Chapter 664: The Bloom Family Doctrine [Bonus Chapter]
"What...?"
The single syllable fell from Silas’s mouth like a dry pebble dropping into an abyss.
His hands remained half-raised with the water-mana still swirling across his knuckles, but his posture had completely unraveled from battle-ready vigilance into bewilderment.
Behind the observation railing, the silence was deafening.
Harper stood frozen, her index finger poised mid-air where she had been pushing up her glasses.
The lenses caught the blinding silver glare of Seraphina’s spirit form, masking her eyes, but her jaw had gone slack enough that her mouth formed a perfect silent ’O’.
Beside her, Valerius was still patting at the scorched ends of his golden bangs, but his hand froze midway against his skull.
The blond scion blinked once and twice as he looked at Seraphina, then looked at Silas, his brain visibly stalling out like an engine starved of fuel.
"Children...?" Valerius croaked, his voice cracking violently in the hollow cavern. "Did the atmospheric pressure drop break my ears, or did she just--"
"Quiet, Valerius!" Seraphina snapped, though the terrifying dual-toned resonance of the Primordial Spirit couldn’t entirely mask the sudden desperate tremor in her voice.
She drifted down until the soles of her slippers touched the vitrified glass of the floor.
The tight compressed sheath of silver-white fire hugging her skin flickered with the runic marks glowing like molten tin along her collarbones.
She crossed her arms tightly over her chest, trying desperately to summon the haughty authority of a Bloom heir, but the furious crimson rushing beneath her glowing cheeks betrayed her.
"It is standard clan doctrine!" she declared, her plasma-white eyes darting nervously toward the basalt floor before snapping back to Silas. "In House Bloom... if an heir secures a prospective fiancé of verified caliber, the clan directives explicitly instruct us to consolidate the bloodline and produce heirs as soon as possible! It prevents succession disputes!"
She puffed her cheeks out with her silver bangs falling across her face.
"I am satisfied that your foundation is genuine!" she mumbled, her voice shrinking into a soft mortified squeak that sounded absurd coming from a being clad in cosmic fire. "So... how many do you want? Personally... I think... four would be adequate..."
A deep collective wheeze escaped Valerius’s lungs as Silas stood in the center of the ring, staring at her.
’Four...?’ Silas thought, his mind racing through the absurdity of the conversation happening inside an active smoking dimensional containment cube. ’She’s haggling over a kindergarten classroom?’
He sighed, lowering his arms completely.
"Haah..."
The water-mana dissipated into harmless mist around his wrists.
Silas reached up with his right hand, scratching the messy hair at the back of his neck with a slow resigned grimace.
He knew Seraphina.
Trying to argue logic with her when her pride and her fire were both dialed to maximum was like trying to put out an oil fire with paper towels.
...There was no escaping this. If he tried to deflect, she’d probably summon a volcanic lance just to interrogate his commitment.
He was just going to have to chest the entire thing and roll with the hit.
"Honestly?" Silas said as he looked straight into those glowing silver eyes. "As many as you want."
Seraphina froze.
The silver-white plasma in her eyes flared violently as a shade of red so intense it rivaled an active volcano rushed up her neck, across her cheeks, and straight to the tips of her ears, completely overpowering the divine radiance of the Primordial Spirit.
Her jaw dropped with her chest hitching as her breath hitched in her throat.
For three agonizing seconds, she stood paralyzed by his answer, completely short-circuited by how easily he had given in.
Then... her face went terrifyingly flat as the mortified bashfulness vanished and her features settled into an icy stone-cold mask of scrutiny.
’Did I do something...?’
SNAP!
Seraphina snapped her fingers.
KRA-BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!
Without a single microsecond of warning, the entire pocket of oxygen within a five-foot sphere surrounding Silas spontaneously combusted into a concussive shockwave.
The detonation sounded like an artillery shell firing point-blank inside a sealed vault as a blinding flash of yellow-white flame ripped across the platform, the concussive pressure slamming violently into the basalt dome, rattling the runic seams of the isolation cube so hard that dust rained down from the ceiling baffles.
Silas emerged from the smoke with his slippers sliding backward three inches and a thin hastily deployed film of high-pressure water sizzling around his shoulders as he coughed against the acrid air.
"What was that for?!" Silas yelled through the haze.
Seraphina lowered her smoking hand with her glowing white eyes narrowing into two razor-thin slits of judgment as she stared through the vapor at him.
"I see..." Seraphina said, her dual-toned voice dripping with dangerous accusation that made the hair on Silas’s arms stand up.
"...So you want to knock me up four different times?"
’Why are you mad at me for going along with the flow...?’
Silas now stood three paces back from his original mark, rubbing the soot off his forearms where the water film had hissed into white steam.
Across the glass-slick platform, Seraphina’s hand dropped slowly to her hip with her smoking fingers curling into loose fists.
The silver-white fire clinging to her frame rippled like watered silk and threw long sharp shadows across the cracked slabs.
’...I don’t really mind,’ she thought, as the realization bloomed behind her breastbone in a dizzying rush of heat that had nothing to do with her core.
Honestly, she wouldn’t have cared if he’d said ten.
Her chest felt absurdly full of a warm fluttery lightness that made her want to kick the nearest boulder into dust just to burn off the extra energy.
He hadn’t balked and he hadn’t laughed it off as a joke either.
He had stood there in his violet pajamas and agreed to it with that irritating, unflinching calm of his, like anchoring his bloodline to hers weighed no more than ordering tea.
But she was young and she had no idea what to do with the warmth pooling behind her ribs other than set something on fire...
"Merging with the Primordial Fire Spirit grants my combustion a flat tenfold amplification," Seraphina said, her dual-toned voice slicing through the haze with a clear bell-like ring. "Every drop of mana I circulate right now carries ten times the output, ten times the density, and ten times the acceleration."
She rolled her shoulders and tilted her head from side to side until her neck gave a crisp crack.
The silver-white aura around her arms tightened until it clung to her skin like a second layer of molten scales.
Her red eyes had dissolved into solid plasma, and the runes across her cheekbones throbbed with luminous beats.
"So take this seriously, Graves," she warned, pointing a glowing finger at his chest. "If you try to hold back on me now, you won’t walk out of this cube on your own two feet... Draw your sword... Circulate your core and show me what a Gold Core looks like when it actually stops holding its breath. I know you’re capable of much more..."
She waited with her breath hitching slightly.
In her mind she could already see it... the foundation of a Gold Core Lord, the golden pressure tearing through the artificial ceiling and the crushing weight of a man who had killed so many monsters in the Khemet incident.
’I want the same feeling he gave off when he was with the World council...’
Sera wanted to see him unmasked, she wanted to feel the ceiling of the man she had claimed and across the ring, Silas let out a short quiet breath through his nose.
"Alright," he said simply. "I’ll take it seriously."
He nodded and rolled his right shoulder once then... nothing happened.
No golden aura tore through the floor and no world-ending pressure crashed down on the dome like Sera expected.
The full weight of a Gold Core stayed sealed beneath his flesh as if it didn’t exist at all.
The only thing that changed was his posture as his center of gravity settled by a fraction of an inch, his shoulders leveled, and the lazy teasing smirk vanished from his face, replaced by a cold flat stillness that made the air between them feel brittle.
Seraphina’s teeth clicked together.
’That’s it?!’
A furious indignant flame surged from her stomach into her throat as her knuckles went white as the fire coiled tighter around her forearms, hissing like agitated vipers.
"You arrogant—!"
Before the word cleared her lips, Silas vanished.
He didn’t dash at all... It was almost like he stopped existing...
One instant he was forty paces away, standing loose on the scorched stone and the next the air in front of her face folded inward with a crack that rattled the dome.
’—FAST!’
Her battle senses, sharpened by the spirit’s cosmic awareness, screamed down her spine.
Her silver-white pupils snapped left just in time to catch the blur of a violet pajama sleeve, dotted with little gold stars, cutting through the heat haze.
SWISH!
Silas arrived without a sound with his body pivoting on a needle-thin axis.
His left palm was already open with his fingers curved like talons, slicing through the barrier around her torso with effortless movements.
’Abyssal Sever!’
It wasn’t a sword strike but the thin crescent of hydro-mana coating his palm was compressed to a microscopic edge and as a result, it produced a blade of heavy water so dense it sheared the air into a high-pitched metallic shriek.
As expected, Seraphina didn’t retreat.
Backing down wasn’t in her blood, instead she snapped her right arm up and drove her elbow forward in a short vicious intercept wreathed in a three-thousand-degree solar mantle.
KRA-SHING!
It sounded like a diamond chisel striking a high-pressure boiler but his strike didn’t dissolve against her heat at all...
It bit into the solar mantle and sent the silver-white plasma scattering in ragged spitting chunks!
’His weight... it’s completely different from before!’ Seraphina realized, as the shockwave raced down her arm and rattled the bones of her shoulder.
He hadn’t raised his mana output but he had stopped pulling his weight.
And as a result... The raw power of a Lord who had tempered his flesh and marrow in battle was bearing down on her with the momentum of an iron press.
Before she could torque her hips to counter, Silas’s right hand whipped out from beneath his ribs.
’Hurricane Repulsion!’
He compressed the gale into a two-inch cylinder and pressed it flat against her solar plexus.
BANG!
The detonation punched through her balance as her feet left the stone and the violence hurled her backward like a ragdoll.
"Not yet!" she snarled mid-flight.
She twisted her spine with gymnastic ferocity and dug her heels into empty air.
Two jets of white-hot plasma exploded from the soles of her slippers and acted as retro-thrusters, murdering her backward momentum.
She planted herself sixty feet back with her slippers carving two glowing glass troughs into the platform and thrust both palms forward.
’That’s It... Flame-Slash!’
Sera was capable of producing several and so, she threw twelve.
Her arms became a blur of silver-white motion.
Crescent after crescent of compressed solar fire peeled off her fingertips and crisscrossed the cavern in an interlocking web of white-hot death that spanned the entire arena.
The radiant heat vitrified the broken stone under their path and turned the dust into drifting sparks of red glass.
One stray crescent sliced through the ceiling baffles and sent a rain of molten runes pouring down.
Valerius threw himself flat against the railing.
"THAT WAS A LOAD-BEARING RUNE! SHIT! THAT WAS A LOAD-BEARING RUNE!"
He had nabbed the prototype... how was he supposed to explain this to his father?!
’Cyclone Slipstream!’
A razor-thin current of wind wrapped around his ankles and calves like coiled springs, and his movement stopped being steps at all.
The air cracked every time he changed direction as where he’d stood a heartbeat earlier, a pale afterimage hung in the heat and tore apart.
Shift! Slide! Pivot! Whoosh!
He slipped through the gaps of her barrage with millimeter precision.
The first crescent screamed past his right shoulder and singed the hem of his violet collar.
The second shaved the air over his ducking head with the heat turning the moisture on his skin into vapor and a third cut through his afterimage a full half-second after he’d left it.
’S-so fast...!’ Harper gulped, she was aware that she was much stronger now but Silas could still beat her easily... Could Nitocris even beat him?
He rode the thermal updrafts her own spells created with his footwork flowing like water poured down an uneven slope, and closed the sixty-pace gap before she’d released the final crescent.
’He’s reading the trajectory before the mana even leaves my fingers!’ Seraphina thought with her battle high peaking into delirium. ’This is it! This is what I wanted!’
She didn’t wait for him to arrive, Sera slammed both palms into the glass and a wall of fire stood up between them like a curtain.
Silas went straight through it.
The Slipstream tore a hole in the flames, and his violet sleeve came out the other side smoking with one gold star scorched black and a fist already cocked at her face.
’Got you—’
’Not yet!’
She dropped under the punch, spun on her heel, and her flaming heel clipped his shoulder.
BAM!
He rolled with it, came up on one knee, and the glass behind him exploded outward in a ring of red shards.
’She’s good,’ Silas thought. ’She’s really good...’
"BURN TO ASH!" she roared, abandoning the weapons made of flame as she clapped her hands together.
BWOOOOOOM!
A colossal pillar of silver-white fire detonated from the bedrock directly under Silas’s feet and the column roared toward the basalt ceiling in a fifty feet wide geyser of primordial solar plasma meant to swallow him whole and atomize his water mantle down to hydrogen.
At the observation railing, Valerius ducked behind the barrier with his arm thrown over his face as the heat wave hammered his skin.
"SILAS!"
From the heart of the roaring white pillar, a deep hum rolled through the floor.
’Tidal Impact!’
The pillar didn’t hold him.
Two swirling spheres of black-blue heavy water, each the size of a siege carriage, tore outward from the center of the column like rotating mills.
The mass of the water was pressurized and freezing cold, and it crashed into the inward-curving walls of the solar pillar.
TSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!
A scream of boiling steam ripped through the cube and drowned out the baffles.
The shock between primordial heat and abyssal water shattered the bedrock for forty yards around them with the stone cracking into fine silt under the explosive expansion.
Through the blinding curtain of vapor, Seraphina saw the blue eyes and they...
...They looked cold and unimpressed