Chapter 666: Alleyway Trouble [Bonus - ]
Seraphina nodded with her expression suddenly remarkably sweet as her red eyes went wide and bright with a mix of desperate hope and stubborn pride.
"Yes," she said softly, leaning forward on her elbows. "Those are the papers. You beat me at full power... You proved your foundation is solid enough to stand beside me, so naturally I want you to sign them right now so we can submit them to the archives before the council convenes."
Silas stared down at the crisp paper in his hands and a cold tingle ran across the back of his neck.
’I really don’t want to sign this right now,’ Silas thought, as a quiet drop of cold sweat rolled down his temple.
It wasn’t that he disliked her.
Despite her temper, her ridiculous pride and her borderline crazy combat habits, Seraphina was fiercely loyal, genuine to a fault, and absurdly endearing when she wasn’t trying to incinerate his eyebrows.
But an official legally binding betrothal to the heiress of House Bloom?
That meant dragging the whole bureaucratic monster of the World Council into his private life.
It meant clan elders, political audits, and endless formal inquiries that would inevitably draw unwanted attention toward him and his family too.
’It’s a massive mountain of added stress,’ he mused, tapping his thumb against the wax seal. ’Though... having House Bloom’s backing in the high courts wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world—’
CRACKLE-SNAP!
A blinding violet bolt of lightning struck the low table.
Silas flinched and pulled his hands back as the electric discharge scorched the cedar.
The heavy paper in his grip was instantly caught in a miniature vortex of black sand and purple voltage with the high-tier paper disintegrating into a shower of harmless gray ash that drifted down onto the Persian rug.
Silas blinked at his empty hands and Seraphina’s jaw dropped.
Standing right beside the couch, Harper slowly lowered her right hand, her violet eyes burning with furious indignation from behind her glasses.
"What?!" Harper snapped, her voice ringing out in sharp, incredulous outrage. "You shameless little bitch! Why are you trying to jump the line?!"
Seraphina shot up from the couch like a launched missile, her hands clenched into trembling fists.
"YOU, YOU RUINED THE SEALS!"
"Of course I ruined them!" Harper yelled back, pointing an accusing finger at Seraphina’s nose. "We went on one double date, the shopping, the dinner, that stupid auction, not even a month ago! He hasn’t even visited your family’s main estate, and you’re already ambushing him in his own living room with binding marriage contracts?! What kind of desperate garbage is this?!"
"It is strategic consolidation!" Seraphina shrieked, stamping her foot. "He beat me! The terms were set! You’re just jealous because House Whitmore doesn’t have an approved consort draft ready to deploy!"
"Jealous of what?! An unhinged firebug who pees herself during a friendly spar?!"
"I DID NOT PEE MYSELF, YOU PURPLE-HAIRED PARASITE!"
The two women were practically nose to nose with sparks of crimson fire and crackles of violet static dancing between their glares and their voices bouncing off the walls in a chaotic escalating war of words that showed no sign of slowing down.
"You couldn’t even wait for him to finish his tea, you impatient little furnace!" Harper snapped. "He hasn’t even had breakfast!"
"At least I’m brave enough to put it on paper, you coward! You’ve been hiding behind your glasses and your stupid lightning for weeks, waiting for him to notice you!"
"I’m not hiding!"
"You’re being a coward!"
"You peed yourself!"
"I DID NOT PEE MYSELF!" Seraphina screamed, and a ring of sparks flew off her shoulders and set the corner of a sofa cushion smoking.
"The cushion, Sera!" Harper shrieked. "That’s a good cushion!"
"Then put it out, you purple-haired witch!"
"With what?! I don’t have water powers!"
Both of them froze and looked at Silas.
Silas, who had already lifted his teacup to cover his face, took a calm sip.
"Don’t look at me," he said. "Also I’m charging you too from the couch."
Silas lowered the teacup an inch with a huge bead of sweat rolling down the side of his neck, and looked over at Valerius.
The blond noble was sitting at the opposite end of the sectional, staring at Silas with an expression of soul-deep disgust.
’Lucky, miserable bastard,’ Valerius thought bitterly, slumping against the armrest. ’Two heiresses tearing the room apart over who gets to marry him first, and he’s sitting there drinking cold tea like it’s a Tuesday morning... I hate him... I genuinely hate his entire existence...’
Valerius cleared his throat loudly, deliberately tuning out the screaming match two feet to his left.
He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and looked straight at Silas.
"Hey, Silas," Valerius called out, raising his voice to cut through the bickering. "Do you want to meet up in the Sovereign Realm later this week?"
Silas blinked and set his cup down. "The Sovereign Realm?"
"Yeah," Valerius nodded, his golden eyes brightening with real interest. "The Umbral Basin where Blessed Land sits is classified as an Unknown Zone, right? It’s completely cut off from the standard trade routes... After the whole mess with the Council, did you ever manage to get yourself some kind of access to Central City?"
Silas paused as his memory clicked into place.
"Oh," he said, rubbing the back of his neck. "Yeah, I got something."
He remembered the dense black basalt tile Musvi had handed him across the bone counter of the archive, the silver and violet mandala etched across its face with the hawk and compass stamped on the back.
It was sitting in his inventory, completely unused.
’It only works once I embed it into the Keep’s bedrock,’ Silas thought. ’I haven’t done that yet. Once I do, I’ll be able to walk straight to Central City whenever I want... but until then, I’ll just follow Evelyn there. She’s leaving anyway.’
Valerius slapped his knee with a wide infectious grin.
𝒻𝑟𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝑛𝘰𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝘤𝘰𝘮
"Perfect! Then let’s meet in Central City! Sterling Enterprises has a permanent commercial lodge in the Third Ring. I’ll give you a proper tour of the whole metropolis, the sovereign exchanges, the black market pavilions, the high-tier alchemy guilds, all of it... I’ll bring Mia along, too. She’s been wanting to stretch her legs outside the territory and you should bring Aeliana! It’ll be a solid group."
Silas let out a quiet, appreciative chuckle and ran a hand through his dark hair.
"Man, I’d love to," he said honestly, with an apologetic grimace. "Sounds like a great time. But... I’m actually already heading to Central City with someone else later today."
The living room went dead silent as the screaming match between Harper and Seraphina cut off so fast it was as if someone had severed the audio feed.
Both girls slowly turned their heads toward the armchair.
Harper’s violet eyes narrowed behind her glasses, and her arms dropped to her sides with sudden chilling poise.
Seraphina’s red eyes widened, and a low dangerous heat began radiating from her collarbones again.
Valerius raised an eyebrow and leaned in with open curiosity. "With someone else? Who?"
Silas looked between the three of them, completely unbothered by the sudden spike in atmospheric pressure.
"Evelyn," Silas answered simply.
Seraphina’s mouth opened and closed.
The heat creeping off her collarbones dropped a few degrees, replaced by the sulky deflated look of someone who had been ready for a much better fight.
"Evelyn," Harper repeated slowly, pushing her glasses up her nose. "The one in the hoodie that saved us last time right?"
"She’s heading to Central City today anyway, and I haven’t set up my own way there yet," Silas said, scratching his cheek. "So I’m just going to follow her... It’s the easiest option."
"That’s it?" Seraphina demanded. "That’s the whole reason?"
"What else would it be?"
The two of them stared at him the way people stare at a very handsome rock, and Valerius dropped his face into his palm and groaned into it.
"I’ll come later today then."
"Mm," Harper said, and took the teacup out of Silas’s hand and sipped from it herself with enormous dignity, as if to prove she was perfectly calm.
"That’s my tea."
"...It’s cold anyway, bitch."
Seraphina tried to launch off the couch to protest, got about halfway up, and her legs promptly folded like wet paper.
She flopped back onto the cushions with a thump and a long wounded wheeze, and Harper’s smirk came back so fast it was almost rude.
"Just sit for five minutes..."
"I will remember this," Seraphina muttered into a cushion. "All of it. Every second."
"I’ll send you the lodge address, Silas," Valerius said, already standing and brushing soot off his vest. "Whenever you’re through the gate, just find me."
"Thanks, Val. I can call you that right?"
...
In the other district of Valoria City’s southern edge, the afternoon sun rarely touched the ground.
Steam drifted from an iron exhaust pipe overhead and wrapped around the fire escapes that clung to the brickwork like skeletons as a small woman walked down the center of the passage with her boots stepping over the cracked cobblestones without a sound.
She was swallowed by an oversized dark-gray hoodie with the hem hanging down over her cargo pants and her hood pulled low over a messy bun of black hair.
"Mmm... I’ll soon be going back to the Sovereign Realm."
A slim cigarette hung from her lips, lit with a snap of mana and a thin ribbon of blue-gray smoke trailing over her shoulder.
Her face looked permanently exhausted, but beneath the hood, her sharp dark eyes scanned the masonry.
’So... I’m meeting Silas later today, and he’s following me to Central City,’ Evelyn thought, pulling the cigarette from her lips with two fingers and blowing a cloud of smoke at the damp brickwork.
She watched it curl and fade against the cold iron of an overhead fire escape.
Lord Sky had been quiet for weeks.
The comment sections were probably a warzone by now, hundreds of millions of followers screaming into the void, wondering whether the undefeated Lord had finally fallen off the face of the earth.
A masked voice-modulated persona didn’t just keep itself running so she had a stream to restart.
She tugged the hood down a little further and glanced at the sleeve of her hoodie.
’He asked me once if I only wear hoodies,’ she thought. ’Idiot... I own other clothes...’
She considered that then she shoved her hands into the front pocket and kept walking.
From the fragmented reports filtering through the underworld networks, the negotiations with the World Council had ended with almost miraculous success.
Blessed Land’s boundaries were recognized and it only got better for Silas from here, he also got a shit ton of money.
’Which begs the question,’ she mused, tapping ash from the glowing tip. ’Do we really have any business left with each other?’
Were they even friends?
Evelyn let out a dry self-deprecating snort.
In her line of work, "friendship" was an expensive luxury that usually ended with a poisoned dagger in your kidneys or a shallow grave under an unmarked stone.
People like her had contracts, temporary alliances of mutual survival, and debts paid in blood or coin.
Yet... she had spent a while walking the quiet paths of Blessed Land.
She had watched him tend to his people, watched the way Eluned looked at him, and shared food.
She took another slow pull with the bitter smoke burning her throat in a way that grounded her scattered thoughts.
She had already given the order that morning.
Her soldiers were to round up the stragglers, break camp, and head back to the territory to prepare it for the day the rest of them left Blessed Land.
They had grumbled, but they had gone so the housing block stood quiet now, and the western ridge was empty.
’Well then,’ Evelyn thought, flicking ash into a puddle of murky water by her boots. ’I’ll get him a proper parting gift. Something useful...’
She had enjoyed her time in Blessed Land.
It was peaceful, perhaps the only truly peaceful place she had set foot in since her core awakened.
And now that the dust had settled and the treaties were signed, there was nothing left to hold her there.
She had a fortress to run, an audience to feed, and it was time for Lord Sky to stream again.
Still... leaving didn’t mean disappearing.
Silas lived in the Human world too, in the same city she did so she could still see him there.
That thought sat a little more comfortably than she wanted it to.
’Don’t tell me I fell for the bastard or something?’
Regardless, somebody was following her and they weren’t really that much of a pro at it...
’Since when did I have stalkers?’ she thought, drawing on the cigarette. ’It’s obviously not a pro, a pro would have dropped back by now but this one just keeps coming.’
She was almost tempted to let it go on a little longer, if only to see where it ended.
But she had a boy to meet, a stream to restart, and a very bad habit of finishing things quickly so her footsteps slowed.
She stopped in the center of the damp cobblestones, right beneath a rusted drainpipe that dripped murky water onto a pile of broken glass.
Drip! Drip! Drip!
Why was she in this place...? Well it was near somewhere she wanted to forget.
Evelyn didn’t turn around.
She simply lifted her head slightly with her gaze locking onto a shattered second-story window framed by rotting pine shutters, twenty feet behind her right shoulder.
She took the cigarette from her lips, flicked an ember into the wet shadows, and her voice cut through the alley with cold certainty.
"I know you’ve been following me for four blocks," Evelyn said calmly into the dark. "Come on out."