Chapter 162 Yasmin Ro'Khan

“Takes right after her mother.”

Rosalind burst into a rich, melodic laugh, the throaty purr vibrating against Azriel’s chest as she tipped her head back against the velvet cushions.

Rosalind didn’t swat him away, instead, her manicured claws lightly trailed the edge of his jawline, thoroughly charmed by the sheer audacity dripping from his voice.

The reaction from the surrounding skyboxes, however, was dead, suffocating silence.

Several highborn noblewomen, duchesses, and matriarchs seated across the adjacent Bastet and Tigris terraces froze, wine goblets pausing halfway to their painted lips.

Slit pupils contracted into needle thin lines.

Stunned disbelief rippled through their scent markers like a spilled jar of vinegar.

To them, what had just unfolded was nothing short of blasphemy.

In Tartarus, men, even highborn ones, let alone an awakened male bearing the slave tattoo, simply did not speak to a ruling Duchess with such effortless, teasing familiarity.

A male was expected to keep his eyes averted, his posture submissive, and his tongue tied unless explicitly commanded to beg or serve.

Yet here was Azriel, standing tall with shoulders squared, casually bandying insolent banter with one of the most ruthless feline matriarchs in the continent, and Rosalind was laughing at it, looking up at him not with wrath, but with warmth.

A few rows over, an elder from the Nivus snow leopard delegation whispered furiously behind a jade fan, her icy blue eyes darting toward Azriel with scandalized outrage.

Near the Tigris section, Duchess Katarina’s knuckles turned white against her flagon, her amber eyes burning into the side of Azriel’s neck as she struggled to comprehend why the pet she had discarded was carrying himself like a sovereign in the making.

Vesperia merely let out a slow exhale of thin, aromatic smoke, her golden eyes gleaming with dry amusement as she watched the court’s unspoken hierarchy splinter under a single casual exchange.

The sun climbed toward its zenith, scorching the Colosseum’s white sands until waves of heat rippled against the containment wards.

Block after block dissolved into frantic violence.

Claws clashed with enchanted steel, blood splashed across cracked runic flagstones, and dozens of shattered contenders were dragged into the infirmary tunnels.

Azriel stood like a carved pillar of shadow beside Rosalind’s divan, his violet eyes tracking every subtle shift in mana.

With each clash, his mental archives expanded, dissecting how these Adept scions wove raw aether through their marrow.

Then, the colossal crystal display across the sky flashed blinding crimson, a sovereign bell tolling through the arena rafters.

The entire basin went dead silent.

On the sector for Ring Seven, two names flared in blazing, royal script.

One belonged to an armored minotaur kin brute from Karnvokh’s frontline nobility.

The other name sent a collective shudder through the entire five hundred thousand spectators:

Yasmin Ro’Khan.

A chorus of drawn breaths rippled across the Sovereign Concourse. Down below, emerging from the eastern imperial tunnel, stepped the direct bloodline scion of the Sovereign Fang herself.

Unlike the towering, sun bronzed Amazons that defined the Sekhmet imperial line, women who routinely stood above six feet tall with thick, corded sinew, the girl who stepped onto the sands was an utter anomaly.

Standing barely five foot four, Yasmin was petite, slender, and impossibly cute.

She wore a fitted, sleeveless crimson tunic over dark leather shorts that showed off lean, toned thighs and a narrow, supple waist.

Instead of the massive golden manes typical of the lioness matriarchs, her fiery tawny gold hair was tied up in two bouncy, messy high buns, with soft, rounded feline ears that twitched with manic, restless excitement.

A long, slender tail tipped with a black tuft whipped through the air behind her, matching the broad, fanged grin plastered across her porcelain face.

She didn’t look like a terrifying imperial lioness at all; she looked like a cute, playful kitten that had wandered into a slaughterhouse by mistake.

Yet the heavy suppression rings around her wrists and ankles hummed with dense, suffocating golden aether that made the air within twenty paces of her shimmer like liquid glass.

Up on the golden throne, Empress Mahesa al Sekhmet pinched the bridge of her nose with a long, ringed finger, letting out a weary, sovereign sigh.

“Look at her. Not a shred of imperial dignity. The girl has the bloodline of a war goddess, yet she acts like a feral hound loosed in an open yard.”

Maeve chuckled sleepily from her jade seat, her heavy emerald coils shifting with liquid grace. “Mm… let the little cub play, Mahesa. She has the purest battle pulse in your lineage.”

Across the ring, her opponent , a seven foot tall minotaur vanguard clad in spiked black plate and wielding a twin headed battle axe the size of a tavern bench , swallowed hard.

The brute’s hooves dug into the flagstones, her curved horns gleaming, but her nostrils flared with unmistakable dread.

Facing Eleanor meant a clean, cold execution; facing Yasmin meant being dragged into a whirlwind of feral madness.

Azriel’s interface pulsed with frantic pings:

[LIVE CHAT]

[Sadistic69] (Red): A PETITE LOLI LION SCION?! In a family of seven foot Amazon lionesses?! SHE’S SO ADORABLE OH MY GOD!

[Nine_Tailed_Vixen] (Cyan): Don’t be fooled by the cute cheeks! That girl’s a pure disaster! Look at her tail twitching , she’s practically drooling for a brawl!

[God_Slayer_Klara] (Red): Eleanor fights for supremacy and boredom. This one fights because her nervous system gets off on violence. An authentic battle junkie.

[Moon_Priestess] (Cyan): Her mana isn’t cold like Eleanor’s. It’s boiling solar fire. She could end this in half a breath, but she won’t.

“Ring Seven , commence!” the judge’s rod struck the stone.

BOOM!

The minotaur girl roared, channeling every drop of earth aether into her legs as she launched forward.

The massive axe came down in an executioner’s arc capable of splitting an iron carriage clean in two.

Yasmin didn’t draw a weapon.

She didn’t have one.

With a gleeful squeal, the tiny princess darted forward, her body blurring into a streak of gold.

CLANG!

A deafening shockwave shattered the sand in a thirty foot radius.

Yasmin had caught the razor edge of the colossal twin bladed axe with two bare, leather gloved hands.

The force of the strike pressed her down, but she didn’t buckle.

Instead, her bright, honey golden eyes widened with intoxicating delight, her tiny fangs flashing as a manic giggle escaped her throat.

“Yes! Hit harder! Come on, big sister, you’ve got more than that in those horns!”

The minotaur let out a panicked bellow, wrenching the axe back and unleashing a frantic, earth shaking flurry of cleaves and overhead smashes.

Yasmin danced through the steel storm like a leaf caught in a gale.

She wasn’t just evading; she was playing.

She ducked beneath a horizontal slash that took off a few strands of her fiery hair, laughing openly as the wind brushed her cheek.

She parried a brutal backhand strike with a casual flick of her forearm, letting the kinetic shock rattle through her bones just to feel the vibration.

Where Eleanor would have ended the match with a single, contemptuous twitch of her nodachi, Yasmin actively held back her solar aether, intentionally letting the battle drag out just to bathe in the friction, the sweat, and the raw kinetic roar of the clash.

Her bloodline thrived on it.

The longer she fought, the brighter the golden runes along her bare shoulders flared, her tiny frame radiating the sweltering heat of a miniature sun.

“My turn!” Yasmin chirped cheerfully.

Before the minotaur could bring her heavy axe up to guard, Yasmin sprang into the air, doing a midair corkscrew.

With blinding speed, she delivered a spinning heel kick straight into the flat of the minotaur’s axe.

KABOOM!

Dense, golden flame aether detonated upon contact.

The massive steel axe cracked down the center, the shockwave blasting the seven foot vanguard backward across the arena until she slammed headfirst into the ward, coughing up blood before slumping into the sand, thoroughly battered and out of breath.

Yasmin landed gracefully on the balls of her feet, her chest heaving, a thin sheen of sweat glistening over her collarbone.

Her cheeks were flushed bright pink, her eyes glowing with pure, unadulterated euphoria as she shook out her stinging hands.

“Aw… already done?” she pouted, her ears flattening in genuine disappointment as she kicked at the sand.

“I was just starting to warm up!”

“Winner, Ring Seven: Yasmin Ro’Khan!” the judge announced, shaking his head at the carnage.

Up in the private skybox, Rosalind leaned against the railing, her golden eyes narrowed at the cheering arena.

“Feral little girl,” Rosalind murmured, though there was a grudging thread of respect beneath her aristocratic sneer.

“She fights like an alley cat rolling in broken glass. Completely unrefined.”

Azriel watched the tiny, sweat drenched princess skip out of the ring, waving happily at the screaming commoners in the stands.

A dangerous, calculating light stirred in his chest.

“Unrefined, perhaps,” Azriel murmured smoothly, his violet eyes tracking the lingering heat distortion on the sand.

“But an opponent who enjoys bleeding is always the hardest kind to break.”