Chapter 613: Trap [Bonus - ]

Chapter 613: Trap [Bonus Chapter]

Nine spiraling lances of white-hot three-thousand-degree solar flame erupted from the floor around Farid, converging on Harper from every angle to incinerate her down to her marrow.

Ititius chuckled.

"Hehe."

VUM!

He raised Harper’s right hand, casually snapping his fingers.

CRACKLE-SNAP!

The purple lightning native to Harper’s body manifested as a dense spinning disk of violet current that rotated around her forearm like a buzzsaw as Ititius swept Harper’s arm in a wide horizontal arc.

SHRIT-SHRIT-SHRIT!

The violet frequency cleaved through the nine solar lances as if they were threads of warm silk, scattering the high-tier fire into harmless sparks!

Before Farid could even begin to process the counter...

WHOOSH!

A massive barbed tendril of black sand erupted from the floor beneath Farid’s feet, shooting upward between his thighs, piercing through his groin, his spine, and exploding out through the top of his skull.

CRACKLE-SHATTER!

Farid turned to black glass and pulverized into ash before the sparks of his own spell hit the floor.

"MONSTER!"

"RUN! GET TO THE ELEVATOR—"

The remaining nine Khemet men broke completely.

They threw their halberds to the floor, turning on their heels, scrambling frantically toward the reinforced airlock at the edge of the cavern.

"Now, now," Ititius laughed, Harper’s voice echoing with cold amusement as he took three leisurely steps forward. "Did I give you permission to leave the stage? A proper audience remains seated until the final bow!"

FWOOOOOOOOOOOM!

From Harper’s sleeves, dozens of undulating razor-sharp ribbons of black sand surged forward and they began to hunt...

The attacks whipped through the air like ancient ravenous eels, wrapping around throats, drilling through kneecaps, and coiling around chests.

SPLAT! CRACKLE! SHATTER! CRASH! SNAP! CRUNCH!

A rapid-fire rhythmic sequence of glassy detonations echoed through the subterranean chamber.

One by one, the fleeing people were petrified in dynamic panicked strides with their arms outstretched toward the heavy vault doors, before shattering into drifting heaps of dark powder that settled over the lapis tiles like an obscene snowfall.

Within forty seconds, the floor was silent as eleven men were gone and erased completely with their souls devoured by the void-sand without leaving a drop of blood behind.

...Only one man remained.

The young Europa substitute sat huddled against the base of an iron pillar, his slate-gray uniform drenched in cold sweat with his carbine lying discarded five feet away.

His teeth were chattering so violently that the clicking sound was clearly audible in the quiet cavern.

His eyes were wide, bloodshot, staring at the purple-haired demon who was slowly walking toward him.

"P-Please..." the young man whimpered, tears cutting clean pale tracks through the soot on his cheeks. "Please... I don’t belong here... I just arrived from Europa... I have a mother in Sector Four... please don’t kill me... I beg you... I’ll open the vault for you... I’ll do anything..."

Ititius stopped three paces away.

He tilted Harper’s head, looking down at the weeping boy with an expression of mild curiosity.

"A mother?" Ititius murmured, his green-and-gold eyes gleaming with mocking amusement. "How surprising... Mortals always bring up their progenitors when the blade touches their throat. Do you honestly believe a god cares about the weeping of a northern peasant?"

The substitute threw himself forward with his forehead slamming against the cold flagstones, groveling at Harper’s boots.

"Please! I have no magic! I’m just a technician! I don’t care about Khemet! I don’t care about the Sun-Crown! Just let me take the service lift! I won’t speak a word! I swear by the World King, I will never speak of this—"

"You speak far too much," Ititius sighed, shaking Harper’s head in mild exasperation. "It is truly exhausting."

SHRUNK!

A single needle-thin spike of black sand shot directly from Harper’s toe.

It entered through the base of the boy’s skull, traveled down his cervical vertebrae, and flared outward into his heart.

The Europa substitute didn’t even have time to finish his prayer as his groveling form instantly hardened into black glass, the desperate weeping expression permanently frozen into the dark crystal.

SNAP!

The statue collapsed under its own weight, turning into a neat three-foot pile of black dust beneath Harper’s boots.

Ititius turned his back on the carnage, wiping a speck of gray soot from his collar with Harper’s fingers.

"Filthy commoners," he muttered, Harper’s voice carrying that distinctive arrogant snarl. "Always making such an unsightly mess before they expire..."

He walked leisurely toward the center of the cavern, his green-and-gold eyes locking onto the colossal humming fortress of the Terrestrial Mana-Suppression Engine.

The machine rotated with cold indifference as it was unmoved by the slaughter that had just unfolded outside its perimeter.

The honeycombed dome of the primary defensive barrier hummed with an impenetrable sound that vibrated directly against Ititius’s marrow.

"Ah..." Ititius hissed, Harper’s physical face twisting into an ugly venomous sneer. "You wretched, miserable little toy... Since the age of the Second King, your disgusting hum has pricked at the heavens, locking true divinity away in the cosmic dark while mortals play at civilization."

WHOOOOOSH!

Ititius raised Harper’s right arm, her palm igniting with a massive concentrated orb of black sand and compressed purple lightning.

"DIE, YOU ROTTING MACHINE!" Ititius roared!

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The divine blast detonated directly against the honeycombed blue barrier and the concussive shockwave ripped through the half-mile chamber, tearing the steel catwalks from the walls and throwing clouds of pulverized basalt into the air.

Yet, when the smoke cleared...

The blue barrier wasn’t cracked, hell it didn’t even flicker.

The stabilization runes simply absorbed the impact, routing the divine energy through its heatsinks and releasing it into the exhaust vents with a soft dismissive hiss.

"WHAT?!" Ititius shrieked, Harper’s physical vocal cords cracking under the sudden furious screech.

The veins along her neck bulged with blinding golden light.

"IMPOSSIBLE! A mortal cage resisting my divine authority?!"

’Why... why is he so annoying...?’

Harper was scared of course and she was also pissed off but she felt a bit of shame too, after all, this was her ancestor which she descended from.

...Were they always so dumb? Also she was glad about the fact that Ititius only had access to Nitocris’s memories and not hers.

’This is a Sub-suppression engine.’ She thought to herself, if he did destroy this one, Khemet as a whole would still be okay but this North Khemet would be overrun by rifts to the Sovereign Realm.

Many people would die, but hopefully they could evacuate on time though Harper didn’t know how long it would take before he figured it out and went deeper for the other Suppression Engine, the main one.

’I know... I know I wanted to grow stronger but please Silas... please save me.’

Ititius threw two more explosive strikes against the barrier, but each impact was swallowed whole, dispersing across the barrier without leaving so much as a scratch.

"Damn it! Damn it all!" Ititius snarled, pacing frantically back and forth across the flagstones with Harper’s fingers digging into her own scalp in unhinged irritation.

...He knew.

He could feel it through the atmospheric vibrations of the exhaust shaft far above.

’Someone is coming,’ Ititius calculated, his eyes darting toward the dark ceiling. ’A signature... cutting through the crater at breakneck speed. This is very bad...’

He had to execute the next phase of his plan immediately.

If he was caught locked in an extended siege against an automated fortress while being pressured by someone strong, his newly reclaimed vessel would be ground to pieces before his divinity could fully stabilize.

"Calm yourself, Ititius," he whispered through Harper’s lips, forcing her chest to draw a deep trembling breath. "You are an ancient master of magic... There is no lock forged by mortal hands that cannot be picked."

He stopped before the shimmering blue ward, lowering his hands but he didn’t strike it again.

Instead, Harper’s physical palms pressed flat against the outer surface of the blue barrier.

’If the wall refuses to break... I will simply drink the stone.’

BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZT!

Ititius began weaving a forbidden primordial absorption array.

He inverted Harper’s internal mana circuits, forcing her secondary pathways to operate as a high-velocity spiritual vacuum as the raw stabilization mana of the Suppression Engine was violently, forcibly siphoned directly out of the barrier runes, pouring through Harper’s palms like boiling oil.

"Ngh...!" Harper’s physical body groaned with her knees trembling under the agonizing pressure of the intake. "This is good..."

Harper’s mortal meridians weren’t built to process such monumental quantities of mana output.

The blue energy coursed through her arms like liquid glass, tearing microscopic fissures through her vascular walls, turning her veins bright azure beneath her pale skin.

Yet, Ititius didn’t stop... He was a god and he didn’t care if the scabbard frayed at the edges.

’I will survive.’

He harnessed the stolen stabilization mana, utilizing its specific harmonic frequency to temporarily dissolve the molecular cohesion of the inner barrier.

SHUUUUUU!

The honeycombed blue dome parted, opening a narrow six-foot fissure directly in front of him as Ititius stepped through the threshold, reaching the physical hull of the Suppression Engine itself.

"Ah..."

The machine’s outer casing was forged from an ultra-rare high-density alloy known only to the highest research ministries of the World Council, a substance practically impervious to conventional elemental decay.

Ititius reached out, pressing Harper’s bare right palm directly against the spinning housing.

KRZZZZZZZZ-CRACK!

The machine’s automated anti-tampering wards fired in pure reflex as a blinding arc of concentrated disintegration flashed across the metal!

SPLAT-TEAR!

Harper’s physical right hand, her wrist, and her forearm up to the elbow were instantly disintegrated into fine dust!

"AGHHH!" Ititius roared, Harper’s head snapping back in raw agony. "Insolent scrap iron!"

CRACKLE!

Before the blood could even spray from the severed stump, a violent wave of black sand surged from the elbow.

The bone, the muscle, the flesh, and the skin knitted back together with rapid sickening clicks, regenerating the entire limb in the span of two heartbeats.

Ititius didn’t hesitate.

He gritted Harper’s teeth, channeled every scrap of Harper’s newly enhanced physical output, and drove Harper’s regenerated sand-hardened fist straight into the central maintenance intake seam of the machine.

BOOM-CRUNCH!

The plates groaned.

"Hurry... Hurry..."

With an agonizing metallic screech that set the teeth on edge, Harper’s hand punched three feet deep into the internal machinery, shattering the delicate silver-script conduits, crushing the central mana-regulator, and ripping free a bundle of glowing sparking copper-quartz coils.

BZZZZZT-SPARK-POP!

The smooth hum of the Suppression Engine instantly hitched as the rings shuddered violently, wobbling in their magnetic tracks.

Sparks of blinding blue and red plasma erupted from the breached casing with the cooling fluids hissing as they boiled against the exposed heatsinks...

The machine began to violently short-circuit with its stabilization frequency dropping by forty percent in a single breath.

THUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUM!

A concussive impact rattled the floor behind him as Ititius slowly withdrew Harper’s bloody arm from the smoking breach, shaking the boiling oil from her knuckles.

"Stop."

The voice wasn’t loud but it carried a suffocating power that seemed to physically pin the air in the chamber to the stone flags.

Ititius slowly turned around, clapping Harper’s hands together in slow applause as he stepped lightly backward, vaulting over a fractured steel pipe to create twenty yards of distance.

"Hoho~" Ititius purred, a massive grin spreading across Harper’s face. "The hero arrives at the eleventh hour! How exquisitely predictable!"

Standing thirty paces away, silhouetted against the dark mouth of the exhaust shaft, was Kara White.

Her long midnight-blue cloak was torn at the hem, coated in gray ash and scorched soot.

Her long wild black hair thrashed in the dust, and her half-lidded violet eyes were fixed on Harper’s face with a pair of cold murderous pupils that burned with an intensity so terrifying that the temperature around her seemed to drop into an icy void.

A dense suffocating aura of pure murderous intent rolled off Kara’s single-armed frame, pressing against the cavern walls with the weight of an entire falling mountain.

Ititius laughed, tilting Harper’s head with an amused scoff.

"The machine is remarkably durable," Ititius chuckled, resting his hands on Harper’s hips. "I must give credit to your mortal artificers but... do you feel that, little hero? Can you feel the shift in the ether?"

He closed his eyes for a microsecond, Harper’s chest inhaling the ozone-thick air with genuine ecstatic relish.

"The seal is fractured," Ititius whispered. "The anchor is slipping and the sweet boundless energy of the Sovereign Realm is beginning to bleed back into this pathetic little sphere... My true divine power is answering the call! I need only finish dismantling this heap of iron, and the gates will tear wide open!"

He turned his green-and-gold eyes back toward Kara with his pupils narrowing as he studied the specific vibration of the mana rolling off her body.

He paused as the arrogant smile on Harper’s lips subtly twitched.

"Wait..." Ititius murmured, his voice dropping into a sharp suspicious rasp. "This mana... this dense suffocating stench of..."

His eyes widened, recognition flashing like a lightning strike through his divine mind.

"It’s YOU!" Ititius shrieked, pointing an accusatory manicured finger straight at Kara’s face! "You are that insolent peasant cur from the secret realm! You are Silas Graves!"

Silas, standing within the shell of Kara White, didn’t answer.

Ititius threw his head back, a sharp mocking bark of laughter tearing from Harper’s throat.

"AHAHAHAHA! Look at you! Look at the mighty!" Ititius mocked, waving Harper’s hands with exaggerated feminine flourishes. "What is this ridiculous little costume?! Did you cross the sea and cast away your manhood just to play at being a woman?! How utterly pathetic! How disgraceful!"

There was nothing... Kara didn’t say anything.

’I’m sure of it now... Ititius,’ Silas thought, the name landing in his skull like a dropped anvil. ’The cockroach who refused to stay dead... The thing that wore her face, butchered a palace, and turned a district into glass...’

’I’m going to kill you.’

SHUUUUUU!

The pinned left sleeve of Kara’s midnight-blue coat tore open.

With a soft fluid hiss of regenerating bone and muscle, a pale muscular left arm materialized from the shoulder, its fingers flexing with sharp cracks as Kara brought both hands up into a low aggressive brawling stance.

Yet beneath the cold fury, her jaw gritted until her teeth ached.

’The body...’

That was the trap, and it was a clean one.

Ititius wasn’t fighting through an avatar as he was wearing Harper’s nervous system.

Every punch Silas threw, every blade he summoned, every spell he channeled would tear through Harper’s flesh before it ever touched the god inside.

The Dawn Blade would cleave her in two and anything fire would burn her to ash.

He didn’t want to hurt Harper.