Chapter 1687: Unworthy
Ryonosuke’s glaive came down like a falling pillar and Vex caught it on her sword with both hands locked on the grip. The impact cratered the stone beneath her boots and sent a shockwave through her arms that rattled every bone from wrist to shoulder.
The Mad Dog of the Fujimori, one of their highest-level enforcers, smiled down at her through the lock with his teeth red and his bare arms bulging with veins that pulsed at the surface, and the gap in their raw strength was so vast that holding the parry felt like bracing against a collapsing ceiling.
"Hah! That’s a nice face you’re making, white-haired lass! Push even harder and I’ll feel great when I cut your head off!"
She pushed, and her curses were already weaving while she held.
[Hex of Amplified Suffering] aimed at his nervous system with the precision nearly two centuries of practice had given her, dark mana threading through the gaps in his aura to lock onto his pain receptors, and the hex connected, sank in, and shattered against his magic resistance like a cobweb hitting a fortress wall.
Two Fujimori retainers flanked her in the same breath with the coordinated silence of men who had fought beside their general for decades.
The first came from her left with a katana aimed at the gap between her ribs. Vex wrenched herself free of the lock and deflected the thrust, which left her guard wide open on the right where the second retainer’s blade caught her across the back, opening a gash from shoulder blade to hip.
She stumbled forward with her teeth bared and blood running hot down her spine, and the binding curse she snapped around the nearer retainer’s ankles lasted exactly one second before his mana burned through the threads like heated wire through silk.
Three of them. All higher level than her by margins that turned her curses into polite suggestions and her sword into a blunt instrument against their armor.
She was fighting for survival, and survival was being generous.
The retainer’s pommel caught the side of her skull and her vision went white.
When it came back she was on one knee with her sword planted in the dirt to keep from falling, and the thought that surfaced between the ringing in her ears was quiet and certain and shaped like a truth she’d been refusing to look at for a long time.
She remembered a briefing room in a Consortium outpost, nearly a year ago by now. Standing at the front in her loose kendo robes, watching Vesper Phenom candidates go through every shade of pale the human face could produce before she’d said a single word.
Soren and Lyra, bright-eyed kids barely old enough to hold a weapon, staring at the floor because looking at her directly felt like looking at a predator through the bars of a cage they weren’t sure was locked.
She remembered Blossom grabbing Quinlan’s hand so hard her knuckles went white, because Vex’s aura alone was enough to make the dogkin tremble like a kitten in a thunderstorm.
She had been a monster beyond measure. The creature those girls could never hope to contain, the apex that existed to remind every bright-eyed youngster in the room how far below they truly stood.
Ryonosuke’s glaive clipped her shoulder and the force spun her sideways, and as she fought to keep her footing her eyes found the duel fifty meters south through the smoke.
Ayame and Blossom, barely twenty years old, fighting Kaede Fujimori.
The dogkin who used to tremble at Vex’s presence was trailing arcs of the Bloodfather’s lightning from her claws, striking from angles that should have been suicide, and the samurai who was rotting in a slave cage a year ago carved lines through the air with a swordsmanship so clean it stopped soldiers mid-swing just to watch.
Two of the youngest women in the harem, matching a continental powerhouse blow for blow with a brilliance that pulled the attention of every fighter in range.
’I used to be the one they watched like that.’
The retainer’s katana found her thigh. Her knee buckled, and she went down hard on both knees this time with blood running freely from three wounds that weren’t closing fast enough.
’Two hundred years old.’ The number felt like a crippling weight on her entire existence.
Nearly two centuries of killing, of training under Black Fang, of bleeding and breaking and crawling back to her feet every single time, and the sum total of that time was a woman on her knees, getting beaten by not even leaders of enemy forces.
Those girls were twenty.
TWENTY!
’And most of those twenty years were spent learning court etiquette and chasing rabbits through the underbrush, or whatever the fuck Blossom had been doing before Hubby put a collar on her.’
They’d been alive for less time than Vex had spent trying to master a single hex, and they were already fighting at levels she couldn’t reach even if the Goddess herself gave her another fifty years to try.
She went from the best fighter in the group to a debuffer who softened targets so Quinlan’s real fighters could land the kill.
Support.
The word she refused to let anyone speak in her direction, the word that made her blood run hot every single time someone got close to using it, sat in her chest now with the undeniable weight of truth.
She was support. She bound enemies’ feet so Ayame could cut them apart.
She weakened a target’s resistance so Serika could punch through it.
She made Quinlan’s actual fighters more effective while standing in the background and pretending that was enough.
It wasn’t enough, and it would never be enough, because Vex had sworn on everything she was that she would stand at Quinlan Elysiar’s side with her head held high until the end of time.
The tears came before she could stop them.
They spilled down both cheeks in hot, ugly streaks that cut through the blood and grime on her skin, and the sound that crawled out of her throat was thinner than a sob, a reedy whine dragged from somewhere deep enough that pride couldn’t reach it in time.
