After A Billion-Year Torture, I Returned As A Transcendent Player

Chapter 72: Deathly Beatdown (1/2), Arrival of Divine-rank

The two guards in the bathing hall moved first, and they were not slow.

Both were peak Legendary-rank, hand-picked from the Desmeral house, and they read the situation in an instant. The kneeling hostage was gone, and something with warping air and an icy grin stood in his place.

They came at him from both sides at once, one wreathed in serrated stone, and the other trailing whips of pressurized water that hissed against the steam.

Aidan met the stone one head-on.

The guard’s fist came down like a quarry collapsing, and Aidan caught it on his open palm without giving a single centimeter. The crack of the impact blew every droplet of steam out of the air between them.

The guard had half a second to register that his arm had stopped working before Aidan folded him.

A knee drove into his ribs and lifted him clean off the floor, and lightning-wrapped knuckles hammered him back down through the lip of the pool. Crystal shattered, water erupted, and the man’s serrated stone shell went out like a dying lamp.

The water-user’s whips lashed in from behind, pressurized enough to slice plate armor.

Aidan turned into them instead of away, and let his new Nether-threaded wind shear spin up around his body. Every whip that touched the rotating field came apart into dead mist, rotted mid-motion, and the guard’s eyes had just enough time to widen before Aidan was inside his reach.

He didn’t use an aspect for this one. He used his hands.

Three blows, each one placed with a surgeon’s patience, shoulder, sternum, jaw, and the peak Legendary guard folded onto the wet crystal without ever landing a strike.

The remaining three guards burst through the doors together, alerted by the noise, and found their two seniors decorating the ruined pool.

To their credit, they didn’t hesitate. To their misfortune, neither did Aidan.

The first came in behind a talent that split him into four mirror-selves, all attacking from different angles. Aidan’s eyes tracked the one whose feet displaced the water on the floor, and he put that one through a crystal pillar with a burst-loaded palm while the three fakes dissolved around him.

The second guard was smarter, hanging back and raining lances of condensed light from range.

Aidan walked through the barrage, electromagnetism bending each lance a hand’s width off course as it arrived, and the guard’s nerve broke somewhere around the tenth deflected shot. He turned to run, and got precisely one step before an Epoxy thread caught his ankle and introduced his face to the floor.

Aidan put him to sleep with one measured heel-drop between the shoulders.

The last guard looked at his four downed colleagues, looked at Aidan, and raised both hands slowly.

"Smart," Aidan said. "Sit in the corner."

The man sat in the corner.

Through all of it, Ruvel Desmeral hadn’t moved from his pool. And he wasn’t scared. That was the astonishing thing, the sheer depth of the safety he’d marinated in his whole life.

"Are you done?" Ruvel sighed, wine still in hand, as if Aidan had ruined the ambiance rather than his escort. "You realize what you’ve bought yourself, right? Lay even one finger on me, and my family will give you a fate worse than death. They’ve done it before. There’s a man in our dungeons who’s been begging to die for sixty years."

He set his wine down on the pool’s edge and beckoned lazily toward Beatrix.

"Come here, and become mine. Like these ones here."

His foot pressed down on the face of the woman beside him in the pool, grinding her cheek casually against the crystal edge, and she made no sound at all, which was somehow worse than if she had screamed.

Something in Aidan went very quiet.

The icy grin left his face, and what remained wasn’t an expression at all.

He crossed the pool without appearing to move through the space between, and his hand closed around Ruvel’s throat before the young master’s brain caught up to his eyes.

"Wha..."

Aidan threw him.

Not a technique. Not an aspect. Just a full-armed, contemptuous throw with Legendary-rank strength behind it, and Ruvel Desmeral left his own bathing hall through four consecutive crystal walls, each one detonating into glittering dust as his naked body tore through it.

He cleared the palace entirely, sailed over the gardens in a long, screaming arc, and crashed down in the center of the grand wedding stage that had been built for his big day.

The stage held. Barely. Ruvel, naked and bleeding glitter, did not look like a groom.

The commotion carried. Visitors and gawkers came running from across the island, and within minutes a crowd ringed the stage, staring in open disbelief at the young master of the Desmeral Family sprawled bare on his own altar.

Aidan walked out of the hole in the palace at a stroll.

Behind him, Tom drifted through the broken wall with Beatrix floating gently in his talent’s grip, and she had already stripped away the heavy bridal gown and changed into her own clothes from her storage ring, a Hunter’s practical gear, hers by choice.

She hovered above the stage looking like herself for the first time in days, and she stared down at Ruvel with an expression that suggested she was enjoying this a great deal.

"Wh... what is going on here?!"

A portly man in a GHA formal coat came shoving through the crowd, and Aidan recognized the type before the title. The acting chairman of the Global Hunter Association, minding the store at Epic-rank while all thirteen of Earth’s Legendaries were off-world.

The man took one look at Ruvel’s state and went pale as paper.

"You! You attacked the young master of the Desmeral Family?!" His voice cracked with pure panic. "Apologize! Right now, before this becomes something Earth cannot afford! Get on your knees and..."

Aidan turned his head and looked at him.

That was all. Just a look, utterly icy, with a billion years of patience sitting behind it, and the acting chairman’s voice died in his throat mid-word. He shut his mouth and took one careful step backward, then another.

On the stage, Ruvel had scrambled up, snatched clothes from his storage ring, and dressed with shaking hands, his face flushed crimson from something well past embarrassment.

"You’re dead," he spat, voice climbing toward a shriek. "You’re dead, your family’s dead, everyone you’ve ever spoken to is dead! I’ll have them flayed in front of you for years! You worthless dirt-planet insect!"

He tore a necklace from around his throat and crushed the pendant.

Light erupted from it, and an avatar took shape above the stage, a man in his prime with Ruvel’s same dark hair and none of his softness, pressure rolling off the projection in slow, heavy waves.

Early-stage Divine-rank. And through the avatar, the man himself was watching.

"Father!" Ruvel jabbed a finger at Aidan, nearly weeping with rage. "Kill him! I want him dead! Him and everything he loves!"

The avatar’s eyes moved across the scene, the ruined palace, the downed guards being dragged out, his naked son’s clothes still half-fastened, and settled on Aidan with the cold calculation of a man who solved problems for a living.