"How did it get like this?" Ciel muttered to the trees, hiding from the enraged woman in what remained of her armor. He could admit the bulk of her anger was his fault. Any maiden would be furious after having her equipment dissolved by synthetic slime.
"I'm on the verge of a breakthrough, too," he lamented to the heavens. "I just need to reach Mandrake and sort out this mess. Why does it have to be so difficult?"
"Come out and face death, you creep!" The fury of a scorned princess echoed through the forest. "You owe me my gear!"
Ciel bit his lip, rapidly assessing the scenario. He came to a conclusion: if he had to make someone mad, he might as well milk every benefit from the situation.
---
Xiahana La Louve would never admit it, but at this moment, she had more in common with a raging berserker than Nuan Yulong.
In the dense woods, where moonlight struggled to penetrate the canopy, Xia shone like a holy beacon. Her expression, twisted with rage, seemed to channel the indignation of every suit of armor ever crafted.
It wasn't hard to understand her furor. Half of her beautiful white armor lay in ruins, courtesy of Ciel's slime and explosions. To make matters worse, that armor had been crafted for her ascension as Crown Princess; it held immense sentimental value.
"Look what you've done to my armor!" She shrieked, her voice powered by a potent mixture of justice and outrage. "Come out and pay for your crimes!"
Suddenly, Ciel's voice rang out from above, dripping with feigned nonchalance: "Isn't that just a piece of metal?"
Xia reached the overgrowth and delivered a shining white blast. The smiting glow eviscerated the treetops, leaving behind no trace, not even smoke.
Ciel's bodiless voice continued unabated, "So what's your deal? That girl fought because of daddy issues—totally the father's fault, by the way. But you? Why are you spending time blasting at an immaterial speaker?"
Xia lopped off another branch; droplets of sweat dripped down her face.
"Let me take a guess," he called from the undergrowth, unleashing psychological assassination. "Is it a mission for your country? Or, Void help me, mommy issues this time?"
"I don't even know my mother, idiot!" Xia's next slash cut down another tree but failed to produce Ciel. Her breathing grew heavy from both exertion and trepidation. "Come out and fight me!"
"Oh my, it is daddy issues, isn't it?" he spoke from behind. "When did Acceltra become a prime location for milk-fetchers?"
"My father is a great man!" Xia spun and stabbed at a tree, her blade finding only air and splintered bark. "He was framed!"
"But why are you here then?" Ciel echoed from the distance.
Xia, focusing on her target like a bull seeing red, pursued him. She tanked each question he had spoken.
"If he's truly innocent, why aren't you back in your nation trying to clear his name?" He threw another question to trip her.
Xia parkoured over a fallen log, ignoring the uncomfortable shackle of truth tying her leg.
"Or better yet, what's the proof of his innocence?" Ciel released another poke with the truth. "Getting someone a guilty verdict is easy. It only takes a kangaroo court, but vindicating his name means finding the true culprit of his crime. And then, somehow, convincing the jury they made a mistake."
"Do you think the King of Curtis would sell out his own people to the Yulong Empire?" She stopped and screamed. Her lungs ran empty from the volume she unleashed.
"Wow, so all this time you're royalty," Ciel said from her side. "Where's your bodyguard? Do they let royal bloodlines walk out into an obvious trap alone nowadays? That never ends well."
"I'm buying time to let them escape," Xia huffed. She eyed the forest as if each tree bark could transform into ferocious fangs.
Her frustration grew with each of Ciel's taunts. His voice seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once, always one step ahead of her.
"And how long is this 'time'?" he verbally ribbed. "Judging from the lack of an enthusiastic search party, I think your men may have already abandoned you."
"Shut up!" Xia's Aura burst to life in an attempt to repel the doubt and the painful epiphany. "I'm going to kill you, then demolish this empire and get the proof of my father's innocence. I will not allow anyone to get away with insulting his name!"
"That is a delusion," Ciel proclaimed with iron-hard certainty. The stinging diss left his vocal cords, and hit her with the cold, rough truth. "First, your father's detractors would never let this opportunity go to waste. They will mobilize the media. Every second you spend here is more dried ink on papers that exaggerate his flaws, real or not, by a thousandfold. Even if you pull a miracle and succeed in your impossible mission, his reputation will never be the same."
Leaves rustled, and Xia endured the downpour of reality soaking into her. And it was nowhere near over.
"Second, you're misunderstanding something. On the off-chance you beat everyone here and get to Mandrake—something I'll give you a solid chance of accomplishing out of respect—you will not find what you want. That whiny moron would never cut this kind of shady deal, not even after all these years. The grandest conspiracy for you to unearth is a harebrained official receiving an ax. Best case scenario, there will be no major reevaluation, no cure-all to make people realize their folly, just another ambitious idiot punished for using the God-Emperor incorrectly. Your nation will just shrug at this clown show and move on; no one will accept they are wrong."
Xia spun towards the direction from which the lecture emerged. Her jaw clenched with growing pain of loss, but again the speculation resumed behind her.
"Worst case, and the most likely in my opinion, your father had really contacted that guy for help. Mandrake is among the most reasonable people I know. If your father truly is that great of a man, that idiot is the person he would contact when something is going south."
She quivered. Her body unraveled before Ciel's cold theory, but the coup de grace was yet to come.
"Thirdly, look at yourself. Beating everyone? That must be a joke. You're isolated in the middle of the forest. Void only knows where. You bled against Mandrake's kid, and you want to get the real thing? You can't even defeat me."
"Just shut up!" Xia howled like an injured animal. Her Mana surged.
WHITE MAGIC RANK V: WRATH OF SOL
Torrential pulses of Mana coursed through Xia and cut through the clouds above with a cutting whisper. Light of the heavens shone into the dark forest. Burning comets of iridescence fell from the sky. The drum-beat of the carpet bombing continued until the very trunks and ground had been flattened. Wind blew the disintegrated landscape away to reveal a girl standing amidst countless empty craters she had made.
Overheated by the strain, She swayed and fell to her knees. Kneeling on the ground, she looked through the shaky world for her targets. What she spotted was a battered finger of a metal cube inscribed with glowing letters.
That chipped and cracked block carried Ciel's scathing conclusion: "Sorry, but all this time you've been chasing an imaginary opponent in a game you don't understand. Granted, you're probably an expert by now."
The device died, and Xia hammered the ground. Her face bubbled with tears as she bawled into the cold night.
---
From his monitor, the faraway Ciel observed the brat reduced to a teary mess in the middle of nowhere and felt a moderate sense of satisfaction. He lifted his hand and welcomed back the drone sent to divert Xia.
"Unmanned smartdrone for remote operation armed with a dispenser for Ether's voice transmitter," Ciel admired the beauty of his creation's sleek design and its exemplary performance against Xiahana. "Etaceh's old design is geared toward arranging country-wide Ether Cannon or matter transference," he sighed at his detractor's stupidity, but a grudging admiration tinged his voice. "I always told her all those extra parts are impractical and could be substituted for stealth missions. Why did she never listen?"
Ciel sent the drone back into a pool of blackness hidden inside his lab coat. Whistling in victory, he walked through the lush ground, making his way back to find Nuan Yulong. The plan forward couldn't be more simple: get the girl to lead him to the Yulong Empire's capital, give Mandrake the rightfully earned 'I-told-you-so', and set up his shop.
Abruptly, he stopped in his tracks. His memory flickered back to that lost, crying girl among the craters.
"Maybe I might even get some solutions for her situation," Ciel murmured. "I do owe her something for that armor."
He hurried the pace of his journey, but what he discovered at the end of that pathway shocked him.
A clearing, damaged by battle, greeted him. Trees were chopped with utmost precision. Ground upturned and trenches dug, but what truly rang the alarm bells were the pieces of tattered kimono lying on the ground.
The crime scene pointed to a single conclusion: Nuan Yulong had been abducted.
