Chapter 594: Dawn Blade [Bonus - ]

Chapter 594: Dawn Blade [Bonus Chapter]

"I could not possibly comment on your personal intellectual capacity—"

"These are hot garbage!" Kara snapped, throwing her hand up in pure furious exasperation. "A rusty kitchen knife, a slab of scrap metal, a shiny pebble, a pair of deer boots, and a bottle of poison that makes you puke your guts out after twenty minutes?! What is this, a garage sale in the lower slums?! You promised me entry to the World Vault, and you’re trying to shove Tier 2 common trash down my throat just so you can go back upstairs and take a nap?!"

Number Five let out a tiny barely audible click of her tongue behind her mask, clearly annoyed that her blatant attempt to dump useless warehouse surplus had failed so miserably.

"The items possess historical significance—" Number Five began stiffly.

"Take your historical significance and throw it into the sea," Kara scoffed, spinning on her heel and marching past the pedestal. "I’m not leaving this vault until I find real power... Move, shorty. We’re going deeper."

Number Five sighed, adjusting the hood of her robes, and hurried along behind her.

They walked for nearly twenty minutes, leaving the orderly polished rows of the early aisles far behind.

As they crossed the threshold of Aisle 20, the architecture of the vault began to subtly shift.

The clean straight lines of petrified wood and polished slate gave way to raw jagged bedrock that seemed to have been violently melted and flash-frozen.

The soft azure illumination of the quartz ceiling thinned, replaced by long creeping shadows that clung to the corners of the massive stone arches.

The pressure in the air grew heavier.

TAP! TAP! TAP!

Their boots echoed loudly through the cavernous gloom as eventually, they entered a colossal circular plaza where Aisle 28 intersected with the central arterial road.

At the center of the plaza, elevated upon a massive three-tiered dais of cracked obsidian, sat a structure that made Kara’s steps abruptly halt.

...It looked like an ancient macabre monument.

Resting in the center of the obsidian platform was a complete humanoid skeleton, bleached bone-white by centuries of dry air.

It sat slumped in a kneeling posture upon the stone, clad in the rotting tattered remnants of what had once been an exquisite tunic of royal-blue silk.

Planted directly through the cracked obsidian floor between the skeleton’s knees was an enormous breathtaking greatsword.

The blade was forged from an ancient incandescent golden metal that seemed to actively bleed sunlight into the surrounding dark.

Intricate undulating solar runes were etched along the broad fuller, humming with a deep radiant heartbeat that warmed the freezing air of the plaza.

Both of the skeleton’s bleached bony hands were clamped firmly around the gold-wrapped hilt, locked in a permanent post-mortem death grip that had endured for centuries.

Kara tilted her head as her dark eyes locked onto the golden blade with intense sudden fascination.

"What is that?" Kara asked, pointing her right index finger toward the kneeling monument.

Number Five stopped two paces behind her with her posture growing rigid and uncharacteristically somber.

"That," Number Five spoke, her muffled voice carrying a profound reverent gravity, "is the final resting place of the Second World King... When his life reached its natural limit, he refused to be buried in the imperial mausoleum on the surface so he walked down into this vault alone, took his place upon this dais, drove his personal weapon into the bedrock, and allowed his spirit to dissolve into the world."

She paused, gesturing toward the brilliant sun-lit greatsword.

"The weapon is known as the Dawn Sword," Number Five continued, her voice echoing off the stone pillars. "A sword, forged during the first rebuilding era. It was the Second King’s personal battle-blade, an artifact of such immense volatile authority that—"

SWOOSH!

Before Number Five could finish the word ’authority,’ the space beside her violently emptied.

’Wait, where did she—?!’ Number Five’s thoughts screeched in sudden panic!

Kara was gone.

In a single terrifying blink of pure physical acceleration, Kara crossed the thirty yards of open plaza.

Her boots barely kissed the cracked obsidian of the three-tiered dais with her dark coat flaring behind her like the wings of a hunting falcon but she didn’t hesitate.

’I like this weapon...’

GRAB!

Kara’s single right hand reached out, clamping firmly around the warm gold-wrapped hilt of the Dawn Sword, right between the bleached brittle finger-bones of the Second World King.

CRACK-SNAP!

The centuries-old skeletal fingers shattered instantly under her grip with bone dust showering over the stone.

With a sharp effortless upward jerk of her shoulder, Kara ripped the massive golden blade clean out of the obsidian floor.

SHIIIIIIING!

The metal sang with a deafening crystalline roar that shattered the silence of the plaza as Kara spun the massive greatsword in a fluid casual arc through the air, resting the flat of the golden blade effortlessly against her right shoulder, offering the weapon an admiring half-lidded smirk.

"Cool sword," Kara drawled with her voice completely smooth.

Down below the dais, Number Five’s porcelain mask tilted up in pure horror.

"NO! DROP IT!" Number Five screamed, her small frame launching forward in a desperate sprint.

Her midnight-silk robes whipped around her legs, her arms reaching outward as her voice cracked into panic.

"DROP IT, YOU IDIOT! THE CORE IS PERMANENTLY BONDED TO THE ROYAL BLOODLINE! IF AN UNVERIFIED SOUL TOUCHES THE HILT, IT WILL DETONATE AN INSTANTANEOUS—"

It was too late.

PING!

The Dawn Sword violently ignited and the dormant solar runes along the golden fuller did not merely flare... they detonated into a supernova of pure golden light.

"It’s too—"

A massive expanding shockwave of warm golden energy erupted radially outward from the blade however it was not a violent tearing explosion.

There was no concussive shockwave of shattering stone, no heat that scorched the skin, and no deafening thunderclap of destruction.

Instead, it was an overwhelming ocean-like flood of pure weightless radiance... a tidal wave of liquid gold that instantly swallowed Kara, Number Five, the shattered skeleton, and the entire plaza in an all-consuming brilliant white-gold embrace, drowning the darkness of the vault in the light of a brand new dawn.

"...Huh?..."

Somewhere beneath the roaring gold, buried deep in the marrow of the light itself, Silas thought he heard something that sounded almost like a sound being spoken... but the thought scattered before he could hold onto it, swallowed whole by the dawn.

WHOOSH!

The blinding sea of liquid gold washed through the endless corridors of petrified wood and dark basalt like the first rising light of a forgotten dawn.

SHUUUUUUUU!

The radiant wave crested against the vaulted ceiling fifty feet above, washing over the glowing blue quartz rafters before smoothly receding like a tranquil tide pulling back from a foreign shore.

The light died down almost instantaneously, snapping shut into a tight focused halo that curled closely around the broad, golden fuller of the greatsword.

Silence descended upon Aisle 28 as a dead suffocating quiet that made the arrays sound like a thunderous roar.

Midway through her frantic desperate leap toward the obsidian dais, Number Five froze.

She hung arrested in the air for a fraction of a heartbeat with her small hands clawed forward and her midnight-silk sleeves whipping around her elbows like storm clouds.

The featureless white porcelain mask was tilted straight toward the platform, yet the paralyzing shock radiating through her posture was loud enough to shake the dust from the stone pillars.

"Huh?" Number Five squeaked.

FLAP! TAP!

Her soft leather boots hit the cracked obsidian floor with an unceremonious stumbling thud.

She landed awkwardly, pitching forward onto her knees before catching herself on the rough stone with her newly regenerated left hand.

The woman whipped her head up, looking wildly across the shattered remnants of the three-tiered dais.

The bleached, centuries-old skeleton of the Second World King lay scattered in brittle fragments across the floor tiles with its desiccated ribcage cracked open and its finger-bones pulverized into fine white silt.

...And standing directly in the center of the ruin looking utterly unblemished, was Kara White.

Kara hadn’t been vaporized into ash at all.

Her dark tailored trousers weren’t singed, her loose coat hung casually over her frame, and her single right hand remained clamped firmly around the gold-wrapped hilt of the colossal greatsword.

WHOO!

Intricate razor-thin solar runes, carved in an ancient script that looked like dancing serpents of molten sunlight, traveled up the broad fuller of the Dawn Blade. ℯℯ𝑙.

They reached the crossguard, leaped across the star-iron collar, and seamlessly bled onto the pale skin of Kara’s right hand but the runes didn’t burn at all.

They braided themselves into her epidermis like delicate luminescent golden tattoos, weaving around her wrist, crawling along her forearm, and sinking directly through the pores of her skin with a soft warm chime.

PING!

The light died down completely and the golden script vanished beneath her skin, leaving her arm clean and undisturbed.

"That wasn’t so bad..."

Kara lifted the heavy blade, stepping over the shattered vertebrae of the ancient King with a careless crunch of her boot heel.

She swung the massive weapon in a fluid whistling figure-eight through the stagnant air, testing its balance and the weight was terrifying, easily two hundred pounds of solid divine-grade solar alloy, yet in her grip it felt as light as a seasoned training sword.

SHING!

She rested the flat of the golden steel against her right shoulder with her dark eyes narrowing as she stared at the edge.

"Weird," Kara muttered, her voice dropping into a dry perplexed drawl. "The hell is this...?"

Silas’s internal senses were humming violently.

Behind the mask of the single-armed woman, a strange prickling sensation was crawling through his core channels.

It wasn’t foreign mana forcing its way into his circulation, it was a harmonic pulse, almost like a dormant heartbeat that had suddenly discovered an echo in his own chest.

It felt like walking into an old forgotten room in a childhood home and finding a coat that fit his shoulders down to the exact millimeter...

Before he could pull up the System interface to query the blade’s parameters, a sharp choked gasp echoed from the base of the dais.

"You..." Number Five choked out, pushing herself up from the floor with shaking arms.

Her porcelain mask was tilted upward, her voice cracking beneath the silk hood in horror. "You can actually wield it...?"

Kara tilted her head down, looking at the small hooded woman with a half-lidded unimpressed stare.

"I’m holding it, aren’t I?" Kara asked dryly. "Unless you think this two-hundred-pound chunk of gold is floating on its own."

"That is impossible!" Number Five yelled, taking a frantic jerky step forward, her sleeves trembling. "That is the Dawn Blade! It is a primary regalia! The concept was personally by the First King of the World during the early days of the Reconstruction... The First King was the only mind capable of designing soul-bound weapons of that caliber! It was through his private classified blueprints that the Second King, his favored heir, was able to physically forge the weapon for his own campaigns. It is fundamentally hardcoded to the ancestral line of House Castellian and if anyone outside the direct royal bloodline attempts to draw that steel, the internal solar power is supposed to detonate a wave of magic that incinerates the wielder’s nervous system into carbon!"

Kara’s eyebrow gave a microscopic twitch.

’Second King...’ Silas mused internally, his thoughts growing remarkably cold and quiet.

For a brief fleeting fraction of a second, when the blinding light had first erupted from the hilt, an echo had brushed against the fringes of his mind.

Ah...’

He’d dismissed it as a hallucination caused by the sudden surge of radiance, but looking down at the scattered bones of the Second King, Silas felt a cold sharp question settle behind his ribs.

’That’s not possible. I’m not Castellian blood... I’m nobody’s discarded prince, I’m Silas Graves, a slum kid from Sector 5 who got dragged into this world... there’s no royal blood running through my veins right? So why did this thing just open for me like I was born to hold it?’

There were too many things to reason and he just wanted to ignore it... Perhaps it was because of the Gold Core?

Outwardly, Kara let out a long theatrical sigh, resting the pommel on the obsidian floor with a dull clunk.

"Well, whoever built it had great taste in balance," Kara smiled, her expression turning infuriatingly smug. "Thanks for the history lesson, short stuff. I think I’ll take this as my first item..."

Number Five’s entire body went rigid and beneath the porcelain mask, you could practically hear her jaw locking with enough force to crack her teeth.

"You cannot simply take the Dawn Blade!" Number Five argued frantically, her muffled voice rising into an indignant shriek. "It is an irreplaceable artifact and it belongs to the Royal mausoleum! It is a historical pillar of the World Council’s heritage! If the World King discovers that you walked out of the vault carrying the personal sidearm of his direct ancestor—"

"The World King told me to take whatever caught my eye," Kara cut her off flatly, her dark eyes flashing with cold immovable amusement. "Five items with unrestricted access... Those were the terms signed in front of the Nine Major Powers and the entire assembly. What, is the supreme ruler of humanity going to go back on his royal word over an old sword resting on a pile of dead bones? If he wants it back, he can walk down to Blessed Land and ask me for it himself."