Chapter 586: Bet On It

"Kar—"

CRACK!

With slow insulting rhythm, Kara used her single hand to snap the chitinous tail off a massive shrimp.

She dipped it deep into the spiced butter, swirled it once, and tossed it into her mouth.

CRUNCH!

Beside the table, Silas was thinking behind that composed half-lidded female mask.

’Again, the gloves by themselves are bloody useless to them,’ Silas mused, watching a tiny drop of garlic butter plop onto the high-grade papers of the Council below him.

It was almost comical watching these rulers stew.

The entire theater sitting around this circular ring had completely missed the forest for the trees as they saw an artificial bypass around the bottleneck of cores...

’Fucking hell.’

They believed they were staring at a universal key that could turn common line infantry into multi-elemental artillery units.

What they didn’t know, what no one outside his personal workshop in Blessed Land could possibly understand, was that Rowenna had woven her own personal brand of paranoia from the academy directly into the conductive sub-fabric.

The woman had spent nights under the pale light of her room, according to her, cackling like a madwoman while etching microscopic interlocking counter-divination runes into every square millimeter of the silk threading.

She had proudly declared, with heavy bags under her bloodshot eyes, that it was her "anti-theft intellectual containment spell."

If any mortal artificer tried to cut the seams, dissolve the leather, or probe the mana channels with a spectral needle, the internal runes would instantly destabilize into inert ash, leaving nothing behind but scorched cowhide... with a small gift.

And then there was Thora.

’The dwarf woman is going to blow a gasket when she finds out I tossed them out,’ Silas thought, the corners of Kara’s lips twitching with the ghost of a smirk.

Thora had spent too many hours over an open forge, hammering the star-iron eyelets into the leather with her own calloused soot-blackened hands so naturally, she would undoubtedly scream bloody murder, throw an iron spanner directly at his kneecaps the second he stepped foot back in the Blessed Land smithy, and threaten to dismantle every one of the golems out of spite.

’I’ll just have to buy her a crate of aged alcohol from the markets and a cartload of high-purity ore from the LAB,’ he calculated casually. ’A dwarf with forty pounds of fresh forging stock and five gallons of northern liquor forgets a grudge in about twenty minutes.’

Besides, the mechanics of those gloves were biologically tethered to Aki’s royal bloodline.

The phantom pathways required cellular walls with an absurd elasticity, a rare genetic trait carried only by the true imperial lineage of House Castellian.

Without that exact physiological buffer, any normal Awakened who slipped those gloves on and tried to draw from the secondary reservoir would suffer an instantaneous violent meridian blowout as the foreign mana detonated inside their forearms, blowing their arms into a wet crimson mist before they could even finish visualizing an incantation.

’And they still want it?’

Whoever bought them would spend months having their chief alchemists fry their eyebrows off in cleanrooms, only to realize they were holding an ornamental pair of expensive leather mitts.

At the end of the day, they’d have to come crawling right back to Blessed Land just to ask how to flip the switch.

Across the circular marble slab, President Julian Vanderbilt Senior looked as if his coronary arteries were about to burst under high pressure.

The corporate titan of the Republic of Columbia was gripping the carved armrests of his executive chair with such violent intensity that the polished star-iron trim was groaning under his fingers.

His charcoal pinstripe suit was immaculate, his iron-gray hair combed back with razor precision with his heavy signet rings glinting against the light of the floating optical plates but beneath that multi-billion-credit veneer, his face was the mottled color of bruised plum.

Every single nerve in his skull was screaming.

Since barely a few hours ago, His only son... Julian Junior, was currently floating in an alchemical nutrient tank with his pelvic girdle shattered into powder with his hip joints pulverized by the very people who had been sitting at this table.

’We also failed to get revenge...’

And now the woman representing Blessed Land was casually peeling shellfish over the official documents of the World Council, treating the leaders of humanity like unruly children waiting for a schoolmaster’s nod.

’Stingy, arrogant, low-born bitch,’ Vanderbilt raged within the silent trembling cage of his own thoughts, his blood pounding in his ears like an industrial drop-forge. ’She won the Exhibition... Blessed Land has already secured the rights to the northern mining corridor, the sole extraction concession for the celestial quartz veins, and every nation on this continent will have to pay them billions in maritime tariffs just to buy unrefined ore. She holds the future wealth of a continent in her palm, and she’s being stingy over a single pair of gloves?!’

Vanderbilt’s teeth ground together with a harsh sickening scrape as he forced his breathing to slow, feeling the cold suffocating gazes of the other heads of state boring into his back.

He couldn’t blow this.

...Not now.

The Republic’s aerospace divisions needed that conductive blueprint... If Columbia could adapt those artificial pathways to their mechanized armor suites, they’d break the Directorate’s monopoly on mid-tier mana engines overnight.

Vanderbilt bowed his head with a stiff humiliating jerk of his neck that made every muscle in his shoulders burn with shame.

’All I want is to choke this bitch to death with my bare hands,’ he thought, his fingernails digging into the upholstery. ’I want to drag her by that black hair through the salt flats of Columbia until she begs for mercy.’

Outwardly, his voice was smooth and dipped in the thick syrup of corporate contrition.

"Lord White," Vanderbilt began, his raspy voice trembling slightly as he fought to keep it level. "If my previous overtures were perceived as aggressive, I tender the Republic’s sincerest apologies... The heat of the tournament and the unfortunate medical incidents of the morning have frayed our collective tempers but I must urge you to look past personal grievances. What you hold on your person is not a mere weapon, it’s an epoch-defining breakthrough for our species... The security of humanity, the defense of our continental perimeter against the breaches, demands that—"

"Fine."

Vanderbilt’s jaw locked mid-word.

He blinked, his spectacles slipping a millimeter down his nose. "I... what?"

"I said fine," Kara drawled, not even looking up as she tossed an empty shrimp shell onto the silver platter with a hollow clatter. "You want the gloves? I’ll sell them."

The Great Assembly Chamber seemed to lose all atmospheric pressure in a single collective heartbeat.

Not a single soul moved.

Around the Grand Table, the rulers of humanity froze as if struck by a high-tier petrification spell as the endless sound of the runic dampening arrays carved into the celestial marble felt suddenly deafening, buzzing straight through their boot soles.

To the north, King Zhao Xian of the Shogunate Isles paused, his long white beard fluttering slightly, his eastern eyes widening beneath his dragon-embroidered silk hat.

Beside him, King Minamoto no Masashi, whose hand had remained perpetually glued to the black-lacquered hilt of his ancestral katana, subtly uncurled his calloused fingers with his dark eyebrows twitching in disbelief.

Pharaoh-President Menes Al-Mansur sat bolt upright in his golden chair.

The bronze-skinned ruler of Khemet, still pale and hollow-eyed after seeing that his favored son was killed, leaned forward so fast his lapis-lazuli collar clicked against his white suit.

Even upon the elevated royal dais, the shadows shifted.

The King of the World, sitting back in his bespoke midnight-navy wool suit, looking like a youthful immortal sovereign barely in his late twenties despite centuries of rule, didn’t shift his posture.

His oceanic blue eyes remained cold, terrifying pools of ancient unmoving ice, but the microscopic distortion of pure mana that constantly hovered around his fingertips momentarily ceased its vibration.

In his lap once more, the Second Princess Kiera tilted her head.

Her royal-blue locks spilled over the King’s tailored lapel, her golden eyes... the unmistakable radiant sign of an Awakened Purple Lord Core... flickering with sudden feline amusement.

She had watched Kara threaten ministers, dismiss the Crown Prince, and mock the court with terrifying arrogance.

Why would a monster who hoarded territory suddenly hawk her primary artifact like a common street peddler?

Up in the mezzanine tier, the independent lords were equally stunned.

Magistrate Bloom’s gray-streaked brows drew together in a sharp V, his hand tightening on the hilt of his saber, while beside him, the second Magistrate adjusted his violet cowl, leaning forward to whisper something that never left his lips.

’If Aki were in this room right now,’ Silas thought, amused by the shock rippling through the hall, ’she’d be throwing a complete royal tantrum... Tugging at her hair, her face bright red, stuttering about how I’m trading away the only thing that made her feel useful.’

Aki was currently sequestered in the dressing suites three levels below, surrounded by terrified royal maids frantically trying to scrub the dried shale from her midnight-blue velvet skirts while walking on eggshells around her newly awakened authority.

But she’d understand eventually... She trusted him, even when his moves looked completely reckless to the rest of the world.

THUD!

Kara reached into her inner coat pocket, pulled out the pair of midnight-blue gloves, and tossed them carelessly onto the center of the celestial marble.

The weave hit the stone with a dull metallic weight.

Under the glare of the quartz skylight, the delicate microscopic runes etched along the knuckles hummed with a soft luminescence with a pale smoldering ember of crimson fire on the right cuff and a faint spiraling ribbon of emerald wind on the left.

"There’s about two small sparks of fire-mana left in the right knuckle," Kara said casually, resting her chin in her palm as she swept her dark eyes across the circle of global rulers.

"Maybe three quick attacks of compressed wind in the left... Just enough for your chief artificers to hook up their sensory needles, calibrate the frequencies, and see how the conduits fire... And who knows, if the winning bid is pretty enough, maybe I’ll even feel generous and charge the reservoirs to full capacity before you take them home... Consider it a private auction with an open floor and the highest bidder takes the prototype."

The silence cracked like winter ice.

’Money-hungry bitch,’ Chancellor Henri de Montmirail thought, his thin spectacles catching the light as his guild arbiters frantically began tapping numbers into their holographic balance sheets. ’She threatens to sever Vanderbilt’s neck ten minutes ago, and now she turns the most sacred assembly in the world into a bazaar stall.’

’Greedy extortionist wren,’ Sir Arthur Pendelton of Albion sneered internally, his silver-haired head tilting down as his cold blue eyes locked onto the glowing star-iron weave. ’She knows every nation here would empty their national reserves to avoid falling behind in conductive weapon research.’

Kara’s grin widened by a fraction, her eyes gleaming with dark predatory mirth.

She didn’t need mind-reading magic to know exactly what every monarch and minister in this room was thinking...

They thought she was an unrefined opportunistic barbarian who cared about nothing but padding her personal vault.

’Good... Let them think it, it’s just as I planned too. A greedy monster was predictable and one with a gold one was even more terrifying.’ Kara thought.

The black haired woman then shifted her gaze up toward the mezzanine tier, looking directly at the platforms reserved for the non-sovereign noble houses.

"What about House Sterling?" Kara called out, her voice cutting through the rising murmurs with effortless volume. "Or the grand Matriarch of House Bloom? You two are sitting on gold mines... Not interested in placing a bid?"

In the Bloom delegation box, Matriarch Etilga Bloom sat as rigid as an obsidian statue with her heavy crimson silk robes pooled around her boots and her terrifying scorched-earth presence radiating outward like an open blast furnace.

Beside her, Seraphina’s father, Magistrate Bloom, remained stony-faced.

Etilga’s lips thinned into a razor-sharp dismissive line.

"House Bloom relies on the pure supremacy of its bloodline flame," Etilga replied, her voice cold and dry as cracked bone. "If a scion of my house requires external leather conduits to ignite their mana, they are unfit to carry the family crest... We have no use for artificial crutches."

A few seats down, Patriarch Lohan Sterling offered a thin noble smile.

His silver robes shimmered under the chandeliers with his pale calculating eyes flicking briefly toward Grand Tsar Volkov across the floor before returning to Kara.

"The Sterling Conglomerate has already concluded a comprehensive infrastructure pact with the Tsardom of Borealis regarding the extraction corridors," Lohan stated smoothly. "It would be an egregious breach of business etiquette for our house to bid against our primary commercial partner. We respectfully decline..."

’Naturally,’ Silas thought, amused by the corporate cowardice. ’Lohan doesn’t want to piss off the seven-foot bear he’s planning to dig trenches with.’