Chapter 1740: Running Away |
Kaede ran.
The swing that tore the rift open flowed straight into her first stride, and the chosen of the Fujimori shot toward the glowing wound in the world with every shred of speed her body could produce.
Half the ring had been waiting for exactly this.
Warriors broke from the crowd’s inner edge before her lips finished uttering the spell, lunges collapsing toward her path from a dozen angles, and the fastest two were the women she had been dueling.
"You’re running from our duel?!" Ayame’s shocked shout rang across the field as she fired forward. "As clan leader?!"
Blossom dissolved into the void mid-leap. The dogkin wasn’t about to let the criminal she sentenced so magnificently run away.
In the prisoner columns, the captured remnants of her clan watched their leader sprint for a hole in the world.
"Lady Kaede...?" The lieutenant with the ruined arm strained against the shield pinning her down, disbelief plain on her face.
"She’s... running from a sacred duel?"
For all the violence converging on her, none of it was enough.
Kaede was desperate and still one of the most powerful fighters the continent had ever produced; she pulled away from Ayame’s edge by a hand’s width, left Blossom’s claws raking empty air, and the rift’s pale light washed over her as she reached the threshold.
"[Warp Gate]."
Quinlan’s voice carried no urgency whatsoever, and his own gate unfolded directly across the rift’s mouth, standing flush before hers, swallowing her escape.
Kaede’s boots gouged trenches through the frost as she checked her sprint one step short of his portal, twisting aside before her momentum could carry her through, and she lunged around the rim, hunting for any seam where her [Shinkai Mon] still glowed behind his.
Before she could find it, the air at her back shifted.
Black Fang’s heel came around in a full spinning arc and hammered into the back of Kaede’s skull with a crack that rolled across the silent field, and as she pitched forward, Ayame’s blade opened her back while Blossom’s claws tore through her shoulder, three impacts becoming a single shove that hurled her through the Primordial Villain’s gate.
She came out the far side mid-fall, and the hand was already around her throat.
The exit had opened exactly where its owner wanted it, an arm’s length in front of Quinlan at the height of his waiting grip, and armored fingers closed before her eyes could refocus.
He lifted, and the Duchess of Silverwind left the ground with her boots kicking at empty air.
Her blade thrashed toward his forearm with its own frantic intent and never arrived.
"Won’t let you!" Kaelira’s gauntlets clamped around her wrist, Serika’s grip crushed her fingers flat against the hilt, and Vex wrenched the arm straight, three women pinning one sword hand as if it were a separate beast that needed its own subduing.
It was.
Nobody on that field could afford to underestimate the cheater and the relic in her grip, least of all the man holding her by the throat, and the war his women were waging against one sword arm proved it.
The blade hauled the limb toward Quinlan’s ribs with a strength that owed nothing to Kaede’s scrambled brain, veins bulged along Kaelira’s forearms as her gauntlets lost a centimeter and clawed it back, Serika’s heels carved furrows through the frost behind her full Solar Fist strength, and Vex threw more of her weight against the forearm the harder the relic pulled.
"Oh, no you don’t...!" Serika ground out through clenched teeth, and centimeter by centimeter the arm bent straight, every grip locked onto wrist, knuckles, and forearm, because not one of the three would lay so much as a fingertip on the steel itself.
Kaede’s world was swimming.
Black Fang’s heel had left her thoughts sliding sideways, blood sheeted from her opened back and shoulder and the older cuts beneath them, and the grip around her throat was measured with insulting precision, tight enough that every breath came as a whistle, loose enough to keep her conscious.
Through doubling vision, Kaede found her clan.
Her samurai knelt in their disarmed columns and stared directly at her, past the hand strangling their chosen.
"She was leaving us," a young voice said from somewhere in the ranks, flat with shock, and the lieutenant with the ruined arm stopped straining against the shield that held her, the last of the fight draining out of her face.
"Instead of mounting an honorable final stand, Lady Kaede tried to run..."
Her [Shinkai Mon] flickered and died behind Quinlan’s gate, unused.
At the center of it all, Quinlan gave the woman in his grasp his full attention.
He sized her up without hurry, taking in the scrambled eyes, the bleeding back, the famous relic that needed three of his women to keep it away from his ribs, and the longer he looked, the harder his gaze became, animosity climbing rapidly.
"So this is her, huh... The wretched woman who betrayed and sold my Ayame into a life of misery."
His armored fingers began to close, slow and dangerous, and the whistle of Kaede’s breathing thinned toward nothing as her boots kicked harder at the empty air.
"Quin!" Ayame’s shout cut across the duel ground with open worry riding it, because she knew the man was a heartbeat away from snapping her neck.
Hearing her, Quinlan caught himself and chuckled.
The pressure around Kaede’s throat eased off. "Got a little carried away." He tilted his head toward his samurai lover in apology. "You’re not mine to deal with, after all."
Then he looked the duchess over once more, slower this time, and when he spoke again, his voice rolled out loud enough for every rank ringing the duel ground to hear.
"You know, I owe you a lot. If you weren’t the world’s worst sister to have ever existed, I would not even be alive today."
Shock swept through a hundred thousand spectators in a wave of gasps and murmurs, victors and prisoners alike, because the greatest force on the continent had just credited his existence to the enemy dangling from his fist.
Isveth reacted faster than any of them.
The Head Shrine Maiden produced parchment and quill from her robes in a single practiced motion, and behind her, dozens of shrine maidens were already doing the same, an entire column of fanatics readying to write as one.
A delicate young maiden with freckles on her cheeks sprinted out of the ranks and bent forward at the waist. "Head Maiden! Here!" She offered her back to Isveth as a writing table, chin high and face set with profound duty, and when the parchment came down on her spine, her eyes began sparkling with unfiltered joy.
She was part of it now.
The recording of the Holy Son’s history.
Myrasyn had drifted to the column’s edge by then, and the Elven Queen stood reading the freshly born scripture over Isveth’s shoulder, making zero effort to disguise her interest.
"Back when I met her, I was a total nobody," Quinlan continued, reminiscing. "I couldn’t wield a spear half right. Ayame had to keep correcting my terrible stance over and over again, and whenever level 2 trash monsters slipped past my guard, she was the one who saved me."
The gasps came back twice as loud, with the scribbling turning downright violent, and Isveth’s tongue poked out of the corner of her mouth in utter concentration as she chased the Holy Son’s every word across the page.
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