Chapter 139 - The King
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From his sea of consciousness — through the connection that had been built in the underworld's deep water, through the master-slave contract that Lady Achillia had forced into existence in the dark beneath the mountain — Sun Wukong came out.
The golden armor. The golden eyes. The aura that had been growing steadily back toward what it had been before the thousand years of imprisonment — mid stage Grandmaster now, the spiritual energy replenishing almost a year of connection to a Five Element Dantian that produced more than it consumed.
He didn't posture. Didn't announce himself.
He moved.
Directly at the Imperial family's Grandmaster — the speed of a mid stage Grandmaster with a thousand years of combat knowledge behind every movement, the specific efficiency of something that had no patience for the preliminary stages of a fight.
The Grandmaster raised his cultivation to meet it.
Sun Wukong hit him before it was fully raised.
The impact produced a shockwave that traveled across the battlefield and knocked standing cultivators off their feet in a twenty meter radius. The Grandmaster left the ground — traveling, the distance he covered telling the full story of the gap between his cultivation and what had hit him — and landed in the Imperial alliance's rear formation.
Ten cultivators went down with him from the landing's force alone.
Sun Wukong was already there.
The fight between them lasted four exchanges. At the end of the fourth exchange the Imperial family's Grandmaster was on the ground and not getting up — the pride and the decades of accumulated power and the absolute certainty that he sat at the top of what the Hellenic Republic produced all of it present and all of it insufficient.
"Go." Socrates said to the Golden Knights above him.
They moved — dropping from formation into the battlefield below, the organized sweep of a hundred Master Realm cultivators moving through Foundation Establishment and Qi Condensation fighters with the specific efficiency of something that had been built for exactly this. Not killing indiscriminately — targeting those who kept fighting, the ones who hadn't read the moment and adjusted.
Those who read it dropped their weapons.
Most of them read it.
They surrendered.... Because they had no other choice....
---
The battlefield went quiet in stages.
First the Foundation Establishment level — the techniques stopping, the formations dissolving, the individual fighters finding the same conclusion from different positions and arriving at it in the sequence that their cultivation and their courage determined. Then the Masters. Then the silence spreading outward until it covered the whole field and what remained was the aftermath — the ground that the fighting had done what fighting does to ground, the injured being tended, the weapons dropped by those who had made the right decision sitting in the grass like a record of the moment it changed.
The Imperial family's representative — not the Grandmaster, he was being tended to — stood in front of Socrates.
He was a younger man. Second in the family hierarchy. The kind of person who had been sent to this position because the first option was no longer available and the third option wasn't ready.
He looked at Socrates in the air above him.
At the jade. At the golden robe. At the hundred knights arranged in the sky above the battlefield. At Sun Wukong standing in the grass below with his golden armor and his golden eyes and the specific stillness of something that had finished what it was doing and was waiting to see if there was more.
"The Imperial family of the Hellenic Republic—" he started.
".... ." Socrates looked at him..
The representative looked at him.
"Surrenders." He said and the Nothern Gladiator Guilds and its alliance hailed.
---
The formal proceedings took three weeks.
Not the fighting — the fighting was over. The proceedings. The sitting in rooms and the statements made in specific formats and the documents signed in the presence of witnesses who had been selected for exactly this witnessing. The accumulated bureaucracy of a Republic becoming a Kingdom — the legal architecture of the change being as significant as the change itself, the frameworks that organized power in the Hellenic Republic being rewritten from their foundation upward.
The Trueblood family became the Imperial family.
The Republic became the Kingdom.
The holder of the Golden Imperial Jade became its King.
Socrates stood in the hall where the final document was signed — the same hall where the Imperial family had read the first report about the dungeon conquest two years ago, the marble floors and the high windows and the weight of decisions made inside it unchanged — and looked at the document in front of him.
At the line where his name went.
At the title above the line.
He picked up the instrument and signed it.
His name in his own handwriting. The same handwriting that had filled examination papers in a school in the Hellenic Republic before any of this. The same hand he had used to spar with Mr. Jaggers.
Socrates Trueblood.
King of the Trueblood Kingdom.
He set the instrument down.
Outside the hall's high windows the Kingdom — the streets, the families, the cultivators and the ordinary people and the houses both powerful and not — was doing what it was doing. Being itself. Continuing. The change in what it was called not yet having arrived in most of its daily movements.
It would. These things always did.
Sun Wukong was on his shoulder.
"King." The Monkey King said — tasting the word. "My master is a King."
"Don't." Socrates said.
"I'm merely observing—"
"Don't observe either."
Sun Wukong was quiet for a moment.
"I once served the Jade Emperor." He said. Quietly. Without theatrics for once. "The ruler of Heaven itself." He looked at the document on the table. At Socrates' name on it. "And here I am."
"Here you are." Socrates said.
"A King's beast." Sun Wukong said.
"A King's companion." Socrates said.
Sun Wukong looked at him.
Said nothing.
But something in the golden eyes settled — the specific settling of something that had been looking for a frame to put itself in for a very long time and had just found one that fit...
Then Socrates looked up... "I wondered how my sister is faring...."
"I'm sure she's safe.. And you don't really need to carry out the task King Aspasia impose on you... Your meridian is now heal... You're now a King..." The Monkey King said to him...
"True.... I just wish she's here beside me...." Socrates muttered staring at the sky...
"Amelia..."He called softly...." I miss you."