Chapter 739: ...

Chapter 739: ... [Bonus Chapter]

The voice was quiet.

It was also deep and terrifyingly smooth... a voice like velvet and dark water.

It didn’t sound in the open air either, It sounded inside the center of Elora’s skull and hummed against the base of her brain.

Her breath caught.

Her eyelids fluttered open, and her tear-stained icy blue eyes widened in disbelief.

"H-huh?" she stammered.

The entity stayed crouched in front of her with its head tilted slightly as the purplish hue of its skin had begun to shimmer with some strange current running under it.

"You would like something, right...?" the voice murmured, gentle and probing and heavy with a weight that made the stone floor hum beneath them. "I need something too, so let’s help each other."

Elora gritted her teeth and pressed her back harder against the cold stone.

She couldn’t make sense of it. A moment ago it had been slaughtering her Heroes, and now it was offering her a deal. Her pulse hammered in her ears.

’Help each other...? What could this thing possibly need from me?’

Her eyes darted past its shoulder to the courtyard, to the Swordsman lying face down in the red snow and the Shield Knight’s folded shield glinting beside him.

A moment ago this same thing had pressed its palm against a man’s forehead and turned his head inside out but now it was crouched in front of her like a merchant waiting for a counteroffer.

Then the world seemed to bend around the crouching figure.

VUUUUUUM!

The purple rubbery flesh didn’t peel or shed.

It dissolved like ink spreading in clear water... The twisted spasming outline smoothed out, its impossible angles folding back into the proper shape of real space.

Right before Elora’s wide terrified eyes, the abomination was gone and in its place was a tall man.

He was still squatting on his haunches looking perfectly balanced.

Deep vibrant blue hair cascaded down past his broad shoulders, flowed over his chest and spilled past his waist onto the frosted flagstones.

It fell across his brow and temples like a dark waterfall and hid the fine planes of his face, so Elora couldn’t make out his features at all.

But through the parted strands of blue, two eyes stared straight into hers.

Elora’s breath stopped completely.

They were a pure brilliant azure, the exact unmistakable shade of the World King and his children.

Every Lord on Earth knew that color... It was the blue of the royal bloodline, of House Castellian, of the dynasty that had ruled humanity since the Apocalypse.

’Why...?’ Elora thought, her lips trembling. ’Why does he have the King’s eyes...?’

And then, as she stared into them, the azure began to change.

Slowly, a deep bruised purple glow kindled in the pupils and bled outward through the irises like a drop of violet poison spreading through clear sapphire water.

The purple light burned with an alien hungry pull that locked her gaze in place as she couldn’t blink but she couldn’t look away either.

The man tilted his head a little, and a faint dark curve touched his lips behind the veil of blue hair.

"Your deepest... darkest desire..." he whispered, and the words thrummed through the bones of her jaw. "Your deepest desire is that you aspire to be Number One, correct?"

Elora blinked as a shudder ran through her limbs.

’How... how does he know that?’

She had never said it out loud... It wasn’t written in her journals. She had never whispered it to her brother or her retainers or the council elders of Valoria City.

It was the secret burning fire that had driven her through every grueling stage of cultivation, the ambition that let her swallow the humiliation of every rival she had ever been forced to bow to.

The man’s smile widened a little, reading the answer written across her pale frozen face.

"Simply being Number One isn’t your goal," he went on smoothly, his voice dropping into a tone that reached into the darkest corners of her ambition. "You want to be Number One above everything, so that even territories like Asgard fall under your might, correct...?"

A cold shiver raced down Elora’s spine.

Asgard... The territory every Lord spoke of in hushed, reverent whispers.

Just thinking about putting her heel on Asgard’s throat was madness, the kind of thought that would get anyone who said it aloud laughed out of every hall in Valoria City yet he said it as calmly as someone saying the sun would rise tomorrow.

For one strange moment she thought of Evelyn, and of Kara White strolling through Central City while Elora sat at her desk planning how to be polite to her.

She thought of every Lord who had ever looked down at her, every hall where she’d had to smile and bow and wait her turn and something inside her that had been screaming in terror a moment ago went very still, and listened.

"I will help you," the man said.

The words fell on her ears with the weight of a royal decree as his gaze deepened... the purple glow in those azure eyes flared and burned into hers.

Suddenly, deep in the center of her mind, a sharp searing heat ignited.

It felt as if an invisible glowing seed had been planted right behind her eyes.

The tiny point of light began to pulse with a low steady throb and spread outward in soft misty tendrils that slowly clouded her vision... The ruined garrison, the smell of blood and the bite of the wind all softened and slipped behind a warm, heady purple haze.

’No,’ some last proud corner of her mind whispered. ’No, don’t... this is wrong... I’m Elora Verinda... I don’t kneel to anyone...’

The whisper grew fainter with every throb of the seed until she couldn’t remember why she had been afraid of it.

Her racing pulse slowed.

The terror that had frozen her chest gave way to a strange floating lightness, a creeping sense that all of this had always been going to happen, and her limbs grew heavy and willing.

The tall man leaned in a little closer, and the ends of his blue hair brushed the frost on the terrace floor.

"In exchange for ▓█?? X????k????v?????????a????r???? ??█▓."

The moment the word left his lips, the world shuddered.

THUUUUM!

The flagstones of the garrison groaned, vibrating at some impossible depth that set the air ringing like a struck iron bell... High overhead the clouds seemed to stutter in their drift and freeze in place.

Elora’s ears couldn’t take in the sound.

Her mortal hearing simply refused to hold the syllables as the word bypassed her ears completely and echoed across her soul instead.

...It was a name, or an idea, or a thing, that belonged to a language older than the stars.

The man’s expression stayed perfectly calm while the world trembled around him.

"I will make you the strongest Lord in existence," he promised softly, holding her captive inside that glowing clouded haze with his azure-purple eyes.

He paused.

Slowly he straightened a little and turned his gaze away from her, out across the ruined Verinda Garrison.

He looked at the shattered weapons, the two hundred collapsed bodies lying motionless in the dirt, the frozen pool of blood beneath the Swordsman’s headless body and the five broken Heroes scattered across the flagstones.

A soft weary breath slipped past his lips.

He sighed.

It was the heavy tired sigh of someone who had walked across ten thousand battlefields exactly like this one, who had watched countless empires burn to ash and found nothing new under the sky.

He turned his eyes back down to Elora, and his voice dropped into a quiet final tone that crushed whatever resistance was left in her clouded mind.

"You don’t have a choice... After all, I have the knowledge of the world."

...

FLASH!

The spatial transfer tore open in the middle of the office with a sudden silver-white concussion that rattled the leaded windowpanes in their frames.

The layered hum snapped shut behind them with a sharp whick, and all at once five pairs of boots hit the thick woolen carpet of the Keep.

The landing dropped its weight into their knees.

Air rushed into the space where they had appeared, smelling of dried lavender, oak floor wax and the familiar faint iron bite of the five-story stone Keep.

"Phew..."

A shared shuddering sigh of relief rippled through the little group.

Rika didn’t even bother taking off her traveling cloak.

The beast goddess took three sluggish steps and slumped forward until she was leaning her whole upper body against the edge of the dark mahogany desk.

She rested her cheek right on the cool polished wood, her long lashes fluttering shut, and let out a soft exhausted groan like a tired snow leopard curling up in a snowbank.

At the hollow of her collar the downy phoenix hatchling poked its tiny head out from under the wool, gave a low drowsy peep and promptly tucked its beak back into her scarf.

"I don’t want to go out for that long again," Rika murmured into the desk, her voice muffled and thick with fatigue.

Her fingers stroked the rim of the wood lazily. "There were too many new people... They kept looking at me... I don’t like being looked at by so many strangers... I like Blessed Land much better, The grass here doesn’t talk back."

’It’s surprising that she’s actually an Introvert.’ Silas thought.

Two paces away Solenne was having the exact opposite reaction.

The fox-artificer stood frozen in the middle of the carpet with her nine fluffy silver tails fanned out behind her hips in a huge rippling arc of downy fur.

Her long silver fox ears swiveled in every direction, catching the creak of the floorboards and the distant hum of the hearth flues.

Her golden eyes darted from the tall oak bookshelves to the heavy map table, taking in the framed blueprints, the stacks of ledgers and the high-backed leather chair behind the desk with breathless wonder.

"I-Is this your office, my Lord?" Solenne whispered, clutching the strap of her tool satchel against her chest.

Her tails swayed in slow figure-eights and brushed the legs of the side tables. "It’s so quiet... There aren’t any steam whistles shrieking every ten minutes, and the floor doesn’t shake from the shaft drills! The mana in the air is so even... it’s like standing inside a perfectly tuned resonance chamber!"

Kara stood near the center of the room with her long midnight-black hair spilling over her shoulders and her left sleeve pinned neatly to her dark traveling tunic with its silver brooch.

Her violet eyes swept over the familiar stonework of the Keep with quiet satisfaction.

She reached up with her slender right hand and took hold of the plain silver ring on her middle finger.

With a smooth practiced twist she pulled it free.

SHRRRRK!

A rippling shimmer of spatial mana cracked the air around her silhouette.

The slender feminine shape blurred and expanded as bone and muscle and height snapped back into their true proportions as the jaw squared, the long black hair shortened into messy dark bangs and the violet in the irises dissolved into deep dark blue rimmed with a faint dormant ring of gold.

The silver brooch popped loose and dropped into his palm as the empty left sleeve filled out again.

Silas’s left arm grew back down to the wrist, and a second hand flexed open at the end of it, fingers curling and uncurling as if they had just woken up.

Silas Graves stood in the middle of the office once more. He stretched both arms high over his head until his shoulders popped with a satisfying crack.

"Haaah..." He let out a deep chest-clearing sigh and rubbed the back of his neck with both hands, looking around the familiar room. "Man. That was quite a time we spent in Central City."

Aeliana stood tall by the eastern bookshelf in her true form.

The silver of her disguise was completely gone, and her hair fell to her hips in a radiant cascade of spun gold that caught the lamplight in shifting ripples.

Her long sweeping pointed ears twitched as she looked at him with cool silver-green eyes.

"However, it was only a day and a half, Lord Sy," Aeliana said plainly. "And it is already nearly evening."

Silas chuckled and shook his head.

He walked around the wide desk, stepped carefully over Rika’s sprawled legs, and dropped into the high-backed leather chair.

The worn hide groaned pleasantly under his weight as he leaned back and rested both elbows on the carved armrests.

"Even a day can be a long time, Aeli," he said, letting his head fall back against the headrest with his eyes half closed.

Aeliana looked at him, and the faintest, almost invisible smile touched her pale lips.