Chapter 468: Capturing Rook [II]
Kaelron’s posure returned, his dark eyes going darker still, serious in their intensity. “Admiration and subservience are two very different things, Zynx. You don’t surpass a mountain by bowing to it. You do so by tearing it down.”
Alexia tilted her head, her eyes narrowing as she picked up the subtle shift in his posture with her Aura Sight. He was going to charge in. “A bit dramatic, don’t you think? This is just a mock war.”
“It’s never just a mock war!” Kaelron snapped, willing Essence into his legs. “For people like you — born with heaven-sent talent, born in wealth and prestige — everything es easy! But for the rest of us? Every skirmish, every win, every single inch of ground we claim is something we have to tear out of the world’s throat with our teeth! Why did I join your opposition, you asked? It’s because I wanted to fight you! You and the Phantom Knight! Him and the Tyrant of Apex! I want to fight all of you monsters! Everyone who’s strong! I want to fight for the thrill of standing my ground against someone like you! I want to fight for the fun of it!”
The forest floor caved under his feet. In the next second, Kaelron moved so fast he turned into a blur.
But Alexia was ready. Instead of backing off, she pounced into the path of his charge and hurled her warhammer at him.
Kaelron’s eyes shot wide as the massive iron head came barreling toward his chest like a runaway train. He hadn’t expected her to throw her weapon!
Scowling, he swatted it aside… and noticed Alexia had disappeared from his line of sight.
Oh! A distraction. That throw was a distraction.
By the time Kaelron finished deflecting the airborne warhammer, his peripheral vision caught a shadow to his right.
He whirled, swinging his mace wildly, and grinned as its spiked head connected with Alexia’s shoulder. The crunch of bone, spray of blood, and thud of impact followed.
Alexia cried out in pain. Her shoulder joint popped out of its socket as she went tumbling sideways into the dirt.
The tear in her left arm was agonizing, but her teeth were clamped so tight together she nearly cracked her own molars instead of screaming.
“Was that it?” Kaelron scoffed, mockingly disappointed. “I expected more from you—”
But whatever he was saying was cut off when the blind ginger lifted her head, a toothy grin plastered on her face. And between her fingers, she tauntingly held out a Card.
Startled, Kaelron quickly looked around him and found one of his own Cards to be missing. That girl! She plucked it from the air beside him!
It was the highest form of humiliation for a Hunter to lose his Card this way.
Usually, after drawing a Card, a Hunter could make it hover near their body until they chose to dismiss it.
It was second nature for them to keep their active Cards moving out of harm’s way. And yet…
Wait, which Card even was it?
Currently, Kaelron had four Cards active.
One for his light leather armor, one for his mace, one for basic enhancement buff, and one was his Origin Card.
Which one did she take? It looked like his Armor Card.
…And it indeed was.
When Alexia closed her fist around the stolen Card to crush it, Kaelron’s light leather armor immediately dissipated into harmless specks of light.
But it didn’t make sense.
If she wanted to turn the tide, why choose the Armor Card over his Mace or his Enhancement Buff? His light leather armor only had a single enchantment that made it somewhat resistant to heat and fire.
It offered little protection against actual physical impacts.
Before Kaelron’s brain could fully assemble the missing piece of the puzzle, Alexia was zeroing in on him.
Dislocated shoulder dangled uselessly at her side? Didn’t matter. Flesh torn and bleeding? Also didn’t matter.
She rolled off her knees, used her good arm to plant her palm into the dirt, and launched herself forward with every shred of Essence left in her reduced reservoir.
The distance between them vanished in an instant. But Kaelron wasn’t too worried even as she came at him like a living battering ram.
He raised his mace to crush her. He still had his weapon. She was still exposed. This would be easy.
…It was not easy.
Alexia, as it turned out, wasn’t even targeting him.
She slid on the ground underneath his broad swing and came up behind him, letting loose a hail of quick punches on his spine.
Her attack didn’t seem to do anything other than irritate Kaelron. The tall boy turned and brought his mace along with him in a horizontal arc.
In response, Alexia jumped to vault over the swinging weapon before landing right next to Kaelron.
He was just starting to gather his bearings as she discharged another flurry of feather-light punches at the side of his vulnerable ribs, her one good hand moving at breakneck pace.
Again, it didn’t hurt. But it did make him incredibly uneasy.
What was she trying to achieve?!
Every single hit felt like a tickle — a sharp sting for a microsecond, but not packing any real power.
Gritting his teeth, the boy whirled his mace back, intending to bludgeon her head off and end it once and for all.
But the fight had already ended.
The moment he raised his arms, he felt his entire body turning stiff and his joints locking up.
It was a terrifying sensation. Scary and inexplicable as a wave of numbness spread outward from his spine and ribs to paralyze his muscles in an instant.
His lungs refused to expand, his fingers went limp, and the heavy spiked mace slipped from his grip, thudding uselessly into the mud.
He crumpled, one knee pletely refusing to work. “Wh… what’s—?”
“I also expected more from you,” Alexia’s angelic voice purred right beside his ear, then snickered, obviously very pleased. “I thought you did your homework.”
“What— What did you do to me?!” he rasped, jaw so tight he could barely force the words past his teeth. “I– I can’t move! I can’t move!”
“Don’t worry,” she continued with her mean laugh. “I just hit your pressure points. You’ll be fine when you wake up. It’s a trick I don’t get to use much these days.”
Kaelron attempted to wrestle back control of his own body, but the struggle was in vain.
Alexia, meanwhile, raised her right hand and allowed her warhammer to e flying back into her grip.
“Oh, and, Kaelron,” she said, a little more sincere now. “I eliminated you in the fourth round. You must have misremembered because someone was disqualified above us.”
Kaelron’s mind stalled.
Even through the numbing haze permeating his body, even through the humiliation of being done in like this, that one sentence pierced deeper than anything else. “You… remembered?”
Alexia paused, then snorted as if the question had caught her off guard. “Of course I remembered. You were a pain in the ass to beat back then, too.”
For a moment, it seemed like he was about to say something, but the blind girl arced her hammer and knocked the daylights out of him before he could.
One of the two Ivory Rooks had fallen.
Reviews
All reviews (0)