Zavier understood what she was trying to convey to him. She had a serious expression on her face as she reassured him that nothing bad or permanent would happen to Shiranui so he should calm down a bit. Moreover, his lack of impulse control could have gotten them all disqualified. Even if he didn't care about his admission into the Caesar University, he should at least not spoil the opportunity that Kacie, Nadia and Dahila had earned with a lot of hard work.
Zavier could do nothing but keep his butt glued to his seat with a worried expression on his face. Not being able to do anything while Shiranui was in such a state was incredibly vexing to him but he had to control himself for his cousins and Dahila.
Shiranui was still stuck in her terrible nightmare. She had already lost sight of her goal and was unwilling to wake up again thinking that she would accompany the aggrieved souls to the end.
She felt her soul breaking past the shackles of her body and floating towards the sky. The sky that she saw was not red any longer but the clearest of blues, like the deep ocean. The sun shone on her face but the light didn't blind her any longer. It felt as if the sunlight was welcoming her instead. A peaceful expression creeped up on Shiranui's face as she began to cut her ties with the world in order to enter the light. And then she heard it once again; the same sentence with that same insufferable attitude and suffocating indifference.
Boiling rage burst inside her as if a volcano had erupted inside her body. The rage inside her bubbled out of her in the form of an unfamiliar flame that she had never seen before but she hardly cared about it at all. The only thing in her mind was that sentence that she had just heard.
"Is that all you can do?"
A severe pain clouded her mind as she began to remember things that she had wanted to forget but had been unable to for so long.
She wanted to destroy the one who had said this to her; that horrible monster that had devoured her entire family and had blamed her lack of power for not being able to stop her.
The rage made her forget her earlier decision of letting it all go. She was unable to forget. How could she forget when everything else in the world was trying to make her remember what she was trying to forget?
The same words made her want to open her eyes once again. She half expected her sister to be in front of her again uttering the same words; looking at her with the same demeaning look in her eyes as if Shiranui was worse than an insect in her eyes.
And that was when she heard it again.
"Huh, is that really all you can do? I thought that you were supposed to be good but you are no better than the rest."
Her eyes jerked open and she saw who it was standing almost on top of her. It was not her sister whom she was expecting. It was her previous opponent that she had failed to defeat, Rebecca.
Strength erupted from somewhere inside of her as she got back on her feet with her limbs trembling from overexertion. Her knees almost buckled from the severe pain and exhaustion but she clenched her fists tightly and composed herself so as to not fall back again. Her glare at the same time wanted to penetrate through her opponent. If eyes could have killed, Rebecca would have died a hundred times over.
Shiranui had never been unreasonable even if she had been cold hearted but at that time her eyes had gone red with anger and she was unable to distinguish the actual source of her anger and indignation. The faces of Rebecca and her sister overlapped at some point and their similar words started echoing in her mind with the strength of a loudspeaker making it so that she was unable to ignore it no matter how hard she tried.
The force with which she kept clenching her fist kept on increasing and her nails pierced into her palm but Shiranui didn't even feel the pain. Blood leaked out of her hands and fell onto the boiling ground drop by drop.
Rebecca had been planning to put on a show for the audience. She was actually relieved that Shiranui had finally gone down. Rebecca had already given her an excessive beating contrary to what she wanted but Shiranui had been refusing to go down.
In order to show her strength to the audience, she had been saying those provocative words like the protagonist of a novel.
Although she thought of herself that way, she was actually acting like a villain acting out their monologue before the final battle. Her words had managed to thoroughly enrage Shiranui who had previously accepted her defeat. This had put Rebecca in a tight spot as well as she had never expected her publicity stunt to backfire in such a way.
Still she wasn't afraid at all. She had already beaten Shiranui black and blue before. This revival meant nothing at all since there was no strength in Shiranui's knees at the moment. She was barely standing.
Shiranui on the other hand was on the brink of bursting. The flame inside her was trying to burst out by breaking apart all the seals in its path.
As her eyes regained their vigor and life, a strange energy came out of her womb and penetrated each and every cell of her body while invigorating her with endless energy that she had never felt before.
The seals that had been keeping the flame in shackles started to burst apart as she felt searing sensation on her body. Her body had started to burn furiously and the color of the flame was not the one that she was familiar with. It was golden in color instead of black.
The flame had taken over her body completely and was burning away her whole body, or so she thought. In fact, although her body was burning there was no pain since it wasn't burning her at all.
On the contrary, it was a flame much like her Dark flame in the way that it was her skill so it wouldn't harm her no matter what.
As the golden flame increased in luminosity and ferocity, a golden pattern began to emerge on her body as if it was being tattooed on to her by the golden flame itself.
The pattern looked as if thousands of snakes were twisting and turning around her while intertwining with each other in a complex design. Some of the snake heads were even spitting flame from their mouths like a dragon.
"Yamata pattern? It's the Yamata pattern for sure. Isn't it?"
Galen who had not participated in any of the conversation before this finally spoke up as if he had been unable to control his excitement after having witnessed the golden flame that had erupted out of Shiranui without a moment's notice.
To the others around him, it appeared that the pattern must have been a big deal as Galen was acting so excited and unreserved for the first time since the start of the competition.
"It's been a while since I have seen this pattern appear on someone. After all the members of that clan..."
The people around him waited for him to continue but seeing that he had stopped midway as if he had remembered something unpleasant, they didn't disturb him any longer.
Galen noticed that the people around him were looking at him expectantly so he obliged them all as he felt that it was his responsibility for arousing their interest to such a level in the first place.
"The last time that pattern appeared, dozens of S rank mages had perished under its wrath. I wonder what would happen this time."
There were loud exclamations at his explanation but it hadn't been very concrete for the audience to make sense of what was happening.
Scott on the other hand had seen this pattern for the first time in his life. He didn't know anything about it so he had to ask someone who was more experienced than he was. As such, he turned to Harry and asked him about it.
"I have a feeling that you know what that is."
"Of course I know. Or did you think that I was as ignorant as you are?"
"Hurry up and tell me what it is."
Harry pretended as if he was thinking whether he should tell or not but didn't waste too much time contemplating. He took a deep breath to sound more mysterious as he began to explain the Yamata pattern.
"This is a power that exclusively belonged to a single bloodline, namely the Yamata family. Even among the Yamata family, the pattern is extremely rare. Only the ones who had managed to awaken their ancestral bloodline to the extreme would be able to awaken this pattern on their body. The golden flame was in fact a means to carve the pattern on the body of the girl."
Updat𝒆d fr𝑜m fr𝒆ewebnove(l).com