Primordial Villain With A Slave Harem

Chapter 1746 Horrid Realization

"We chose 'this' over that girl?"The golden arcs answered before anyone else could.

Ayame read the [Ougon Zan]'s spread before the light finished deciding where to land, slipping between the molten teeth on a line that shouldn't have existed, and the detonations chased her across the ground in a chain of craters marking every spot her heels had left a half-beat prior.

Kaede swung again and again, each arc wider and more ragged than the last, and the gap that Ayame's technique had been nullifying all fight came roaring back through the magic because spells scaled on raw power and raw power was the one cliff her sister still held.

Ayame could dodge, and she could deflect, cutting the fringe off every golden wave with clean sweeps of her katana, but she could not close, and the gap between them widened step by measured step as the younger sister buried the older in magic.

In the prisoner block, the lieutenant with the ruined arm watched golden light repaint the faces of the samurai around her, and her brow furrowed.

Gold.

Lady Kaede's arcs had been silver for as long as anyone in the clan could remember, a clean moonlit edge that was her signature on every battlefield she'd graced.

Whatever was tearing across the arena floor right now burned a color that didn't belong to her.

"This is no longer a duel..." A soldier nearby grumbled.

"I feel disgusted."

A Fujimori sacred duel was decided by the blade.

That was the oldest law of their clan. Steel against steel, the sword speaking where words could not.

Whatever strength a warrior carried in their own body wasn't forbidden, a warrior fought as the warrior was, but the one who reached for magic first admitted their sword wasn't enough, and in a clan built on the sword, that admission weighed more than a loss.

Their chosen had made it before the entire continent.

"Lady Ayame was always the talented one," the lieutenant said to the row beside her. "Does anyone here remember differently?"

"No one does!" A young samurai shot upright three seats down, straining against the shield at her back. "She was a promising young lady even as a child, I was part of her guard when the elders said she was our bright future!"

"Lady Kaede couldn't keep up with our common soldiers, let alone the officers sitting in this block before the inheritance!"

Heads turned through the prisoner block, then more heads, because the thing none of them had dared to say out loud for years was suddenly in the open air and spreading fast.

"That's right. She only became powerful after the succession." A grizzled samurai two rows back was on his feet, pointing at the arena floor. "The unnatural strength, the eerie spells, the inexplicable rate of growth and that sword answering to her... None of it existed before the elders crowned her, and now look!"

His finger stabbed toward Kaede, whose blade was wrenching toward openings her arms couldn't serve fast enough, the weapon and its wielder pulling against each other like two beasts yoked to the same cart, and every veteran in those rows could see it plainly: the woman on that floor was barely controlling her own sword.

"The elders..." The lieutenant's voice carried a weight that had nothing to do with volume. "We've all had our suspicions for years..."

Recognition ran through the block, the sound of soldiers hearing someone finally say the thing they'd all been swallowing since the succession.

"But Lady Ayame's crime..." someone said, and the block went quiet.

That was the wall.

The elders could be vultures and the succession could stink of rot, but Lady Ayame had been sentenced to a life of slavery by a decree the King of Vraven himself had signed.

No samurai had the standing to question a royal judgment, and no amount of suspicion about the elders could outweigh the word of a king.

The grizzled samurai's voice came back quieter. "What was her crime, exactly? Does anyone know?"

The block went still, and for a moment the only answer was the ring of steel out on the floor.

Then a voice came from the middle rows, reluctant. "There were whispers, back then, that Lady Ayame had gotten into bed with the Phantom League, and that Lord Raijin's death came far too cleanly for a man in good health, far too conveniently for the daughter already promised his seat, as though she'd grown tired of waiting for what was owed to her."

"Whispers," the lieutenant said. "Never a charge read aloud, never proof laid before the clan. The elders witnessed the inheritance duel behind closed doors, the King's seal made it law, and the space where a reason should have stood, we filled in ourselves and let it harden."

Not one soldier in that block had ever been shown a thing beyond the whisper itself.

The lieutenant lifted her gaze to the lower tiers where Alexios Valorian sat, and sighed.

"All of this stinks, and has been stinking since the start... But we chose to turn a blind eye and follow orders..."

On the floor, the golden arcs would not let Ayame breathe.

Kaede fired [Ougon Zan] in overlapping fans, each swing wilder than the last, and the duel ground shattered in golden lines while Ayame wove between them on footwork alone, landing on strips of stone the light hadn't eaten, strips that shrank with every volley.

A crescent caught the trailing edge of her sleeve and burned the cloth to ash. The next forced her into a backbend so deep her ponytail brushed the floor, the molten light screaming over her chest close enough to press heat through the fabric.

She rose from the bend and caught the next arc on her blade, deflecting it wide, but the parry cost her a full step backward, and the step after that cost another, and the floor was running out.

"You're still trying to beat me with just a sword?" Kaede's voice cracked across the gap between arcs, breathless and triumphant.

Ayame deflected another arc and let the momentum carry her two steps sideways before she answered.

"That's the point of this duel, Kaede," Ayame spoke with exasperation. "By our oldest traditions, you just told every samurai watching that your sword wasn't enough."

Kaede's expression contorted, ready to spit back. But before she could reply, Ayame's eyes went cold.

"Don't even open your mouth, I'm no longer interested."

Gone was the reserved samurai fighting her treacherous sister, replaced by the Blade of the Primordial Villain fighting an enemy they had to take down to continue their path toward unquestionable might.

"Nothing I say will get through to you."

The mark on her stomach pulsed warm beneath her clothes, and Ayame reached for the Reservoir.

"So I'm done talking."

Quinlan's water answered through the bond, arriving as a thin film that ran the length of her katana like dew on polished steel, barely visible past the first row.

Then it thickened into a pressurized current that wrapped the blade in a sheath of translucent blue, catching the winter light and scattering it across the cracked stone in soft pale ribbons.

Ayame stopped retreating.

Her weight settled into a stance that flowed instead of braced, and when the next golden crescent screamed toward her, the katana came up in a sweep so smooth it looked contemptuous.

The water on her blade parted the arc down its center the way a river parts around a stone, both halves detonating harmlessly past her shoulders while she walked through the gap where the spell had been.

The arena went quiet enough to hear the water dripping from her steel.

"She's using water!"