Chapter 600: Fight For Love [Bonus - ]

Chapter 600: Fight For Love [Bonus Chapter]

Up in the observation deck, Vanderbilt took a terrified involuntary step backward with the blood draining from his face until he looked like a corpse.

He snatched the intercom microphone with shaking hands, his voice squeaking in panic.

"W-What punishment?!" Vanderbilt screamed into the glass. "What kind of punishment?!"

Rowenna’s laugh returned, echoing from the glowing gloves with bright cheerful cheekiness that sounded like a schoolgirl announcing recess.

"You’ll all die, of course!"

CRACK-BOOM!

The white-hot runes on the gloves destabilized with a deafening screech as Varun didn’t even try to counter it.

’I can’t...’

He didn’t try to weave a shield and he didn’t channel his century-old core.

He knew, with the cold certainty of an ancient scholar staring into an open furnace, that the mathematical power of the detonation before him was simply a catastrophe.

"RUN!" Varun shrieked at the top of his lungs, spinning on his heel!

He bolted for the airlock door with his blue silk robes smoking as he ran with the desperate speed of a dying beast.

Up on the observation deck, Vanderbilt was already moving backward with his boots scrambling across the polished tiles as he threw his hands up in horror!

"GET BACK, YOU FOOL!" Vanderbilt screamed through the microphone, his face twisted in raw animalistic terror. "DON’T BRING THAT THING OUT HERE! GO BACK INTO THE CHAMBER! GO BACK—"

It was too late.

VUUUMM!

The conduits reached critical mass as Varun reached the threshold of the airlock with his outstretched smoking hands mere inches from the outer corridor.

’I don’t want to... I don’t want to di—’

FLASH!

The gloves violently collapsed inward for a microsecond, sucking all ambient light and sound out of the room!

Before Vanderbilt’s dilated horror-stricken eyes, Grand Master Varun didn’t even have time to scream.

The white-hot explosion detonated outward directly from his center of mass, vaporizing the ancient two-hundred-year-old runic master into fine subatomic ash in the span of a single picosecond...

And then, the energy expanded.

A colossal expanding sphere of pure golden radiance tore through the airlock, shattering the triple-layered quartz observation window into millions of microscopic dust motes!

In that final frozen second before the blast wave reached his face, before the searing celestial heat stripped the goggles from his skull, Julian Vanderbilt Senior could see it.

Floating in the heart of the brilliant blinding light, hovering like a mocking specter from his worst nightmares...

He saw Kara White’s face.

Her dark half-lidded eyes gleaming with cold lazy amusement wither single right hand waving a cheerful dismissive goodbye.

’N-no...’

Her lips curved into that exact same infuriating smile she had worn while chewing shrimp over the official documents of state.

KABOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

A deafening earth-shattering roar ripped through the underground foundations of Research Facility No. 95 as the blast wave tore through reinforced titanium bulkheads like wet tissue paper, collapsing thirty stories of desert bedrock into an inferno of fire, smoke, and shattered concrete.

Above ground, far out in the quiet desert of the Columbia frontier, the red mesas violently buckled as a mushrooming pillar of brilliant golden light punched through the crust, illuminating the dark night sky for a hundred miles in every direction, incinerating forty billion credits of ambition into glowing radioactive dust.

...

WHOOSH!

The royal transport flagship Aethel-Sun carved through the upper thermosphere like a gilded leviathan, its armored hull of polished white titanium and celestial gold alloy deflecting the brutal midday radiance of the Great Dunes thirty thousand feet below.

Escorting it in tight arrowhead formations were eight high-speed combat cruisers of the Sun-Crown’s guard, their jets emitting synchronized hums that parted the thin desert clouds into rippling waves of heat haze.

Inside the Aethel-Sun’s primary observation lounge, the atmosphere was suffocatingly quiet.

The lounge was expansive, floored with dark lapis lazuli tiles imported from the deep mountain veins of the eastern reaches.

Heavy curtains of spun cloth-of-gold hung along the panoramic viewing windows, filtering the harsh glare into a warm amber twilight.

Pharaoh-President Menes Al-Mansur sat upright on a high-backed divan carved from petrified cedar with his posture rigid and formal despite the private quarters.

He still wore his double-breasted military dress uniform of immaculate white wool, the golden pectoral collar resting heavy against his collarbones and its lapis inlay catching the dim light.

His bronze skin, usually flawless and radiating the haughty vitality of the apex solar lineage, looked sallow at the jawline.

His liquid-gold eyes, usually sharp enough to flay an ambassador’s composure across a conference table, were clouded with a deep bottomless exhaustion.

Across the low glass table, seated close enough that their shoulders continually brushed, were the surviving remnants of his bloodline’s martial pride.

Tariq Al-Mansur sat with his forearms resting gingerly on his knees.

The young prince’s face was drawn, dark hollows under his eyes betraying sleepless agony, but his lips were curled into a soft quiet smile as he looked at the woman beside him.

His hands, once the pride of Khemet’s close-quarters sand-dancers, were bound in thick medicated bandages of woven spirit-silk.

Beneath the wrapping, the jagged brittle sensation of vitrified blood-quartz throbbed constantly, a brutal permanent reminder of the moment Seraphina Bloom’s azure flames had crystallized his flesh into brittle glass.

And resting her hand over his bandaged wrist was Safira.

She looked breathtakingly whole with her olive skin smooth and glowing under the amber lights and her long dark hair cascading over her bare shoulders in loose perfumed coils.

To any regular observer, she was unharmed but Menes knew the truth.

He’d been there in the special theater beneath the Citadel only hours after the match concluded...

He’d watched Tariq collapse to his knees, screaming until his throat bled, begging the court alchemists not to sweep away the pile of shattered burnt glass shards that Seraphina had left on the arena sand.

Menes himself, along with three of the highest-tier Sand Shifters in the dominion, had spent seven grueling hours weaving life through those fragments, feeding the girl’s dormant soul-core with pure liquefied solar-quartz until the shattered glass of her body reassembled, grain by agonizing grain, reversing the vitrification before the soul could fully detach into the void.

’This is why our blood makes us so strong,’ Menes thought, his fingers curling slowly against the cedar armrest, feeling the hard gold rings bite into his flesh. ’No other lineage on Earth could survive being reduced to broken glass... We are the children of the living dune... We shatter, and we reassemble. We bleed quartz, and we mend with gold...’

Yet, as Menes looked out the reinforced viewport at the endless expanse of the Great Dunes stretching toward the horizon, a cold sickening tremor seized the pit of his stomach.

’And yet... it’s that exact same blood that makes us so horrifyingly vulnerable.’

He could feel it.

It wasn’t a sensation he could articulate to his marshals or his surviving ministers as it wasn’t a physical mana signature, nor was it a spatial anomaly pinging the flagship’s radar.

It was an ancient chill scraping against the marrow of his bones, a rotten spectral friction that felt like coarse black grit churning inside his circulatory vessels.

Menes was a Fourth Stage powerhouse.

He commanded the authority of the desert sun, capable of melting an entire armored division into slag with a gesture of his hand yet, looking at his own palms, he felt utterly naked.

’I will not survive past today,’ the thought rose within him.

It was the certainty of an animal that heard the executioner’s boots on the cellar stairs.

The ancient sin was coming due and the debt that had rotted beneath the foundations of the White Citadel since the First Rift, the primordial crime their founder had committed against the shadow that birthed their empire, had finally climbed out of the deep dark...

He had already lost his eldest, the Crown Prince, to a border skirmish in the Sovereign Realm years ago and barely a day prior, his third son, Malikar, had been reduced to a pile of lifeless sand in an open-air cafe with his soul devoured before the boy could even draw breath to scream.

Menes’s gaze drifted back to Tariq.

On any normal day, Menes would have looked upon his middle son with cold disdain.

Tariq was too soft and too emotional as well.

He fought with the desperate bleeding heart of a romantic rather than the ruthless calculation required of a royal hegemon as he had risked the entire succession to shield this girl.

Yet now, watching the boy smile, a genuine tender fragile smile that looked entirely out of place in a family that had bred itself for slaughter, Menes felt an agonizing hollow ache rip through his chest.

’If only we had more time,’ the Pharaoh-President thought, the bitter words tasting like ashes on his tongue. ’If only the world weren’t ending today...’

Menes cleared his throat with the sound sharp and metallic in the quiet lounge.

Tariq stiffened immediately, his smile fading, replaced by the guarded defensive posture he’d worn in his father’s presence since childhood.

Safira pulled her hand back slightly, lowering her dark eyes in formal deference.

"The two of you have displayed remarkable resilience," Menes began, donning the mask that had shielded him through three decades of continental politics. "However, we are returning to Iunu... Within twenty-four hours, the High Council will convene to officially ratify the new succession charters following the tragic loss of your brother Malikar..."

Tariq’s jaw tightened at the mention of Malikar’s name with his bandaged fingers clenching into tight brittle fists.

"You are now the sole surviving male heir of House Al-Mansur, Tariq," Menes continued, his liquid-gold eyes narrowing slightly. "The responsibilities of the Sun-Crown will fall entirely upon your shoulders when my time concludes... Which brings us to the domestic reality of your household."

Menes leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table, fixing Safira with a cold piercing stare.

"Safira is the daughter of the Vice President. Her bloodline is distinguished, her martial foundation is exceptional, and her loyalty during the tournament cannot be questioned. However... she was shattered. Her core, while stabilized, carries micro-fractures that will permanently cap her cultivation at the lower tiers of the Third Stage. A Pharaoh-President requires an Empress whose lineage commands authority across the southern alliances. Therefore, as your father and your sovereign, I must decree that Safira cannot hold the primary seat of First Wife... She may enter your court only as a secondary consort or a concubine if you will."

The air in the lounge instantly dropped by ten degrees.

Safira’s breath hitched with her head dropping lower and her knuckles whitening against her silk trousers but she didn’t speak.

In the brutal patriarchal hierarchy of Khemet’s nobility, an emperor’s decree on marriage was absolute.

SH-SH-SH-SH-SH!

A violent hiss of shifting mineral erupted from the carpet as Tariq surged to his feet, knocking his heavy cedar chair backward.

He didn’t cower at all... With an explosive furious roar of mana, he thrust his right arm out, placing his entire body directly between his father and the woman he loved.

CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-SHING!

Streams of coarse golden sand bled directly through the pores of Tariq’s bandaged forearms.

The mineral grains spun in tight, screaming vortexes of pressure, condensing in mid-air with the sharp ringing of grinding steel, forming three jagged, six-foot-long desert lances that hovered mere inches from Menes’s throat.

"Do not speak of her as if she were an item in a trade manifest!" Tariq roared, his eyes blazing with an unhinged intensity that made his bandages crack with leaking crimson mana. "I don’t give a damn about the southern alliances! I don’t give a damn about the succession charters! When I was lying in the dirt with my hands crushed to powder, she threw herself in front of Seraphina Bloom’s blades to keep me breathing! If I take the Sun-Crown, she sits beside me as Empress, or I’ll burn the throne room to the ground myself!"

The sand lances hummed violently, vibrating with enough concussive force to crack the heavy crystal decanters on the table.

Tariq knew it was madness.

He knew, with certainty, that against his father’s Fourth Stage domain, these three sand lances wouldn’t even pierce the collar of Menes’s uniform.

A single flick of the Pharaoh-President’s finger could unravel Tariq’s core into dust...

Yet, standing there, bleeding from his wrists, Tariq didn’t flinch as he glared into his father’s eyes, ready to die right there on the cabin floor.

Menes stared at the spinning tips of the sand lances and for two agonizing seconds, the silence was deafening.

Then... the Pharaoh-President’s chest hitched.

CLAP! CLAP! CLAP!

A sudden booming bark of laughter tore from Menes’s throat.

He threw his head back with his hands coming together in slow, genuine applause that echoed off the reinforced bulkheads.

"Hah! Hahaha!" Menes laughed, the sound was wild as it lacked the detachment he’d worn for twenty years. "Look at you! Look at my boy!"

Tariq blinked, completely stunned, the sand lances faltering in mid-air.

"F-Father...?"

"You actually grew a pair of balls!" Menes grinned, wiping a genuine tear of amusement from the corner of his eye, his liquid-gold gaze shining with something that looked terrifyingly like pride. "Twenty-four years I spent watching you tiptoe through the court like a frightened hare, worrying about protocols and diplomatic propriety and now, you point steel at your Father’s throat for a woman... That was magnificent!"

Menes lowered his hands with his smile softening into something tired, almost sorrowful.

"She is your Empress, Tariq," Menes said softly, his voice carrying the finality of an irrevocable decree. "The marriage is recognized... You have my full, unconditional blessing. Take her and marry her the second our boots touch the sand of Iunu."

He looked at Safira, who was staring at him with wide tear-filled eyes, completely unable to process the sudden reversal.

"And do not make me wait," Menes added with a melancholic chuckle escaping him. "Give me more grandchildren already... Fill the palace with screaming, unruly brats who inherit their mother’s stubbornness. An old man wants to hold his grandson before his hair turns entirely white!"