Chapter 583: Think Fast

It was a slow exhausted sound that echoed across the dead quiet of the platform as she rolled her uninjured right shoulder with her gaze lifting slowly to meet Devan’s wild bloodshot eyes.

"You really love the sound of your own voice, don’t you?" Kara said, her voice lacking any sort of mockery as it stripped down to cold crushing boredom. "All that noise about the agony of the apex... the heavy burden of being unmatched... the tragic loneliness of high potential..."

She shook her head once with her eyes narrowing into cold slits.

’God, I hate this guy.’

"You aren’t lonely because you’re strong, Devan," Kara said quietly, each word cutting through the sulfur haze like a razor. "You’re lonely because you’re a loudmouthed mediocre frog sitting at the bottom of a very small puddle, convinced the mud you’re choking on is the entire world..."

Devan’s jaw dropped.

The insult was so blunt and so lacking of any sort of courtly subtlety, that his brain stalled for an entire heartbeat.

Then, the blood rushed to his eyes.

"I WILL TEAR YOU TO PIECES!" Devan screamed, throwing his entire weight forward in a blind hysterical charge.

WHOOSH!

He gathered every remaining drop of volcanic mana in his core, channeling it straight down his right arm to form a massive screaming drill of molten basalt.

’So getting your opponents riled up like this before a fight helps this much?’ Kara thought, perhaps next time, she would try it against another unfortunate fellow.

’For now...’

WHOOOSH!

The atmosphere across the entire Central Ring instantly ceased to exist as up in the air, Aki who had been hovering on a thin delicate gust of emerald wind gasped with her eyes dilating in instinctual terror as her wind-cushion vanished beneath her boots.

’What... what spell is he about to—?!’

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

A catastrophic detonation of pure compressed air displacement exploded from Kara’s single forward step.

’Huh....?’

The attack was not a blade made of wind nor was it an air cutter, If Sera had to put it into words... It was like an invisible train.

The concussive overpressure ripped through the thirty paces of star-iron plate, gouging a massive six-foot-deep trench straight through the solid metal, tearing the structural supports beneath the ring to ribbons.

"Aughhhhh!"

Devan’s charge was violently erased by this train.

WHAM!

The concussive mass of the vacuum hammer struck Devan dead center in the chest!

CRACK-CRUNCH-SHATTER!

The volcanic runes etched into his bronze flesh were pulverized out of existence as his sternum, clavicles, and thoracic cage caved inward by four agonizing inches with a wet sickening crunch that echoed across the entire basin.

"Ungggghhhhh—!"

He couldn’t even let out a proper sound as the breath in his lungs blew out of his throat in an instantaneous red fog.

BOOM!

The directional power of the vacuum strike was angled forty-five degrees downward and Devan Varma was driven vertically into the solid star-iron floor like a common iron nail under a hydraulic forge.

WHOOOOOSH! BANNNGGG!

The metal ring buckled with a thirty-foot crater detonating around his mangled form as he was hammered flat into the floor as his limbs twitched once before going completely limp!

His eyes rolled back until only the blood-shot sclera showed with his mouth hanging slack and his core collapsing into protective shutdown.

The vacuum pulled the trailing dust cloud through the crater, leaving the platform suffocatingly quiet while in the center of the warped, dented trench, Devan lay motionless and completely out of it.

PING!

The extraction runes pinned to Devan’s sash and the unconscious Ananya Rao flared simultaneously with luminescence as their bodies dissolved into millions of shimmering ethereal white particles, shooting vertically into the purple sky to be reclaimed by the World Council’s recovery barges.

BZZZZZZZZT!

From the floating relays suspended above the arena, the voice chimed across the ruins of Sector Forty-Four.

"Notice of Elimination."

"The representatives of the Indus Sovereignty have been defeated and so the Indus Sovereignty is officially eliminated from the tournament bracket."

Silence settled over the black platform.

Kara stood at the edge of the crater, casually dusting a speck of gray soot from her uninjured sleeve with her breathing calm and completely undisturbed.

"Boring," she muttered, rolling her shoulder as she turned her back on the pit.

’Ah...’

The lingering ozone of vaporized basalt still hung heavy in the air, but the blinding vermilion light of Devan Varma’s volcanic power was gone.

Only a scattered constellation of dying white extraction particles drifted toward the purple troposphere, dissolving into nothingness alongside the broken form of Ananya Rao.

Isolde stood completely petrified on the scorched rim of the eastern flagstones.

DRIP!

A bead of cold sweat rolled down her neck, slipping beneath the high star-iron collar of her dueling tunic.

Her slender fingers, usually so steady and effortless with her matched parrying daggers, twitched violently against the polished wire-wrapped hilts.

She didn’t look at her cousin Leona, nor did she look toward the sky where the World Council’s surveillance eyes spun in their orbits.

Her gaze was utterly pinned to Kara White.

’One single blow,’ Isolde thought, her throat constricting until every breath felt like swallowing dry sand. ’She didn’t even draw a blade and she didn’t use an incantation either... She crushed the apex of the southern line like an insect beneath an anvil.’

In the refined courts of Albion, they taught you that true supremacy was an art of lineage and measured resource management.

You measured an enemy’s core reserves, you calculated the angle of their guard, and you whittled them down with peerless parrying combinations until an opening presented itself...

Yet looking at Kara standing over that smoking six-foot-deep trench, dusting off her lapel with complete dismissive boredom, Isolde felt an alien terrifying emotion blossom behind her ribs.

It was reverence.

’That isn’t just martial mastery...’ Isolde mused, her heart thumping against her ribs in a chaotic rhythm. ’That is true authority, If Albion possessed an anchor like her... if someone could stand in the High Council and project that kind of undeniable immovable gravity...’

She found herself staring at the effortless tilt of Kara’s shoulders, the casual arrogance of her stance, unconsciously seeing in the mysterious Lord of Blessed Land the ultimate paradigm of what a sovereign warrior ought to be.

A genuine role model and a standard to strive toward.

"Think fast!"

WHOOSH!

The sharp abrasive rasp of Leona’s voice shattered the reverie like a rock hurled through a glass window.

"Ugh... Not you again..."

Isolde’s eyes dilated.

Her dueling instincts fired on raw reflex, however before her heels could even complete their half-pivot across the basalt dust, a shadow completely blocked out the desert sun.

Leona was already inside her perimeter.

SWOOSH-BANG!

Leona didn’t bother with fancy footwork as she came in low with her heavy trench-machete held behind her like a trailing counterweight and her right boot snapping outward in a vicious horizontal roundhouse kick aimed straight for Isolde’s floating ribs.

CRACK!

The steel toe of Leona’s combat boot connected with Isolde’s defensive parrying dagger, but the concussive transfer of force was immense.

BANG!

Isolde was knocked violently sideways with her boots sliding three paces across the black star-iron floor and her teeth rattling inside her skull.

"Damn gutter rat!" Isolde snarled, spitting blood from her split lip as she immediately dropped her center of gravity; however she didn’t retreat. "I’ll teach you a big lesson!"

Using the sideways momentum of the impact, Isolde spun on the ball of her right foot with her left arm whipping forward in a blinding low-angle thrust with her secondary stiletto.

The silver-plated blade hummed with a needle-thin conduit of pale wind-mana, aimed directly to pierce through the joint of Leona’s right shoulder.

It was a textbook riposte that was clean and perfect... This woman wouldn’t be able to block i—

SLIP!

Leona didn’t try to block it.

The moment the stiletto lunged forward, Leona’s upper body seemed to lose all its skeletal rigidity.

She flowed like heavy sea-water slipping around a breakwater with her head and torso dipping beneath the incoming steel by less than half an inch.

The blade pierced through empty air with the razor-thin wind-mana barely grazing the coarse fabric of her sleeve.

In that single second of overextension, Isolde’s eyes snapped down to Leona’s feet.

Leona’s front heel had dug into the metal plate with her knees bent inward at an acute angle and both of her hands dropping down near her hips in an open-palm coiled posture.

A cold icy terror gripped Isolde’s chest.

’N-no...’

She recognized that stance... It was something that Isolde herself had used against Leona before, when they were still twelve during their first spar.

’This bitch wouldn’t dare—’ Isolde screamed internally.

WHAM!

"Too slow, high-and-mighty!" Leona yelled as her left leg snapped upward like an uncoiling iron spring!

It wasn’t a standard kick at all, instead it was an executioner’s heel-axe.

Her heavy reinforced boot slammed straight down onto the crown of Isolde’s head with the concussive violence of a falling boulder.

CRUNCH-BOOM!

The impact drove Isolde’s skull violently downward into the star-iron platform.

The polished metal rang like a church bell as Isolde’s forehead slammed into the floor with the shockwave making her skull bounce upward like a rubber ball with a fountain of scarlet spraying from her broken nose and split forehead.

’H-huh...?’

Her parrying daggers slipped from her limp fingers, clattering uselessly across the stone.

Before Isolde’s airborne head could even reach the apex of the rebound, Leona was already rotating her entire torso into a vicious piston-driven right hook.

"This is good revenge, bitch!"

WHOO KER-BLAM!

She poured every remaining shred of her emerald wind-mana straight into the impact and the punch caught Isolde dead-center in the temple, blowing a concussive shockwave of pulverized air and blood across the arena.

Isolde was launched horizontally through the air like an artillery shell, soaring thirty yards across the Central Ring before skidding face-down into the crushed quartz dust with her consciousness snuffed out instantly.

PING!

The moment Isolde’s body stopped moving, her transponder flared into an incandescent burst of white light!

Down below, the broken battered form of Gareth Pendelton, who had been lying motionless in the dirt since Maya’s Fourth Rotation dismantled his chest flared simultaneously.

BZZZZZZZZT!

Both of their physical bodies dissolved into millions of dancing, ethereal white particles, shooting vertically into the purple sky as the spatial extraction protocol reclaimed them.

"Notice of Elimination," the cold metallic voice of the World Council boomed from the floating optical relays overhead.

"The representatives of the Albion Concordat have suffered catastrophic incapacitation and collapse. The Albion Concordat is officially eliminated from the tournament bracket."

"Haah... Haah... Haah..."

Leona stood with her legs planted wide with her trench-machete held loosely in her left hand and her knuckles slick with her cousin’s blood.

She wiped her brow with the back of her forearm, smearing soot and sweat across her tanned forehead with her breath tearing from her lungs in ragged heaves.

SNAP!

Her instincts flared as she spun on her heel, her right hand reaching down to draw a curved, eight-inch trench-dagger from her utility belt, bringing both blades up in an immediate lethal cross-guard toward the western ridge.

Standing twenty paces away, watching her calmly, was Valerius Sterling.

The young heir of the Sterling line looked like he had stepped straight out of an imperial gala rather than a continental death match.

His golden armor gleamed under the harsh sunlight without a single dent, scratch, or speck of ash tarnishing its pristine lacquer and beside him, Rook Sterling was casually leaning against a basalt pillar, chewing on a dried ration strip with his eyes flicking between the optical relays and the horizon without the slightest trace of tension.

Valerius’s pale eyes slowly shifted, locking directly onto Leona’s dagger.

WHOOOSH!

For half a second, a soft emerald-green radiance flickered behind Valerius’s irises as the atmospheric pressure around the platform dropped instantly by three full bars.

The loose sand near Leona’s boots stopped falling, caught in a series of micro-pressurized air currents that began slicing microscopic grooves into the star-iron floor with whistling vibrations as a sharp dread seized Leona’s gut.

’This man...’ Leona realized, her jaw clenching so hard her molars ached. ’His wind affinity... it’s insane. It’s on an entirely different level compared to mine. Hell, it feels denser than even the Princess’s attacks.’

She could read the control written in the air around him.

If Valerius chose to unleash that purple-core wind reserves right now, she was entirely at his mercy.

Her battered ribs were cracked, her mana channels were weeping from the brutal exchange with Isolde, and her stamina was running on absolute fumes.

If they clashed, he would slice her down in three seconds flat, and the Sovereign Territory of Amazonia would be wiped clean off the leaderboard.