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

Chapter 73: Deathly Beatdown (2/2)

Aidan stood at the foot of the stage, and his anger was a physical pressure inside his own chest now, held on a leash worn down to threads.

"I’ll say this once," Aidan said, voice flat. "Get your son the fuck out of here, or he dies here today."

The avatar’s eyes narrowed.

"You dare say you’ll kill my son in front of me?"

"You didn’t teach him manners. You didn’t teach him how to take ’No’ from others." Aidan’s voice stayed level, and that was the frightening part. "Since you didn’t, bear the consequences or avoid them. I’m getting pissed off a notch by the second, and that’s not really good."

The father answered with fire.

No warning, no posturing. The avatar simply opened one hand, and blue flames poured down over Aidan in a roaring flood, Divine-rank might compressed into heat that turned the air itself into light. The stage-front vanished inside a pillar of azure, and the crowd screamed and fled the wash of it.

Ruvel’s face split into ecstatic, tear-streaked glee.

"Now you’re dead! You fucking dumbass!" He spun toward the acting chairman, drunk on it. "Go and bring that bitch here! Fuck this wedding. I am leaving with her right now!"

The punch arrived before the sentence finished echoing.

It came out of the blue fire itself, and it hit Ruvel’s face with a sound like a mountain clearing its throat, and the young master of the Desmeral Family went down through the wedding stage, through its support pillars, and into the churned earth beneath, the entire structure collapsing around the crater of him.

The avatar’s flames guttered in shock.

Where Aidan stood, the blue fire wasn’t touching him. A semi-translucent border wrapped his body in a crimson-gold sheen, and everywhere the Divine-rank flames pressed against it, they simply ceased, eaten away at the boundary like the armor was swallowing the attack whole.

Not blocking. Consuming.

’A billion years, I held this down.’ Aidan flexed his hand inside the sheen, and his anger, given form at last, hummed against his skin like something grateful to finally be useful. ’Turns out it makes decent armor.’

He walked into the ruins of the stage and pulled Ruvel out of the crater by the hair.

The young master came up swinging, an early-stage Legendary in his own right, panic finally lending him the will to fight. His fist met Aidan’s cheek with everything the Desmeral bloodline had given him.

Aidan’s head didn’t move a centimeter.

"My turn," he said.

The first blow drove into Ruvel’s gut, and the sound it made wasn’t clean. Something structural gave way in there, and Ruvel folded over the fist with his eyes bulging, wine and bile spraying out of him across the churned earth.

Aidan let him retch, then threw him.

Ruvel skipped across the ground like a stone across water, three long bounces, each impact tearing a furrow through the dirt, and fetched up hard against the base of a decorative pillar. He was still trying to remember how to breathe when Aidan arrived and picked him up again.

"That was for the guards’ smiles when they walked me in."

A backhand cracked across Ruvel’s face, and his jaw visibly shifted sideways in a way jaws were not meant to. Teeth scattered into the flowerbeds, red and white against the petals.

The avatar’s flames came down in a roaring flood, desperate now, and the crimson-gold border drank every drop of them without Aidan so much as glancing up.

He took Ruvel’s right arm, the beckoning arm, the one that had waved Beatrix over like property, and bent it backward at the elbow until it stopped being an arm in any functional sense. The crack echoed off the palace walls, and Ruvel’s shriek climbed into a register that made the crowd flinch as one.

"That was for ’come here and become mine.’"

The foot came next. The one that had ground down on the woman’s face in the pool. Aidan stomped, precise and unhurried, and the bones in it went like dry kindling.

"STOP!" The father’s voice tore out of the avatar, Divine-rank composure shattering entirely. "STOP IT! I’LL BURN YOUR WHOLE PLANET! NAME YOUR PRICE! STOP!"

Aidan didn’t stop.

He hurled Ruvel skyward, let him hang at the top of the arc just long enough to understand where he was, and met him on the way down with a rising knee that caved his ribs inward. What hit the ground afterward barely resembled the man who’d lounged in that pool an hour ago.

Ruvel tried to crawl. That was the part the island would whisper about for years, the Desmeral heir dragging himself through the dirt of his own wedding venue with one working arm, streaked in blood and glitter, sobbing promises and apologies and his father’s name in no particular order.

Aidan followed at a walk, letting him crawl exactly far enough to hope.

"P-please," Ruvel gurgled through his ruined jaw. "Please, I’ll give you anything, I’ll..."

"The women in your pool didn’t get an ’anything.’" Aidan planted a foot on his back, pinning him flat. "Beatrix didn’t get an ’anything.’ Why would you?"

The begging dissolved into wordless sounds, and then the sounds stopped being words at all, and Aidan finished it the way the Darkness had once taught him things were broken. Patiently. Completely. His fists rose and fell with the terrible evenness of a man doing necessary work, and the avatar’s screams and flames battered uselessly against the crimson-gold border through every second of it.

When Aidan finally straightened up and let the body drop, it didn’t move again.

The island had gone utterly soundless, the crowd frozen, the acting chairman on his knees in the dirt, and the avatar’s blue flames flickering in something that a Divine-rank powerhouse had likely never felt before.

Aidan stood over the corpse of the Desmeral heir, rolled his neck once, and lifted his eyes to the avatar.

"I warned you," he said quietly. "Bear the consequences, or avoid them. You chose."