Chapter 1724: Sentencing!
On the eastern front, Kaede’s sword arm had stopped mid-swing.
The pressure that rolled off the man in the sky hit her chest like a battering ram and her boots slid backward through the scorched dirt, the cursed blade screaming in her grip as it dragged her arm sideways toward the source with immense hunger. It wanted him dead.
Across from her, Ayame and Blossom had stopped momentarily as well, their eyes turned skyward.
Kaede’s teeth ground together.
"Soldiers!" Her command cut through the ranks before her breathing had steadied. "Aelindra was one councilwoman! Not a queen, not a general, one seat on a council of many, and seats can be filled! The tides are even, the war is not won by circus shows! Maintain formation and fight with honor!"
"..."
"Lady Kaede..."
"Yes, my lady!"
Just like that, her troops steadied. The Fujimori banner snapped forward.
Across from Kaede, Blossom stood perfectly still with her gauntlets at her sides and her ears angled toward the sky, her blonde tail a blur behind her that hadn’t stopped since Quinlan took to the air.
She had watched Myrasyn’s entire performance with wide, shining eyes that belonged at a festival and not a battlefield, and the pure, unfiltered awe on her face made it abundantly clear that the dogkin had fallen completely and irrevocably in love with the queen’s display.
The voice, the authority, the staff coming down in that brilliant arc, the dramatic pause before the sentencing, all of it. Blossom loved it the way only Blossom could love something: wholly, immediately, and with her entire body vibrating to prove it.
Then Ayame’s elbow found her side.
"Blossom. She’s about to charge us."
The whine that left the dogkin could have shattered hearts across the continent, and she tore her gaze from the sky with visible anguish before turning back toward Kaede.
Her tail did not slow down.
She planted her feet, straightened her back in one sharp motion, and raised a gauntleted fist above her head the way Myrasyn had raised her staff.
Her chin lifted, her chest puffed out, and her brow furrowed into what she clearly believed was the same regal severity the queen had worn, an expression that on her face landed somewhere in the vicinity of a kitten trying to look like a lion.
"Kaede Fujimori!" she announced across the melee, and her voice rang with all the authority a bubbly dogkin with a tail wagging at terminal velocity could produce.
Several soldiers on both sides stopped fighting to look at her.
She had clearly decided she was going to perform her own version of the queen’s sentencing whether the battlefield was ready for it or not, and the mimicking motions she made were alarmingly accurate in form, her free hand sweeping out in a near-perfect copy of Myrasyn’s gesture, her posture rigid with ceremonial weight, every movement studied and precise.
"For the crime of making Blossom look away from Master’s incredible moment!!" Her voice carried genuine conviction and her ears were vibrating with excitement.
She held the pause.
It was the exact pause Myrasyn had held before delivering the sentence, timed well and carried with real commitment, and it would have been genuinely impressive if the girl holding it could stop her smile from breaking through.
"The sentence is punishment!!"
Ayame stood beside her with a flat expression.
"You mean death?"
"Death!!!" Blossom gasped, realizing she made a grave mistake.
"Because she made you look away from Quin, not because she betrayed and sold me? Your oldest friend?"
Blossom’s head whipped toward Ayame and the regal posture evaporated in an instant. "That too!!"
The dogkin evaluated her lacking performance without bias. "Blossom needs practice... Natalie and Poppy will help her!"
Then her eyes snapped forward, the warmth drained from her irises, and the adorable girl who had been playing queen vanished into the void between one heartbeat and the next.
...
Across the battlefield, elven soldiers who had dropped their weapons stayed where they’d fallen, kneeling or standing slack with tears drying on faces still burning from the warmth in their blood, and the armies around them let them be.
Dwarves and Fujimori had bigger concerns than allies who had stopped swinging.
The coalition’s councilwomen moved through the paralyzed ranks with ashen faces, grabbing shoulders, barking orders into ears that refused to hear them.
One seized a kneeling archer by the breastplate and hauled her upright. The archer looked through her matriarch with wet eyes, sinking back to her knees the moment she was released.
Another slapped a sobbing mage across the face hard enough to split her lip, and the woman took the blow without blinking, her hand still pressed to her chest where the warmth lived.
They had lost their army.
The undead hadn’t paused.
Gorthrax’s horde ground forward with the same dead inevitability it had carried since the first corpse climbed to its feet, because mindless things don’t feel dread, and the lords commanding them saw no reason to waste time.
"I’ll kill him after I kill you!" The Drowned King’s voice tore from his rusted helm as his mount crashed through the melee toward Iris.
Iris parried the swing and let the impact carry her boots across the dirt, grinning through the blood running down her face. "Didn’t know corpses could dream!"
The Drowned King’s mount reared with a shriek of grinding metal, and the fury that poured off the undead lord doubled the pace of every corpse within fifty meters of his banner. "I’ll tear your mouth off!"
"I don’t need to cast spells to beat you! Aim for my limbs or something more valuable, retard!"
"I meant I’ll shut you up, you braindead cunt! You have no grasp on language itself!"
"Grasp language? What nonsense are you blabbering about? All I need to grasp is your hideous skull to break it apart!"
"ARGH!" The lich screamed in frustration.
"ARGH!" Iris screamed a battle cry, swinging her sword with all her might.
...
Above the battlefield, Black Fang watched the chaos with her violet eyes.
"Are you done?" she asked, not turning toward Quinlan.
He chuckled beside her, golden light still rolling off him in waves. "No. But you can go."
His grin sharpened. "Have fun."
Black Fang stepped off the air without a word.
The Beloved mark on her skin blazed bright purple the instant she dropped, the light burning through her clothing and painting a violet comet trail behind her as she fell toward the battlefield with her hair whipping upward and her serpent tattoos pulsing in rhythm with the mark, every channel in her body flooding with a power that hadn’t existed before today.
It was time to see what a Beloved Mode Black Fang looked like!
