Chapter 537: We Need Her [Bonus - ]

Chapter 537: We Need Her [Bonus Chapter]

The golden light was so absurdly thick that the air physically turned into liquid pressure, slamming down upon every living soul in the Great Assembly Chamber like an oceanic trench collapsing inward.

"AGGGGGH!"

Up in the mezzanine, dozens of junior diplomats, guild scribes, and corporate analysts were instantly knocked unconscious with their eyes rolling back as they slumped over the brass railings.

Down at the Grand Table, Tsar Volkov’s massive bear-like frame was physically pinned to the back of his chair with the breath violently expelled from his lungs as his teeth rattled in his skull while Vanderbilt grabbed the edge of the table with both hands with his knuckles turning purple as the terrifying gravity forced his forehead toward the marble.

Even the hooded World Council Heads were forced back, their midnight robes whipping violently in the gravitational tempest.

Aki couldn’t breathe.

Her vision went black with her ribs groaning under a weight that felt like an entire continent resting on her collarbone and then, as suddenly as it had arrived...

SNAP!

The pressure vanished.

The golden light collapsed back into her chest in the span of a single heartbeat, leaving behind only the hysterical shrill of dying barrier alarms and the frantic gasping of five hundred terrified trembling people clutching their chests.

Kara White sat calmly in her violet-velvet chair.

She pushed her wire-rimmed glasses back up the bridge of her nose with a single unbothered finger, looking around the devastated gasping chamber with an amused smirk.

"So," Kara murmured, her smooth voice echoing through the deafening silence. "Is that enough?"

The King remained standing at the dais with his fingers digging deep into the celestial marble and his sapphire eyes wide, dilated with genuine shock.

Because everyone who had survived that single suffocating pulse knew the impossible truth.

Kara White... Lord Vespera... was not a fraud.

She was truly a Gold Core.

And from the dense multi-layered harmonic resonance of that golden eruption, she had already broken through the threshold... she was already standing firmly within the Second Phase of Core Refinement!

WHOOSH! WHOOSH!

The light in the air didn’t vanish though the pressure had dissipated.

It folded inward toward the center of the black-haired woman’s chest in a sharp implosive vacuum that made the deep obsidian flagstones beneath the amphitheater vibrate like struck anvils.

For four or five seconds after the last brilliant filament was swallowed back into the fabric of her tailored suit, nobody in the Great Assembly Chamber drew air.

In the mezzanine galleries, three junior administrative secretaries hung limp over the polished brass balustrades with their eyes rolled white into their skulls and their dropped styluses clattering rhythmically down the tiered stone risers before coming to rest in the gutters.

The King remained seated.

His broad star-iron-ringed fingers dug into the beveled lip of the celestial marble table, pressing with enough unconscious force to produce spiderweb hairline fractures across the polished white slab.

His deep eyes... usually looking cold and immovable remained wide, locked with intensity onto the woman seated in the violet-velvet chair.

Within the classified iron-bound archives of the Throne, the history of human awakening was recorded with obsessive chronological precision from the very first dawn following the Cataclysm.

Across those centuries of blood, ruined civilizations, and tectonic upheaval, humanity’s historical books had recorded precisely two Gold Cores.

The first was Odin.

He was a legendary figure who had walked the earth during the chaotic second generation, rising shortly after the founding World Council Heads had carved out their quarantine zones.

His awakening had not been an orderly progression through the standard spectrum of cores... It had been a violent phenomenon that the chroniclers of the old era could only describe as pure fantasy.

When he stood within the Pantheon, dozens of conflicting elemental affinities had ignited within his spiritual pathways simultaneously harmonizing into a singular gold core that instantly established him as the undisputed apex of mortal survival.

Yet the moment he descended into the Sovereign Realm, he vanished from human records.

He never ascended back into the mortal world or perhaps he had, once, to inspect the bloodied aftermath after the Novice Trials, but he had never shown his face before the governing bodies again.

Time flowed differently in the Sovereign Realm... down in those weird planes, where the spatial geometry bent back on itself, decades ran like water.

What had been several centuries for humanity had likely been thousands of years for Odin.

Down there, far beyond the reach of human communication relays and imperial diviners, he had ascended completely, taking the mantle of the God of Asgard... existing on the tier of a true deity, or perhaps standing even higher, towering above the primal horrors that ruled the outer dark.

The only reminder humanity had of that lineage was Thor.

Odin’s firstborn daughter and even she was an erratic unpredictable entity.

She claimed the title of Protector of Midgard, but the King of the World could count on one hand the number of times she had actually stepped forward to prevent a continental disaster.

Most of her time on the mortal plane was spent wandering the coastal trade cities, drinking herself into a stupor, and stuffing her stomach with mountain-high plates of roasted meats, sweet breads, and imported pastries.

She was a deity in her own right with her physical power alone capable of leveling city blocks with a flick of her wrist, but she treated the affairs of the World Council like ants squabbling over spilled sugar.

The King had never quite known whether her complete indifference was a deliberate insult from Odin for the ancient sins the royal house had committed during the early era, but he despised her all the same.

The second Gold Core was the First King.

The ancient patriarch of House Castellian and the founding progenitor whose brilliance had elevated their bloodline to the Throne and birthed the very Suppression Engines that kept the continents from sliding into the abyss.

Unlike Odin, the first Castellian had not been a warrior.

He was a scholar and an inventor who spent his days locked away in vaults surrounded by half-assembled clockwork, ether batteries, and runic blueprints.

In his personal journals, which were passed down through the royal line under unbroken blood-seals, the First King had described his Gold Core not as an engine of war, but as a curse of perception... A curse Of Knowledge.

He wrote that the core poured so much raw cosmic architecture into his brain that the simple act of thinking was agonizing like a constant burning migraine that felt as though his skull were being split open with an iron wedge.

Through that terrible unceasing clarity, he had designed the primary Suppression Engine and the nine regional sub-engines.

Yet he had perished shortly after humanity’s first great Citadel was assaulted during the early days of the Apocalypse.

A Tier-7 Black Dragon... an ancient calamity that modern rankers only read about in sealed bestiaries had breached the outer wards and leveled the capital.

The First King, having spent his entire life expanding his mind rather than reinforcing his physical combat shell, was wiped out in the initial blast wave.

His death, however, had not ended his legacy.

His research survived, preserved by his children.

It was the Second King who had taken those incomprehensible schematics and actually forged the Suppression Engines, anchoring them deep into the tectonic crust and saving the human species over the centuries that followed and with each dying breath of a monarch, the fundamental spark of that ancestral lineage was transferred into the next heir through the royal blood-rite.

When the authority had passed to the current King, he had inherited two distinct gifts... Destruction, and one other power that he had never once revealed to the World Council.

For decades, those gifts had bred silent, festering questions in his heart.

If the First King had possessed Destruction within that golden spark, why hadn’t he used it to atomize the Black Dragon? Why hadn’t his own father used it to secure dominance over the other eight nations?

And above all... what made a Gold Core so terrifyingly different?

The King’s fingers twitched against the celestial marble.

When Kara’s presence had detonated across the chamber a moment ago, his hand had trembled.

It was an imperceptible shake, completely hidden from the assembly, but he had felt it deep in his marrow.

She was strong.

She was not yet on his level since he had cultivated for a long time, bathing his soul pathways in the distilled ether of the deepest royal vaults but she was approaching the threshold with terrifying speed.

’Why are Gold Cores so inherently unfair?’ the King thought, his jaw setting so hard the tendon stood out like wire against his neck. ’The rest of humanity bleeds for decades to refine a single facet of a Purple Core, and this stray from the west reaches the Second Phase before she even learns how to dress for court...’

Down at the table, Kara leaned back into the plush violet velvet of her chair, letting out a long relaxed breath through her nose as she tapped the rim of her empty crystal glass with her single right forefinger.

CLINK!

"Hey," she said, her voice cutting through the ringing silence as she glanced toward the terrified serving staff huddled near the northern wall. "Are you going to pour another round, or do I have to ask the King to pass his pitcher? What does a girl have to do for some more good wine around here..."

The chamber slowly began to pull itself together as the dead silence gave way to the muted sounds of ragged breathing, boots shifting on the stone floor, and papers rustling on desks.

The rulers around the Grand Table forced their expressions into neutral dignified masks, though the sheen of cold sweat glistening along their temples betrayed them.

Every single person sitting at that marble slab was running the exact same calculation... Blessed Land must be bought.

A Gold Core was an existential deterrent.

If any one of the Nine Major Powers managed to tie Kara White to their standard... through marriage, trade treaties, land grants, or joint military charters... The global balance of power would irrevocably tilt in their favor!

The fact that she held citizenship in Europa meant nothing.

Independent rankers of her caliber didn’t give a damn about municipal borders, and Chancellor Montmirail’s flushed terrified face proved that Europa held zero administrative control over her.

She was a free agent holding the ultimate weapon.

’We need her,’ thought King Zhao of Shogya with his white beard trembling as his fingers traced the gold silk of his dragon robe. ’A Gold Core aligned with our deep-sea mining anchors would make the Hegemony untouchable...’

’Whatever she wants,’ Da Silva concluded internally, her dark feline eyes measuring Kara’s shoulders with a look. ’We offer her an honorary marshalcy in the Amazonian Vanguard and if she wants land, we carve out three provinces or how many she wants.’

Then, a dry grating sound broke the reverie.

TCH!

It was a scoff.

A sharp disrespectful click of the tongue that echoed across the quiet marble like a dropped wrench.

Every head at the table turned.

President Julian Vanderbilt Senior sat hunched forward with his charcoal suit soaked through with sweat at the armpits and his chest still heaving from the spiritual suffocation he had just endured.

Despite the terror that had forced him toward the table moments before, his broad square-jawed face had curdled into an expression of bitter disdain.

The humiliation of being pressed into the stone like a bug was eating away at his composure, and the sight of this girl treating the supreme summit of humanity like a cheap terrace cafe pushed his corporate arrogance past the breaking point.

He glared openly across the marble slab, his voice cutting through the hall with harsh abrasive venom.

"A Gold Core?" Vanderbilt sneered, the words tumbling out of his mouth in a loud bark that made the surrounding diplomats recoil in horror. "The world is expected to tremble before a miraculous anomaly, and what arrives? A crippled delinquent that sounds like she came from the Slums! We are told Gold Cores exist on an untouchable divine plane above mortal limitations... that a Second Phase refinement makes you the equal of a Lord in their third or fourth refinement stage! Yet look at you! You sit there with an empty sleeve pinned to your ribs! If you are so grand, so untouchable, why the hell are you missing an arm? You couldn’t even heal your own dam—"

CRUNCH!

Vanderbilt’s voice slammed to a dead halt.

The entire table paused and their eyes darting toward the violet chair in stunned disbelief.

Kara hadn’t flinched.

She hadn’t summoned a blade or blasted him into paste as she merely had her single right hand buried in the small brown paper bag she had smuggled past the security gates.

She had pulled out a large roasted hickory nut, tossed it casually into the air, caught it cleanly in her mouth right in the middle of his tirade, and bitten down with an audible sharp crack that echoed off the stone.

CRUNCH! CRUNCH!

She chewed slowly, unbothered by the guards still aiming their rifles at her perimeter, completely unfazed by the fact that the leader of a global superpower had just shouted insults at her face.

Her mouth was full with her cheek bulging slightly as she swallowed, taking a measured luxurious sip of the remaining wine from the glass before her.

She lowered the glass with a soft clatter.

Looking through her clear wire-rimmed lenses, she fixed her glowing violet eyes directly on Vanderbilt’s trembling red-faced profile.

"Are you... done?" she asked.