Chapter 1688: Envy
Her pentagram eyes, the eyes that used to make veteran fighters flinch when she walked into a room, blurred red and wet as the Hexwitch wept on a battlefield surrounded by enemies who could kill her in three clean strikes.
’Hubby is becoming something no one has ever seen.’ The thoughts weren’t thoughts anymore, they were coming in fistfuls, ugly and wet and impossible to hold back.
’And they’re climbing right with him. Every one of them. Blossom, Ayame, Serika, Lucille, all of them getting stronger, all of them evolving, all of them becoming women worthy of standing next to him while I rot. I’m rotting while girls young enough to be my great-granddaughters leave me in the dirt.’
"I can’t keep up..."
The words left her mouth before she knew they were coming, cracked and small and aimed at no one, spoken to the scorched stone under her knees because she couldn’t say them to anyone who mattered.
"I can’t keep up with any of them..."
Ryonosuke’s boot came down on her sword arm and pinned it to the stone.
The Mad Dog stood over her with his glaive resting on his shoulder, and the manic grin that defined his existence was gone.
He stared down at the crying woman beneath his boot with a furrowed brow and an expression that sat somewhere between confusion and genuine discomfort.
"Oi, oi..." He scratched the back of his head with his free hand. "What’s wrong with you, woman? You’re bawling your eyes out in the middle of our fight."
His red-stained teeth showed in a grimace. "Stop weeping! You’re killing my mood! Stand up and fight!"
"Lord Ryonosuke." One of the retainers stepped forward with her katana still drawn, her tone clipped and urgent. "We need to move. Alexios Valorian is on the field and the elders want him dead."
"So go kill him," Ryonosuke said without looking away from Vex.
"This is a priority target, my lord. The elders were explicit that-"
"The elders’ mess is the elders’ problem." He waved the woman off with the back of his hand. "I came here to have some fun, not to clean up after a bunch of wrinkly fossils and their little ’project’."
He looked down at Vex, and the grimace deepened.
"But THIS isn’t any fun!"
His boot caught her in the ribs, and the impact rolled her onto her side with a dull crack that she barely registered through the fog of everything else collapsing inside her.
Vex didn’t react.
Her free hand was already pressing against her lower abdomen, fingers digging into the fabric over the Bloodfather’s brand just below her navel where it pulsed warm beneath the skin.
She reached for it the way Serika had reached for hers and found wind screaming between her knuckles, the way Lucille had reached and found magma pooling beneath her boots, the way Blossom had reached and found lightning racing through her claws.
The Reservoir was open. The bond was warm. Quinlan had accepted her wholeheartedly, of course.
Nothing answered her.
Her fingers pressed harder, searching, and the warmth beneath them stayed flat and formless, a current with no shape, heat with no name.
Quinlan’s lovers found an element waiting for them, a gift shaped to their souls, proof that the bond saw them and decided they were worth it.
When it reached Vex, it chose nothing.
’I am not worthy. I don’t deserve an element.’
The tears came heavier and the sound she made raw and full-throated and dragged from a place so deep it didn’t have a name, because the only language Vex had ever trusted was power, and power had just told her she didn’t matter enough.
Ice crystallized across her body.
<Stop having a mental breakdown in the middle of a fight for survival and get up, you damned hormonal psycho!> came the mental chiding as Aurora’s barrier reformed against her skin in a layer of frozen precision that sealed the bleeding in one clean motion, the crystalline coating flexing with her body as she breathed, dense and elegant and beautiful in the way only mastered power could be.
Quinlan’s ice, channeled through the Essenceweaver who never even thought of leaving the backline, shaped into something that turned a simple shield into art.
Vex stared at the frost creeping along her shoulder through the blur of tears, and the thought that landed was quiet and surgical and cut deeper than any blade on this field.
’Even her.’
Her fingers were still pressed white-knuckled against the silent brand below her navel. ’Even the girl who sits in the back pressing shields all day got an element. She got Hubby’s ice and turned it into something gorgeous, and she’s back there protecting me right now with it!’
The jealousy that flooded through her was so hot it drowned the pain from the three wounds still bleeding through Aurora’s frost.
She was jealous of Aurora. Of Blossom. Of Ayame, of Serika, of Lucille, of every single woman who was climbing toward the future Vex had claimed as hers since the day she swore herself to him, and the jealousy was so corrosive it was dissolving whatever was left of her composure from the inside out.
She wanted to scream.
She wanted to be first.
She wanted to be enough.
She wanted to be someone worth sharing limited powers with, trusting her to make great use of it.
She wasn’t, and she knew it, and that knowledge was the cruelest thing anyone had ever done to her, and no one had even done it on purpose.
The young girls would stand at his side.
They would fight his wars, grow into legends, become the names the world remembered alongside the Primordial Villain.
And Vex would be the old woman in the back, debuffing enemies so the real fighters could land their kills, watching through fading pentagram eyes as the man she loved outgrew her one impossible leap at a time, too old to catch up and too stubborn to let go.
The most miserable future seemed all but set in stone, as far as the Hexwitch was concerned.
But then...
She looked at the frost on her arm again, Aurora’s ice, Quinlan’s ice flowing through Aurora’s hands, and the jealousy curdled into something uglier and more specific.
Ayame and Blossom she could stomach, with extreme self-grudge and loathing, because those two fought at the front where Vex did, and their strength was the kind she recognized even through the envy.
But Aurora? The girl who sat in the back and pressed shields?
Daddy’s needy little bitch who spent half her waking hours fussing over potions?
