Chapter 632: Top And Bottom [Bonus - ]

Chapter 632: Top And Bottom [Bonus Chapter]

Aki sat cross-legged on the silk counterpane, carefully lifting each sculpt from its foam insert like an archaeologist handling brittle porcelain relics.

She picked up the miniature of Eluned.

"Woah..."

The sculpt was breathtakingly delicate, captured in flowing robes of translucent jade and silver that seemed to whisper with an invisible, gentle breeze.

The Former Spirit of the World Tree was posed with a soft serene tilt of her head with one slender hand resting over her heart while the other reached outward in a gesture of effortless botanical dominion.

Around her delicate ankles, tiny, perfectly cast roots burst through faux cobblestones, cradling microscopic blossoming lotuses.

"She really is so elegant..." Aki murmured to herself, turning the piece under the warm coastal sunlight.

Her fingers brushed against the small joint embedded inside the figurine’s left palm as she turned the box over, checking the miniature pictorial insert, and let out a soft gasp.

"Wait... it has an interlocking peg?"

Aki took the Kara White figure she had set aside, carefully aligning the hands.

With a tiny satisfying click, Eluned’s slender fingers slid perfectly into place, gently clasping onto the single-armed sovereign’s right elbow.

The two sculpts balanced together flawlessly, looking for all the world like an ancient queen resting trustingly against her stalwart champion.

Aki’s heart fluttered in her chest.

"They actually designed them to hold onto each other... That’s so shameless. That’s ridiculously cute."

She set the pair down and continued exploring the carton.

Next was Aeliana, suspended upon an arched rod of violet acrylic that gave the illusion of weightless celestial flight, her longbow pulled taut with an arrow carved from tinted crystal.

Beside her was Tasmin, crouched low, shrouded in sculpted shadow-wisps, her twin daggers gleaming with a mirror-finish coat of chrome paint.

Then came Brida, towering over the others, resting her massive eight-foot cleaver over a plate-armored shoulder with an unapologetic toothy grin that captured her boisterous personality with startling fidelity.

She had seen these ones before, but there were more.

’I’m glad the others got figurines as well, I can’t wait to show them...’

There was Rowenna, posed with a flurry of translucent runes spinning around her fingertips as her expression was a mix of crazy genius and subtle flustered shyness.

Vala’s was mid-spin with her blade wreathed in five distinct swirling bands of elemental power while Fenna was crouched on an angle with a quiver of arrows at her hip and Kadi, grinning like an unhinged little battle maniac, her fists encased in spiked gauntlets of petrified rock.

Then finally, tucked into the very bottom corner in a custom-stamped foil sleeve, was the eleventh piece.

Aki gently peeled the velvet cover back.

"No way..." Aki burst out into a bright musical laugh, holding the figure up to the light. "Thor?! Thor actually got an official figurine in the Blessed Land set?!"

It was unmistakable.

The thunder-goddess was posed with one foot planted boldly atop a shattered abyssal drake skull with her wild golden braids arcing with jagged sparks of blue electric lacquer and her head thrown back in mid-bellowing laugh.

In her right hand, Mjolnir was captured in a blur-sculpt of motion, while tucked under her left arm... sculpted with hilarious irreverent precision was a tiny frothing wooden tankard of northern mead.

"They even gave her the ale mug," Aki chuckled, shaking her head as she arranged the eleven figures in a broad protective semicircle across her duvet.

She tapped Kara’s head with the tip of her pinky finger, speaking in an exaggerated playful whisper.

"Alright, Lord Vespera, your army is assembled. What are your orders for today? Should we go conquer the tea parlor or—"

"A bit ambitious for an afternoon, don’t you think?"

The moment the latch clicked shut behind the doorframe, Aki’s spine went rigid with pure panic.

Her eyes darted wildly between the eleven figures scattered across her duvet and the tall cowled shadow stepping through her balcony doors and in the half-second she had to decide, instinct won over dignity entirely.

She snatched the Kara White figurine off the pillow and clutched it protectively against her chest with both hands, as though hiding the evidence would somehow un-happen the last forty-five minutes of her life.

...It didn’t work as Aki froze.

The air in the bedroom suddenly grew heavy, humming with the unmistakable static of compressed spatial displacement as she whipped her head toward the sunlit balcony doors.

Leaning casually against the open mahogany doorframe, half-shrouded in the sheer white curtains that fluttered in the ocean breeze, was a solitary figure.

She wore a long traveling mantle of midnight-blue wool, its hem dusted with faint streaks of pale-green bone ash.

The left sleeve was pinned neatly across her chest, looking empty while her right hand hung loosely at her hip.

Beneath the deep cowl, a pair of sharp, half-lidded dark eyes observed the princess with a quiet tired amusement.

"K-Kara?!" Aki squeaked, her heart violently hammering against her ribs as she scrambled backward on the bed, her hands instinctively splaying out to guard the army of tiny plastic warriors. "How... how did you get in here?! The royal estate’s warding array is—"

"Shh," Kara murmured softly.

She raised a single finger to her pale lips, stepping soundlessly across the polished cedar threshold into the bedroom.

"Keep your voice down, Aki... I’m running on roughly sixteen minutes of uninterrupted consciousness over the last seventy-two hours, and if your people start firing harpoons at the terrace, I might actually burst into tears."

Kara walked over to the bed, her boots making no sound against the thick wool of the rug.

She looked down at the colorful array of figures scattered across the ivory linen, her dark eyebrows rising in genuine tired bewilderment.

"What do we have here?" Kara asked, crouching down beside the edge of the mattress, resting her chin upon her forearm.

She reached out with a single leather-clad finger, gently tapping the tiny plastic head of the miniature Kara White. "Is that supposed to be me? My jawline looks significantly more villainous than it does in a mirror."

Aki’s face burned a sudden crimson.

She was suddenly acutely aware that she was sitting on her private bed, wearing an informal silk gown, having been caught red-handed playing with toys of the woman currently staring directly at her face...

"They’re... they’re the official commemorative edition!" Aki stammered, pulling her knees against her chest in a desperate attempt to look dignified. "From the Apex Manufactory! They sold out globally in forty seconds! How did you even know about them?!"

"I signed the licensing clearance," Kara sighed, rolling her single shoulder with a muted pop. "Some oily corporate emissary from the High Directorate cornered me in a command tent while I was washing monster bile out of my hair, shoved sixteen pages of contract parchment into my hands, and promised me a twenty-five percent royalty cut on all gross merchandise transactions if I gave them my likeness rights. I signed it just to make him stop talking..."

Kara tilted her head, her gaze drifting over the collection. "How much did you pay for this box?"

"For the full royal collector’s set?" Aki muttered, looking away shyly. "About... twenty thousand Spirit Credits."

Kara’s brow furrowed. "Twenty thousand? For eleven lumps of painted resin and some clear acrylic sticks? That’s it?"

Aki blinked, staring at her in sheer unadulterated disbelief.

"That’s... that is an astronomical sum of money, Kara! Twenty thousand credits could buy a car in Europa!"

"That’s a bit cheap," Kara grunted, shaking her head with the cold cynical calculation of an old merchant. "Considering the Directorate is netting millions of units per production run, twenty thousand is practically a giveaway... Those leeches are underpricing my face. I should have demanded sixty-five percent."

Aki let out a soft exasperated breath.

"Well... the corporate notice said this was merely the early shipment. Because the initial pre-orders shattered every single retail database on the planet, they announced they’re going to release six additional waves over the next half-year with alternate poses and special battle-damaged editions... A deluxe set featuring you riding Talira in her full draconic form with an active plasma-light battery in her throat."

Kara gave a slow enthusiastic nod with her lips curving into a wide bright smile.

"Oh, wonderful," Kara said. "Truly marvelous. I can’t wait to see my face on lunchboxes and novelty keychains."

Aki looked at her closely.

Despite the smiling sarcasm, Aki’s sharp perceptive gaze didn’t miss the faint bruised shadows ringing the dark eyes beneath the hood.

The woman’s skin was pale, lacking its usual vibrant electric luster... her posture, while upright, carried the dragging inertia of an engine that had been burning its fuel injectors on an empty tank for a while.

Kara was exhausted.

"You really worked yourself half to death out there, didn’t you?" Aki said softly, the playful banter draining from her tone, replaced by an earnest warmth.

Kara let out a long ragged groan that rattled the fabric of her cowl as she dropped her forehead flat against the edge of the mattress, burying her face in the soft silk of the duvet.

"You have no idea," Kara muffled into the blanket. "Twelve days, Aki... Twelve days of digging trenches, cutting rifts, listening to Thor belch northern mead into my ear, and watching Number 5 argue with military marshals about evacuating, I haven’t slept on a surface softer than a fractured basalt slab in nearly two weeks... The air in Khemet tastes like copper shavings and burnt hair and I’m pretty sure if I blow my nose right now, a handful of bone-dust will come out."

She slowly pushed herself up, leaning back onto her heels.

CLICK!

Kara reached up with her single hand with her thumb flicking a tiny silver ring embedded into the hand.

FSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSH!

A subtle translucent distortion rippled across her body like heat shimmering off summer asphalt.

The broad shoulders narrowed as the long wild mane of black hair shortened, shifting into a clean slightly messy crop of dark brown locks.

The sharp, feminine jawline squared, the high cheekbones settling into the familiar stubbornly handsome, and quietly exhausted contours of a young man who was taller than Kara.

The pinned left sleeve unraveled, and from the void of the cloak, Silas Graves’s left arm emerged, resting casually against his knee as his regular clothes appeared too.

The disguise ring clicked into his pocket.

Silas let out a deep shuddering breath, rubbing the bridge of his nose where the tension of the transformation always left a dull ache.

"God," he muttered, his true voice filling the quiet bedroom. "I forget how much my ribs hurt after holding that illusion for that long."

Aki’s breath caught in her throat.

Even though she knew his secret... even though she was one of the microscopic few on the entire Earth who understood that the legendary Lord Vespera and the unassuming Europa orphan Silas Graves were the exact same soul, seeing the transition unfold with such casual intimacy in her own bedchamber sent a dizzying warm flutter straight into the base of her stomach.

Silas slowly pushed himself to his feet.

He took two heavy dragging strides toward the edge of the mattress with his boots falling with the leaden weight of a soldier coming home from the front.

"Wait, Silas, the figurines—"

Aki moved with nimble speed.

Her slender hands blurred across the duvet, scooping up Kara, Eluned, Thor, and the rest of the tiny plastic army, quickly transferring them over to the low nightstand beside the headboard, ensuring not a single painted sword or crystal arrow was crushed under his weight.

The moment her hands cleared the linen, Silas collapsed forward.

"Whoa—!"

Aki lunged forward instinctively with her arms reaching out to catch him before his face hit the headboard.

THUD-FLUFF!

Her slender unarmored frame was unprepared for the weight of a high-tier Awakened’s physical mass. Silas, on the other hand, didn’t catch his balance simply fell forward into her arms, taking her down with him.

The two of them tumbled backward onto the massive king-sized down mattress in a chaotic flurry of tangled sea-foam silk and heavy wool with the springs creaking softly beneath their combined momentum.

FLUMP!

Silas landed heavily on top of her.

His broad chest pressed firmly against her ribs with his face buried deep into the crook of her neck and his warm steady breath brushing directly against the sensitive porcelain skin behind her ear.

His arms lay limp at her sides, pinning the hem of her gown against the sheets.

THUMP-THUMP! THUMP-THUMP!

Aki’s heart hammered so violently she was terrified he would feel it through her sternum.

Her sapphire eyes were wide, staring up at the white-painted plaster of the ceiling as her face flushed with such intense heat that she felt dizzy.

The scent of him completely overwhelmed the lavender-scented laundry wash of her pillows.

Silas let out a long heavy infinitely content sigh that deflated his entire frame, sinking deeper into the soft down.

"Even though a Gold Core doesn’t technically require sleep..." Silas murmured, his voice muffled against her skin and vibrating right into her collarbone, "...I swear by the ancient kings, I just needed to feel a bed. A real, soft, clean bed that doesn’t smell like sulfur..."

Aki lay paralyzed beneath him, her hands hovering awkwardly above his back, her fingers trembling in the warm air.

"S-Silas...?" she squeaked, the pitch of her voice barely above a whisper. "You’re... you’re very heavy..."

Silas let out a soft exhausted chuckle.

SHIFT!

[Author’s Note]

Like the announcement I made on Discord, I’ll be posting 10 Chapters for the next 2 days (Since I’ve finished today’s one) so I do hope you enjoy them, on another note, Today’s my birthday keke so make sure that you give this poor author a lot of Golden tickets and gifts, Castles hehe~

I’ll be off to bed.