Tadex Arc Pt2 (Chapters 11-18)
The guards didn't move.
They stood at their posts around the arena and looked at the boy with the blood-stained hand at his face and did nothing, because doing something meant risking the Prince, and that calculation paralysed them completely.
On the field, Mukai's colour had left him entirely.
Kangetsu looked out at all of it - the frozen guards, the stunned crowd, Mukai standing motionless in the centre of the arena - and grinned with the satisfaction of someone whose plan had gone exactly right.
"Tell the King he'll be hearing from Alicia soon!"
A ripple moved through the crowd. Confusion first, then something edging toward fear, but not quite there yet.
From the other side of the portal, barely audible, an irritated hiss: "Daughter of Chandler."
Kangetsu cupped a hand to his ear. "What's that, big guy?"
"Say Daughter of Chandler." Sifiso's voice came through fully this time, seething.
Kangetsu turned back to the terraces. He let the silence stretch one beat further than necessary.
"Daughter of Chandler."
The name hit the crowd like a change in air pressure. Whatever noise had been building stopped. People who had been leaning forward pulled back. Someone near the top of the terraces made a sound that wasn't quite a word. The fear that moved through the stands was old and specific - the kind that lives in a name rather than a face, passed down through enough years that people feel it before they can explain it.
Then the portal closed and Kangetsu was gone.
"Sukai!"
Moto and Mukai's voices tore through the silence at the same moment. Moto was already on his feet, already moving toward where the portal had been, and he didn't slow down. He hit the closing void at full sprint and went in.
"Moto!" Sheu's voice cracked.
The portal shuddered. It spat him back out like a rejection - violent, immediate - and he flew backward and hit a stack of arena chairs with a crash that scattered them across the ground. His shoe came off somewhere in the middle of it.
Najo reached him first, skidding to a stop beside the wreckage.
"What happened?" His eyes moved from Moto to Mukai, still standing frozen in the arena's centre, to Sheu, still on her feet and shaking.
"They came from nowhere," Sheu managed.
Mukai broke. He turned and ran for home.
Moto was already getting up, limping, one shoe on. "Let's follow him."
"Are you serious right now?" Najo grabbed his arm.
Moto pulled free. "Quickly, before we lose him."
They caught up easily. Mukai was fast but he wasn't hiding.
Moto ran beside him and said nothing for a moment, just watched the worry radiating off the Prince's back - unguarded, uncontrolled, nothing like the person who had pinned Sheu against a tree two nights ago.
"Why are you following me?" Mukai didn't look at him.
"Our friend is in danger. We want to help."
"This isn't a joke." Mukai's voice was clipped. "I don't need dead weight."
"I'm surprised you even care," Moto said. "Sukai told us you hated him."
Mukai looked away. His jaw tightened. He didn't answer.
The mansion doors were guarded. They parted for Mukai and closed in front of everyone else. He turned back just long enough to tell the guards to keep them out, and then he was inside and the doors were shut.
They waited.
King Douglas arrived before Mukai came back out.
Sheu saw him first. She grabbed both boys by the backs of their necks and pushed them down, already dropping to one knee herself.
The King wore a deep red fur robe and moved with the unhurried weight of someone who had never needed to rush to be taken seriously. A solid gold crown, set with coloured gems, sat on his head. On the fingers of his right hand, a different ring on each one.
"What brings you here, children?"
"We are friends of Sukai. Please let us-" Sheu's elbow found Moto's ribs. "-Your Majesty. Please let us help."
King Douglas looked at Sheu for a moment with something close to amusement. "What a clever friend you have." His gaze moved. "Ginimbi's boy - are you here for the same thing?"
Najo said nothing. Sheu's elbow hit him harder.
"Yes," he said quickly.
"It's a shame to be meeting my son's friends like this." King Douglas raised one ringed finger and a guard stepped silently out from inside the house. The doors opened behind him and Olivia appeared with Mukai at her shoulder, Mukai's expression hardening the moment he saw that Moto had been allowed to stand at the threshold.
The guard produced a video transfer device. The screen brightened.
Alicia looked out from it with the composed ease of someone who had prepared for this conversation and found it mildly entertaining.
"Greetings, Your Majesty." Her voice carried the warmth of someone sharing a secret. "I never thought my work would bring me against you. But money talks."
"How much do you want?" The King's voice was tight.
Alicia laughed - light, unhurried, the laugh of someone who had already heard this question and found it predictable. "Don't be foolish. If I wanted money, I would have taken Ginimbi's kin." She paused, letting that settle. "I want something infinitely more valuable. And I know you'll be hard-headed at first, so to spare us both the back and forth-"
The screen shifted. Sukai was brought forward by two of the group's members, bound at the wrists and ankles, eyes wide, able to do nothing but twitch his fingers against the rope.
Olivia, who had been standing perfectly still on the balls of her feet, lowered her heels to the floor.
It was a small thing. Almost nothing. But the lightning that crept around her in faint, uncontrolled sparks was not nothing, and her eyes stayed fixed on her husband's face - steady, deliberate, a choice she was making in real time.
"Dear." The King's voice dropped. "Please. Let's hear the demands."
Olivia's heels stayed on the floor. The sparks didn't spread.
"Good," Alicia said. "The moment your wife steps outside, the boy is dead. I know what she's capable of." She let that sit for a breath. "Now. Bring the Earth Ore to a cave six clicks past the border."
"But that's-"
"No back and forth, Douglas." The familiarity of his name in her mouth made the King's guard visibly clench his jaw. "Bring it without fail. You have until twilight."
The screen went black.