Chapter 1739: Audience
Only the final Fujimori holdouts refused to be part of it.
Scattered squads were still fighting across the field, hacking toward the duel ground to reach their clan’s leader, and the war ate them one squad at a time.
"Lady Kaede! Hold on, we’re com-" A lieutenant with a ruined arm led six samurai against the encirclement, and Scar’s Elites took them alive out of sheer efficiency, shields cracking bones and pinning the survivors into the frost mid-sentence.
Behind them, a second squad fared worse, running into a wall of purple-eyed puppets wearing their own clan’s armor, and they died on the blades of comrades who had fallen hours earlier.
Inside the ring, the duel was coming apart, and so was the woman at the center of it.
Kaede’s arcs had lost their geometry.
Strikes that had carried perfect lines all battle long now swung wide and landed heavy, and the synergy between wielder and blade was developing holes.
They were both getting desperate.
Kaede reached for angles a half-beat before the sword wanted them, the sword surged toward openings her arms were too slow to serve, and the seams between the two intents opened exactly where Ayame’s edge could find them.
The cut that bloomed along Kaede’s shoulder came from one such seam.
"Move with me!" Kaede’s voice cracked as she snarled at her own weapon.
Inside her grip, the whispers that had purred since her succession frayed into a frantic buzz, and the next mistimed exchange ended with Blossom’s claws raking across her thigh.
One more exchange flung the three fighters apart, and for the first time since the fight began, neither Ayame nor the dogkin pressed the advantage.
They stepped back instead with their blades lowering by degrees, and the quiet that followed was so foreign that it pulled Kaede out of her stance.
She looked up.
While she fought, the world had been replaced.
Where a battlefield had raged that morning now stood a ring of enemies a hundred ranks deep, stretching around her in every direction, and not one banner of the coalition remained upright anywhere inside it.
Dwarves knelt in disarmed rows.
The elven host stood under the white of their queen.
Ash and scattered bone were all that remained of the undead that had poured through her gate all day, and her own samurai knelt in guarded columns with their swords gone, or lay in pools of blood.
Nearly every ally she had brought to this war was dead or captured.
She found Black Fang at the crowd’s inner edge, holding Chizuru off the ground by the hair, and beside her the King of Vraven with Hozumi’s ankle in his fist, and panic, true panic, closed around Kaede’s chest and squeezed.
Then the air shifted.
It came down on the field like a tide, a pressure that bowed a hundred thousand heads at once and made Kaede’s defenses lock on instinct.
The Primordial Villain was descending toward the duel ground with the blonde elf at his side and the limbless ruin of the dwarf king drifting behind him, and his aura pressed heavier than it had when his ambushers first poured through her gate.
’How...? It’s not just intimidation... The gap is real...’ Kaede’s grip strangled her hilt. ’He didn’t fight because he spent the entire battle torturing Ragnar, and his presence is heavier than at the start?! That’s impossible. Unless...’
Her eyes snapped to the blue-skinned ranks holding the western arc, a thousand soldiers who had killed without pause.
’His blue freaks... do they give him XP?!’
Quinlan looked at her.
One glance across the ring, level and unhurried, and then he dismissed her, descending the last stretch to land in front of Black Fang as if the chosen of the Fujimori were an item on a list he would get to in due time.
As his boots touched the frost, the dark helmet receded, plates folding away from his face like something alive, and the man beneath was grinning.
The grin was for his own. His eyes went to Black Fang first, then swept to Ayame and Blossom standing in the ring. He winked at his samurai lover in particular, who returned the glance with a soft smile.
Then his gaze traveled across the rest of his women scattered through the crowd’s edge, and the pride in his expression was so open and so absolute that it needed no words at all.
His girls had carried a continental war on their backs, and every single one of them had come out the other side far, far stronger.
Frost crawled back over what was left of Ragnar, sealing the stumps and the ruined torso into a clean block of ice that settled upright in the slush, the rest of the dwarf king saved for later like a meal he hoped to savor.
By then the field had gone quiet enough that voices carried all the way to where Kaede stood.
Black Fang said nothing.
She simply raised her arm and held Chizuru out toward Quinlan, the old woman dangling from her fist like a kill a cat had brought to the doorstep.
Quinlan chuckled at his utterly adorable ally of few words. "Want to save her for later as well?"
She nodded at him once.
"Sure, let me help you."
Ice raced up Chizuru’s body from the boots, and within seconds the last female elder of the Fujimori stood frozen beside the dwarf king, eyes still open and aimed at nothing behind a hand’s width of ice.
"Might as well," Alexios mused, and held Hozumi out toward the Primordial Villain by the ankle. "Help me out, will you?"
Quinlan looked at the offered elder, then at the king, and did not move at all.
"What?" Alexios’s brows climbed. "I rush to your rescue after you beg me for help, and you cannot even turn my enemy into an icicle?"
He sighed. "Fine. I will ask my damned wife." His gaze began sweeping the crowds for Morgana.
Frost raced up Hozumi before the sweep finished, the new icicle planting itself beside Chizuru, and the grin in Quinlan’s voice was audible across half the field. "There. Now we don’t owe each other anything."
The king’s eyes narrowed into dangerous slits. "You think turning this fucker into a popsicle carries the same value as a king charging through a dangerous portal into enemy lands to save a wanted criminal?"
Quinlan was silent for a moment.
Then he shrugged at Alexios. "More or less, yeah."
Alexios’s fists began to tremble.
Across the ring, Kaede watched her elders being put away like winter stores.
Her teachers, the pillars of her clan, the people who had crowned her, armed her, and built her into the chosen of the Fujimori, were frozen like meat between two bantering men, and the panic in her chest tore through whatever ceiling had been holding it.
Footsteps crossed the frost.
Ayame stepped forward with her katana in hand, her blue eyes settled on Kaede.
"They won’t interfere." The tip of her blade rose toward her sister. "Let us finish our sacred duel."
Kaede’s hands shook on the hilt.
She had to escape!
With every shred of desperation in her body, Kaede Fujimori, leader of her clan and Duchess of Silverwind, screamed.
"[Shinkai Mon]!"
She swung, and a dimensional tear split the air open.
