Chapter 669: A Usurper [Bonus - ]
Silas froze mid-stride and he slowly turned his head to look at the Elf.
Aeliana looked back at him with her expression completely serene and her eyes were serious.
For five full seconds neither of them said a word. The only sound in the courtyard was the rustling of the spirit herbs in the gentle wind.
"Aki’s Wonderland," Silas repeated flatly. "Are you serious?"
Aeliana nodded once, maintaining absolute aristocratic composure.
"I’m very serious, Lord Sy... She wrote it in colored inks and stamped it with three separate flower crests. Eluned liked it and well Morwenna said it was childish so they bullied her."
Silas pinched the bridge of his nose and let out a deep defeated groan that came straight from his soul.
’Aki’s Wonderland...’ he thought, staring up at the canopy of the World Tree. ’I mean... it’s not that it’s inherently bad. It’s Aki. She’s whimsical and she’s colorful too but does she really expect the other lords to take her seriously if a Lord war ensues?!’
He could already picture someone hearing the name Aki’s Wonderland.
It sounded like a children’s amusement park, not an armed vassal dominion capable of fielding high-tier awakened warriors.
’What happened to proper imposing territory names?’ Silas mused with an exasperated sigh. ’Names like the Obsidian Spire! Or the Reach! Even The Iron Citadel or Verdant Bastion would have sounded respectable! Hell, even Valerius had the sense to call his territory the Sterling Aegis... I’m just joking.’
He dropped his hand and looked down at the glowing runes beneath his boots, and a quiet helpless laugh broke through his chest.
"Well," Silas chuckled, shaking his head with fond resignation. "Honestly... I think it fits her perfectly. Though they bullied Morwenna?"
"She will be very pleased to hear you approve," Aeliana smiled, stepping into the center of the dais beside him. "Yes, she’s been very bullied since morning and has been awaiting for your arrival..."
Silas channeled a tiny thread of his Gold Core mana into the activation rune.
VUUUUUUUUUUUUUM!
The runes flared with blinding brilliance and wrapped around them in a twisting pillar of spatial light that folded the distance between Blessed Land and its new vassal territory into a single heartbeat.
FLASH!
The spatial displacement cleared instantly, and the fresh crisp scent of wild mountain pine and blooming starlight-lilies flooded his senses.
The grass under his boots was impossibly soft, the sky overhead a deeper blue than any he had seen in the Sovereign Realm, and somewhere in the distance a wind chime made of what sounded like glass bells was playing a cheerful slightly out-of-tune melody.
’Okay,’ Silas thought, taking it all in. ’I can see where the name came from...’
SHREEEEEEEEEK!
Before his boots could even fully settle, a high-pitched whistling tore through the air directly in front of his face!
Silas didn’t think.
His body moved before his mind had finished registering the sound, and his right hand snapped up and closed around the incoming shaft three inches from his nose.
CLANG-KRAAAASH!
It wasn’t an iron arrow or a thrown dagger, the weapon itself was a six-foot spear forged from solid crystallized starlight... it was a blinding, iridescent shaft of pure starlight mana humming with enough piercing force to punch a hole through a person.
The throw sent a concussive shockwave rippling outward and flattened the grass for ten yards around the transit pad, and Silas stood in the middle of it with his boots exactly where they had been, holding the spear in one bare hand like a man who had been handed a walking stick.
"Eh?"
Silas fingers tightened until the humming strangled itself into a dull whine.
"What’s this?"
𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝚠𝕖𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝕖𝚕.𝚌𝗼𝗺
He flicked his wrist and drove the starlight shaft deep into the earth beside his boot, where it shivered like a plucked harp string and then dissolved into glittering dust.
Silas slowly lifted his head with his blue eyes narrowing through the settling spatial dust and a thin ring of gold flashing around each pupil.
Standing twenty paces away at the top of a blooming grassy knoll was an elf.
She was nearly as tall as Silas himself, with a lean athletic frame draped in form-fitting silver plate that gleamed under the soft sky of the territory.
Her long silver hair whipped around her shoulders in the wind, and across both of her cheekbones glittered a scatter of tiny silver marks, a constellation of stars that pulsed with a faint lilac light.
Her angular striking face was pulled into an ugly venomous sneer, and her cold blue eyes were fixed on him with pure hatred.
In her left hand, a second spear of crackling starlight was already condensing out of the air.
She pointed the glowing weapon directly at his throat.
"Usurper," Ther’Abella spat.
’I’m a Usurper...?’ Silas thought.
Ther’Abella’s blue eyes narrowed into slits of unfiltered venom as she dragged her gaze up Silas’s frame.
’This is the man bearing Lady Eluned’s surname...’
The bitter vile realization burned in the back of her throat like acid...
She had pictured a bloated wretched parasite, perhaps a fat decrepit old lord who had somehow bound the pristine peerless high lady to his service through manipulation.
But the reality standing twenty paces away was quite different... He was young, tall and lean, with the effortless poise of a man in his prime and a sharp undeniably handsome jawline.
And he had caught her Starlight Spear with a bare hand, without drawing a weapon and without taking a single backward step.
’It doesn’t matter,’ she raged internally. ’It changes nothing! A pretty face and stolen parlor tricks! Nobody in the mortal realm or the heavens above deserves to breathe the same air as Lady Eluned, least of all a filthy arrogant usurper like him!’
Before she threw it, her gaze flicked left on instinct and locked onto Aeliana standing by the edge of the transit dais.
A spike of raw humiliating outrage lanced through her heart.
’Why is she looking at me like that...?’
Aeliana wasn’t raising a hand.
She wasn’t preparing a barrier or reaching for a bow, instead she was watching with a soft mournful sigh as her silver-green eyes were full of open pity.
’Pity?! For me?!’
"Die!" Ther’Abella screamed, her pride fracturing into blind violence.
SHREEEEEEEEK!
She poured every ounce of her starlight foundation into the second spear.
The grass beneath her boots turned to white ash as the constellations on her cheeks flared and her blue eyes ignited into a blazing lilac, and she hurled it with enough velocity to break through the air.
’I’ll kill him...’
She didn’t wait to see where it landed either.
Two daggers of condensed radiance snapped into being in her fists, and she blurred across the meadow in a serpentine sprint with her blade points trailing ribbons of silver plasma, meant to open his throat the instant he tried to parry the missile.
Silas didn’t parry.
’What—’
He didn’t even lift an arm.
WHOOSH!
The spear shrieked through the place where his head had been and pulverized the hillock behind him into a fountain of dirt and flowers as Silas was already gone with only a pale afterimage hanging in the grass where he had stood and tearing apart in the wind.
’Behind me?! No, above—where is he?!’
Her instincts screamed, but her eyes couldn’t track him.
The air directly before her face folded inward with a concussive crack and Silas now stood inside her guard.
’IMPOSSIBLE!’
In pure panic, Ther’Abella crossed her radiant daggers into a desperate X-guard and flashed a luminous star-shield over her chest to buy distance but Silas didn’t bother stepping back.
He lifted one open hand and slapped it flat against the shield.
SHATTER!
The starlight construct burst into drifting dust, and the shockwave kicked her daggers wide and left her standing with her arms spread like a scarecrow.
’He broke it with his palm,’ Ther’Abella thought, staring at the falling motes. ’That shield has stopped a wyrm and he hit it like he was closing a door...?’
She refused to believe it.
She whipped her right dagger across in a vicious backhand slash aimed at his throat, and Silas leaned his head back an inch as the blade went through the space his neck had been.
’Again!’
She poured everything into a flurry, left and right, high and low with each strike faster than the last.
WHOOSH! WHOOSH!
Silas moved his head, his shoulders and his waist with small and lazy adjustments that left her blades slicing through empty space by a hair, and almost politely, he tapped the flat of her wrist with two fingers and sent a dagger spinning off into the clover.
’He’s playing with me,’ she realized, and the thought left a cold nauseating hollow in her chest. ’He’s not even trying to hit me.’
"Is that all?!" she snarled, her eyes blazing. "Fight me, usurper! Fight me like a man who deserves her!"
She whipped her left wrist in a tight circle and a chain of woven starlight lashed out from her bracer, wrapping three times around his forearm, and she planted her heels and hauled with a roar that cracked the ground at her feet.
’Now! If I can pull him off his stance—!’
The chain went taut and Silas didn’t move an inch.
’What—?!’
She heaved again with her whole body with the muscles in her back screaming and the constellations on her cheeks blazing white but it was like trying to drag a mountain across a field by a thread.
He looked down at the chain wrapped around his sleeve, then at her, and raised his arm.
She came off her feet.
’HE LIFTED ME—’
She flew toward him on her own chain, and he closed his fist around the glowing links and pulled.
CRACK!
The chain snapped apart in a shower of silver sparks, and the recoil sent her tumbling backward across the meadow in a long skidding roll that carved a trench through the clover.
She came up on one knee, already forming a starlight glaive in both hands with its curved blade as long as her arm.
"Not enough!" she screamed, and swung.
A crescent of lilac light peeled off the glaive and tore across the meadow, cutting the grass in a perfectly straight line aimed squarely at his waist.
Silas lifted his hand and slapped the crescent aside like a fly, and it exploded against the hillside in a glittering fan that drifted down through the air like confetti.
Ther’Abella stared at it.
’That was my strongest cut,’ she thought numbly. ’That cut once split a siege tower in half... He swatted it... With a hand?’
’No. No! I am not afraid of him! I am of the Viridian Guard! I swore my life to Lady Eluned!’
She flung both arms wide.
Behind her, a dozen spears of starlight bloomed in the air like the spokes of a wheel with each one humming at a different pitch until the whole meadow rang like a struck chime.
"FALL!"
SHREEEEEEEEEEEEEEK!
The volley came down in a spreading fan, and the ground erupted wherever a spear touched it, geysers of dirt and burning white light climbing into the sky in a ragged line toward him.
He simply walked with one unhurried step after another, and the spears punched craters on his left and right and the shockwaves did nothing but flutter the hem of his tunic.
At the edge of the dais, Aeliana lifted her teacup to keep the dust out of it.
’Not one,’ Ther’Abella thought, watching the dust settle with her mouth hanging open. ’Not one of twelve... He didn’t even look at them...’
He was ten paces away now then five.
"Don’t look at me like that!" she shrieked, though his face was calm and almost bored. "Don’t you dare look at me like that, you leech!"
She came again behind the last of her own volley, the daggers snapping back into her fists, and fought him at close range with everything she had.
’Why can’t I touch him?!’ she raged, throwing her whole body into a savage swing. ’Four hundred years! I survived four hundred years of butchers and warlords and beasts, and he’s not even breathing hard!’
Her right dagger arced out in a long desperate swing that carried her whole shoulder with it, and for half a heartbeat her ribs were wide open.
Silas stepped into the pocket.
He planted his back heel, torquing his hips with the unadorned physical power of a Gold Core, and his right fist drove forward like an industrial ram, plunging beneath her sternum and burying itself in her solar plexus.
BAAAAAAAAAANG!
’GUH—!’
Every lungful of air in her body was blasted out through her teeth as her vision strobed white.
She started to fold over his arm, and her mind even half-conscious, was already reaching for a spell.
’I can still—!’
Silas pulled his fist back and drove it in again, a hair to the left of the first but in exactly the same place.
BAAAAAAAAAANG!
’Ah—’
The second shockwave rattled her organs and sent black nausea crashing over her brain.
Her legs dissolved beneath her as the daggers slipped from her numb fingers with the starlight fading before the hilts struck the dirt and the lilac fire in her eyes went out like a snuffed candle.
She was already falling, but Silas didn’t let her hit the ground cleanly.
His foot hooked behind her ankle and swept her legs out from under her, his hand clamped onto the nape of her silver cuirass and turned her limp frame in mid-air as he laid her face-first in the damp turf.
THUD!
Before she could draw a single ragged gasp, a heavy boot settled onto the center of her spine and pinned her flat against the earth.
’I can’t... I can’t move...’
Ther’Abella choked on dirt as Silas took both of her wrists in one big hand and drew them back and up toward her shoulder blades in a joint-lock that sat right on the edge of tearing the bone from the socket.
’Four hundred years,’ she thought, and her eyes burned with something that wasn’t only pain. ’Four hundred years of surviving and the end is a stranger’s boot in a field of flowers... Lady Eluned, I’m sorry... I failed you again...’
A shadow fell over the back of her head.
At the edge of the runes, Aeliana lifted her teacup to her lips with a long sigh. She expected it and she was happy that this woman had been disciplined...
"Lord Sy," she called mildly, "do try to leave her enough ribs to answer questions."
"I’m working on it," Silas said without looking up.
He leaned down slightly, his voice dropping into a low chill with the weight of his boot pressing down just enough to make her vertebrae creak.
"Start talking," Silas said. "Who are you, and why are you throwing spears at me in my own territory?"