Chapter 547: The Inevitable Truth
He couldn’t see the serpents. Skylar’s smoke blinded him. But Tori-Sense, that ridiculous precognitive twitch that warned him of incoming projectiles, must have fired on both threats because his body moved before the serpents arrived. He stepped left and the first serpent’s jaws snapped shut on empty air. He brought the bat down and the second serpent exploded into shards of frozen water that sprayed across the platform.
He moved through her smoke blind. Through Skylar’s phantasms. Through ice constructs launched from thirty feet away. And he didn’t slow down.
Natalia felt Isabelle move through her ice field, the wind user circling wide to approach from Satori’s blind spot. Good. Isabelle was adapting. Isabelle was doing exactly what a partner should do.
But Natalia wasn’t watching Isabelle.
She was watching Satori tear through her Phantasm Smoke with the back of his hand. The heated bat evaporated enough vapor that his face appeared through the haze, and he was looking at her again. Always at her. Through every trick and illusion and distraction they threw at him, his eyes found hers with the gravity of something fundamental and unshakeable.
He wanted her to watch.
He wanted her to see what he was. Not the mask he wore for the cameras and the VHC and the people who thought they knew Satori Nakano. The real thing. The animal underneath. The monster that wore a boy’s smile and fought with a baseball bat and had somehow convinced five women to bind their souls to his.
Natalia watched.
She watched him dodge Isabelle’s spear thrust by a margin of inches. She watched him turn the dodge into a counter, his elbow slamming into Isabelle’s forearm hard enough that the spear wavered. She watched him step inside Isabelle’s guard and press the bat against her throat, not striking, just holding it there long enough for the implication to register.
Isabelle yielded.
The crowd noise crested like a wave and broke against the arena walls. Natalia barely heard it. Her blood pounded too loudly in her own ears. Her palms sweated inside Cel’s gloves despite the cold pouring through them.
Satori released Isabelle and turned fully toward Natalia. Skylar materialized at Natalia’s side, both knives drawn, her breathing hard.
Two against one.
It should have been an advantage. Natalia was a telekinetic powerhouse with ice abilities that bordered on S-Rank output. Skylar was an illusionist and close-quarters specialist whose knives had drawn blood from every opponent she’d faced today.
But Satori was walking toward them with that grin and that bloody lip and that bat, and Natalia’s body wouldn’t stop betraying her. Every cell screamed two messages at once. Run. And stay.
"Together," Natalia said.
"Obviously," Skylar replied.
They attacked in tandem. Natalia threw a telekinetic wave that should have knocked Satori off his feet while Skylar flanked right, smoke trailing from her hands in ribbons that hardened into phantom blades aimed at his legs. The combination covered every angle.
Satori activated Steel Body.
His skin turned the color of polished iron. Natalia’s telekinetic blast hit his chest and scattered harmlessly, the kinetic force absorbed into something impenetrable. Skylar’s phantom blades shattered against his arm like glass against marble. For ten horrible seconds, nothing they did mattered. He was a statue made of war.
He grabbed Skylar by the back of her collar and tossed her sideways. Not hard. Not violently. Almost gently. The kind of throw that said "I could have broken you but I chose not to." Skylar hit the ice and slid fifteen feet before her knives caught and stopped her.
Then Steel Body faded.
And Satori was right in front of Natalia.
Close enough that she could see the individual hairs of his eyebrows. Close enough that the warmth radiating from the Dragon Witch’s Ring reached her face and fought against the chill of her own Aspect. Close enough that the Covenant bond sang between them like a tuning fork struck against bone.
His bat touched the underside of her chin. Tipped her head up. The metal was warm against her skin.
"Yield," he said.
Not a command. A request. Spoken softly enough that only she could hear it, his voice low and rough from the fight, from the blood, from whatever dark furnace burned inside him that she’d spent months feeding.
Natalia looked up at the man she loved. The man who terrified her. The man who made her feel small and powerful and furious and desperate all at once. His dark eyes held hers and the bond between them hummed with everything neither of them could say in front of twenty million people.
He was asking. He always asked. Even when they both knew the answer.
Natalia placed her hand on his chest. Over his heart. Over the regenerator brace she could feel humming through his combat suit. She pressed her palm flat against the warmth of him and felt his heartbeat, strong and steady, the heartbeat of a man who had just dismantled two S-Rank potentials without breaking a sweat.
"Yield," she whispered.
The arena erupted.
Natalia didn’t hear it. She was too busy staring at the boy with the bat and the bloody grin and the gentle eyes, the boy who scared her more than anything she’d ever faced in a Gate, the boy she would have followed into the dark even if the Covenant bond had never existed.
Satori lowered the bat.
He wiped the blood from his chin with the back of his hand.
And he kissed her.
On the platform. In the sunlight. In front of twenty thousand screaming people and forty camera drones and a woman named Maximus Hype who lost the ability to form words for a solid three seconds.
Natalia kissed him back. Hard enough that she tasted copper. Hard enough that frost spread across his jaw from her lips. Hard enough that the crowd noise became a physical vibration in her chest and she didn’t care, couldn’t care, because the only thing that mattered was the heat of his mouth and the pressure of his hand on her waist and the terrible, wonderful, inevitable truth she’d known since the first time he carried her out of a dungeon.
She was his.
She had always been his.
And he was the scariest thing she had ever loved.
