Read Novel Full Chapter 758: Domination
Chapter 758: Domination
Almond sat near the bow with the crown fragment warm in his hands. He had not put it down since Velmoor fell.
"It’s watching us," he said quietly. "Deciding what kind of kingdom we are."
"Then let’s show it," Lily said.
He did not have to wait long.
---
Drevane struck first, and she struck ugly.
Her hull came about in the dark before true dawn, and the sea around her began to churn.
Wreckage rose with her. Hundreds of drowned soldiers, armor barnacled black, weapons kelp-wrapped and dripping. An army built from every ship this ocean had ever swallowed.
They did not go for the Chainbreaker.
They went for Corvanth.
"She’s spending nothing and asking the sea to do her killing," Almond said. His eyes had already gone distant, reading the whole grim tide at once. "That’s not strength. That’s theft."
"Then let’s take it back," Rudra said, and spun the wheel hard. "Full speed. We end this fast."
---
The Chainbreaker hit the drowned ranks like a hammer.
Gopu came first, diving out of the low gold clouds with his jaws already wide.
Dragonfire poured out in a solid column and tore straight through forty ranks of drowned soldiers in one pass, turning barnacled armor to slag before a single blade could rise to meet it.
"That’s one way to say good morning," Ainen called up at him.
Saffa answered from the deck below, both hands raised, ice spreading out across the water in a spiked field that skewered a second wave clean through their rotted chests.
Natalia’s first volley went out a heartbeat later, arrows wreathed in channeled fire, and every one of them found a throat.
"Kayla, wall!" she shouted.
Kayla’s lattice rose silver and absolute along Corvanth’s exposed flank, and the drowned soldiers that threw themselves against it simply stopped existing on the other side of it.
Silvester hit the deck running, blade already drawn, and the first drowned soldier that swung for him found nothing but air.
He dropped low under the arc of a kelp-wrapped axe, pivoted on one heel, and drove his sword up in a single clean line.
Light poured off the edge as it rose, a blazing streak that split the soldier from hip to shoulder and kept going, carving straight through the two ranks behind it.
"Anyone else want to try that?" he called out, grinning through the smoke.
Hiroshi answered by punching straight through a shield made of fused coral, and Maya’s patterns caught the three soldiers behind it in a closing net that Hiroshi finished with a single downward strike.
Aryan was already moving between them, blade flashing twice, and two more drowned soldiers folded and did not rise again.
"I take it back," he called. "This is fun."
Big D did not bother with a blade at all. He simply walked into the thickest press of the drowned ranks and started throwing them, one after another, off the deck and into the sea, laughing low in his chest the whole time.
"Come on then," he growled. "Is that all this dead king’s got left in him?"
---
Almond crossed a bridge of Rudra’s frozen sea in three strides and reached Drevane’s own ship before her crew had finished reforming their line.
He did not go in alone.
Alfred came first, blade a silver blur that opened a path through six soldiers before any of them registered he had moved. Sylvia’s vines followed, spearing up through the deck planks to drag another three off their feet and hold them there.
"Clear him a line," Almond said, and Benedict answered, stepping forward with his shield raised, bastion sigils flaring gold as he simply walked through the resistance like it was fog.
Galvaren dropped out of the sky behind him, storm wings spread wide, and drove a spear of raw lightning down through the mast that Drevane’s crew had been using for cover.
The mast came apart in fire.
Meliora’s transmutation cube spun once in her hand, and every drowned soldier’s weapon within twenty paces simply lost its edge, crumbling to rust in their grip.
Velkris folded the light across the deck so that half of Drevane’s remaining soldiers swung at shapes that were never really there.
Nyssara finished what was left, frost and flame twin strikes that froze one flank solid and burned the other to ash in the same breath.
Almond walked through the wreckage of it all and found Ysolde Marrow waiting for him at her own broken mainmast, blade drawn, eyes hard.
"You could stop this," he said.
"I could," she agreed, and came at him fast.
Her blade was quick, edged in something dark that drank the gold light around it, and for three exchanges she matched him strike for strike.
Then Almond read the weapon the way he read everything now, down to the one truth sitting at its core, and found that it wanted only one thing.
To win, whatever the cost.
He turned the fourth strike aside at the exact point the blade’s own hunger left it open, and it spun out of her hand and dropped hissing into the black water below.
Ysolde looked at her empty palm.
Behind her, the last of her risen dead sank back beneath the waves and did not return, Rudra’s Unmoved Current finally closing over the whole churning battlefield like a lid.
"Fine," she said. "Fine."
Her ship groaned and began to list, hull opened in a dozen places by dragonfire and lightning and Meliora’s rusted, ruined weapons still scattered across her deck.
Her crew took to the boats without her stopping them.
Ysolde went last, and looked back once.
"You’re a strange kind of dangerous," she said. "The kind that wins by refusing to become the thing it’s fighting."
"It’s working so far," Almond said.
The Hub’s notice landed clean and final.
[Kingdom Eliminated: Drevane]
[Kingdoms remaining in event: 2 of 312]
---
Vessa did not wait for the wreckage to settle.
"Regalon," she called, voice carrying hard across the water. "You’ve earned my thanks twice now. That doesn’t mean I’ll hand you the last flag for free."
Her storm-glass rigging lit from end to end, and lightning arced out across the gap between the ships in three converging bolts.
"Positions!" Rudra shouted.
Saffa’s ice caught the first bolt and shattered under it. Kayla’s lattice caught the second and held, barely, silver light straining white at the edges.
The third came straight for Rudra himself.
Clovelle folded the space in front of him without being asked, and the bolt passed through empty air a full pace to his left and struck the sea instead, throwing up a column of boiling steam.
"Thank you," Rudra said.
"Don’t thank me yet," Clovelle said. "She’s not done."
She wasn’t. Corvanth’s whole deck lit at once, chain lightning leaping from soldier to soldier as Vessa’s crew charged the gap in a single coordinated wave.
Natalia and Kayla held the front of it, but it was Marcus who called the answer.
"Split their formation! Silvester, Hiroshi, center! Everyone else, flanks!"
Silvester met the first Corvanth soldier’s blade with his own, turned it wide with a single hard twist, and answered with the same blazing line technique that had carved through Drevane’s dead. It tore clean through the man’s guard and sent him sprawling, stunned but breathing.
"Sorry about that," Silvester said, already moving to the next.
Hiroshi and Maya broke the center of the charge apart between them, her patterns herding soldiers into range and his fists finishing what the patterns started, blow after controlled blow that put people down without putting them under.
Aryan ducked one strike, answered with two of his own, and grinned at the soldier blinking up at him from the deck. "You’ll live. Mostly through my restraint."
Gopu rose above the whole clash and slammed both wings down at once, a shockwave of raw air that staggered every Corvanth soldier still standing and cleared the deck for what came next.
"Now, Almond," Rudra called.
Almond was already moving, crossing the last stretch of open water with Ashkryon rising molten and vast beside him, furnace heart blazing, lattice singing with borrowed heat.
The Sovereign of the Molten Lattice struck Corvanth’s mainmast with one open palm, and the whole structure came apart in a wash of white fire that lit the sealed ring like a second dawn.
Vessa staggered at her own helm as her ship’s heart, the storm-glass rigging that fed every bolt she commanded, cracked from bow to stern and went dark.
She looked out at her broken deck, at her crew already breathing hard and outmatched, at the Chainbreaker’s family standing whole and unshaken across the water.
She laughed once, low and tired.
"That’s the difference," she said. "I finally understand it."
She drew her sword, slow, and laid it flat across both open palms.
"Ananta Regalon," she called, loud enough for both decks to hear. "Corvanth yields the field."
---
The Hub’s final notice for the Rift Relics Conquest broke across a sky finally, truly lightening toward morning.
[Kingdom Eliminated: Corvanth]
[Kingdoms remaining in event: 1 of 312]
[Ananta Regalon stands alone.]
No one cheered. They were too busy checking each other for wounds that mostly weren’t there.
Big D looked out at Corvanth’s ship, wounded but whole, her crew lowering boats of their own free will.
"That’s domination done right," he said. "Nobody drowns who didn’t have to."
Rudra crossed the gap of water to shake Vessa’s hand one last time.
"Find me again sometime," he said. "When neither of us has to be an enemy."
"I’ll hold you to that, Admiral," Vessa said.
Beneath the Chainbreaker’s hull, the golden light finally began to rise.