After Lord Kurtain arrived, Meditation Aura threaded through with black and white particles gathered in the garden outside the great white mansion, coalescing slowly into the shape of a woman as she teleported in.
Every guest present froze the instant they laid eyes on her.
She was tall, her figure impossibly delicate, shaped in a perfect hourglass that drew every gaze in the room without effort. An opaque black veil, translucent in places, trailed all the way to the ground, paired with a full-sleeved black robe inlaid with dark jewelry and charms of every kind imaginable. Every visible inch of her had been adorned with something, gemstones catching what little light slipped through the veil covering her eyes, leaving only her nose and lips visible, the latter coated in deep red.
Her skin held a pale, almost bloodless white, with spider-like patterns woven faintly into the fabric of her veil. Six arms extended from her frame, two primary limbs and four secondary ones, a pair emerging from her ribcage, another pair from her waist. Her hourglass figure, modest chest and hips balanced with striking precision, radiated a kind of seductive elegance most people in the room had only ever heard described secondhand.
An ethereal, faintly terrifying aura clung to her, thick enough that simply standing in the same room felt like a quiet test of nerve.
Every man in the hall lit up at once.
"Lady Noctia truly is beautiful. Worthy of her place among the top ten beauties of the Aura region," someone murmured near the back, awe plain in his voice.
Every major region kept such a list, rankings built from physical beauty, personality, charm, and a dozen other harder-to-name qualities. Lady Noctia currently sat fourth. Competitions determining these rankings were held regularly in the Romani family's capital, reserved exclusively for women, the mirror to the far bloodier tournaments men fought through in the Ardyn family's territory.
"I wonder how many marriage proposals she gets in a single year," one bachelor mused wistfully.
"My whole life would be worth it if she so much as glanced my way once," another sighed dramatically, drawing laughter and enthusiastic agreement from the small cluster of unmarried men around him.
The married men, by stark contrast, kept their expressions carefully blank, sweating quietly under the watchful, narrowed gazes of their own partners standing just close enough to notice a single wrong glance.
Sasaki remained entirely unmoved. Decades spent as a Living Corpse had left him almost entirely untouched by lust, and what little remained, his sheer willpower crushed flat before it could ever take root, especially against anything as blatant as a charm-based attraction.
Also, and rather significantly, Alia was staring directly at him. On his own wedding day.
He couldn't help himself, though, watching Lady Noctia's approach with a face carefully arranged into polite neutrality while his thoughts wandered somewhere else entirely.
I really do love her, though, he thought, unbidden, picturing Alia instead of the woman gliding toward him.
A faint blush crept across his cheeks, subtle enough that only a fellow Supernova could have caught it at all. Mortified the instant he noticed it himself, he very nearly reached for his Living Corpse form out of pure reflex before forcing himself to stay exactly as he was.
None of the other Supernovas in the hall bothered to notice, too absorbed in their own private calculations to spare him a glance.
Alia, seated nearby with Chris and Sylvana, gently bouncing a fussy Alisa in her arms in a losing battle against nap time, caught it immediately.
Her eyes narrowed. She opened her mouth, already halfway through composing a suitably scathing message to send his way, when a large, ugly-faced, black-and-brown-skinned creature poked its head partway out from her shoulder.
"Nix has asked me to pass along that he's blushing while thinking of you," Kung announced flatly, sounding thoroughly unbothered by his own existence in this conversation. "Disgusting. The both of you."
Alia's face went pink instantly.
"Why is that idiot blushing about ME right now, in front of everyone!" she hissed, mortified. "And you, get back inside; nobody asked for narration!"
Kung let out a long, put-upon sigh and retreated back into her body without further comment.
Kung was a Supernova-level cursed spirit, contracted to Alia back in her youth, and remained one of her strongest allies, a core pillar of both her combat strength and half her signature techniques.
Across the garden, Sasaki caught the exact moment Alia's cheeks flushed, and despite the solemnity of the occasion, a small, helpless grin threatened to break across his own face before he wrestled it back down into something appropriately composed.
Worth it, he thought, watching her fluster with open, private delight. Completely worth the blush.
His smile faded the instant his attention returned fully to Lady Noctia, expression sliding back into careful neutrality.
She, for her part, chose not to pursue what she'd clearly already noticed. As a Supernova of the Mind Pathway, that small blush hadn't slipped past her for a second. But chasing down something so trivial would only cost her dignity in front of a room full of guests, and she understood exactly which battles were worth fighting and which weren't. She was, after all, only a guest here today.
She ascended the white stairs, and both she and Sasaki exchanged a formal bow.
Her shallow bow sent the dark jewels and charms along her robe tinkling softly together, a sound like distant wind chimes.
She produced her gift next. A small, black, mind-shaped charm, no larger than a baby's fist, drifted free from within her robe and hovered before Sasaki's face, glowing faintly white.
"I ask that young Lord Sasaki accept this inheritance," she said, voice smooth and formal, "once held by a past family head of my own Sophia family. The Mind Weaver."
Sasaki accepted graciously, letting the charm sink into his world of consciousness and subconsciousness. It dissolved there almost instantly, releasing a dense flood of knowledge, history, techniques, Auras, combat insight, methods for cultivating Mind Pathway resources like Emotion Devourers and memory prints, all of it pouring into him at once.
His expression stayed perfectly calm.
Internally, his jaw tightened.
Clever woman, he thought. I lost to her once, years ago, and had to hunt down every scrap of Mind Pathway inheritance I could find just to piece together something capable of countering her.
And even then, I only won because I built techniques specifically designed to beat her, and her alone.
This gift is a genuine, complete Supernova-level inheritance. But its methods mirror her own too closely to help me refine anything further against her specifically. And nobody else in this hall even knows its name, let alone its contents.
I'll let this one go today. His mouth curved, faint and private, beneath his otherwise composed expression. But I won't forget it.
Sasaki wasn't a petty man, nor prideful, nor arrogant by nature. But he understood plainly that showing weakness here, today, in front of every royal family in Lumenia, would only make his life considerably harder going forward. His reputation mattered too much to risk over something this small.
He offered Lady Noctia a warm, easy smile and gestured toward the hall beyond. She swept past him, drawing every eye in the room as she went, and two waiting Hypernovas fell into step to escort her onward.
"This way, my lady," one of them murmured.
...
Meditation Aura threaded with cherry pink particles swept into the garden as another woman appeared, and the moment she did, a sweet, faint aroma spread through the air, settling over every guest present. Bodies that had been holding tension all evening loosened without warning. Every ache, every small discomfort anyone had been carrying simply dissolved.
This was Idrila Romani, head of the Romani family, presiding house of the Beauty Pathway, and an Aura user of that same path herself. The technique responsible was called Arousal Becomes Aroma, and she had timed her arrival with obvious precision, waiting deliberately until after Lady Noctia had already made her entrance.
She was tall, slender, her long black hair falling in a silken sheet down to her waist, eyes a deep, striking red that caught the light like polished crystal. Her skin held a flawless fairness, every part of her seemingly arranged to complement every other part in perfect harmony, beauty and grace woven together without a single seam showing.
She held the top spot on the Aura region's list of ten beauties. First place, uncontested, at least within the boundaries anyone could actually measure. Since the end of the Dystopian War, the three regions had drifted apart entirely, contact between them all but severed, which made ranking her against anyone beyond this region technically impossible. Within it, though, few would have dared argue the point.
She turned with slow, deliberate elegance, her crystalline gaze settling on Sasaki, and a small, knowing smile curved her lips.
That smile alone sent a ripple through the hall, men flushing red, several looking away entirely, unable to hold her gaze for more than a second.
Sasaki remained entirely unmoved.
Such a crude technique, he thought, watching her approach without the faintest flicker of reaction. My passive defenses don't even need to activate against something this blunt.
Then again, the Beauty Pathway was never built for combat anyway.
Idrila climbed the white stairs carefully, lifting the hem of her red and black gown just enough to keep it clear of her steps, and offered Sasaki a calm, graceful bow. He returned it in kind.
Her gift followed, a large resource point capable of producing an impressive yearly output of red mirror hearts, a resource valuable enough on its own to draw appreciative murmurs from several guests still watching nearby.
Sasaki assumed the exchange concluded there.
Lord Sasaki, she sent instead, her mental voice sweet as ripened strawberry, smooth as warm butter, the kind of voice that made refusal feel almost unnatural. I would love to purchase some information regarding the third one. Might you be generous enough to sell me a little?
Of course, Sasaki thought dryly. The Beauty Pathway is, after all, simply a derived branch of the Deceiver Pathway.
He sighed audibly. "And why exactly does that particular information interest you?"
Her smile sharpened into something teasing, her tone dipping into false innocence. "Why do you ask, my lord? Could it be you're feeling a little jealous?"
They went back and forth like that for some time, Idrila circling the request from every conceivable angle, offering resources, rare materials, even partial inheritances in exchange. Sasaki refused every single one without wavering.
The guests still gathered nearby grew visibly confused by how long the exchange dragged on, though none of them complained, not with an excuse this pleasant to keep staring at. Even the women in attendance seemed perfectly content to let the conversation run its course.
...
Soon after, the remaining guests arrived in a steady, glittering procession.
Lord Excalibur Blackknight of the Blackknight family. Elder Alma Gabriel of the Gabriel family. Lord Kaelix of the Intuiti family. Prince Sage of the Noam family. Elder Lumora of the Visionary family. The Grand Tempest of the Emetra family. Young Lord Solaris of the Lumina family. Venerable Eclipse of the Sasrir family. Lord Seraph of the Kennedy family. Leonidas of the Ardyn family. Princess Eris of the Lilith family. Justiciar Aegis of the Judicia family. Lord Aion of the Aroa family. And finally, Lord Specular of the Symmetra family.
Some arrived together in small clusters; most came alone, each entrance grander than the last, gifts piling higher with every new arrival. Large resource points. Rare materials. More than one mega resource point among them.
Sasaki accepted each with practiced grace, though privately, the weight of it all pressed down on him with every new gift handed over.
Wonderful, he thought, watching yet another glowing charm settle into his collection. More resource points I'll now need to staff, protect, and actually develop. As if I have the manpower, time, or spare inheritance knowledge to properly cultivate half of what's already been handed to me tonight.
I'll likely end up selling a fair portion of these off just to fund the materials needed to make the rest worthwhile.
Eventually, the last Supernova crossed the garden and climbed the stairs, and with that, the guest list closed. No True Supernova had come tonight. None had been expected to, not really, though the disappointment still rippled quietly through the crowd regardless.
"I truly wish Lord Alexander could have made an appearance," one guest murmured to another, a note of genuine longing in his voice.
"A shame, isn't it," his companion agreed. "I'd hoped, foolishly perhaps, that I might actually lay eyes on a True Supernova tonight. Seems that hope was misplaced."
Similar murmurs drifted through pockets of the crowd, quiet regret settling over more than a few faces.
And yet Sasaki remained standing just outside the hall, gaze fixed off to one side, posture alert in a way that clearly wasn't idle waiting.
Guests began to notice. Whispers rippled outward, heads turning, curiosity building.
Sylvana, catching the shift in mood, glanced toward Alia in confusion.
Alia pressed a soft kiss to Alisa's forehead, the baby finally drifting into sleep against her shoulder, and answered before Sylvana could even voice the question.
"There's still one more guest coming," she said quietly, a faint, knowing smile touching her lips. "And this one's special."