Chapter 535: The Exhibition of Succession [Bonus - ]

Chapter 535: The Exhibition of Succession [Bonus Chapter]

A collective sharp intake of breath hissed through the hall.

Up in the mezzanine, Valerius Sterling choked on his breath as his armored elbow slipped off the railing with a loud clank.

Beside him, Seraphina Bloom didn’t move, but her crimson eyes flared with sudden mocking amusement.

Down at the Grand Table, Lohan Sterling’s head turned sharply.

The Patriarch of House Sterling didn’t look at Vanderbilt as his cold eyes flicked straight up toward the mezzanine, locking onto his blonde armored son with an expression that could have frozen boiling oil.

Valerius immediately looked down at his boots, pretending to inspect a scratch on his mythril greaves.

On the other side, Matriarch Etilga Bloom did the exact opposite.

The fiery red-haired woman leaned back in her star-iron chair, crossing her legs beneath her crimson silk robes with her chest puffing out with blatant unapologetic pride.

Her lips curved into a wicked grin as she caught her daughter Seraphina’s eye up in the gallery, offering a tiny approving nod that practically screamed a lot of words but Seraphina knew what she meant.

’Good girl.’

Vanderbilt’s voice rose, vibrating with outrage.

"My boy was surrounded, provoked, and physically brutalized! His pelvic girdle was shattered by a blunt impact, and his internal organs suffered severe concussive hemorrhaging. He is currently lying in an emergency regeneration tank in the medical ward, breathing through a synthetic lung, while the scions responsible sit comfortably in your galleries!"

Vanderbilt slammed his fist onto the marble again.

BANG!

"Valerius Sterling threw the strike and so did Seraphina Bloom as not only did she do that but she also drew a weapon and threatened an official diplomatic envoy but the instigator... the woman who authorized the violence, who stood by and commanded the attack under the guise of royal authority was your own daughter!"

Vanderbilt thrust a thick trembling finger directly at Aki.

"The First Princess!"

The entire amphitheater turned as more than five hundred pairs of eyes pivoted like synchronized searchlights, pinning Aki to her low-tier seat.

Aki’s stomach plummeted into a cold bottomless abyss.

She kept her spine straight as an arrow with her hands folded over her velvet lap, but inside her chest, her heart was hammering with sickening violence.

She had known Vanderbilt wouldn’t let it go, it was obvious the boy’s father would demand blood but hearing the supreme leader of a global superpower openly denounce her before the entire World Council, demanding her head as if she were a common delinquent, felt like having a bucket of freezing ditch-water dumped over her bare skin.

’Here it comes,’ Aki thought with the terror rising in her throat like bile. ’This is what I was afraid of... My authority is completely hollow. I have no core, I have no army and now the wolves know it.’

She looked at her father.

She looked at the King, desperately searching that carved-marble profile for even the faintest flicker of parental defense... a single word, a sharp rebuke, an imperial declaration that no foreign president had the right to drag his firstborn daughter through the dirt.

The King didn’t even look down at her.

He sat there with his heavy sapphire eyes resting on Vanderbilt with cold impenetrable detachment and beside him, Princess Kiera tilted her head as her amber-gold eyes flicked toward Aki with an expression that was impossible to read...

It was neither cruel nor sympathetic, but utterly distant, like a traveler watching a stray dog limp across an alleyway.

"Julian," the King spoke, his voice dangerously flat. "You bring schoolyard brawls into the Great Assembly Chamber."

"My son’s spine was fractured, Majesty!" Vanderbilt bellowed, his face dark with blood. "This was not a schoolyard brawl! It was an unprovoked attack on a sovereign delegation! I demand formal compensation! I demand that the Sterling and Bloom houses face diplomatic censure, and I demand that the First Princess be stripped of her diplomatic immunity and placed under formal house arrest until an official inquiry is concluded!"

The silence in the room was absolute.

Aki felt the blood drain from her face.

’House arrest... Stripped of her immunity...?’

If she was locked in a tower, she would never see the light of day again.

She would be completely erased from the court, buried alive while Kiera took every scrap of her life.

’I know you don’t like me but still...’

She waited for the King to strike Vanderbilt down.

’This is a disrespect to your royal name right...?’

She waited for the void-light to flare in his eyes, to turn the Columbian President into dust for daring to demand the arrest of a royal princess.

’Don’t you love your royal reputation...?’

It didn’t happen.

The King merely drummed his fingers against the celestial marble.

TAP! TAP! TAP!

"Hold that thought, Julian," the King said.

The words were so casual and so completely dismissive that Vanderbilt actually blinked in confusion.

"Sire...?"

"I said, hold that thought," the King repeated, his voice dropping into a quiet icy tone that brooked no further argument. "We shall address the conduct of the youth and make do on your grievances in due time but the World Council does not halt the machinery of global security to debate broken pelvic bones so sit down."

Vanderbilt’s mouth pressed into a thin white line.

His chest heaved and his fingers clenching into fists, but the crushing weight of the King’s aura was already pressing down upon his shoulders like a mountain of lead.

Slowly, the Columbian President sank back into his high star-iron chair, his eyes shooting a final murderous glare toward Aki.

Aki sat frozen, her breath coming in shallow silent sips.

’He didn’t defend me,’ the realization echoed through her skull. ’He didn’t deny it... He didn’t tell Vanderbilt to watch his tongue... He just told him to "hold that thought." Is he going to use me as a bargaining chip? When the meeting is over, he’ll throw me to the Columbians to balance the ledger?’

Every shred of safety she had ever clung to as a princess had just dissolved into thin air.

From this moment on, every noble house, every foreign envoy, every opportunistic vulture in the capital knew that the First Princess was unprotected.

...She was fair game.

The King swept his gaze across the Grand Table, deliberately erasing the incident from the docket.

"Now," the King said, his voice rising, filling the vaulted dome with authority. "Let us address the foundational purpose of this emergency summit... The matter of the Northern Rift."

The atmosphere in the room snapped instantly back to razor-sharp tension.

Every head of state sat up straight.

The scribes in the mezzanine gripped their styluses, and the holographic arrays above the center of the ring shifted, projecting a massive sweeping topographic map of the fractured northern continental border.

"As this assembly is well aware," the King explained with his hand tracing the jagged red fracture line cutting across the map, "six weeks ago, a massive shift of the planet stabilized an expanse of over forty thousand square kilometers within the Sovereign Realm’s transitional corridor... It sits directly between the borders of the Republic of Columbia and the Tsardom of Borealis."

He zoomed the display in, revealing dense pulsing clusters of deep purple and crystalline silver beneath the digital frost.

"The initial orbital scans have confirmed what our diviners predicted," the King continued. "The sector contains the largest unrefined deposit of void-iron, spirit-core silt, and primal ether crystals discovered in the last forty years... A resource reserve capable of supplying the defensive armaments of the civilized world for the next half-century."

The eyes of every ruler around the circle burned with naked ravenous hunger.

"Under normal royal charters," the King said, "contested transition corridors are partitioned based on geographic proximity... However, both Columbia and Borealis claim exclusive historic drilling rights to the subterranean leylines feeding that rift and neither nation has shown a willingness to compromise."

"Because there is nothing to compromise!" Grand Tsar Nikolai Volkov roared, standing up so violently that his star-iron chair screeched against the obsidian floor.

SCREEECH!

The massive bear of a man pointed a thick calloused finger at the holographic map.

"The northern trench has been watered with the blood of Borealis soldiers for five generations!" Volkov bellowed with his voice shaking the mezzanine glass. "Our ice-fortresses hold the perimeter! Our men freeze in the mud while Columbian mining conglomerates sit in air-conditioned suites eight hundred leagues away, trading paper shares... That void-iron sits on our tectonic shelf so it belongs to the Tsardom by right of blood and iron!"

"Your tectonic shelf was drawn on outdated maps eighty years ago, Nikolai!" Vanderbilt shouted back, jumping to his feet as his prior grievances were instantly forgotten in the face of trillions of credits in raw minerals. "The entire underground drainage of that rift flows directly into the Columbian western aquifer! If you drill those void-iron veins with your primitive heavy-bore rigs, you will fracture the mana leylines and poison our domestic water reserves! Columbia has already invested six hundred billion credits in non-invasive acoustic extraction platforms so the corridor belongs under Columbian administrative jurisdiction!"

"Non-invasive?!" King Zhao of the United Hegemony cut in, his ancient dragon-embroidered sleeves fluttering as he stood. "You call setting up three hundred mechanized dredging platforms non-invasive, Julian?! If Columbia takes that rift, the western trade winds will carry the ether runoff straight into the Shogunate ocean trenches! It will disrupt our maritime harvesters... The Hegemony demands a thirty percent partition of all extracted ether silt to offset ecological damage!"

"And what of Europa?!" Chancellor Henri de Montmirail argued, his wire-rimmed glasses slipping down his nose as he slammed his treaty ledger onto the marble. "The Alpine trade agreements explicitly state that any newly discovered transit corridors must be subject to open-market guild bidding! You cannot simply carve up the Sovereign Realm like a slaughtered hog between two border nations!"

"Silence, you ink-stained bureaucrat!" Volkov roared back with frost-mana crackling across his massive knuckles. "If Europa wants void-iron, pick up an axe and come dig it out of the permafrost yourselves!"

The Great Assembly Chamber collapsed into chaos.

The rulers of humanity were screaming at each other across the Grand Table with envoys shouting over the railings.

The Indus mages were chanting defensive mantras as their psionic auras flared, the Albion Prime Minister was banging his star-iron cane against the floor like a madman, and Vanderbilt looked like he was about to physically leap across the celestial marble to strangle the Tsar of Borealis.

The King watched the brawl unfold with cold simmering disgust as he opened his mouth to speak.

"Gentlemen—"

His voice was instantly swallowed as the deafening roar of nine sovereign delegations screaming over mineral rights and trade routes drowned out the Throne entirely.

The King’s hand clenched into a fist against the armrest.

CREAK!

The star-iron armrest groaned, the ancient metal warping under the terrifying force of his grip as a dark suffocating shadow began to bleed into the King’s sapphire irises with the void-light of Destruction flickering at the edges of his pupils—

"QUIET."

The word didn’t come from the King.

It came from the far northern arc of the table, from the shadowed bench where the seven World Council Heads sat.

VOOOOOOOM!

A terrifying suffocating eruption of pure boiling crimson mana blasted outward from the central hooded figure.

The crimson aura wasn’t hot like fire... it was viscous and heavy as liquid iron, expanding in a concussive wave that washed over every inch of the amphitheater.

WHAM!

The overwhelming spiritual gravity slammed into the nine rulers like a falling ceiling.

Tsar Volkov was physically shoved back into his chair with the breath punched out of his massive chest.

Vanderbilt’s knees buckled, forcing him down into his seat as his paper ledgers scattered across the floor.

Up in the mezzanine, dozens of junior aides dropped to their knees, clutching their throats, gasping for air as the crimson light bathed the obsidian walls in a terrifying bloody haze.

It was a crushing mountain of pure power... a spiritual presence so absurdly vast and so violently refined that it simply froze the blood in everyone’s veins.

Aki gripped the arms of her chair with her vision swimming as the crimson mana pressed against her chest like an iron plate.

Even without a Lord core, she could feel the terrifying weight of it.

At the Council bench, the hooded figure sat perfectly still.

She wore heavy midnight-silk robes woven with anti-divination wards, her face completely obscured by a smooth featureless mask of polished white porcelain.

Only her hands were visible and they were pale with elegant fingers resting lightly over the edge of the stone.

"You bicker like stray dogs over a scrap of meat," the Council Member spoke.

Her voice was unmistakably female as it echoed through the crimson haze chillingly.

"Need I remind you that not only do you sit before the Throne but you sit within the inner sanctum of the World Council... If you cannot conduct the business of humanity with dignity, I will strip the voices from your throats and settle the borders myself."

The silence in the room was terrified as even Tsar Volkov didn’t dare utter a syllable.

He sat back with his chest heaving and his eyes wide as he stared at the porcelain mask.

The female Council Member slowly withdrew her aura.

FSHHHH!

The crimson mana contracted, swirling back into the folds of her midnight robes like mist receding into a cave, leaving the room cold and dead quiet once more.

She settled back into her high-backed seat, folding her hands into her sleeves as if nothing had happened.

The King released his grip on the warped armrest.

He didn’t look back at the Council bench, nor did he mention her name as he merely offered a quiet respectful dip of his head toward her station.

"Thank you," the King murmured softly.

He turned his gaze back toward the nine trembling heads of state.

"Arguing will not get you anywhere," the King said, his voice sounding calm for someone that almost wanted to kill all of them moments ago. "A war between Columbia and Borealis over a mining corridor would crack the regional leylines and invite the very extinction we seek to prevent. The Crown will not permit it..."

The leaders exchanged nervous bewildered glances.

’What does he have in mind...?’ Aki thought, her eyes darting between her father and the silent Council Heads.

She remembered the guest protocols sent out three weeks ago.

Her father hadn’t just summoned the heads of state and their financial ministers... The decree had explicitly mandated that every delegation bring their top advisors, their young relatives, and their recognized heirs.

Even High Marshal-President Da Silva, who had no children of her own, had brought her twenty-two-year-old younger sister along with the Amazonian retinue.

Was this why? Had the King planned this from the very beginning?

The King’s mouth curved into a slow, deliberate smile.

"If the elders cannot agree on how to divide the earth," the King announced, his voice filling the hall with grand authority, "then the youth shall decide it for them."

A collective rustle ran through the mezzanine.

"Here, within the fortified grounds of the Citadel," the King continued, "the Crown shall host the Exhibition of Succession... A martial showcase taking place directly within a stabilized sector of the Sovereign Realm’s transitional zone and the preparations have already been completed by the Royal Engineers."