As suspected... Kamek and the Prince of the Mushroom Kingdom had indeed joined forces. This meant the entire situation had been a setup from the very beginning!
When Bowsette saw Kamek standing alongside Prince Peach, the last shred of hope in her heart vanished, instantly replaced by an uncontainable, burning rage.
"Prince Peach?!"
The Mario brothers' mouths hung open in absolute shock; their eyes nearly popped out of their sockets. They never could have guessed that Prince Peach would appear at the same time as someone from the Bowser Kingdom.
"Mario, Luigi, you haven't forgotten what I told you before, have you?"
Prince Peach pointed to the wizard beside him. "This is my ally in the Bowser Kingdom—the sorcerer Kamek."
Bowsette took a deep breath, forcing down the fury in her chest as she spoke: "Kamek, do you still remember what I ordered you to do?"
"Of course."
Kamek nodded with a smile and raised his magic staff, waving it lightly. A bright light flared from the staff as sweat poured down the wizard's face.
"Now, the King and the residents of the Mushroom Kingdom have been restored to normal."
[Survival Mission 1: Assist the Mario brothers in rescuing Prince Peach from the Bowser Queen's castle and restore the Mushroom Kingdom to normal.]
[Status: MISSION COMPLETE.]
[Survival Mission 2: Choose one of the following options:]
Option 1: Assist Prince Peach in marrying Bowsette to forge an alliance between the Mushroom Kingdom and the Bowser Kingdom.
Option 2: Help Bowsette out of her predicament and protect her until she restores her strength.
Just as Cyan had predicted, Survival Mission 2 was a branching choice. Caught between Prince Peach and Bowsette, she naturally chose to help Bowsette for her second mission.
Drinking a Strawberry Cola, Cyan continued to play dead in Nishi's arms. The wounds on her body began to heal rapidly as she waited for the absolute best moment to strike.
In truth, the plan Cyan had just whispered to Bowsette during their battle was only one of several contingencies she had propped up in her mind. Her original plan had been to wait until the Mario brothers defeated Bowsette, clear Survival Mission 1, and then decide what to do once Survival Mission 2 triggered.
However, defeating Bowsette outright and convincing Bowsette to intentionally throw the match yielded two entirely different outcomes.
In the first scenario—where they defeated Bowsette—the moment Prince Peach tried to force Bowsette into marriage, Cyan and Nishi would have to step forward and face the Mario brothers and Kamek all at the same time.
In the second scenario—by convincing Bowsette to yield after exposing the true traitor—they gained an incredibly powerful combat asset. The only variable that slipped past Cyan's calculations was the fact that Bowsette's strength had already been severely drained by a certain traitor. Yet even so, Bowsette remained a formidable ally.
There was also the lingering risk that Survival Mission 2 might have been a forced single path to help Prince Peach. If that had happened, she would have had no choice but to go all out alongside the Mario brothers to finish off the Queen. Though she didn't know what kind of "mutual destruction" trump card Bowsette was keeping up her sleeve, she had tried to account for everything. If any unexpected chaos arose, she would just have to take it one step at a time. Besides, as the main protagonists of this world, the Mario brothers undoubtedly had hidden trump cards of their own that hadn't been revealed yet.
Looking at the smug smile plastered across Prince Peach's face, Nishi felt a sudden, powerful urge to kick him. She leaned down and whispered into Cyan's ear: "Master, should we...?"
"Wait," Cyan replied softly.
She felt the current situation wasn't the optimal moment to make their move just yet.
Prince Peach walked up to Bowsette, dropped to one knee, and extended his hand toward her. With a face full of simulated devotion, he spoke with absolute earnestness: "Queen Bowser, please marry me! Once the Bowser Kingdom and the Mushroom Kingdom unite, our realm will be recognized as an official nation by the Seven Kingdoms! Isn't that exactly what you've always wanted, Queen Bowser?"
"Go look in a mirror and take a good look at yourself. You want to marry me? Are you even worthy?" Bowsette looked down on Prince Peach from her throne with a face full of pure, unadulterated contempt. "I used to think your internal character might differ from your outward appearance, but your soul turns out to be just as disgusting as your face."
"My Queen! Everything I have done has been for the sake of the Bowser Kingdom!" Kamek stepped up beside Prince Peach, trying to offer desperate, earnest counsel. "Even if it is merely a marriage in name only! Once the Bowser Kingdom combines with the Mushroom Kingdom, we will become the most powerful nation in the world. Even if the other six countries refuse to recognize us, they will be forced to! Our Bowser Kingdom is a legitimate nation, not just a rogue faction!"
Hearing Kamek's words, Bowsette could no longer contain the fury in her heart. She violently stood up, grabbing him by the collar with both hands. Due to the lingering effects of the Ice Flower, a strange, discolored flame leaked from the corners of her mouth as she roared: "Why does the Bowser Kingdom need the validation of seven pathetic foreign realms to be considered a kingdom?! If they don't recognize us, do we suddenly cease to exist as a country?! With the absolute strength our kingdom commands, why should we beg for their approval?! Kamek, you completely misunderstood everything from the very start! A nation's existence does not require the signature of an external clerk! Why should we let foreign countries dictate the internal affairs of our Bowser Kingdom?!"
"My Queen! Do you truly want the very nation you built with your own hands to remain a global laughingstock?!"
Hearing Bowsette's words, Kamek stared up at her in utter disbelief, as if he were seeing her for the first time in his life. He realized he had never truly understood her core operating principles.
"A laughingstock?"
Bowsette let out a disdainful smirk, laughing bitterly in her extreme rage. "The only entity transitioning into a laughingstock here is you! The ultimate traitor of the Bowser Kingdom! Kamek! You have completely trampled over my trust!"
A fierce, white-hot inferno capable of turning anything to ash instantly engulfed Kamek's body. The strike was so sudden he didn't even realize the Queen would launch a direct attack against him.
Thud!
Bowsette slammed Kamek's charred, smoking corpse onto the stone floor. It immediately crumbled into a heap of dense gray ash, and his magic staff clattered to the ground.
"Hmph! An absolute monument to ignorance!"
Bowsette delivered a heavy, dismissive kick to clear the annoying staff out of her way. However, the exact millisecond it slid across the stone, the staff suddenly defied gravity and floated directly into the air.
"Bowsette...! I invoke the absolute limits of my soul to place a terminal curse upon you!"
The scattered ash blanketing the floor plates suddenly swirled upward, tightly wrapping around the levitating staff. Kamek's disembodied voice echoed directly from the wood, and a concentrated beam of dark, unstable energy shot straight into Bowsette's chest.
"Pfft—!"
A massive spray of dark blood erupted from Bowsette's mouth, her health bar instantaneously dropping by more than half. No one present in the chamber had expected that a soul-sacrifice curse manifested by a dying high-tier Magikoopa would possess such terrifyingly destructive power!
This sudden, chaotic escalation left everyone completely stunned.
Bowsette collapsed back onto her throne, her face entirely drained of color. She clamped both trembling hands over her mouth, but dark blood continuously leaked through the tight gaps of her fingers.
"Mario! Luigi! Do not let the opportunity Kamek sacrificed his literal life to create go to waste! This is a one-in-a-million opening!"
With Kamek's physical expiration, the psychological conditioning and hypnosis he had maintained over Prince Peach didn't dissolve; instead, the deletion of the caster caused the prince's manic pursuit of political authority to enter a state of hyper-activation.
"Subdue the Bowser Queen immediately! Drag her back to the Mushroom Kingdom in chains!"
Prince Peach screamed, his eyes locking onto the severely weakened Queen as dense networks of bloodshot veins mapped across his pupils. His facial features contorted into a hideous, ravenous mask of pure greed, completely purging the last vestiges of his historical, innocent demeanor.
"You are exceptionally annoying."
In the literal span of a single eye-blink, Cyan materialized directly in front of Prince Peach and drove her fist squarely into the center of his face with a resounding crack.
"Within this theater of operations, you do not possess the right to speak."
The operational trajectory had completely bypassed Cyan's expectations. She hadn't projected that Kamek would manage to launch such a devastating post-mortem attack against Bowsette, effectively stripping the Queen of all combat readiness.
"Prince Peach?!"
Mario and Luigi watched in pure shock as the prince was launched backward, spinning horizontally through the air before violently impacting the distant wall and slowly sliding down the stone surface like wet clay.
"Mario brothers, if your current objective is to take Bowsette away, you'll have to defeat us first," Cyan articulated, drawing her posture into a perfectly erect stance as she cleared her Demonic Blade from its scabbard, her hands crossing into the guard of the Infinite One-Blade Style.
Nishi immediately recognized that this was the definitive final engagement. She integrated a Fire Flower into her personal matrix, while drawing a glittering Super Star directly into her left hand. A sphere of concentrated fire stabilized over her right hand, which she flipped forward to detonate directly under the feet of the Mario brothers.
"You... why are you two deploying your combat parameters to protect the Bowser Queen?!" Mario and Luigi demanded, their features a mix of deep confusion and betrayal as they stared down Cyan and Nishi, entirely unable to comprehend this sudden factional inversion from their former allies.
"Kamek successfully lifted the transmutative arrays; the Mushroom Kingdom has been restored to normal, so our primary contract obligations have achieved complete fulfillment. Our current tactical deployment is executed under a secondary contract formally commissioned by Queen Bowsette."
Concluding her explanation, Cyan elevated her Demonic Blade, the razor-sharp apex of the steel pointing with absolute precision between the brothers' eyes. Responding to her internal call, the Ripple energy (Hamon) coursing through her bloodstream transitioned into a state of hyper-activity, discharging cleanly through her pores until a shimmering mist of pure golden light completely enveloped her frame.
She asked in a freezing, absolute tone: "Do you choose to execute a tactical withdrawal from this sector under your own power, or do we manually oversee your removal?"
What a profoundly reliable back...
Staring at Cyan's slender silhouette radiating that intense, golden light, Bowsette found her focus entirely hijacked by the view. Yet, the element that lingered most vividly within her memory was the specific, exquisite flavor profile of those pale-gold holy embers she had tasted moments prior during their fake duel.
Yes, the flavor profile truly was exceptional~!