Free Web NovelChapter 17: No Answers?
The voice was barely a whisper yet it cut through the silence of the dugout like a blade.
It sliced cleanly through Caius’s internal medical assessment as the soft trembling feminine voice in a world defined by roaring monsters and dying men was entirely disorienting.
Caius looked up.
Aurelia Solis hadn’t walked to her cot.... She was standing exactly three feet away from him, completely frozen...
The terrifying Villainess looked absolutely nothing like the walking weapon of mass destruction that had just vaporized dozens of beasts with golden holy fire.
She looked like a porcelain doll that had been dropped directly into a mud pit and had miraculously failed to shatter.
Her posture was unnaturally rigid.
Her breathing was incredibly shallow with her chest barely rising beneath her tattered mud-caked clothes.
The cascading golden hair that usually framed her flawless face was a tangled mess of thick soot, dried blood, and trench dirt.
She was visibly shivering however her glowing piercing crimson eyes weren’t looking at his face.
They were obsessively glued to his left hand... the exact hand he had used to violently grab her bare arm and drag her down into the mud.
She was staring at his skin as if it were an impossibility, rather a glitch in the very fabric of the universe.
In her traumatized mind, the violent worldview that she lived by was shattering.
For her entire wretched existence, the Imperial Inquisitors had drilled a single, truth into her skull: her flames were a curse of indiscriminate destruction.
They acted on the subconscious malice of her broken soul...
They melted iron... They vaporized flesh... They had incinerated her own brother...
She was a monster, fundamentally incapable of feeling the touch of another living creature without reducing them to screaming ash yet, there was his hand. frёewebnoѵēl.com
It was perfectly intact.
The calloused skin was entirely unblemished and the flesh was unblistered.
When he had forcefully grabbed her bare arm to save her from the Alpha’s snapping jaws, her cursed magic had involuntarily flared but the apocalyptic heat hadn’t manifested... The flames had been warm.
They had been gentle and they had lovingly wrapped around his grip, completely defying the destructive rule of her own existence.
The walls of her lifelong isolation were violently crumbling around her, and it was terrifying her.
"H-hey..." Caius started, reaching down to his duffel bag to grab a relatively clean strip of linen.
He was trying to act as though this were just a standard, post-battle cooldown.
He treated the situation casually, fully intending to quietly bandage his bleeding shoulder and maintain the stoic persona he had carefully crafted to keep the walking nuclear weapon pacified.
"Answer me!" She yelled out with her voice suddenly shaking.
The volume of her cry seemed to physically rattle the damp dirt walls of the bunker.
It wasn’t the arrogant command of a royal princess demanding obedience from a commoner.
It was the shattered plea of a prisoner who had just watched the heavy iron door of her cell swing open for the very first time in a decade, completely unable to comprehend the sunlight bleeding into the dark.
The chilling apathy that had defined her entire existence since she arrived at the Carrion Front was entirely gone.
She looked terrified of the reality she was currently witnessing.
"The Imperial Inquisitors told me exactly what I am," Aurelia continued, taking a step closer with her chest heaving. "They studied my core for years. My flames... they burn everything that touches me. Everything. There are no exceptions. It is a curse of indiscriminate destruction. They melt iron. They vaporize flesh. You grabbed my bare skin! I saw the fire wrap around your hand! Why do you still have a hand?! Why are you still alive?!"
Caius looked down at his left hand, flexing his unblemished fingers, before looking back up at the frantic Villainess.
He couldn’t tell her the truth, not that he even knew what the truth was... Why hadn’t he burned in that fire? Ereba hadn’t even intervened.
However he had to maintain his persona.
Caius ripped the linen cloth with his teeth with his expression turning deadpan.
"I don’t know," Caius lied smoothly, applying pressure to his bleeding shoulder. "Maybe my Ash core smothered the ignition point before the heat could transfer. Ash is just the byproduct of a dead fire, right? Maybe it acted as an insulator against your magic."
It was a completely bullshit magical theory, but he said it with such arrogant confidence that it sounded vaguely plausible.
In a world governed by elemental factions, conflicting mana types, and divine authorities, the idea that a fundamentally ’dead’ core could act as a grounding wire for hyper-volatile plasma wasn’t entirely outside the realm of imperial physics.
’Why does he lie to me...?’ Aurelia thought as she stared at him with her lips parting slightly. ’We have already tried this out and I can even burn those who are from the Water Tribe... so what makes him so special?’
"And before you ask why I shoved you out of the way of that Alpha," Caius continued. "I didn’t do it out of some noble, self-sacrificing chivalry. I simply did the math."
He tied the makeshift bandage tightly around his thick bicep, grunting at the sharp pain.
The linen instantly began to stain a dark, wet crimson as the ruined capillaries struggled to close beneath the crushing pressure.
"You’re the Emperor’s daughter... Any fool who has eyes can see it." Caius stated, looking her dead in her glowing eyes. "Your father is a notoriously unstable tyrant. If the Imperial Princess gets her throat ripped out by a stray beast in this mud pit while I’m standing two feet away... he won’t just execute me. He’ll send the Imperial Fleet to literally glass my family’s entire estate into a smoking crater just to make a point... or he’ll kill everyone here, I don’t mean to disrespect him."
He leaned back against the damp dirt wall, sighing exhaustedly.
The cold of the earth seeped through his skin which was in contrast to the boiling heat of the Void energy slowly settling deep within his meridians.
"I saved you because keeping you alive is the only way I guarantee I don’t get eradicated. It’s as simple as that."
It was a perfectly constructed shield.
It was the exact type of ruthless, self-serving logic that defined the nobility of the Solis Empire.
Every lord, every scion, every bastard son of the high houses operated on a currency of leverage, survival, and bloodline preservation.
By framing his act of physical salvation as a purely selfish maneuver, Caius was stripping the romance from the moment.
He was establishing a transactional baseline. I keep you breathing, you keep the Emperor’s dogs off my neck.
Aurelia stood in the dim light, staring at the muscular man sitting in the shadows.
She heard his excuse but none of that actually mattered to her... The logic didn’t matter as wel...
The physical reality did.
She looked at the deep, jagged, bleeding gashes across his broad shoulder.
She saw the hot crimson blood staining his ripped silk shirt, the expensive fabric thoroughly ruined by the brutal mechanics of the Carrion Front.
He had literally thrown his own body between her and death. He had taken the kinetic impact of an Alpha Blight-Fiend... a strike that would have easily sheared a lesser man’s torso in half just to ensure her fragile, mana-exhausted frame wasn’t touched.
And when he touched her... the curse that had isolated her for her entire life had simply failed.
The lie about the Ash core insulating the heat echoed in her mind, but it felt hollow.
It felt like an excuse.
Even if it were true which it wasn’t, even if his biology was the sole reason he didn’t turn to ash, it didn’t change the fundamental outcome.
He was safe. frёewebnoѵel.ƈo๓
Slowly, the violent trembling in her hands began to worsen.
It was no longer just the adrenaline crashing...
She realized she was standing in front of the single, solitary anomaly in the entire universe.
A boy who would bleed for her, and a boy she could not burn.
For the first time in her memory, she was looking at a human being who didn’t view her through the lens of pure terror.
He didn’t look at her like she was a ticking time bomb... He looked at her like she was an investment...
He looked at her like she was a person with tangible value and she didn’t even know his name.
"What is your name?" Aurelia whispered with her voice turning incredibly small, cracking under the weight of a soul-crushing isolation finally coming to an end.
