Chapter 1826 - 1383: Self-Detonation Ritual (3)

"What's he chanting?"

In the briefing room dozens of kilometers away, Duke, hearing the old man reciting scripture, turned to Lemont beside him.

He sensed something was wrong too.

The next second, the old man raised his head, his eyes looking straight into the helmet camera on Marcus's head.

Then he smiled, and spoke into the camera in clear, slow Arabic, as if pronouncing the final sentence:

"Witness. Witness how the seeds you sowed with your own hands will grow into thorns that devour you."

After that he made a gesture—both hands crossed over his chest, left on top, right below, fingers bent at specific angles, thumbs interlocked.

"Stop him!"

Lemont's voice showed obvious strain for the first time.

Two Delta Force Soldiers lunged forward.

But it was already too late.

The old man's body didn't swell, didn't undergo any dramatic change.

He simply, calmly, pressed a black button held in his left hand.

The button had been hidden all along in the folds of his robe.

The explosion did not start from the old man's body.

It erupted from deep in the building's basement.

First came a low, earth-deep groan, then the entire floor heaved upward and split open, and orange-red tongues of fire spewed out of the cracks.

The shockwave wasn't horizontal, but vertical, blasting straight up like an invisible giant hammer, smashing the building's structure from below.

The concrete slabs shattered like biscuits, brick walls blew outward, the roof was torn off in one piece and flung upward, then broke apart in midair.

Flames and thick smoke swallowed everything in an instant.

In the briefing room, all the screens simultaneously turned into a blinding sheet of white, then flickered a few times and dissolved into dense snow.

The audio channel carried deafening blasts, then the crack and crash of collapsing building materials, the shriek of twisting metal, followed by a brief, suffocating dead silence, and finally only the hiss of radio static in the background.

The drone feed came back three seconds later.

From the overhead view, the entire two-story building had vanished, replaced by a crater fifteen meters across and three meters deep, its rim piled with twisted rebar, shattered concrete chunks and burning timber.

Thermal imaging showed a dozen hot spots in the rubble, but most were no longer moving—only three or four along the edge were slowly, painfully crawling.

Duke stood where he was, motionless.

His hand still rested on the comms console, fingers frozen in the position of pressing the transmit key.

There was no expression at all on his face.

But something in the depths of his eyes had gone out, like a lamp yanked from its power source.

He slowly, very slowly, lifted his hand and pressed the transmit key. His voice was unnervingly steady, so steady it was frightening: "Medical teams, move out immediately. All standby units, prioritize rescue of survivors, secure the site, seal all access routes. Execute at once."

Then he released the transmit key, turned, and let his gaze sweep over everyone in the briefing room.

His eyes paused on Song Heping's face for half a second, a bottomless emptiness in their depths.

Then he looked away, toward Lemont.

Lemont stood by the wall, his expression very grim.

"Clean up the site," Duke went on. "Count the casualties, recover all… recoverable remains. Set up a temporary morgue. Notify Washington. And…"

He stopped. The pause lasted only two seconds, but felt as long as an hour.

"Confirm the identities of the dead. I want to know whether the man down there is really Fadil Al-Hamid."

Song Heping understood the weight of that sentence.

If the dead man was Hamid himself, then this was a tragic, heroic suicide resistance.

But if the dead man wasn't Hamid?

If he was only a stand-in, a decoy, an actor performing with his life?

Then it would mean the entire operation had been manipulated from start to finish.

It would mean someone had meticulously designed this trap, using the lives of several Delta Force Soldiers to convey a message, to complete a ritual.

He turned and left the briefing room, not looking at the rubble on the screens again.

The corridor was already full of pounding footsteps, shouts, and the chaotic chatter of radio calls.

He went back to his room, closed the door, locked it, drew the curtains, and sat once more in the dark.

Outside, the chopper rotors rose from far to near, then faded from near to far.

Medical rescue teams were taking off, red navigation lights blinking in the pre-dawn darkness.

The base's alarm system began looping the alert-level upgrade notice, the mechanical female voice echoing down the corridors.

Everything felt unreal, like a hallucination.