Chapter 718: Kara’s Property [Bonus - ]

Chapter 718: Kara’s Property [Bonus Chapter]

"H-Hyaaah?!"

A tiny scandalous whimper squeaked out of Solenne’s throat.

Her spine snapped into an arch as her face went a violent luminous crimson that put the spilled wine to shame... Her ears slammed flat against her skull, and her grip on Kara’s vest tightened until her knuckles went white.

"L-Lord Vespera!" she stammered, wobbling in sheer dizzy embarrassment as she looked up at Kara. "N-Not here! Lady Council Head is standing right behind us!"

"I am standing beside you," Number Five said, in the voice of someone studying the ceiling with enormous dedication. "I am looking at the ceiling... I will pretend I did not see any of this."

Kara only smirked.

Her fingers gave the plush silver fur another slow kneading stroke and felt a delicate shiver run through the beastkin’s whole body.

’Does my Lord really like my tails that much?’ Solenne thought frantically, her mind spinning into a hot fog. ’Every time we’re alone, every time he gets close, his hand goes straight for the fur! Is this a Lord’s divine privilege?! Ahhh, it’s so warm...’

Kara released the tail with a last affectionate pat on the shoulder, the fur still twitching in her palm like a happy cat, and the kitsune reluctantly uncoiled her tails and stepped back with her head bowed and her cheeks burning like two braziers.

’I’m a pervert... a big one...’

Kara turned to the desk and brushed an invisible speck from her lapel.

"Well," she said, looking toward the side chamber where the Secretary was already stamping audit registers, "I do hope the Spirit credits finds the right vault without any clerical detours... Blessed Land has plenty of foundries to build, and ore doesn’t pay for itself."

She straightened the silver-leaf crest on her chest, slid back into her usual effortless elegance and headed for the exit.

Beside the desk, the small hooded figure in the midnight-violet mantle stepped forward.

Number Five’s silver boots clicked on the wood.

She tilted her porcelain face up toward Kara’s profile, and her dry voice carried a note of exhausted long-suffering impatience.

"Are you finished with your vulgar commercial extortion, Kara White? Or do you intend to shake down the janitorial staff for loose brass rivets as well?"

Kara stopped at the threshold and glanced back over her shoulder with a sharp wicked smirk.

"...Not yet."

She turned and walked back to the middle of the room. Her polished leather shoes made no sound on the thick wool.

Number Five didn’t move, but the mask caught the muted glow of the serpentine fireplace and gave away nothing.

Only the two narrow slits showed anything at all, dark eyes watching Kara with exhaustion and simmering hostility.

"Not yet," she repeated, her monotone scraping like slate on slate. "I have a schedule, Kara White... The schedule had a lunch in it... The documents are signed... The scout has been remanded... The assets are seized, the tracks are reassigned, and your Chief Artificer is weeping into your vest at a volume that rattles windowpanes... What possible justification do you have for lingering in this den of commercial mediocrity?"

Kara tilted her head, violet eyes narrowing into sharp mocking crescents.

"Well, Council Head, now that we’ve handled the small matter of local municipal theft, what about the larger ledger?"

The temperature around Number Five’s silver cuffs dropped.

"The larger ledger."

"Indeed." Kara strolled past the oak desk, trailing the fingertips of her lone right hand along the lacquered wood. "Lest you forget, I spent a whole week on the Khemet campaign... I marched the desert rifts. I killed a lot of monsters and helped save a lot of people... I played a central role in saving that entire place from collapse, hell I fought a sand golem the size of a cathedral and I carried a whole supply cart through a sandstorm."

"You’re not wrong..."

She stopped three paces from the small Council Head and bent down until her violet eyes were level with the porcelain slits.

"So where’s my list of rewards?" Kara purred. "The stipends? The rare alloy allotments? The private dimensional permits? Surely the World Council doesn’t expect an elite Lord to fight through an apocalypse without an official executive payout..."

"I don’t remember a rewards clause," Number Five said, very slowly.

"Eh? I gave you a whole list, if you don’t remember then how did we give Lord Sky his stuff...?"

The room went still.

Behind the oak desk, the newly appointed Secretary stopped filing.

His spectacles slid down his nose and he stared with absolute terrified disbelief.

Nobody spoke to a Council Head like that... Across the entire Sovereign Realm, monarchs and trade barons and even the Magistrates dropped to their knees when the porcelain mask appeared before whispering their petitions with bowed heads.

Number Five stood motionless for five long agonizing seconds.

Then she drew a deep slow breath.

Her small chest rose under the heavy silk and the platinum compass-roses on her shoulders strained as she filled her ancient lungs.

She turned her whole body to face Kara and squared her narrow shoulders and behind the slitted eyeholes, her eyes ignited.

In the corner, the Secretary quietly began to pray to a god he didn’t believe in.

The chandeliers rang.

A vibrant incandescent violet glow flared in her pupils, so bright that thin crackling threads of spatial mana leaked through the edges of the mask like purple lightning and yet, under that terrifying world-ending display, Silas would have sworn on his Gold Core that the hidden line of her jaw was twitching up into a wide grin.

Number Five opened her mouth.

The clinical monotone was gone as her voice rose into a sharp venomous hiss that was shockingly clear.

"Fuck you, big breasted bitch."

Kara’s eyebrows shot up.

Before Silas could process it, before Kara could blink or draw breath to laugh, Number Five bolted.

Swish!

She didn’t bother with any elegant spatial portal.

She kicked off the steppe rug like a frightened hare, and her silver boots launched her tiny frame at the double doors with a speed that defied mortal biology.

She hurdled the wine-stained desk in a single hop, bounced off a bookcase with a Thwack, sent a gold-plated cogwheel spinning off its stand and kept going too.

"Hey—!" Kara’s right hand whipped out, fingers closing like a claw on the trailing hem of the midnight-violet mantle.

She was fast.

Silas had reflexes sharpened by all of the combat he had done since he became a Lord and a dense Gold Core humming with wind mana... he was prepared.

His fingers brushed cold smooth silk...

At the exact second before the grip locked, Number Five glanced back over her shoulder.

With her tiny left hand she reached up and tilted the bottom edge of her mask up by barely two inches.

She didn’t show her face as her chin stayed buried in shadow and her hair hidden under the hood.

All she showed was her pink tongue.

She stuck it out as far as it would go and gave Kara a furious vulgar shameless raspberry.

"THBBBBT!"

Pop!

The space around her folded in on itself like a collapsing paper lantern.

A tiny implosion of air slapped Kara’s palm and blew her black bangs across her forehead as her fingers snapped shut on nothing.

The Council Head was gone, leaving only a crisp scent of crushed ozone and cosmic vacuum.

"Hmm?"

Kara stood in the middle of the executive office with her hand still out, her empty left sleeve fluttering against her chest in the draft.

She took one step after her, then stopped, because there was nothing left to chase as the silence returned, broken only by the muffled hum of the foundry tracks below.

She lowered her hand and let out a long ragged breath through her nose.

A wry scowl tugged at her lips.

’Ancient my ass...’ Silas thought. ’She’s definitely a bit mischievous.’

"What a cheeky brat," she muttered sonding very fond.

A tiny face peeked out from behind a bookshelf.

"Lord Vespera?" Solenne whispered. "Did the Lady Council Head just stick her tongue out at you?"

"She’s very formal about it," Kara said. "Not a word to anyone..."

"I didn’t see anything, my Lord." Solenne hugged her satchel.

’Lord Silas can make a Council Head run...’ Solenne thought as her tails swayed all by themselves, could he be any cooler?

’The next time I see that little gremlin without her mask,’ Silas thought, a silent vindictive chuckle rolling through his Gold Core, ’I swear by the northern Khemet... I’m going to regenerate my second hand right in front of her, grab both those pale cheeks, and pinch until she squeaks in three different positions.’

It was a joke thought, of course.

He really didn’t need to have one hand but for now the empty sleeve was useful and the mental picture of a freshly regenerated hand bullying an ancient World Council Head was far too entertaining to give up.

He turned his head back toward the desk.

The Secretary had gone stiff beside the filing cabinet.

His spectacles had slid to the very tip of his nose, and his gray eyes were round and thoroughly traumatized.

The leather ledger was clamped to his ribs and his mouth hung open half an inch.

The man had spent his whole career swimming the sterile terrifyingly polite waters of high-tier administration... He’d watched Council Heads sign death warrants with a gentle dip of a quill... He’d watched them erase entire merchant houses from the tax rolls without raising their voices above a murmur as well.

’A-ah... So strange...’

He had never, in his wildest corporate nightmare, watched the Fifth Seat stick out her tongue, curse a Lord’s chest measurements, and sprint from a room like a schoolgirl dodging a headmaster’s cane.

Kara noticed his expression.

"Is there an issue with your ledger, Secretary?" she asked, pitching her voice back to its pristine melodic drawl.

He jumped as if someone had jabbed an iron rod into his spine.

Snick!

He shoved his spectacles up the bridge of his nose with a trembling finger and locked into an immaculate terrified ninety-degree plank.

"N-No, Lord Vespera! Absolutely not!" His crisp professional cadence came back in a desperate rush. "The audit registers are compliant! The accounts are proceeding through the clearance without discrepancy! I was merely reflecting on the, ah, the dynamic flexibility of the Fifth Seat’s executive communication protocols!"

Beside the filing cabinet, the Secretary had started to write "the Fifth Seat stuck out her tongue" in the incident log.

He crossed it out.

"Sudden spatial departure," he wrote instead, and underlined it twice under "reward demand" he wrote "declined."

"Dynamic flexibility," Kara repeated with a low amused hum. "Yes... Let’s call it that."

"It is the official term, my Lord."

"Well I know that, Solenne."

She let her eyes travel slowly around the room, past Solenne, who’d drifted to the glass wall to press her nose against the city.

With the guildmaster gone and the threat of litigation cleared, the sheer size of the office finally showed.

It was forty paces long and thirty wide, topped by a thirty-foot mahogany ceiling, with a massive northern glass wall that gave an unbroken view over the smoky terraces and gleaming sky-ways of Central City.

The black paneling was soundproofed with suppression runes, and the whole top floor was cut off from the commercial corridors below, reachable only by a private lift and an encrypted rune-staircase.

"Look good..."

Kara strolled to the glass wall and looked down at the smog and the sky-barges drifting between the towers.

Far below, a vendor was selling hot chestnuts to people who had no idea that the richest guild in Central City had just changed owners.

It was secure... It was high up and it was legally hers.

Kara tapped her chin with her right index finger, and a small bright idea began to glow at the back of Silas’s mind.

It was a very good idea.

It was the kind of idea he usually regretted, in a good way, three days later however the idea also had a pool in it.

’It can’t be that bad to have a private pool, no?’

Her thoughts clicked into place with sharp precision.

"Secretary," Kara said, her feminine voice carrying a clear authoritative ring.

"Yes, Lord Vespera!" He snapped to attention with his stylus raised over the ledger like a soldier presenting arms.

"This office. Strip it..." She gestured with a lazy flick of her wrist at the vast expanse of petrified oak and black mahogany. "Every gold-plated cogwheel, every gaudy merchant certificate, and every scrap of that ridiculous golden velvet doublet the former scout left behind... I want the whole floor cleared by tomorrow afternoon."