Chapter 1751: A Legend Born |
Ayame’s cheek pressed against Black Fang’s fabric, her eyes red and wet, and from that angle the colosseum unfolded sideways, tiers rising into the winter sky full of people who were clapping for her.
In the stands, Jasmine wiped the corner of her eye with one knuckle, sniffed once at the sight of the sisters hugging, then she grinned through the tears. "If I’d known it was going to be this good of a spectacle, I would’ve charged ticket prices."
She was already clapping before the joke finished landing, hard and proud.
"That’s my badass captain, everyone!" Serika’s fists came together next, the Solar Fist pounding her palms with a booming clap that carried halfway up the tiers.
*Clap! Clap! Clap!*
"Everyone take notes! She may be petite, but she bites hard like a real dogkin!" Kitsara whooped from the dogkin stands, loud and shameless.
The dogkin were fully in agreement with their princess’s observation.
In the elven sections, Myrasyn rose from her seat.
Her green eyes were glassy, fixed not on the duel ground but on Black Fang, and the Elven Queen who insisted they were best friends pressed a hand to her chest as if the sight of that stiff, reluctant hug was the best thing she’d seen in her life.
Then she blinked the moisture away and turned to Seraphiel, and when the question came out, it carried genuine disbelief. "Is that young girl truly only twenty years old?"
"Yep!" Seraphiel beamed back at her queen with her full grin blazing. "She was level 14 when they met less than a year ago."
"Level 14?!" Myrasyn yelped, then her shock turned into a soft smile. "I see... As expected of the Holy Son’s right hand woman."
Myrasyn then looked back to the duel ground.
Her hands came together harder than before, the Queen of all elves clapping with a smile that had nothing to do with politics and everything to do with genuine admiration.
The elves followed their queen without needing to be told, and Seraphiel threw both arms wide and beckoned the rest of the ranks to join until the elven sections erupted in a wave of applause that crashed against the beastkin blocks beside them.
*Clap! Clap! Clap!*
The beastkin howled back.
It started as scattered barks and calls from the dogkin ranks orchestrated by Kitsara and spread into a full-throated chorus that climbed the tiers and merged with the clapping until the colosseum rang with it, thousands of voices rising for the samurai on the frost.
While apprehensive of humans, any warring beastkin tribe could appreciate an honorable, well-fought duel.
Then the sound reached the prisoner block, and it stopped.
The lieutenant with the ruined arm looked at the duel ground below her.
Two women stood at its center.
One was the former lady her clan had condemned, stripped of her name, sold into chains, and forgotten.
The other was the continent’s most wanted woman, and the former lady had just called her sister and wept into her chest.
The lieutenant knew exactly who Black Fang was. So did every officer in the block.
A few exchanged glances that carried the weight of a very awkward conversation nobody wanted to start.
But the iron collar lay discarded on the frost beside the katana, and the woman who had dropped both to embrace a criminal was still the same woman who had just won the most decisive duel their clan had ever witnessed.
The lieutenant rose to her feet. It cost her, a hiss tearing through her teeth.
Her legs shook under her, but she stood, and brought her good hand against her thigh, the sharp slap of palm on armor cutting through the noise.
The samurai beside her stood.
Then the row behind.
Then the next, and the next, armored hands striking thighs in a drumbeat that climbed the prisoner block in a wave until almost every Fujimori soldier in that section was on their feet, saluting the woman they should have followed from the beginning.
*Clap! Clap! Clap!*
Ayame watched it all.
She watched the friends who loved her, the strangers who respected her, the soldiers who had once stood against her rise for her, and the girl who had been chained to a basement floor less than a year ago, who had dreamed of nothing grander than finding a decent master who just let her be, stood at the center of a continent’s attention.
A single tear traced a line down her cheek.
Just then, a gentle current of wind lifted her katana from the frost where she’d dropped it and carried it to her hand, hilt first, placed there by a man who hadn’t moved from his throne.
Ayame caught it without looking, smiled beautifully despite her best efforts, and drew the blade across the cloth at her hip in one slow pull, and sheathed it.
The steel whispered home into the scabbard with a click.
The duel was finished. She did not desire to execute the defeated.
The sword had spoken.
Alexios Valorian rose from his seat.
He descended the steps alone, without escort, and the speed with which he moved said more than his expression did.
The Primordial Villain was seated on a throne of his own making with a broken duchess on his floor, and if the King of Vraven let him speak first during what he knew was to come, the man would be holding court over Alexios’s own subjects before the blood dried.
"In the absence of capable judges, I take it upon myself to declare the winner of this duel."
He looked at the petite samurai standing with her katana at her side.
"Ayame."
No surname followed it.
The decree he’d signed hadn’t left her one to carry, and across the colosseum a hundred thousand spectators heard the absence and understood what filled it.
Ayame’s eyes met the king’s gaze without speaking.
"..." From his seat, Quinlan watched Alexios plant himself on the duel ground and declare a winner.
Then his attention dropped to the twitching arm and the demonic blade scraping across the stone.
At some point, the blind scrapes had found a heading. It was moving toward him in its own morbid way.
Finally, Quinlan glanced up at Black Fang.
"Mind if I borrow her for a moment?"
Black Fang looked from him to the frozen elder at the edge of the arena then back again to him, regarded him for one beat, and gave a single nod.
She was curious as well.
Chizuru’s block of ice began sliding across the floor, carried by a current of earth that deposited it at the foot of his seat without ceremony.
Quinlan raised a hand, and the ice around Chizuru’s head and chest cracked and fell away in sheets until the elder’s face and shoulders were free while the rest of her body remained locked from the ribs down.
"Haah..."
The breath that tore out of her when her lungs could finally expand was ragged enough to draw winces from the nearest rows.
Chizuru’s eyes had been open behind the ice for the entire duel, watching everything. Quinlan made sure of that.
"Two options," he spoke up, wasting no time. "Speak freely, or not freely."
"..." The old woman’s attention traveled the arena.
The colosseum that hadn’t existed an hour ago, armies filling its tiers, prisoner and victor side by side.
Her fellow elder frozen beside her, Ragnar’s ruin and Hozumi’s slack face preserved like specimens in glass.
Kaede on the floor, one-armed and bleeding, the strength the relic had lent her visibly leaving.
And the relic, still dragging the severed arm across the frost, still scraping toward Quinlan at its own agonizingly slow pace.
The fight left Chizuru between one breath and the next.
Whatever iron had held her together through decades of conspiracy broke all at once, and what remained was an old woman frozen from the ribs down, watching generations of work and hope bleed out on cold stone.
Her face caved.
The sharp lines of the tactician turned sunken and grey, aging her a decade in a single exhale, and the eyes that found Quinlan’s had gone flat and empty.
The last flame behind them had guttered out somewhere between the severed arm and the shattered duchess, and whatever stared back at the Primordial Villain had stopped caring whether it survived the hour.
"Ask your questions, Villain. I shall answer to the best of my knowledge..."
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