Surprisingly, by the time I turned around, I was utterly back in control of my anger. Instead of the hot rage that I had expected, a cool calm flowed through my veins. My vision was clear, my thoughts unhindered by emotion.
My face was completely blank, a mask of indifference as I faced Leo. I took in the sight of him, the smug smirk that painted his face, the mirthful glint in his eye. I couldn’t believe that I had missed the utter lack of respect he held within his eyes for so long. He looked at me with the patronizing look of an adult looking at a child.
“Leo,” I said, my voice controlled and quiet. “It’s been a while.”
Leo’s grin widened. “So much anger, Ruby,” he said, his voice mockingly worried. “It’s not good to hold on to so much hatred, you know. You should learn to forgive and forget. For your own good.”
I did not react to his words, the mask of calm on my face unphased. “So,” I began, “you aren’t going to deny what happened?”
Leo scoffed. “Why would I deny it?” he asked. “You’re an idiot, and I played you like a fiddle.”
“So you knowingly left them all to die?” I asked, once again ignoring his insult.
Leo shrugged. “Well, I didn’t know that they were all gonna die like that. And besides, they chose their fate. I told them all to just join Owen after they got caught. But I guess those idiots really believed your words.” Leo laughed then, the sound harsh and grating. “You should have seen them. They were so convinced that you would win and come back to save them. They even tried to tell me to join them. That I would regret it when you became everything you promised to be. Utterly delusional, I tell you.”
Black smoke had begun to drift out of my skin, thin wisps of it swirling around my feet and rising upward. But I had no idea. I could see nothing at the moment but Theo’s face, think of nothing but the fact that my men had believed in me until the end.
A pressure descended on the room, settling on the shoulders of everyone present. The people around finally noticed the confrontation taking place in the room, their discussions grinding to a halt as they all shifted their focus to the two of us. Still, I hardly noticed their attention, my eyes glazed with emotion.
“Calm down, Ruby,” Leo said, still smiling despite the slight pressure on him. “What good is all this anger going to do? And besides, it's your fault anyway. You were the one who went around spouting such fantastical dreams. I didn’t get your men killed. It was your crazy ideas that did.”
I took a step towards Leo, not offering him an answer. My steps were slow, measured, almost trance-like. The wisps of smoke around me become thicker, more dense. The pressure on the people around intensified, great enough for Leo to finally lose his smug smirk.
Every step I took made the weight heavier, and soon Leo’s street-honed instinct began to warn him of a very real danger approaching him.
His face dropped as I got closer and closer, and he took a half-step back in fear. “Wha-What are you doing?” he asked, forcing an awkward chuckle.
Still, I didn’t make a sound, approaching him with the same, frozen calm mask on my face.
“What are you doing, Ruby?” Leo repeated, worry seeping into his voice. “You can’t hurt me here, you know. They’ll put you in jail. I’m safe here. They will protect me.” He sounded almost like he was trying to comfort himself more than he was trying to convince me.
Still, I did not react, so far gone at that point that I could hardly even hear his words. Sparks began to burst out of the streaks of swirling black smoke around me, little flashes of orange like lightning in storm clouds.
“Ruby!” Leonard called out from behind me, finally deciding to step in. “That’s enough. I don’t know what animosity you have with that man, but while you are under our care, any kind of violence will not be tolerated.” He spoke with a firm, strict tone, but still, his voice did not reach my ears.
“Yeah, Ruby. Back off,” Leo said. His face was truly stricken with fear now. He’d long known I was stronger than him, but at that moment, he could sense that he didn’t stand a chance against me. The combined weight of my pressure and his fear rooted him to his spot, not even allowing him to flee.
Flame ignited on my fist, burning a brilliant orange. Leo took another step back, just enough for him to think I was still out of range. But he misjudged my speed.
He blinked, and my fist was in front of his face, in all its searing glow. The heat singed his eyebrows, colouring his flinching face red, but the burning pain he dreaded did not arrive.
Hesitatingly, he opened his eyes to see my glowing fist just inches away from his face, but strangely enough, not getting any closer.
I stood, stuck in place like a statue, breathing hard as my fist burned. I could feel a hand laid lightly atop my shoulder, the gentle touch somehow bringing me out of the haze of my anger.
With a quiet thud that echoed in the silent hall, Leo fell to the floor, wide-eyed and face sweaty from the fear and heat. The room was blanketed in stillness for a moment, the quiet broken only by my breathing.
“You are safe here, Leo,” I finally spoke, my voice raspy with emotion. “And you are right. My men are dead because of me. I am to blame for that, and I have accepted it. But you betrayed me, and that is not something I will let go. You are safe here, but one day, I will find you, and I will make you regret ever making an enemy out of me.”
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
Still on the floor, Leo gave a forced scoff at my threat. “You?” he asked mockingly. “You don’t have the guts. You’re just a little girl, a naive little girl who doesn’t understand how the world works. You’re never gonna go anywhere in the world.” He laughed. “I mean, look at you. Here I am, at your mercy, and you still don’t have the guts to kill me. You can’t even threaten to do it in the future. The universe is going to swallow you up, Ruby. You are the fodder people like me step over on our rise to the top.”
Ren’s hand lightly tugged my shoulder back, bringing me to the side before I could respond. He stepped forward in my place, his face passive as always, as if the situation hadn’t affected him at all.
Crouching down to Leo’s level, he opened his eyes and locked gazes with the man. “You’re right,” he said, his voice level and calm. “Ruby probably doesn’t have it in her to kill someone right now, and you’d better hope she never does.” Ren smiled then, his lips curling into a sinister, menacing curve. “Because I do. I’ve been killing since I was a child, and I have slit the throats of men much, much better than you. So you’d better pray that Ruby stays naive and decides to forgive you, because the mercy you ridicule right now will one day be the only thing that can save you.”
The fire on my fist died out as Ren finished speaking, my emotions fully under control. There was a strange pride in my chest that Ren’s words had sparked, and I couldn’t quite name why. And I didn’t get the time to think on it longer, because not a moment after Ren finished speaking, the entire ship began to shake. There was a low rumble that sounded out through the entire thing, alarming everyone preset. Immediately, a middle-aged man with graying hair and clothed in light green robes appeared in the midst of the crowd, taking control of the situation.
“The pirates have arrived!” he called out, his voice carrying around the hall. “Mages! To your stations!”
The crowd around us instantly burst into a flurry of action, all of them running about as they hurried to where they were needed. Unlike what I had been expecting, they didn’t seem to care much about Ren, Leo, and me. The only one who didn’t immediately begin to ignore the three of us was Leonard, who quickly began to make his way over to us.
“Alright, you three,” he said as he came over. His voice was firm but hurried. “I don’t know what you all are doing up here, and I don’t care about your squabbles, but you need to get back to your rooms. The pirates seem to be a lot more organized than we were expecting, and will probably be more of a problem than we anticipated. It’s not something you need to worry about, but you cannot be here while we fight. It’s already going to be very chaotic; we can’t have you three to look after at the same time.”
“Of course,” I said. “We didn’t mean to be a nuisance. We’ll be right on our-”
Before I could finish my sentence, a thunderous sound, almost like glass shattering, invaded the room. Following the noise came a panicked announcement from some sort of speaker system. “The first barrier has broken!” yelled a surprisingly young voice. “The pirates have Warlord Cannons! The rest of the barriers won’t last!”
Worry coloured Leonard’s face, and it didn’t take a genius to know that the announcement carried dire news.
“Runic Mages!” the same green-robed man called out in answer. “Hold the second and third barriers as long as you can. Everyone else, begin manual attacks on the ships.”
By now, the room had almost entirely emptied out. Only the green-robed man and a few other similarly aged people stood in the middle, intently watching the spectacular scene unfolding outside the ship.
There were two ships in front of us, and another two directly above. The ships were starkly similar in build to the one we were on; the only difference was that they were painted entirely black instead of our dull metallic gray. Their colour made them quite a bit harder to see against the backdrop of empty space.
The space in between our ship and the pirates would periodically be filled with bright golden lights as the Grand Order mages launched volley after volley of their attacks. It was hard to tell how many of the short beams of light were being shot, but they were enough to almost fill up the entire space in between the ships.
Unfortunately, the beams didn’t seem to be doing much. They would disappear before they could even reach the ships, leaving behind only a purple ripple in the invisible barrier they crashed into.
The pirates weren’t just sitting still, however. For every attack they suffered, they responded with their own. Unlike the uniform attacks of light from our side, though, their attacks were a lot more varied. Beams of orange fire and blue lightning seemed to make up the majority of them, but I was sure I saw a few boulder-sized rocks being thrown at us in the midst of the attacks.
Like ours, their attacks would also disappear before reaching our ship, but based on the tense faces of Leonard and the middle-aged men, I could tell we weren’t in a good place right now. It made sense, since we could only target one ship at a time, and for every one attack we made, we received four in turn.
“Ship two has charged its Warlord Cannon!” came a report from the speakers again. It was a different voice this time.
“Attackers, stop attacking!” the green-robed man instantly ordered. “Focus your Flux on helping the barrier!”
There was a blinding white light that suddenly shone from one of the two ships in front of us. It was far, far brighter and bigger than even the combined light of the attacks that we had been throwing at them.
The light twinkled, and a report quickly followed. “Cannon has been shot! Brace for impact!”
There was a beat of silence, and then a deep rumbling as the entire ship shook heavily. Mugs clattered to the floor as Ren and I hunkered down for balance.
A moment later, one that felt like an eternity, the shaking finally stopped, but no shattering sound followed.
“It worked!” came an excited voice from the speakers. “Barrier two has not-”
Before the woman could even finish her announcement, four volleys of attacks came from the enemy ships. The shield lasted for a moment under the barrage before giving in with a deafening shatter.
“Barrier two has fallen!” another voice yelled through the speakers. “What do we do?!”
“Stay calm!” the green-robed man barked out. “We only need to hold off until the rest of the fleet catches up to us. They should be on their way right now. Until then, hold the barriers and keep attacking!”
Suddenly, there was another twinkle in space, followed by a blinding white light that shone from a place no ship should have been.
Immediately, a cacophony of sound tumbled out of the speakers as too many voices desperately tried to yell something. But before any of them could get a coherent sentence out, the light hit the last barrier of the ship. The ship rumbled and shook fiercely, far harder than before, and soon, the dreaded sound of glass shattering invaded the ship.
“There was a fifth ship!” a voice yelled from the speakers in the silence that followed. “Barrier one has fallen!”