Chapter 588: Ladders To Climb?

The chamber slowly settled back into an uneasy breathless quiet as the circus was over.

Now the true, terrifying weight of the summit descended upon the room.

At the northern arc of the table, the central masked figure of the World Council slowly raised her head.

The motion was unnaturally fluid, lacking any micro-movements of human bone and tendon.

When she spoke, her voice was unmistakably feminine, yet it carried a layered multi-tonal resonance, as if three different women were speaking at the exact same pitch with their voices vibrating directly inside the skulls of everyone present.

"Now that the commercial trivialities have concluded," the masked speaker intoned. "We may proceed with the formal business of this assembly."

Every pair of eyes in the Grand Assembly Chamber swung toward Kara.

Kara let out a small tired sigh.

She set her empty crystal glass down, shoved the silver platter of shrimp tails to the side, and finally swung her boots off the Grand Table, sitting upright, resting her elbows on the celestial marble with her right hand drumming a slow beat against the stone.

’Finally,’ Silas thought, his mind sharpening into a razor-thin point of cold focus. ’My turn.’

This was what all the posturing, the blood in the desert, and the public humiliation of the royal house had been building toward...

The World Council was terrified.

For centuries the global hierarchy had been locked beneath an unbreakable ceiling... No mortal had reached the Gold Core threshold in living memory.

The balance of power was a delicate clockwork mechanism managed by the Council and the Nine Powers, and now a living anomaly had come, wielding enough raw power and mana to shatter that clockwork into dust.

"Kara White," the masked speaker continued, her porcelain mask gleaming under the harsh chandeliers. "By the undisputed rite of the world, you have demonstrated a power unseen since the founding era. The Council formally proclaims you Humanity’s Hero... a supreme protector of the terrestrial sphere. It is the collective desire of this assembly that you do not abandon this realm for the higher planes of the Sovereign Realm, but remain anchored here to safeguard our collective borders against the encroaching dark. In exchange for your presence, the Council is prepared to grant unprecedented boons across both realms."

The masked woman began listing the terms, her voice ringing with grand generosity.

"We offer permanent tax exemption across all nine continental corridors, unrestricted passage for Blessed Land’s trade flotillas, and a permanent diplomatic seat at the High Council’s biannual convening—"

"Hold on," Kara interrupted as she raised her right hand, holding up a single slender index finger.

The masked woman’s voice cut off instantly as a sharp collective gasp rippled through the upper stadium tiers.

Nobody, not even the dual monarchs of Shogya nor the Grand Tsar of Borealis, ever dared interrupt a Speaker of the World Council.

It was a breach of protocol that historically warranted execution on the spot!

"Let’s not get ahead of ourselves with poetry," Kara said, dripping with dry unimpressed sarcasm. "Let’s start with the basics, like point number one."

She tapped her extended finger against the marble.

"Before this tournament or hell, this meeting as a whole commenced, the World Council issued an official proclamation stating that if the Lord of Blessed Land presented herself before this assembly in the flesh, she’d be awarded a bounty of nine to ten billion credits. Well... I’m sitting here. I’ve been sitting here for two hours, battling, eating your shrimp and listening to your politicians whine and yet, when I check my newly minted World Bank account, that ten billion is nowhere to be found. Why is that? Are the supreme rulers of humanity running a tab on me?"

The two Magistrates sitting at the table stiffened as the five masked figures remained utterly still, though a faint prickly tension seemed to gather in the air around them.

Kara didn’t wait for an answer as she extended a second finger.

"Point number two," Kara continued, her tone dropping into a lower and far more dangerous tone that sent a shiver down the spines of the listening ministers. "Since you’re so eager to declare me a national treasure and the savior of humanity, it’s only logical I receive absolute immunity... Not the standard diplomatic immunity you hand out to ambassadors, I want immunity on the exact same legal tier as the Supreme Royal Family and if a minister insults me, I can execute him on the spot without a trial... If a guard looks at me wrong, his life is forfeit, and if Vanderbilt looks at my boobs one more time, I can just blast him into oblivion."

"H-huh?!" Vanderbilt stuttered as eyes turned to him, since when had he been looking at her boobs?

Kara slowly turned her head, her dark eyes drifting toward the elevated royal dais.

Her gaze swept right past the silent King, locking squarely onto the empty seat beside him... the station where Aki had spent her entire youth being ignored, degraded, and treated like a piece of worthless court furniture.

"And that immunity extends directly to Princess Aki," Kara said, each word carrying an immovable weight that resonated through the stone. "The way she’s been treated in this court... the insults, the neglect, the pathetic political posturing from men who couldn’t survive ten seconds in the dirt... it ends today. If I hear of a single person in this Citadel treating her like an unwanted stray ever again, the World Council won’t have to worry about the borders... You’ll have to worry about me."

On the royal dais, the King’s jaw subtly tightened.

For the briefest fraction of a second, the oceanic blue of his eyes seemed to swirl with a dark apocalyptic storm of pure mana unraveling and beside him, Kiera’s golden eyes narrowed with her slender hands folding neatly over her silk lap, watching Kara with an unreadable stare but Kara didn’t care.

’Their faces are so annoying...’

She brought her third finger up.

"Point number three, infrastructure," Kara declared smoothly. "Blessed Land is located in an isolated inhospitable mountain range far from the primary trade areas in the Sovereign Realm... That’s terrible for everything so I want a direct high-capacity spatial gate connecting my central keep straight to Central City in the Sovereign Realm that’s built, calibrated, and maintained at the World Council’s expense."

She raised her fourth finger.

"Point number four, territorial assets... I want at least one hundred Hero-tier Summoning Tickets delivered to my vault by the end of the week and several tens of thousands of High-tier Troop Summoning Tickets to bolster my defensive garrisons... Throw in twenty thousand metric tons of your highest-grade of alloys while you’re at it."

She brought her thumb up, opening her entire palm toward them.

"Point number five, commercial ventures... To be honest, I want prime real estate and I want the licensing rights to establish a global luxury hotel and entertainment chain across all Nine Major Powers. You want my face on your posters to reassure the terrified masses that humanity is safe?... Fine, you can use my face for advertising, but I get a twenty-five percent gross royalty on every tourism corridor and commercial hub that uses my name. It should generate enough annual revenue to match the gross domestic product of a medium-sized nation."

Kara leaned forward with a broad shameless grin spreading across her face.

"And finally... I happen to know the World Council maintains a classified vault beneath the Citadel’s foundations, the private treasury of the First Founders right? I want unrestricted access... I go down there with a wagon, I pick out whatever catches my eye like ancient grimoires, lost relics, forgotten divine weapons too... and I take them home. If I can fill a couple of chests, it’d really make my day."

She stopped as the entire room was staring at her in frozen horror.

Vanderbilt looked like he’d forgotten how to breathe.

Sir Arthur Pendelton’s jaw was completely slack while Chancellor Montmirail was trembling so violently that his holographic ledgers were flickering out of alignment and even High Marshal-President Valeria Da Silva was looking at Kara with an expression that bordered on disbelief.

Kara paused, looking around at the sea of paralyzed, pale faces.

She blinked, letting out an annoyed exasperated scoff.

"What?" Kara asked, throwing her hands up in mock exasperation. "What’s with those faces? Don’t tell me the mighty World Council is broke. I haven’t even listed the full extent of what I want yet!"

The heavy obsidian pillars of the Great Assembly Chamber seemed to vibrate under the frozen weight of Kara’s words as nobody breathed and not a single leaf of paper rustled across the celestial marble of the Grand Table.

Across the five curving tiers of the amphitheater, aides, corporators, and grizzled frontline commanders sat petrified in their stadium seats, their eyes bulging as they stared down into the pit.

’Is she insane?’ Chancellor Henri de Montmirail screamed within the frantic shivering privacy of his own thoughts, his wire-rimmed spectacles fogging over with rapid horrified breath. ’Not the full extent of what she wants?! What in the name of the First Founders is her endgame? Does she intend to hold the entire planet hostage until every reserve on Earth is bled dry?!’

Across the floor, Sir Arthur Pendelton’s star-iron cane was practically creaking beneath his white-knuckled grip.

His blue eyes, usually cold and unreadable, darted wildly between Kara’s half-lidded face and the towering northern dais.

Even Tsar Nikolai Volkov, a man who had wrestled northern frost-wyrms with his bare hands and laughed at the prospect of war, sat utterly motionless beneath his dire-wolf mantle with his jaw locked like an iron bear-trap.

They all looked at her as though she were a lunatic who had casually walked into a powder magazine holding a lit stick of dynamite, asking for a lighter so she could check the corners for gold.

The silence grew so thick it tasted like iron shavings.

Everyone expected one of the masked Council Heads to interject or for Magistrate Bloom to draw that ancestral saber an inch from its scabbard, or for the ancient woman in midnight-silk to crush the room under another wave of suffocating gravity.

Instead the response came from higher up as from the elevated royal dais, a voice drifted down into the pit.

"All of that is simply far too much to concede at once."

The King sat back against the dark star-iron of his throne with his tailored double-breasted suit of midnight-navy wool falling over his shoulders without a single wrinkle and Kara paused.

Her right hand, which had been resting loosely near the silver platter of shrimp tails, ceased its slow drumming against the marble.

She tilted her head, her dark eyes drifting upward toward the imperial dais, offering the supreme monarch of humanity a slow unimpressed raise of her brow.

"Huh?" Kara drawled, her tone sounding like an annoyed tenant being interrupted by a landlord on rent day.

The King didn’t blink.

In his lap, Kiera Zel Castellian remained still, her golden eyes watching the exchange with detached feline focus with her hands clasped delicately over her pale silk skirts.

"Your demands exceed the reasonable bounds of political parity," the King stated, his oceanic gaze pinning Kara with the weight of an executioner’s stare. "You are a newly discovered Gold Core... You have held lordship for not even a single turn of the seasons, yet you arrive in this chamber, kick your heels onto the sacred marble, and present an exhaustive list of ultimatums as though you were an ancient hegemon dictating terms to a conquered province..."

He paused, his manicured fingers resting casually on his knee.

"A summit is a venue of bilateral negotiation, Kara White," the King continued. "It is an instrument designed to discover a nexus where the collective interests of the world and your sovereign territory meet in equilibrium. What you have presented is not an equilibrium. It’s blatantly extortion..."

The ministers around the table let out a collective silent sigh of relief.

Finally... Someone was setting the boundary! Someone with the divine right of Destruction was drawing a line in the sand against this wild lawless woman!

Everyone held their breath, waiting for Kara’s explosive retort.

They braced for the table to shatter, for her horrifying mana to detonate, or for another wave of vulgar threats to spill from her lips.

Instead Kara simply blinked.

...Once then twice.

"Oh," she said, her mouth forming a casual rounded O.

She looked down at her polished fingernails, turning her right hand over as if inspecting a speck of dried lint.

"So that’s how it works," Kara mused aloud, her voice carrying an infuriating sunny breeziness that made several ministers twitch. "I just need to spend more time as a Lord, right? That’s the bottleneck?..."

The King’s oceanic eyes narrowed by a fraction.

"That means," Kara continued, looking back up with a bright razor-sharp grin that sent a shiver straight down Vanderbilt’s spine, "the more years I hold the mantle of Blessed Land, the crazier my requests are allowed to become, right? If I stick around for five years, I get half the southern gulf... If I make it to ten years, well, maybe at that point I can just formally request to become the sole ruler of an entire nation. Yes? That sounds like a wonderful ladder to climb. I’ll make sure to put it on my calendar!"