Chapter 356: Freedom
Evelyn sat rigidly on the edge of the plush circular bed.
The heavy soundproofed silence of the neon-pink Love Hotel room pressed against her eardrums.
Her painted Kitsune mask rested casually on the bedside table, exposing the deep anxious frown marring her pale face.
She was currently wearing a completely different set of clothes. After the disastrous towel-drop incident that had effectively short-circuited both of their brains just ten minutes prior, she had desperately raided her inventory.
Her heavy gray combat hoodie and cargo pants were still damp from the emergency sink-wash so she didn’t have any spare gear.
She had fully expected this Shogitown excursion to be a fast single-way trip.
Get in, pay the hacker, get the identity forged, and get out. She had not packed for an overnight stay in a sleazy brothel.
Her only backup clothing was a set of casual loungewear she kept stashed away for emergencies.
She was wearing a massive oversized red hoodie that swallowed her petite frame as the sleeves hung past her knuckles.
Paired with it was a pair of extremely short, black athletic shorts that exposed the long pale length of her thighs.
It wasn’t like she actively wanted to wear it.
It offered zero protection and lacked any hidden holsters for her daggers.
She felt exposed, vulnerable, and very embarrassed too as she sat with her knees pulled tightly together, staring at the floor.
Silas sat opposite her, leaning back against the velvet headboard of the bed.
He still wore his dark trench coat and his heavy boots. His terrifying Oni mask remained firmly clamped over his face.
He had his arms crossed over his broad chest, and his golden-ringed eyes were shut tight behind the metal slits.
Evelyn watched him for a long quiet moment.
"Do you want to sleep or something?" Evelyn asked, her voice quiet and breaking the heavy silence. "We have a few hours before we have to head back into the streets. You could take the bed. I’ll take the velvet chair..."
"No," Silas answered bluntly, not opening his eyes.
His deep voice rumbled through the mask.
"I don’t feel sleepy at all," Silas added.
His biology was fueled by a Mythic-tier Gold Core.
While normal humans required eight hours of rest to repair their cellular damage, his body was practically a self-sustaining engine.
’Even though Elu drained me... Sleep is merely an option.’
He could fight for days on end without feeling a single drop of fatigue and right now, his mind was racing too fast to even consider resting.
Silas let out a slow measured sigh.
He needed a viable way to handle this upcoming tournament without putting himself through unnecessary stress.
The null-stone bands were the main issue.
The receptionist had explicitly stated the rules... There was no pushing mana outside the physical boundaries of the body. No spells, no external shields, no elemental blasts.
’Not that I need them.’
But Silas was cautious as he knew exactly how the criminal underworld operated.
If pushing mana outside was strictly prohibited, but using mana inwardly was left unmonitored or technically allowed by the bands, then every single Syndicate thug in that cage was going to exploit that loophole.
They would use their internal mana to aggressively strengthen their muscle fibers, harden their bones, and accelerate their reflexes.
It would turn a standard boxing tournament into a high-speed meat grinder.
’It’s not like I’m scared,’ Silas thought calmly to himself in the dark.
He wasn’t.
He was a Lord and he possessed a physical foundation that defied all metrics.
He was far more powerful than any street-level criminal, cybernetic or otherwise.
But he didn’t want to take any stupid chances right now.
One lucky strike to the temple from a guy with a reinforced steel fist could do some damage depending on who did it but right now, he wanted to continue his training... He wanted to use his Tide-Blade Arts.
Evelyn noticed the subtle tension radiating from his broad shoulders as she knew that brooding posture all too well.
"I will take a rest, then," Evelyn announced, shifting her weight.
She swung her bare legs up onto the plush mattress, lying down on her back and staring up at the mirrored ceiling.
The physical exhaustion of the day was finally catching up to her.
Silas kept his eyes closed.
"Wait. Before you go to sleep."
Evelyn cracked her dark eyes open, looking over at him.
She reached into the deep pocket of her red hoodie.
Her trembling fingers pulled out another Silverleaf cigar she had been saving.
She desperately needed the nicotine to calm her racing nerves so she placed the dark tobacco between her lips and reached for her plasma lighter.
SMACK!
Silas’s hand blurred. He didn’t even open his eyes as he just whipped his arm out and slapped the cigar cleanly out of her mouth.
The tobacco tube bounced off the wall and rolled across the neon-pink carpet.
"Hey!" Evelyn hissed, sitting up with a glare. "That cost me a fortune!"
"You are not smoking that foul burning garbage inside a sealed and soundproofed hotel room," Silas stated firmly, dropping his hand back to his chest. "I refuse to smell like an ashtray while I’m trying to think."
Evelyn grumbled under her breath, crossing her arms over her chest, but she didn’t try to retrieve the cigar.
She knew he was right. The ventilation in this sleazy room was nonexistent...
"What did you want to ask me?" Evelyn prompted, sinking back down into the pillows.
Silas opened his eyes, the golden rings glowing in the dim light of the room as he turned his head to look at her.
"I need to know about your contact," Silas started, his voice serious. "Why, even with all of the highly lucrative top-tier work that you funnel to this Jax person, does he not just pack up and leave Shogitown?"
It was a glaring flaw in the hacker’s lifestyle.
"Think about it," Silas continued. "I’m guessing you pay him millions of credits to launder your stream revenue. He is practically rich... If he had just taken his servers and left this polluted syndicate-run district, this whole kidnapping situation wouldn’t have happened. Why stay in the gutter?"
Evelyn was quiet for a long bit. The neon lights from the window flickered across her face.
She let out a soft sigh, staring at the ceiling.
"You aren’t wrong," Evelyn admitted. "I asked him the exact same question a year ago. I told him I would buy him a secure penthouse in the commercial district, just to keep my data safe."
She turned her head on the pillow, looking at Silas’s masked face.
"I got my answer," Evelyn said, her voice dropping into a whisper. "Apparently, in the much earlier stages of his life, before he became the best broker in the city, he had been deep in league with a Syndicate or rather, he was directly related by blood to a high-ranking member."
Silas listened closely, analyzing the intel.
"And like most of the core members, and specifically the people born into that vicious family structure, they don’t get to just walk away," Evelyn explained, her eyes darkening. "They had a micro-explosive chip surgically implanted directly into his upper spine."
Silas frowned behind his mask.
"It’s wired into his nervous system," Evelyn continued. "If he tries to leave the boundaries of Shogitown, the signal drops and the chip detonates. It blows his spinal cord in half and severs his brain stem."
Silas absorbed the reality of the underworld.
"Oh..." Silas muttered with the pieces finally clicking together.
That explained the intense paranoia.
Jax wasn’t staying in Shogitown because he liked the grit... he was a literal hostage to his own biology in a way.
"This is why winning this tournament is actually a great opportunity for us," Evelyn stated, her brain spinning the disaster into a net positive.
She sat up on her elbows, her dark eyes shining with sudden determination.
"The winner gets the master trigger to his Slave Rune," Evelyn planned out loud. "If we manage to win the bracket and free him, I’m sure they will remove the chip and we could take him out of here for good."
Silas nodded slowly.
"I could give him significantly better living opportunities," Evelyn continued. "I could move him into the city... He could be my full-time, exclusive data broker. No more dealing with shady street gangs or worrying about rival Lords intercepting my bank transfers or trying to hack into my account."
Silas nodded again with the logic aligning perfectly.
This was a bit of good news amidst the chaos.
If Evelyn secured Jax as a permanent safe asset, Silas wouldn’t have to enter the filthy treacherous innards of Shogitown anymore to get his fake documents updated.
He could just visit his place.
But despite the advantage, Silas still couldn’t help but feel a deep unsettling weirdness about the whole situation.
Participating in a blood-sport to win a human being as a prize felt incredibly dystopian, even for the Sovereign Realm.
"We will win the trigger," Silas assured her with his voice sounding absolute. "We will get your hacker back."
Evelyn smiled softly with a genuine look of gratitude crossing her tired face.
"Thank you for all the trouble you are going through tonight, Silas," Evelyn told him sincerely.
She settled back down under the thin hotel sheets. "If you want, I will pay you a massive premium for fighting in the cage, too. My treat."
"Let’s see..." Silas said. "I just want to get my identity forged first."
Evelyn let out a soft hum of agreement. Within minutes, the crushing exhaustion overtook her.
Her breathing evened out, and she fell fast asleep, curled up in the oversized red hoodie.
Silas turned his head, looking at her sleeping face.
Without the arrogant Lord persona, without the nicotine, and without the constant stress of command, she looked remarkably peaceful.
’She’s quite cute,’ Silas thought to himself with the observation slipping through his mind.
He quickly shook the thought away, turning his gaze back to the mirrored ceiling.
He closed his eyes, focusing his mind back on the immediate lethal problem at hand.
The restriction of external mana.
He needed a way to use his Tide-Blade Arts as he needed Rip-Current Perception.
’Let’s try again...’
He pictured the flow of his Gold Core.
Usually, he pushed the liquid mana out of his pores, creating a thin invisible film of moisture in the air to read his opponent’s movements and structural flaws.
He tried to force it into his eyes earlier, but it just blurred his vision.
Suddenly, it was as though a bright blinding light bulb lit up in his Warlord brain.
’Ah,’ Silas thought with his lips curling into a sharp grin behind the Oni mask. ’Why didn’t I think of this earlier?’
He had been approaching the problem like a mage, trying to cast a spell internally but he wasn’t a mage.
Not a full one anyway... He was a physical fighter.
The human eye was already filled with a clear fluid which was known as the aqueous humor.
He didn’t need to generate new magical water to coat his eyes as he just needed to use his internal mana to vibrate the existing biological fluid already resting inside his retinas.
’It might work...’
He had found another way to use Rip-Current Perception inwardly.
Silas focused his oceanic mana pool. Instead of pushing it outward, he threaded a microscopic razor-thin needle of pure Gold Core energy up his spine and directly into his optic nerves.
He didn’t add volume as he just changed the frequency.
He vibrated the natural fluid in his eyes at the exact frequency of his Tide-Blade Arts and Silas opened his eyes.
There was no pain and no blurry vision.
The neon-pink hotel room snapped into hyper-focused clarity.
But more than that, he could see the structural integrity of everything around him.
He looked at the wooden bedside table.
He could see the microscopic fault lines in the grain of the wood. If he tapped it with two pounds of pressure at the exact right angle, the entire table would shatter into splinters.
He looked at the locked hotel door as he could see the mechanical weak point in the brass tumbler.
It worked.
He could see the weak points of physical matter without expending a single drop of mana outside of his own body.
’Though it’s only for a bit at a time... it works... I can’t wait to see the look on Morwenna’s face.’
...
The digital clock on Silas’s phone read exactly 1:10 AM as the two of them arrived back outside the heavy iron doors of the Black-Ash registration building.
The winding trash-strewn alleyway was dead quiet. The distant drums of the Moon Festival had long since faded into the night and the damp smog hung low over the pavement, illuminated only by the flickering harsh neon signs of the undercity.
Silas wore his dark trench coat with his metal Oni mask secured tightly.
Evelyn walked beside him with her gray hoodie zipped up to her chin and her painted Kitsune mask hiding her face once again.
They pushed the heavy iron doors open and stepped inside.