Read Novel Full Chapter 471: Tides Of War [I]
Chapter 471: Tides Of War [I]
Ivan did as he was warned.
He stopped, then moved his gaze around to fix it on Casey — her dominant hand was tight around the hilt of the sheathed shashka at her hip.
The first thing Ivan did was calculate the distance. It seemed safe enough. She was far and hadn’t activated her Origin Card yet.
Around her, everyone had stopped in their tracks.
Even the ones who had already started crossing the waters ceased propelling their rafts and turned their heads back toward the shore.
A bewildered silence fell over the entire wetland, broken only by the lapping of the river’s tumultuous current.
“…Lady Casey?” Irina hesitated, confused as she stepped between the two. “What… are you doing? Why are you drawing your sword on Ivan?”
Casey didn’t take her eyes off him. “Irina, get behind me. Now.”
Her face was composed, but her heart was hammering. The situation was not good. Ivan was dangerously close to the water.
From what she had heard and seen of him, fighting that guy in his domain wouldn’t be easy, especially if that trident really was an artifact that granted him control over water.
Viktor quickly stepped forward, his eyes darting between Casey’s deathly serious expression and the feigned confused look on Ivan’s face. “Lady Snowrite, what the hell? I don’t see the reason—”
“I said stay back!” Casey barked, her voice like the crack of a whip through the riverbank. Though her eyes, swirling blue over bright violet, remained pinned on Ivan.
The boy in the spotlight was motionless at the water’s edge. He looked a little timid, like he usually did, with his shoulders slightly hunched and his hand harmlessly clutching the trident’s shaft.
“…Casey,” Ivan said, voice quiet, almost wounded. “I… I don’t understand. Did I do something? I can—”
“Silence!” Casey interrupted, her voice dropping into a sharp register. “Save me the meek country boy act. If you want to say something, come here. Step away from the water, slowly.”
For a second, it looked like he would plead his case further, demand answers or question her sanity like Viktor was currently doing.
But as that hopeful second passed, Ivan’s posture relaxed. His shoulders remained loose, but his back straightened.
The large, round glasses perched on his nose angled back and reflected the diffused light of the overcast sky, completely obscuring his eyes.
The corners of his lips twitched. “Or… what?”
All those who were present there could swear on the chill that ran through the crowd just then. Ivan’s voice was flat, cold and unbothered. Confident in a way Casey had never heard before.
That shift in his demeanor was so abrupt, so unlike him, that Irina really thought she had misheard for a moment, her lips parting uncertainly. “Ivan…?”
But Ivan didn’t spare her a glance. He kept looking at Casey. Slowly, he raised his left hand and removed his glasses, discarding them casually into the mud at his feet.
With the glare on his lenses no more, the soft blue in his eyes had hardened into something dark and oceanic, primal like the sea itself.
“You’re sharp,” Ivan said, a faint smile finally stealing over his lips. “And you’re strong. How is that fair? I can see why Samael specifically tipped me off about you. He holds you in high regard, you know that? Not many people can say that. You were foolish to reject his offer.”
“Ivan!” Viktor yelled, taking one furious step forward but not daring to get too close. His blackish-blue eyes turned crimson as he summoned his Origin Card. “Are you out of your fucking mind?!”
Irina was more distraught than confused now. “Ivan, please! Just come here! Step away from the water and let us talk this through! Don’t do anything rash! Please, I beg you! Please! We are your friends, goddammit! Why are you doing this!? You promised you’d be beside me! When I asked you to join Viktor and me, you told me—”
“I told a lie,” he said. Just those two words, and he still didn’t look at her when he uttered them.
The moment seemed to stretch, the stifling silence taut as a bowstring, before snapping under the weight of Viktor’s outrage next. “You gutless bastard, I’ll fucking kill you! The hell is going on in your mind, you moron!”
“Listen to your friends!” Casey picked up, finality in her caution. “You’re surrounded by more than sixty Cadets. Twenty of them are naval specialists like you. Even if water is your domain, you can’t possibly take us all! There will be debuffs and artillery spells raining on you from all sides, and we’ll drag you out of that river before you can do anything!”
Sensing the rising tension, many other Cadets started calling upon their innate abilities. Some assumed lookout positions, ready for any other ambush that might come. Most had simply brandished their weapons.
Ivan wasn’t just chatting either. His trident had long since touched the water. But its effect was only now starting to show.
The water at his boots wasn’t churning anymore— it was going eerily still.
The otherwise turbulent, muddy currents of the Great Divide had seemed to calm down, locked in an unnatural calmness that stretched for ten, twenty, fifty… a few hundred meters out into the river.
“Yeah, the odds look pretty even, don’t they?” Ivan chuckled, sounding rather excited for whatever mind-boggling reason. “Besides, I don’t have to win. I just have to cripple the Ivory navy. Let’s see how you can tip the scales of this war then, yeah?”
That was it.
As if his admission shattered some kind of invisible dam on everyone’s collective restraint, all hell broke loose.
Those who could fly immediately took to the skies. Those already in the river summoned their armors or strengthened their defenses. Those powerful in the water dove right in.
And those on land rushed the double-crosser.
Viktor was one of them. His feet lifted in the air, hovering inches off the ground as he shot onward like a fired bullet. “I’ll rip your throat out, you traitorous wimp!”
“No! Don’t get close to him—” Casey started, perhaps because she was among one of the few who noticed the water had now started ebbing backward.
But her warning came a heartbeat too late. Though even if it had arrived on time, nothing much would’ve changed.
The water moved at Ivan’s command. A large tide erupted from near the center of the Great Divide. It seemed as if the river itself had stood up.
That literal mountain of water swallowed the rafts whole, hurling Cadets aboard screaming into the churning current as reinforced steel and timber snapped apart like kindling.
Someone shouted a warning, someone cried in fear, and someone howled in pain. Yet every other noise was soon buried beneath a thunderous crash.
Thousands upon thousands of tonnes of water slammed back down. The impact shook everything and sent out a tidal wave rolling toward the shoreline. The scale of the flood was apocalyptic.
Viktor’s crimson eyes widened as the incoming wave blotted out the sky above him. His instincts screamed at him to get away, but he forced his focus on Ivan.
He was the closest to him. He had to take him out right here. So he discharged his heat vision, firing two needle-thin, superheated red lasers at his childhood friend.
Ivan, however, was more than ready. He swung his trident upward.
Following the arc of his weapon, a torrential stream of water gushed out from the patch of river near his feet and froze solid, forming a thick wall of blue-white ice between himself and the incoming plasma beams.
The twin crimson lasers carved deep trenches into the frozen barrier, hissing loudly as countless litres of ice instantly vaporized into clouds of scalding steam.
But the laser beams never reached their target.
The moment Viktor’s vision was obscured, Ivan thrust his trident forward. The ice wall exploded. Numerous razor-sharp shards cut through the air like a blizzard fired from a cannon.
Startled, Viktor gasped and crossed both forearms over his face.
Thankfully, the hailstorm battered against a shimmering barrier that flared into existence in front of him just in time, both shielding him and giving him the precious second to soar higher. He did.
It was thanks to Irina. A safe distance away, she had both her hands raised, expression caught somewhere between panicked and enraged.
Ivan gritted his teeth, but didn’t move in. He didn’t have to take any unnecessary risks. Very soon, they all would be pulled underwater anyway.
Everyone else knew this too, of course.
So they tried closing in on him as fast as they could while simultaneously being sensible about it, summoning their Cards and armaments. But nothing could make a difference at this point.
The waterlogged ground under their feet froze. And the water surrounding Ivan himself rose in spiraling columns, twisting around his body like serpents before lashing out at his attackers.
That was all the distraction Ivan needed before the tidal wave reached the shore.
The collision was catastrophic. An entire section of the shoreline vanished beneath the surge of roaring water.
All the Cadets who had been in the middle of their charge were swept off their feet. Their boots lost traction against the frozen mud and their formations collapsed.
Sentries hastily threw up barriers, Supporters reinforced armor, and Casters weaved their spells. None of it mattered.
Only those who could fly escaped the flood. Plus those who were sensible enough to get far, far away.
Some kids desperately grabbed onto the exposed roots of the mangrove trees, while a handful of them possessed some innate abilities or Acquire Cards that helped them maintain their footing.
But the majority of them were caught in the undertow and dragged to the depths of the central river.