The Rules of Blood-Volume Two ; Chapter 51 (267) - Outrage
To call what followed an outrage would be an understatement.
By the time Joan entered the tent at dawn, four hundred men and women awaited the gray man’s arrival. Some were there for revenge against the gray man, while others were there to challenge him for the first time.
The excitement was palpable in the air.
But, as the hours passed by, the excitement slowly turned to frustration. And by noon, anger.
A group of youths, together with Merja, went to the inn where the gray man stayed to bring him here, thinking he was too afraid to come, once he saw how many people actually arrived to challenge him.
But when they returned empty-handed as the inn’s room was empty of any life, anger turned into rage barely controllable.
When the youths went to the surrounding barracks and questioned all the guards they could find, they found only one thing. That he wasn’t seen leaving. Then for the next hours, well in the afternoon, they went to every house, inn, and store they could find.
But nothing there either.
It got to the point that every rock and fallen wood was turned over, and every civilian asked. But the gray man vanished as if he had never been there to begin with. Yet the people he defeated all said the same thing.
That he was as real as it can get.
This sent the youths into two groups. The ones who were defeated or have seen the man, and those who only believed the Gray Man to be a ghost and an obvious waste of time.
The rage was ready to spill out.
And when the first punch was given, the others followed like rain. Punch after punch, kick after kick. Four hundred people were against each other’s throats.
Four hundred people with a thirst of blood so deep, and a pleasure of fighting so high, that it went on for hours. An entire barrack of guards was summoned, but as it was a legal event, they couldn’t do anything but help remove those too severely wounded from the fray.
Until they too had to join in on the fun, as, at some point, the groups that formed dissolved like sugar in water, and anyone became an enemy.
Men, women, guards, it didn’t matter really.
Even Joan and Merja were caught in the middle of the chaos, having to somehow attempt to fight their way out.
It didn’t even matter the reason why the fight started in the first place.
All that was known was that the fight ended in a singular death, over a hundred severely wounded, and well over three hundred wounded or passed out, with nobody able to stay on their feet by the end of it.
The Gray Man, whether he existed or not, had won the challenge without even realizing it.
An achievement so magnificent that even the Daughter, watching silently from the stands, allowed herself the faintest of chuckles.
For the Daughter knew who the gray man was.
But that faint chuckle overshadowed all, as it has not been recorded in recent history when the last time someone saw a Daughter laughing.
That was how rare the moment was, an achievement so great that the chuckle alone might’ve earned a place in the Domain’s history, had there been anyone still watching to see its beauty.
But the smile vanished just as quickly as it came when the Daughter got to her feet, walked off the stand, and went to call for help from the first guard she found in Segetuza.
After two entire barracks of guards came and escorted everyone out, it was found out that the only dead person was Merja, due to a heart attack she had after she was caught in the middle of the fight.
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Joan, still passed out, was escorted to her carriage to be brought back to her Blood. There, the Daughter and coachmen stood waiting, and when the guards placed Joan on her bench, with the sharp sound of a whip, the carriage began moving.
The Daughter, seeing Joan still deep in her violently induced sleep, removed the spell of Joan’s body, allowing the Raw Vita in her body to strengthen her and quicken her regeneration.
But until she woke up, the Daughter looked downward, her eyes losing focus quickly, replaced by a vision of two iron doors, with countless decorations that told the story of her Order.
She sent her mind forward, knocking gently.
A deep metallic roar followed as the iron doors began to slowly open, scraping the stone floor below and revealing a path of marble, illuminated by white crystals on both sides of the corridor.
She sent her mind forward, stopping at the entrance of the corridor.
“Word of Blanc of Blood Denegis has arrived,” she said out loud.
But no voice left her lips in the carriage; it echoed on the marble path in her mind.
A pull of incredible strength, feeling as if she was grabbed by a gigantic invisible hand, dragged her past three other sets of iron doors, all opening instantly as if pushed open by an enormous weight.
With each door she passed at incomprehensible speeds, the marble darkened, and so did the crystals.
From white to gray, from gray to black.
And as the final iron door opened with frightening ease, it revealed a narrow stone path, placing her at the foot of a stairway that climbed for hundreds of steps above the crimson lake below, what the Daughters, in their quiet way, called the Lake of Blood.
“Praise the Blood, Praise the Vita, Praise the Shattered Heavens,” she muttered, bowing before the flight of stairs.
“Praise,” the echoes of countless women replied in unison, distorting the voice to the point it was unrecognizable.
Only after their reply, did the Daughter look upward, past the flight of stairs towards the castle standing near a cliff, on the edge of a thousand-foot drop straight into the lake below.
“What did the Empire’s prospect do?” the voices asked, some with a bit of delay that sent tens of voices all around her.
“He won a battle without being present, escaping days before he was found, by redirecting the people’s attention elsewhere,” the Daughter replied.
“How do you know it was him?” the eerie voices of her masters asked.
“I saw him yesterday, but he hid himself when he noticed the carriage,” the Daughter explained.
“Open your mind,” said half of the voices in her left ear, with the other coming shortly after in her right ear, “Let us see.”
The Daughter closed her mind, allowing the crawling sensation of a thousand hands to overtake her as they looked at every thought, memory, or feeling she had had as of late.
“You speak the truth,” the voices echoed as the crawling sensation left her body, “You have done well, Sister. You are free to return to the surface. We will let the Daughter of Blood Maroux give them the good news.”
“Praise the Blood, Praise the Vita, Praise the Shattered Heavens,” she bowed once more.
And as the invisible giant hand pulled her back into the corridor, doors shutting in succession behind her as she passed them, the only sound that lingered was the echo of the women’s voices.
“Praise.”
Before her vision cleared once more, back inside the carriage.
It was half an hour later that Joan woke up, the freed Raw Vita in her body now making the wounds on her body lessen in severity by the minute.
“Huh?” she jumped up, for good reasons, confused, “What happened? Where are we?”
“The brawl that broke out due to the gray man’s absence,” the Daughter explained, her expression cold, emotionless, “We are now on our way back to the Patriarch to .”
“Yeah, but…” Joan spoke, but lost track of her words.
“Merja passed away,” the Daughter added, “Heart attack.”
“Damn,” Joan muttered, grief-stricken for not more than half a second before asking a more important question in her mind, “Who won the brawl, at least?”
“The one absent,” the Daughter replied, “The Gray Man.”
Joan blinked. Once. Twice.
She wasn’t able to comprehend what the Daughter said.
What confused her more was what that meant for her, so she opened her mouth to speak.
But the Daughter beat her to it, as even a child could have guessed her next question, “The Patriarch would decide what that means for your marriage; however, as his identity remains unknown, it would most likely fail to go further.”
“Unless this makes Father even more curious about this man, and starts looking for him,” Juna muttered, looking at the window and frowning, “If he even exists, that is.”
Joan had just lost against an enemy she hadn’t even fought, which frustrated her to no end. But the truth was that her expression now was nothing but a smile painted as a frown.
For in her heart, she thanked the gray man for his absence, and all that happened, since it kept her free of marriage, even if only until the next time something like this happened.
But that smile too faded when the Patriarch declared the Domain-scale search of the gray man, since the Patriarch, after hearing the story of how an absent man had won a battle, became even more fascinated by this ‘Gray Man’ and his real identity.
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Volume Two ; Chapter 51 (267) - Outrage
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