Date: Unspecified
Ti: Unspecified
Location: Myriad Realms, Card World, Southern Region, Blossom District, Sky Blossom City, TSR Tower, Basent
Thanks to her innate ability to perceive fragnts of truth hidden within falsehoods, Petra instantly knew Aqualas wasn’t bluffing.
If she refused to hand over Bloodette, Aqualas genuinely would flood the entire Southern Region and the surrounding territories beneath an endless ocean. And the truly terrifying part was that this still wasn’t the worst thing Aqualas was capable of doing.
"Are you really sure about this?" Petra asked quietly while staring directly at her. "What about the promise you made to Bloodette?"
The words caused Aqualas’s expression to stiffen slightly. It was obvious her rage had montarily clouded her judgnt.
Petra slowly repeated the vow aloud, each word echoing heavily through the blood-filled basent.
"Bloodette... I, Ocean God Aqualas, promise that in this land, water shall forever remain beneath the land... unless you permit otherwise."
The mont those words were spoken, the atmosphere inside the basent subtly changed.
Even the violently swirling water around Aqualas seed to pause for a brief instant. For the first ti since arriving, uncertainty flickered across Aqualas’s face.
It wasn’t an oath but a casual promise she had made to Bloodette after presenting her this land as her territory. After all, oath in the presence of the world’s will held little value to Supre Beings who were extension of rule stream spirits that were an extension of the world’s will.
Beneath the rage and resentnt, there was still sothing anchoring Aqualas to Bloodette. Sothing powerful enough that even after thousands of years, she hadn’t broken that promise.
Listening to Aqualas’s promise to Bloodette, Cortney’s eyes widened in shock as countless mysteries from history suddenly clicked into place inside her mind.
Back in her school days, there had always been two questions that endlessly plagued students and teachers alike:
Why did the Five Regions never continue expanding outward?
And why didn’t the Ocean Supre, Aqualas, simply drown the Five Regions beneath the sea during the ancient war between the Supre Beings and card apprentices?
The official history books never gave satisfying answers. They vaguely spoke about treaties, balance, and mutual deterrence, but the explanations always felt incomplete.
Now Cortney finally understood why.
The Five Regions never dared expand recklessly because they feared provoking the Ocean Supre. If they crossed certain boundaries, Aqualas could simply reclaim those lands by subrging them beneath the ocean and declaring them part of her domain.
And the reason the Five Regions themselves still existed today wasn’t because Aqualas lacked the power to destroy them.
It was because of a single promise she made to Bloodette. A promise that the Ocean Supre Aqualas chose to uphold for countless millennia, even though she had enough reason not to.
At that mont, the history of the five regions itself suddenly felt far less glorious to Cortney.
The survival of humanity hadn’t rely been built upon the victories of card apprentices. Part of it had depended on the emotions, relationships, and unresolved bonds between Supre Beings that they treated as monsters and saw as enemies.
"Why should I keep my promise when she betrayed and my trust?" Aqualas scread, her voice filled with a pain so deep that even Cortney instinctively felt her chest tighten listening to it.
The sheer fact that Aqualas still carried this much anger after countless millennia revealed just how deeply she must have once trusted and cared for Bloodette. Hatred that survived for so long could only be born from sothing equally profound.
"Where do I even begin?" Petra replied smugly before raising one hand and extending a finger.
"First, if you break your promise now, then you’ll be no better than her. You’ll beco the very thing you hate most."
Aqualas’s expression instantly darkened.
Completely unfazed, Petra opened a second finger and continued, "Second, you still love her, but you want to hurt her as much as she hurt you."
"Shut up! I don’t love her!" Aqualas roared. "She could die for all I cared."
The water within the blood seed to lose control alongside her, causing the entire pool of blood to explode into motion. Forming waves that slamd violently against the basent walls while the blood suspended in the air spiraled uncontrollably around her. Cracks rapidly spread across the basent walls and columns as the pressure leaking from her emotions shook the entire structure.
For a brief mont, Cortney genuinely thought the entire TSR headquarters might collapse above them.
Cortney silently begged Petra to stop provoking Aqualas before the entire basent exploded, but Petra simply refused to back down.
"You do love her, you can’t help yourself from wanting to hurt her," Petra continued with a faint smirk. "After all, among all of us, you were always the most generous... and the pettiest."
"That’s it! I’m killing you first, then I’ll deal with those two afterward!"
Aqualas finally snapped after Petra kept rcilessly pointing out truths she clearly didn’t want to hear.
The next instant, the entire basent violently trembled.
BOOOOM!
A colossal beam of water erupted upward from beneath the floor like an underwater volcano exploding beneath the ground. The reinforced basent instantly shattered apart as layers of concrete, steel, and formation engravings were pulverized into debris.
The torrent swallowed both Petra and Aqualas whole before either of them could even be properly seen anymore. The entire underground basent sounded like a natural disaster unfolding beneath the city. When the chaos settled, both Supre Beings had vanished completely.
In their place remained a gigantic sinkhole carved into the ground, so deep that Cortney couldn’t even see the bottom. Water and blood spiraled downward into the abyss like a whirlpool leading into the underworld itself.
Bloodette was still floating absentmindedly atop the blood while crying, as if the destruction happening around her had nothing to do with her. Cortney’s expression imdiately changed watching Bloodette’s drifting body getting pulled toward the sinkhole along with the draining blood current. She barely managed to catch Bloodette before the whirlpool could drag her into the abyss below.
Clutching onto Bloodette tightly, Cortney desperately stabilized herself while staring into the enormous dark pit left behind by the clash of two Supre Beings. And for the first ti since eting them, Cortney truly understood why the Supre Beings were feared as disasters capable of reshaping the world itself.
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