Chapter 724: I Want To Spar [I / Bonus - ]

Chapter 724: I Want To Spar [I / Bonus Chapter]

Silas blinked.

"You have hands, Morwenna and the bowl’s right there."

"My hands are tired from hauling cargo from yesterday," she lied, without one shred of shame.

Her gaze stayed stubborn as she nearly pouted. "Feed me, Captain... Unless I, as your woman, don’t rate the same rations as an ancient tree-goblin."

’As your woman...?’ Valerius almost choked, he was seducing the people in his territory too...?

"Well you’re not wrong about that, you worked hard yesterday."

Silas let out a quiet defeated breath, picked up a roasted walnut and dropped it in her waiting mouth.

Morwenna caught it between her teeth with a triumphant crunch and her gray eyes flicked sideways toward Aeliana with all the smug superiority of a privateer who’d just claimed a prize galleon.

...Aeliana did not let that pass at all.

Her spine straightened, her hands folded over her lap with a small frown and she turned her green eyes on Silas while her shortened ears tilted forward half an inch.

"Lord Sy," She declared. "In the high elven houses, it is the custom that a lord makes sure his chief retainers are fed when they travel in foreign lands... By that custom, I ask to be fed as well."

Silas stared at her. "Aeli, you’re asking for a nut."

"Well just so you know, she’s not lying~"

"Thank you, Aunt Mia... You’re useful for at least one thing in your old age."

"...Hey! That’s an insult!"

Silas shook his head, took an almond from the bowl and fed it to her.

Aeliana parted her lips with delicate elegance and chewed with slow haughty satisfaction, deliberately not looking at the seething woman beside her.

Morwenna’s nostrils flared... Their eyes met across the table for exactly one second, and a small cold war was declared and ratified.

Tug-tug!

A small insistent hand yanked on the sleeve of his black jacket and Silas looked down.

Mia had scrambled up onto her knees and leaned over his arm with her mouth wide open like a starving nestling, jabbing one tiny finger at her tongue.

"More!" she demanded around a mouthful of honey glaze. "Student, the teacher requires additional offerings! You can’t feed the niece before the aunt... It violates the fundamental laws of ancestral seniority!"

"Okay okay..."

Silas sighed, grabbed another pecan and tossed it into her open mouth.

Her jaw snapped shut with a happy muffled chirp as her ears wiggled.

She stayed exactly where she was as her mouth opened again, and he fed her a third.

Across the table, Valerius sat completely frozen.

His golden eyes darted from Morwenna chewing smugly, to Aeliana daintily swallowing her ceremonial almond, to his own terrifying Hero begging for snacks like a stray puppy at a butcher’s back door.

’Even my own Hero...?’ Valerius thought, his soul screaming. ’Mia?! The woman who swore to turn my spleen into a decorative wind chime because I woke her up five minutes early?! She’s letting him feed her like a pet squirrel?!’

A dark desperate panic flared in his chest.

’This man simply has to be stopped.’ His hands gripped the table until the grain creaked. ’Leave him alone in Central City for three more days and he’ll recruit all the women in the World council and possibly even my own grandmother into his entourage... He’s a menace to the natural order of male camaraderie! 𝖋𝙧ⅇ

He cleared his throat and sat bolt upright. The easy grin slid off his face, and a sharp focused gleam took its place in his golden eyes.

"Actually, Silas," he said, in a firmer voice. "Before we go wandering the commercial districts, there’s something I want to do..."

Silas paused with a walnut halfway to the bowl.

"Yeah? What’s up with you? You want to play that game again... Pay to win, bastard?"

Valerius’s cheeks turned pink.

"Erm... Not right now."

Valerius leaned across the scarred table and locked eyes with him.

"...I want to spar with you."

The almond slipped from Silas’s fingers and bounced off the clay dish.

"You want to spar...?"

Around the booth, five heads turned at once.

Morwenna’s eyebrows climbed, Aeliana lowered her almond, Solenne’s tail stopped mid-wag with a soft fwip and Mia, who still had her mouth open, made a small disappointed noise at the stalled supply line, and then an enormous interested grin spread across her face.

"A Spar? Why not?! That’s an excellent idea."

...

The afternoon sun had begun to slant across the ceramic rooftops of the commercial sector when they left the shade of the arcade.

The heat hung thick over the street-ways, smelling of coal dust and scorched bronze and hot grease and crushed sweet-cane dropped by vendor carts.

Silas walked with his hands in the pockets of his dark joggers, his white shirt shifting against his shoulders in the warm wind while Valerius led the way with a sweeping stride that demanded thirty feet of clearance from every passing messenger and pack-beast.

Around them mutters filled the air.

"They really look handsome..."

"Like they came out of a novel..."

"Especially the Black-haired one, you think he’s a Lord?"

"I want his babies."

Valerius wanted to wash his ears with Mia’s help, this was a public road... Why was Silas getting so much glaze?

"Ah, I’m seeing Sir Valerius there... are they perhaps friends?"

"Sir Valerius is really handsome, I want his babies too."

"You’d just ruin Sir Valerius’s superior genes, you ugly fathead."

Silas glanced at those people, this was a public road... Why did they feel the need to voice the fact that they wanted Valerius’s children?

’Go talk to him if you’re that desperate...’

Behind them the party straggled in a loose beat of boots on flagstone. Morwenna had both fists jammed in the waist of her breeches and kept scowling at the flat front of her shirt like she was wishing fire on Rowenna’s entire bloodline.

Aeliana drifted along like a tall poised crane, ears flicking at street cries with detachment.

Solenne trotted close at Silas’s right flank with her tail swishing, and Mia skipped along the curbs like a wild sparrow, leaping every few paces to swat at the low shop banners.

"Stop that..." Aeliana said, without turning her head.

"Make me." said Mia, and swatted another.

Silas let the bickering wash past him and turned the spar over in his head.

Val had a Purple Core and that was no joke so it would be a good fight... He could already feel his shoulders loosening in anticipation.

"You’re smiling a lot Captain..." Morwenna said from behind his elbow.

"Of course I am, It’ll be nice to get a pumped battle... you know like the one we had yesterday plus I’m excited to see what Val has to show." Silas said with a smile as Morwenna sighed.

’I still haven’t shown you the Fourth style today... I hope you’re interested in learning that.’ Morwenna thought while blushing. ’A-and we haven’t talked about yesterday.’

Her and Captai... Rather Master had hard sex and she was happy but she wanted to know...

’Was Master satisfied with me yesterday?’

He had been groaning while he was inside her and at some point, they had started kissing each other a lot while he told her how much he loved her.

’But still... I want to hear it from his mouth.’

Valerius turned them down a wide boulevard of dark basalt, and the merchant roar thinned out as a heavy thrum came up through the soles of their boots.

"I think we’re here."

Ahead, a massive structure took over the entire southern corner of the avenue.

It was a windowless monolith of interlocking black basalt and shock-absorbent volcanic granite, ribbed with exposed bands of dull gray dampening alloy from the foundations all the way to the vaulted roof.

Brass pressure vents exhaled steady whistling plumes of steam as the mana wards etched across its walls were so dense that the hair on Silas’s arms stood up.

"This... this is the place we need to be."

It was one of the city’s premier private combat complexes.

A leased sealed reinforced chambers to high-ranking Lords, mercenary squads and noble scions whose training would have turned any ordinary building into flying gravel.

"I tried to take the dimensional cube from last time," Valerius complained, flicking his bangs out of his eyes as they climbed the brass-trimmed steps. "Spent two hours prying the master key out of the estate vault... Before I left home, my old man caught me at the armory gate and took the cube straight to the foundry for overhaul."

"It was still holding together?"

"Barely!" Valerius threw up both hands. "He stood in the workshop courtyard holding it under a magnifying lens for twenty solid minutes, staring at the fracture lines in the containment... He kept muttering about how two kids without commissions chewed through six layers of reinforced plating without a core implosion then he looked at me like I’d set fire to his favorite drafting desk and threatened to dock my credit line until the winter equinox."

"Sera set the chamber on fire and I turned the floor into a lake, Val..." Silas said dryly. "You’re lucky he didn’t make you pay for the runic batteries out of your allowance."

Not that Silas knew how being on allowances felt like in this world...

"Details!" Valerius waved it off with a flick of his rings as they pushed through the revolving brass doors. "Foundry masters are all the same... They build a box to withstand elemental violence, then weep like children when somebody provides the violence. Anyway! I pivoted and I leased an entire private sub-level at the bottom of the bedrock... There’s full floor clearance, dampening arrays, independent mana grounding, the whole suite... It cost an obscene pile of spirit credits, but the front desk guaranteed that we could drop a meteor on the tiles and the tea shops upstairs wouldn’t rattle a cup."

"How obscene?"

"...I’d rather not say in front of Solenne, she seems like the kind to be surprised by big money."

’H-huh?’ Solenne blinked as her cheeks went red. ’How did he know...?’

"I’m a Chief Artificer, Lord Valerius," Solenne said nervously. "I price things for a living... Please don’t say it."

The lobby was quiet and spacious and lined with polished river slate.

Armored clerks in gray tabards sat behind quartz counters stamping waivers with mechanical efficiency as Valerius skipped the registration line and strode to a private bronze pillar set in the eastern wall, pulling a heavy keycard of blackened mythril alloy from his breast pocket.

He pressed it against a glowing blue sensor.

BEEP-CHIRP!

The wall beside the pillar parted with a heavy sigh and revealed a freight-sized elevator lined in brushed steel and hydraulic ribs.

"Step aboard, ladies and gentlemen," Valerius announced, sweeping an arm toward it like a stage host. "Going down to the basement of broken dreams... Silas, try not to look so relaxed, It ruins the dramatic tension."

"I’m plenty tense." Silas stepped across the bronze threshold with loose-limbed ease. "My heart’s practically racing."

"Quit sounding so gay..."

"It’s gay for my heart to race?"

"Well not exactly but you sound like a Lord that I know... What was his name? J.Dragonblade or something, that guy’s plenty gay."

’J.Dragonblade... What kind of name is that?’

From the back of the car, Morwenna muttered.

"Even though we’re heading to a fight, you look like a man on his way to a tea party..."

"Morwenna, I’d have you know that tea parties are serious business," Silas said. "At least to nobles."

"I wasn’t talking to you," said Morwenna. "I was talking to the popinjay... He’s the one sweating."

"I’m not sweating!" Valerius said, who was sweating at the temples.

The brass doors slid shut with a solid thud that cut off the sound of the city.

Only the deep hum of the counterweights and the hiss of pressurized oil remained as the floor dropped, and the indicator runes above the door ticked down through twenty, thirty, forty meters of undisturbed bedrock.

Valerius leaned his back against the cold steel with his arms crossed and his boots hooked at the ankles.

The buoyant smile slowly peeled off his face like sea mist under an early sun, until what was left was quiet and tense and very focused.

His golden eyes, bright as raw honey under the yellow lanterns, settled on Silas.

"I’m hitting a wall," he said.

The words came out with the bravado stripped off.

"Ever since the whole Tournament Of Succession thing... Even with the Purple Core, even with all the Core Optimization the family tutors beat into my skull, my instincts lag half a beat behind my mana... It’s like bolting a five-hundred-horsepower engine to wagon wheels made of green timber."

Silas didn’t laugh as he leaned a shoulder on the opposite wall and watched him.

"You’re feeling weak?"

"I keep replaying your duel with Seraphina." Valerius’s fingers tightened on his forearms until the silk wrinkled. "Four dozen times on the sky-barge here... You slipped inside her guard, and you didn’t out-muscle her, and you didn’t drown her with volume... You read her draw before her knuckles locked on the grip... You walked through her speed like it was an open doorway, and every time I push my velocity, I feel like I’m fighting my own momentum... I need to feel that tempo in my bones so I need to stand in front of someone who gets high-speed evasion and get the stuffing beaten out of me until it clicks, otherwise I stall right at the threshold of the elite ranks."

Silas studied him for a long moment and saw the hunger burning behind the young lord’s golden pupils.

"You know, If I’m to be honest... you lean too hard on the kick of your wind," Silas said quietly and Mia nodded. "You use raw burst to fix bad entry angles... Someone who doesn’t panic at high speed won’t try to outrun you, instead they’ll place a point on the line you’re committed to and let your own velocity impale you."

’I see, is that why he refused to fight anybody in the Tournament of Succession? Because he believed that everyone was above him...?’

Valerius’s lips peeled back in a sharp self-deprecating grin.

"That sounds uncomfortably accurate so break the habit out of me... Strip the bad footwork until the clean lines are left."

"Fine but don’t complain when your ribs ache tomorrow."

"If they don’t ache tomorrow I’ll demand a refund on the elevator fare!"

DING!

A bright chime rang through the car, followed by the groan of hydraulic clamps locking into place.

The floor settled with a solid jolt against the bedrock as the steel doors retracted into the stone.

Valerius stepped out into a dim antechamber and walked to a waist-high pillar of black obsidian, and tapped his mythril keycard against the interface slot.

CLACK-WHIRRRRR!

Heavy relays tripped deep in the walls, like a row of iron portcullises slamming onto stone.

A moment later, high above them, whole banks of recessed floodlights flared along the vaulted ceiling with a deafening hum.

The cold white glare crashed down the walls and drove out the gloom, and somewhere beyond the antechamber an enormous space stretched wide open in the light.

"Welcome to our battlefield."