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Chapter : 253
"You had every advantage," Niro continued, his voice growing colder and harder with each word. "The finest tutors. The best training. A bloodline that stretches back to the founding of this Empire. And what did you do with it?" He let out a short, bitter laugh. "You threw it all away.
You joined the war campaign of the weakest, most pathetic, most underfunded Princess in the entire Royal Family."
He leaned closer, his voice dropping to a sharp, cutting whisper that somehow carried even further than his normal speaking voice. "You humiliated our bloodline, Ira. You took everything our family built and dragged it through the mud. You are a failure. You have always been a failure. And you will always be a failure."
The street had gone very quiet. The nearby shoppers were staring. Some with pity. Some with discomfort. Most with the careful, deliberate blankness of people who knew better than to get involved in a noble family's business.
Luna's jaw tightened. Her sleepy eyes had sharpened into something fierce and protective. She opened her mouth to speak, but before she could, another voice cut through the silence.
It was Risa.
* * *
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Risa stepped forward.
It was such a small thing. Just a single step. Her yellow dress swished softly as she moved. Her pink hair caught the sunlight. Her small hands, still dusty with sour cream powder from Ken's chips, curled into fists at her sides.
She positioned herself directly between Niro and Ira, her back straight and her bright green eyes blazing with an anger that nobody on the 13th Unit had ever seen from her before.
Risa was the sweet one. The gentle one. The girl who talked to her plants and giggled at handsome detectives and shared her snacks with everyone. She was not a fighter. She was not aggressive. She was kindness wrapped in a yellow dress with a basket of sewing supplies over her arm.
But right now, looking up at the tall, terrifying Grandmaster who had just called her friend a failure, Risa's green eyes burned with a fierce, uncharacteristic fire.
"You do not get to talk to her like that," Risa said.
Her voice was not loud. It was not dramatic. It was steady and clear and absolutely unwavering, like a small flame burning in a dark room. She tilted her chin up and met Niro's cold grey gaze without flinching.
"Ira is not a failure. She is brave and she is kind and she chose her own path. You have no right to stand there and say those horrible things to her. She does not deserve that. Nobody deserves that."
Niro looked down at Risa the way a person might look at an insect that had wandered onto their shoe. His expression shifted from disgust to something even colder. Amusement. The kind of amusement that came from watching something tiny and insignificant try to challenge something vast and untouchable.
"How quaint," Niro said softly. His lips curled into a thin, mocking smile. "A little healer girl defending a disgrace. Does the 13th Princess recruit her soldiers from the nursery now?"
Risa did not back down. Her green eyes stayed locked on his. Her jaw was set. Her small fists trembled at her sides, but her feet stayed planted firmly on the ground.
"Ira is worth more than you will ever understand," Risa said, her voice rising just slightly. "She protects people. She helps people. She is a real warrior, not some bully in an expensive suit who gets his power from making others feel small."
The words hung in the air between them. For a single, suspended moment, the entire street seemed to hold its breath.
Then Niro's smile disappeared.
His grey eyes went flat and cold, like a door slamming shut. The amusement vanished, replaced by something far more dangerous. His jaw tightened. His shoulders shifted. And very slowly, very deliberately, he raised his right hand.
It was a controlled, precise movement. The kind of gesture that was designed to intimidate, to remind, to make absolutely clear who held the power in any interaction. His palm was open, facing downward, his long fingers spread slightly apart. It was not a fist. It was not a weapon. But everyone who saw it understood exactly what it meant.
It was the hand of a master preparing to discipline someone who had stepped out of line.
Risa's eyes widened. Her breath caught in her throat. Her body instinctively tensed, every nerve screaming at her to step back, to run, to get away from the overwhelming pressure of this man's presence. But she held her ground. Her feet stayed rooted to the cobblestones.
She was terrified. But she did not move.
Niro's hand rose higher. His fingers twitched, and a faint shimmer of mana flickered around his palm. Just a hint. Just a taste. Enough to remind everyone watching that he was not just a noble with a cruel tongue. He was a Grandmaster. One of the most powerful combat mages in the entire Empire.
And he was about to remind this little healer exactly what that meant.
Luna moved. Her hand shot out, lightning mana already crackling at her fingertips. She would not let him touch Risa. Not while she was breathing.
But someone else moved faster.
Ken's sleepy eyes had narrowed into cold, dangerous slits.
It happened in a fraction of a second. His whole demeanor shifted. The lazy slouch straightened by a single, almost imperceptible degree. His weight transferred to the balls of his feet. His right hand, still buried in his pocket, moved just slightly, his fingers positioning themselves with the deliberate precision of a surgeon preparing for a critical operation.
Nobody noticed. Nobody ever noticed when Ken got serious, because the change was so subtle that it was practically invisible. His face still looked bored. His posture still looked lazy. His eyes still looked half-closed.
But underneath that carefully maintained mask, his mind had already calculated the trajectory, the force, and the exact amount of energy required to shatter Niro's right knee with a microscopic gravity pulse.
It would take less than a heartbeat. A tiny, invisible compression of gravitational force, concentrated into a point no larger than a pinhead, aimed directly at the joint of Niro's raised arm. The Grandmaster would never see it coming. He would never understand what happened.
One second he would be standing there with his hand raised in arrogant threat, and the next second he would be on the ground, screaming, with a shattered elbow and a very expensive suit ruined by his own incompetence.
Ken's fingers twitched in his pocket. The gravity pulse was ready. The target was locked. All he needed was the will to release it.
And then Ira moved.
She moved so fast that even Ken was caught off guard. One moment she was standing frozen, her face blank, her hands trembling. The next moment her hands had shot out and grabbed both Ken and Risa by the sleeves of their shirts.
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