Chapter 662: What A Scary Woman [Bonus Chapter]
Silas blinked.
He lowered his ceramic teacup back onto its hand-carved cedar saucer with a slow deliberate clink, staring at the fiery-haired heiress standing in the middle of his living room rug as if she had just declared her intention to commit a war crime.
"A spar?" Silas echoed, his brow creasing into deep incredulous ridges. "Right now? In pajamas?"
"Yes, obviously!" Seraphina snapped.
She crossed her arms beneath her bust with aggressive authority.
The motion caused the hem of her oversized white button-down shirt to billow around her hips, and with that subtle shift in posture... a swell of heat surged outward.
The draft was so dry, so intensely concentrated, that the varnished edges of Silas’s low cedar coffee table gave a protesting crackle with the air warping around her slippers in a shimmering mirage.
"You are my prospective husband, Silas!" Seraphina continued, her voice rising in a sharp melodic tone that filled the vaulted ceiling of the parlor. "Do you honestly expect me to simply accept rumors, secondhand intelligence dossiers, and tournament gossip regarding your foundation? A Gold Core..."
Her red eyes flashed with a razor-thin glint of predatory hunger, tracking the rise and fall of his chest like a raptor measuring the wind before diving on prey.
"I want to feel the weight of it myself," she purred, her chin lifting with royal unshakeable confidence. "I want to see if that spine of yours can actually hold up that ridiculous reputation, or if you’re merely an inflated paper tiger that got lucky."
Of course she knew he was strong but would he be able to use that against her...? If he beat her up... It made her wet just thinking about it.
She stepped forward, closing the distance between them until the toes of her soft indoor slippers lightly nudged the toe of his.
She leaned down, bringing her face inches from his with her scent completely enveloping him.
"And if you manage to beat me," she whispered, her voice dropping into a teasing hush that made the tiny hairs along the nape of his neck prickle with electric static, "you get a reward."
Silas raised an eyebrow, his expression entirely deadpan. "What kind of reward?"
The confident predatory swagger instantly short-circuited as a violent shade of vermilion detonated across the high planes of Seraphina’s cheekbones, racing with terrifying speed straight to the tips of her ears and down the exposed pale expanse of her collarbones.
"Um..."
She jerked her chin away, snapping her spine straight with her teeth sinking hard into her lower lip until a bead of white-hot mana hissed against her skin.
Suddenly, she found the plaster crown moldings along the parlor ceiling endlessly fascinating.
"T-That is reserved for after the match!" She stammered.
Her fingers knotted into the cuffs of her oversized sleeves, tugging at the fabric. "Shut up and don’t ask stupid questions! Just get off the couch and fight me!"
"I’d rather not turn my front driveway into a smoking crater of vitrified asphalt," Silas muttered, leaning back against the leather cushions and glancing past her shoulder toward the front bay window.
On the other side of the low table, Harper sat with her ankles neatly crossed, in violet pajamas with little gold stars that matched his, cradling her teacup with a small content smile.
She had been in a good mood all morning as she pushed her wire-rimmed glasses up the bridge of her nose with one finger, humming softly into her tea.
Then she heard the word "fight" and the humming stopped. ℴ
"Excuse me?" Harper set her teacup down and pressed a hand to her chest like she’d been shot. "A spar? In pajamas? Sera, my Valkyrie is parked in that courtyard! It’s custom mythril, you barbarian! I know exactly what you’re planning... You want to throw your stupid fire around next to my car on purpose!"
She jabbed a finger at the heiress with her cheeks flushed and her eyes wide with wounded outrage.
"If you singe so much as one speck of clear coat, I will sue you! And your mother! And your entire stupid house!"
Seraphina’s lips peeled back into a wicked, feline grin.
"Oh? And what if I do, Whitmore?" Seraphina purred, her tone dripping with venomous amusement. "Are you going to draft an angry formal grievance with your little gold-plated lawyer quill? Or maybe file a three-part petition to the council? You talk like an accountant who got lost on a battlefield..."
Harper’s violet eyes narrowed into lethal dead slits.
A single microscopic grain of light-devouring black sand flickered into existence directly above her left knuckle.
It hung in the air, humming with an ominous vibration, and for a terrifying half-second, the morning light in the living room curved toward her fingers as though she were genuinely contemplating hurling a void straight through the center of Seraphina’s forehead.
"Enough," Silas groaned, pinching the bridge of his nose until his fingers went numb. "Both of you, sit down... There will be no fights in the courtyard. Harper’s interceptor and my car are parked out there, and the neighbors already give me enough looks... I’m not getting a complaint on top of it."
"Then we drive to an arena," Seraphina insisted, stamping her slipper against the parquet floor with a sharp concussive thwack that rattled the teacups. "Right now! We can take my convoy to the Bloom Clan’s secondary estate... Mother is currently in the city finalizing the diplomatic contracts with the Albion delegation—"
Beneath her scowl, however, her internal thoughts were settled.
’Yes... exactly that! We drive to the Bloom compound! I drag him into the central martial ring in front of Mother and the inner-circle elders! I’ll force him to limit himself to a single element so he doesn’t expose the Vespera persona to the public registry, and once he completely stonewalls my primary assault with that ridiculous Gold Core foundation, Mother won’t be able to say a single word against him... Those fossilized clan elders who keep whispering about arranged matches can swallow their own tongues! We’ll be engaged before autumn ends...’
Sera didn’t really care about much, she just wanted to show that he was good and get them engaged as soon as possible.
"Uh, hey. Before you two start drafting marriage annexes, measuring curtain fabrics, and booking courtrooms..."
Valerius’s deep cheerful voice cut smoothly through the brewing domestic squall.
The golden-haired scion leaned forward on the leather sofa, resting his forearms on his knees, reaching deep into the interior pocket of his charcoal vest.
With a dramatic flourish of his thick wrist, he produced a heavy, matte-black metallic cube roughly four inches across.
It was inlaid with intricate microscopic silver runes that bent the dust motes in the air around it into tiny swirling ellipses.
"What is that?" Silas asked, his blue eyes instantly locking onto the geometric rune patterns carved into the dark metal. "A cube that has space runes?"
"Better," Valerius grinned with his white teeth flashing as he tossed the heavy cube lightly from hand to hand.
The metal gave a dull thud against his palm.
"It’s a prototype isolation chamber... Sterling Technologies has been co-developing this with high-tier rune masters contracted directly from the Sovereign Realm, It essentially folds space into an artificial sub-pocket so basically, a self-contained mobile training arena that won’t leak a single drop of force, shockwaves or radiation into the real world."
Seraphina narrowed her eyes at it, her chin tilting up with pure disdain at her plan being foiled.
"It’s the size of a tea canister, Valerius. What are we supposed to do inside that? Spar with our pinky fingers?"
"Watch and learn, fiery," Valerius scoffed playfully.
He stood up, tapped a sequence of three silver nodes along the cube’s upper bevel, and underhanded it toward the center of the hardwood floor.
CLACK!
The moment the dark metal struck the floorboards, it didn’t bounce. It expanded.
The edges uncoupled with a series of heavy hydraulic hisses with the metal unfolding like an origami lotus forged from dark iron, rising, stretching, and warping the air until a freestanding eight-foot-tall obsidian archway stood solidly in the middle of Silas’s living room.
Within the frame of the arch, the air did not lead to the dining room as instead, it swirled with deep pale-gray mist.
Valerius stepped up, gesturing toward the gray mist like an enthusiastic shopkeeper presenting his finest wares.
"After you, contestants."
Silas raised an eyebrow, stepping through the archway first, with Harper and Seraphina following close behind.
The transition was seamless.
The moment they crossed the threshold, the ceiling of the Silverleaf residence vanished.
Silas looked up into an artificial vault stretching at least two hundred feet into the air, illuminated by glowing simulated starlight embedded in the high basalt dome.
Beneath their feet was a massive, reinforced combat platform paved with heavy mana-dampening granite slabs, easily the size of two full regulation football stadiums.
The colossal scale was completely invisible from the outside.
"Woah..." Harper murmured, pushing her glasses up as she scanned the perimeter runic baffles.
Her eyes were shining. "Wait... this is actually insane. You folded a whole stadium into a tea canister?! Valerius, how much do you want for it? I’m serious, name a price!"
Valerius laughed, rubbing the back of his golden neck.
"Not for sale yet, Harper! It’s still an unstable prototype... It took four high-rank mages six months just to stabilize the atmospheric pressure inside this one box so it won’t hit commercial production for at least five years."
He walked over toward the outer boundary line, leaning back against the raised observation railing, crossing his arms with an eager wolfish grin.
’Man...’ Valerius thought, his golden eyes sparkling with pure anticipation. ’Before I found out Silas was Vespera... I honestly thought he was just a solid prodigy around my level but seeing the shit he pulled in the tournament? Knowing he’s sitting on an actual Gold Core?’
He glanced between the two combatants taking their positions on the gray stone.
’Who do I even bet on?’ Valerius mused, a cold sweat breaking out on the back of his neck. ’Logically, Silas washes her... A Gold Core Lord is a walking natural disaster but if I say that out loud and Sera overhears me, she’ll turn my eyebrows into ash before the match even starts...’
Sixty paces away, Silas and Seraphina stood facing each other.
The air between them had already begun to thin with the temperature in the cube dropping into an eerie electric hush.
Seraphina reached behind her waist.
SHING!
With a clean, fluid flick of her wrists, the second of the curved daggers materialized in her grip.
The blades were forged from deep volcanic steel with their edges glowing with a dangerous orange shimmer that distorted the air around her fingers like a desert mirage.
She rolled her shoulders, shaking out the loose cuffs of her oversized white shirt, her red eyes locking onto Silas with ferocious focus.
"You better fight me with everything you have, Silas Graves," Seraphina warned, her voice dropping into a low breathless tone. "If you hold back because you think I’m fragile... if you treat me like a delicate little noble girl... I swear on my mother’s name, I will shatter every bone in your legs. You won’t walk for a month!"
Silas chuckled, reaching into his spatial storage.
Clink!
He didn’t draw the Dawn Blade.
It rested within his soul and drawing it in a domestic spar was equivalent to swinging a live artillery shell at someone’s forehead.
He wasn’t going to risk hurting Sera with it at all.
Instead, he withdrew a standard longsword forged from tempered mythril... It was a simple balanced weapon with a dark leather grip.
He rested the flat of the blade against his shoulder, looking at her with a lazy teasing smirk.
"Is that your idea of pillow talk, Sera? Threatening to cripple your future husband before the wedding?"
FWOOSH!
A sudden violent ring of bright red sparks ignited around Seraphina’s collarbones.
"SHUT UP!" she yelled, her face instantly turning the exact shade of a ripe strawberry as her embarrassment transformed instantly into explosive combustible fury. "DIE, YOU ARROGANT BASTARD!"
Across the ring, Silas’s posture relaxed, but his mind shifted into cold clarity.
’Well I should hold back a bit,’ Silas analyzed, feeling the thrum of his core circulating behind his ribs. ’If I start layering lightning, light, as well as all of the other spells I know, the spatial cube won’t hold the pressure.’
His blue eyes settled on the fiery girl across the stone.
’I’ll stick to water... Maybe a bit of wind for displacement. Let’s see how sharp House Bloom’s claws really are.’
Harper walked to the center line between them with her violet pajamas rustling in the rising heat.
She raised her right hand with her eyes flicking from one fighter to the other, and a little grin tugged at her mouth.
"Okay, rules!" Harper called, her voice bouncing off the basalt walls. "No hitting the head, no wrecking each other’s cores, and whoever gets knocked out of the ring or gives up loses... If either of you actually tries to kill the other, I’m stopping it. Got it?"
She glanced at Seraphina, then at Silas.
"And Sera, if you set the cube on fire, I’m telling Valerius you did it on purpose."
"HEY!" Valerius yelled from the railing.
She lowered her hand by half an inch.
"Three."
Seraphina lowered her center of gravity with the soles of her slippers grinding against the granite.
"Two."
Silas brought the sword forward, holding it in a low loose mid-guard as a crystalline sheen of azure water-mana began to coat the steel like a layer of clear oil.
"One."
Harper’s arm slashed down.
"Begin."
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!
The granite beneath Seraphina’s slippers vaporized into glowing molten slag as she became a crimson comet of compressed solar combustion.
In less than a few seconds, sixty paces of open air ceased to exist.
The atmospheric displacement of her forward acceleration produced a deafening crack that rattled the teeth in Valerius’s skull as the heat from her wake bent the light in the cavern into a swirling prism.
’FAST!’
Silas didn’t blink.
His pupils tracked the crimson streak with his body moving on instinct.
SHING! CLANG!
Seraphina’s right dagger struck his guard in a vicious upward diagonal slash aimed straight for his throat.
The collision of volcanic steel against tempered iron sounded like a church bell being struck by a sledgehammer.
Sparks erupted in a blinding, white-hot shower, but the moment her flame touched his blade, it hissed violently.
TSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!
The thin coating of water-mana along Silas’s steel flared into a dense curtain of pressurized steam.
The superheated steam acted as a buffer, stripping the three-thousand-degree solar flame of its concussive bite before it could melt the sword...
Seraphina didn’t even pause to register the defense.
’Yes!’ her mind screamed ecstasy with her teeth bared in a wild grin. ’He didn’t flinch!’
Usually when she attacked like this... her opponents would go down at once.
SWOOSH!
Her left arm whipped around in a reverse-grip horizontal cleave with the blade trailing a crescent arc of white-hot plasma.
’Flame Slash!’
Silas ducked.
The crescent of solar fire screamed a fraction of an inch above his messy dark bangs with the radiant heat singeing a few stray hairs, before the arc crashed into the distant basalt wall, cleaving a fifty-foot molten trench into the stone.
KRA-KOOOOM!
’Holy shit! That would’ve taken my head!’