Kara’s silhouette with raw pettiness. ’The moment the teleportation seals break and I visit him again, I’m locking him in an iron vault until he explains every single inch of this absurdity... Starting with why he padded that chest three sizes larger than mine.’

Before her temper could spark a flare of silver flame across the platform, the heavy silence hanging over the Central Ring was shattered by a low grinding sound as basalt cracked and slag hissed.

Fifty paces to the north, Devan Varma rose from his dais.

He moved with the ponderous momentum of a magma shelf shifting beneath continental plates.

’Devan, huh?’ Sera thought, she was not too worried about him... well since Silas was here, the Indus man would naturally go for him instead. ’If I were to face him in this state, it would be a different outcome...’

Sera was sure that the battle could go either way because of the amount of mana she had spent dispatching the Prince.

He did not spare a single downward glance for Ananya Rao, whose limp beaten body lay sprawled in the dust at his heels with her skull swollen and her lotus staff shattered into broken kindling.

CLENCH!

Devan’s knuckles popped like small mortar shells.

WHOOSH!

The runes carved across his collarbones, his broad deltoids, and the thick meat of his forearms flared into an angry vermilion.

’H-huh?’ Aki thought.

The mana radiating off him was not the bright fire Seraphina as well as she commanded... It was thick magma that felt viscous and heavy with sulfur as well as liquefied iron while carrying the crushing kinetic density of the mantle itself.

His molten gaze locked dead-center onto Kara.

"I have waited for this moment," Devan rumbled, his voice scraping low vibrating straight through the floor into everyone’s boot soles. "From the hour the rosters were drafted, I knew the others were merely dry chaff waiting for the spark... Cowards hiding behind bows, nobles prancing with thin rapiers, animals screaming in the dirt. Only you carried the weight of a true beast."

Kara remained standing on the edge of the western flagstones, her dark suit fluttering lazily against her shins.

Her right hand rested loose at her hip as her left arm hung limp in its dark sling.

"Huh?"

She offered him a half-lidded flat gaze that looked less like an opponent appraising a rival and more like a clerk waiting for a tedious patron to finish counting copper coins.

Devan took a heavy step forward and with every stride, the soles of his boots left smoking black-rimmed rings in the ground.

"Do you know the curse of the apex, woman?" Devan asked. "Do you know the agonizing hollow boredom of being the peak in an entire country? In Indus, the elders wept over thresholds and bottlenecks... They spent decades meditating before ancient steles, praying for a drop of divine marrow but to me... those bottlenecks were nothing more than shallow curbs in the road. I stepped over them before my twentieth winter and I have never met an equal as no blade has drawn my blood and no spell has forced me to yield half an inch of ground."

’I’m beginning to get tired of these overconfident fuckers.’ Kara thought, at this point, she would rather face another Ren.

Devan extended both hands with his palms facing outward and his thick fingers curling into heavy iron talons.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

A massive circular shockwave of pure volcanic domain aura blasted radially outward from his heels.

The temperature on the platform spiked past the boiling point of lead as a suffocating sulfurous fog rolled across the black metal, the fine quartz sand that had settled on the platform melting instantly into a bubbling translucent film of boiling red slag.

Devan sank his center of gravity into an iron-rooted combat stance with his molten eyes burning into Kara’s forehead.

"You have survived the purge," Devan boomed, his aura churning like an active volcano. "Therefore, I grant you the highest honor a son of Indus can bestow... I grant you permission to be my rival. Stand, Kara White, and let us see if your flesh can endure the molten blood of the world!"

BOOM!

Devan launched and the star-iron beneath his rear foot dented inward by three inches as he closed the thirty-pace gap in seconds.

He tore through the sulfur haze, leaving a twin wake of boiling liquefied iron behind his boots with his right arm cocked back like the piston of a hydraulic press.

Seraphina of course took this opportunity to analyze him.

’He’s not just fast,’ Seraphina analyzed instantly, her eyes narrowing as she read the physical displacement. ’He’s using the liquid magma beneath his boots as a propulsion slide to produce low friction and maximum forward inertia.’

That was quite smart actually...

Devan’s right fist drove forward though it was not a simple punch, instead a condensed three-foot battering ram of boiling four-thousand-degree basalt.

FSSSSSSSSSH... CRASH!

Kara grinned.

"Heh."

She took half a step backward with her left heel, dropping her chin by two inches.

The massive smoking ram of lava screamed past the bridge of her nose with a sickening deafening roar with the blistering hot wind whipping the black hair across her temples.

’Missed?!’ Devan’s mind sparked with immediate violent irritation but he didn’t reset.

"Arrrgh!"

He leaned into the momentum, his left elbow snapping upward in a tight, vicious rising hook, channeling a jagged blade of cooling obsidian along the forearm to take her jaw off.

SWOOSH!

Kara simply tilted her upper torso back by four inches, letting the obsidian edge cleave through the empty airspace above her collarbone.

Devan’s combat instincts took over instantly as he converted the missed hook into a spinning back-fist, pouring a fresh wave of liquid magma into his knuckles to create a blinding cone-shaped spray of molten shrapnel across her entire front.

’Dodge that, rat!’

Kara didn’t dodge the spray.

TAP!

Her boot sole met the star-iron floor.

With an imperceptible twitch of her right shoulder, she stepped straight into the rotation, slipping into his blind spot directly beneath his extended armpit.

The molten spray whistled harmlessly over her right shoulder, scorching the empty air behind her, while her right index and middle fingers snapped out like steel pincers, delivering a sharp double-tap to the nerve cluster right at the hinge of Devan’s floating ribs.

THWACK-THWACK.

"Ghk!" Devan grunted, a sudden jolt of paralysis shooting up his thoracic wall as his breath hitched with his left side going completely numb for half a second.

"Is that all?" Kara asked with her voice completely smooth and drifting into his ear with icy amusement. "You gave that entire theatrical speech about being a lonely god, and you can’t even land a clean hit on a woman with one arm tied behind her back...?"

SNAP!

The veins along Devan’s neck bulged like thick blue cables.

The sheer humiliation of having his elite sequence dismantled by two finger-taps in front of the surviving nobles detonated every restraint in his mind.

"Arrogant wench!" Devan bellowed!

He abandoned close-quarters martial arts as he ripped both palms upward toward the sky, stomping both boots down with as much force as he could.

"Abyssal Magma Geyser!"

RUMBLE-CRUNCH!

The star-iron ring groaned and beneath the metal platform, the structural supports screamed as six massive towering geysers of bubbling white-hot magma ripped through the floor.

The magma curved inward, forming a forty-foot cage of liquid rock and toxic sulfur designed to incinerate every possible method of escape.

’Let’s see you dance across that!’ Devan snarled internally with his teeth bared in feral triumph however to his surprise, she didn’t try and escape.

TAP!

Her boot touched down on the rising wall of the first geyser.

Seraphina’s eyes widened.

’What is he—?!’

Kara didn’t burn as the second her sole met the surface of the three-thousand-degree liquid rock, she released a paper-thin film of high-frequency vibrational mana beneath her leather.

"You’ll have to do better..."

She didn’t fight the heat as she converted the immense upward force to make her move.

STEP! STEP! VAULT!

She skated up the curving face of the erupting lava pillar as if it were a flight of carved marble stairs and with three effortless, fluid strides, she vaulted cleanly over the crest of the magma cage, flipping weightlessly through the sulfurous smoke before dropping back toward the star-iron floor behind him like a falling hawk.

Down below, Seraphina watched the maneuver with her breath caught in her throat.

’That’s my man,’ she thought with a fierce burning pride roaring through her chest.

She had seen high-level movement arts across all the sovereign territories, but nobody moved like Silas.

He didn’t waste a single drop of mana and he didn’t show off... He just took whatever the enemy threw at him and turned it into his personal footstool.

’Show me,’ Seraphina urged silently, her silver eyes glowing with hungry fascination. ’I want to see what you actually are.’

Devan spun around with his boots skidding through cooling slag and his chest heaving like an industrial bellows.

"H-huh...?"

Sweat poured down his bronze skin, boiling away into steam before it could reach his waist.

His knuckles were trembling... not from physical fatigue, but from the raw vibrating fury that was rapidly poisoning his judgment.

Every single rule of combat he had learned in the royal academy was failing him.

The girl wasn’t matching his output at all, instead, she was treating his arts like bad weather.

"Stand still!" Devan roared, his voice cracking with animalistic frustration. "Stop running like a gutter-rat! Stand your ground and cross mana with me! Or was the mighty reputation of Blessed Land just a collection of cheap parlor tricks and circus acrobatics?!"

Kara landed lightly on the scorched metal twenty paces away with the hem of her dark suit settling softly around her ankles.

She sighed.