Chapter 615: Rifts To The Sovereign Realm [Bonus - [

Chapter 615: Rifts To The Sovereign Realm [Bonus Chapter[

Silas watched it go.

"Good riddance..."

A flicker of something like pity moved through his chest, and he set it aside where it belonged... The man had done too much to just be pitied.

"He’s a waste of the word."

He was happy... the god was dead, for good this time. He would have thrown a celebration if not for the fact that this was not the time.

SWOOSH!

Across the room, Harper’s physical body went completely limp with her knees buckling as gravity claimed her frame.

Kara blurred forward with her arms sliding smoothly under Harper’s shoulders, catching the girl before her face could hit the flagstones.

"Harper!" Kara called out, her voice filled with concern. "Harper, can you hear me?!"

She swept mana through Harper’s core... the golden parasite was gone.

The violet soul was there, firmly seated within her chest and circulating her native lightning mana through her newly healed meridians.

’This is good...’

Harper was whole, for real, and she was fine too.

Kara let out a massive shuddering breath of pure dizzying relief.

"Thank the gods..."

Harper’s eyelids fluttered open.

Her eyes were no longer burning with green or gold fire, they were her own... that intelligent beautiful shade of deep violet.

She looked up.

She saw Kara White’s face hovering over her with the dark hair, the sharp jawline, the half-lidded violet eyes, and found something underneath it that she knew.

"You..." Harper’s voice cracked.

Her pale face was drained of color with her lips trembling violently.

"Vespera... That was... you were Silas?" A wet broken laugh shook out of her. "Ah, I didn’t think it was yo— Sniff!"

With a sudden frantic sob, Harper threw both arms around Kara’s neck.

"Mm?!"

She pulled herself upward, wrapping her long legs tightly around Kara’s waist, clinging to her as if she were a drowning sailor clutching the last spar of a shattered ship.

"So–sorry..."

Harper buried her face deep into the crook of Kara’s neck, her body shaking with violent uncontrollable sobs that soaked the collar of Kara’s coat with hot tears.

"Don’t let go..." Harper wept hysterically, her fingers digging so hard into the wool of Kara’s mantle that her knuckles turned white. "Please... Silas... Kara... whoever you are... never let go... please don’t leave me in the dark again..."

Kara’s arms wrapped securely around Harper with one at her lower back holding the weeping girl flush against her chest and the other hand gently patting her trembling hair.

"I’ve got you," Kara murmured softly. "You’re safe and the bastard is dead. I’m not letting you go..."

HUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM!

A strange unnatural sound vibrated through the floorboards which made Kara froze.

She slowly turned her head, looking over Harper’s shoulder toward the center of the chamber.

The Mana-Suppression Engine was no longer glowing azure as the short-circuiting breach where Ititius had punched through the casing had ceased sparking with blue mana.

Instead... a deep crimson light was beginning to bleed from the internal core.

The rings weren’t merely wobbling... they were spinning in erratic screaming reverse.

DING! DING! DING!

The First King’s stabilization runes along the housing were turning cherry-red, hissing violently as the alloy began to warp and liquify under an unprecedented build-up of mana.

Kara’s eyes blinked once then twice.

"No..." Kara muttered, the blood draining from her face until she looked like a corpse. "No, no, no, no, no..."

Harper sniffled against his neck, sensing the sudden tension. "Wh-what is happening...?"

BOOM!

Kara didn’t answer.

She kicked off the floor with every ounce of physical power her legs could generate as she sprinted toward the circular exhaust shaft, carrying Harper tightly against her chest.

"IT’S GOING TO BLOW!" Kara roared.

She reached the base of the vertical shaft, channeled a colossal column of compressed wind mana beneath her boots, and rocketed upward through the four-thousand-foot chimney like an artillery shell.

KABOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

Beneath them, the Mana-Suppression Engine reached critical mass and it did what anything in its position would do... It exploded.

VRM! VRM! VRM!

The explosion that followed wasn’t a regular one though... It was an apocalyptic rupture of space itself.

The crimson detonation vaporized the half-mile basalt dome into subatomic dust in the span of a single second as an expanding sphere of raw spatial distortion tore through four thousand feet of solid continental bedrock, shooting straight up the exhaust shaft like a volcanic piston of energy.

The shockwave tore through reality itself, sending seismic and dimensional waves rolling across the entire continent.

Above ground, in the ruins of the three-mile crater of Iunu...

BOOM-CRASH!

Kara broke through the surface of the earth, tumbling violently out of the yawning crater shaft... as the concussive back-blast of the detonation clipped her heels, throwing her sixty yards across the vitrified black glass of the basin.

"Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!"

She twisted her body in mid-air, curling her torso into a protective shield around Harper, taking the brutal impact across her own back and shoulders as they rolled across the glass, kicking up plumes of dark silt before coming to a sliding halt against the shattered rim of the crater.

"Guh..."

Kara coughed, spitting a mouthful of blood and black sand onto the glass with her vision spinning from the impossible force of the blast.

There were many forces that she could withstand easily and this seemed to not be one of them...

Kara rolled onto her side, looking down at Harper.

The girl was completely unconscious with her breathing shallow, but she was alive as the shock of the dimensional rupture had knocked her out cold.

"Good... Ugh..."

Kara let out a trembling breath, slowly pushing herself up onto her knees.

"We made it..." she whispered, wiping the blood from her chin. "We survived the blast..."

She slowly raised her head, looking up toward the sky above Iunu and in that single microsecond... Kara completely froze.

The breath died in her throat as the sky was no longer blue... It wasn’t even the bruised purple of the earlier clouds...

High above the capital of Khemet, tearing straight through the upper thermosphere... a colossal tear in the fabric of space was violently ripping open.

’...No.’

...It wasn’t one... It wasn’t two...

CRACK-CRACK-CRACK-CRACK-CRACK!

Dozens, then hundreds, of massive swirling pitch-black gates to the Sovereign Realm were violently manifesting across the sky with their edges bleeding raw chaotic mana into the atmosphere.

And from the center of the largest portal directly over the city...

CREEEEEEAK!

A colossal rotting skeletal hand, easily the size of an entire city block, slowly reached out from the void with its bone fingers gripping the edge of the dimensional tear as an ear-splitting roar of thousands of monsters echoed through the heavens!

’Wh... what...’

Kara’s mind fractured in pure horror.

’What he took down was a Suppression Engine...’

Since the Suppression Engine was dead, the anchor was broken... The barrier that had kept the horrors of the Sovereign Realm locked away from the mortal world since the era of the Second King had just been shattered right above their heads.

Down in the outer sectors, sirens were screaming... buildings were collapsing as smaller portals began tearing open directly on the street level.

Citizens were running through the avenues, screaming in helpless terror as winged horrors and four-legged chittering abominations began raining from the sky.

’What am I supposed to do...?’ Kara thought with her hand trembling as he looked down at the unconscious woman in her lap.

Where was the World Council?! Where was everybody else?!

People were going to die... Tens of thousands of innocent civilians were going to be butchered in the streets... all because of that dead bastard Ititius.

’I killed him but now I don’t even feel happy...’

And his own family... Kara’s heart seized with suffocating dread.

’Lia... Martha... Penelope... Kaede...’

They were three miles away in the Grand Oasis Palace!

Evelyn’s private jet was still two hours out and if Silas abandoned this crater to sprint across the city to shield his hotel, his reputation as Lord Vespera, the Hero of Humanity, the beacon of hope the World Council had made her to be, would vanish the moment the cameras caught him fleeing the frontlines.

But if he stayed here to fight... how could one single Gold Core hold back an entire falling ocean of monster legions?!

Even with the local Awakened, Iunu’s elite forces had already been wiped out in the palace!

’What do I do...?!’ Silas screamed internally, staring at the descending skeletal hand with wide desperate eyes. ’How do I save them all?!’

Suddenly...

A sharp crisp chime echoed directly in his head.

DING!

A glowing translucent blue notification slate materialized in the air before Kara’s face.

[THE ENERGY OF THE SOVEREIGN REALM HAS BEEN DETECTED IN THE SURROUNDING AREA.]

[COMMAND: SELECT TEN (10) ENTITIES (HERO / TROOP / MOUNT) TO SUMMON FOR DEPLOYMENT FROM YOUR TERRITORY.]

Kara blinked.

The hopeless desperate terror that had clamped around Silas’s heart vanished in a fraction of a second.

"O-oh..."

A slow smile spread across Kara White’s blood-stained face.

’Summon...?’

She raised her right hand, her thumb hovering over the glowing interface.

’Thank you.’

Kara tapped the tab.

...

The sky above the northern expanse of the Khemet Dominion decayed.

For centuries, the mortal realm had lived beneath the invisible reassurance of the Suppression Engines.

To the average merchant in the lower bazaars of Iunu, to the dockworkers unloading salt-crates along the canals, and to the tourists sipping iced hibiscus nectar beneath white-linen awnings, the Sovereign Realm was a distant abstraction... a place cordoned off behind strict international treaties, governed by licensed territorial lords who entered through their System tabs under the watchful eye of the World Council.

Whenever a wild rift had occasionally torn through the desert in the decades prior, it was an isolated telegraphed anomaly.

Sirens would sound twelve hours in advance.

Atmospheric barometers would register mana spikes with clean precision and Imperial marshals would evacuate surrounding sectors, cordon the perimeter with portable runic pylons, and dispatch a vetted strike team to clear the incursion before the beasts could take their first breath of Earth air.

Civilization had grown accustomed to order... Civilization had forgotten that the world was built upon a thin crust of cooling stone floating over an infinite ravenous ocean of nightmares...

Now, that crust was gone.

Across thirty thousand square miles of the northern part of Khemet, stretching from the smoking glass-lined crater where the White Citadel had once stood all the way to the jagged shale ridges of the border escarpments, space was tearing itself to ribbons.

CRACK-CRACK-CRACK-CRACK-CRACK!

Hundreds upon hundreds of jagged lightless fissures fractured the sky in violent detonations of atmospheric pressure...

They looked like veins of black ink spreading through clear water, vomiting thick plumes of sulfurous crimson mist and howling winds that stripped the roofs from high-rise complexes and sent parked hover-transports tumbling down the avenues like crumpled paper cups.

And from the yawning bellies of those fissures, the horrors poured forth.

SCREEEEEECH!

GROOOOOOOWL!

Winged chittering monstrosities with segmented chitinous carapaces and lamprey maws... four-legged stalkers whose muscles were exposed cords of black lightning, undulating masses of necrotic sludge that melted the asphalt beneath their bellies and thousands of abominations, starved of flesh for centuries, converged upon the living city in a falling shrieking avalanche of violence.

Two thousand feet above the skyway of Iunu’s Major Sector, a twin-rotor civilian news helicopter bucked and rattled violently against the gale-force thermals.

THWAP-THWAP-THWAP-THWAP-THWAP!

Inside the vibrating cockpit, warning klaxons were blaring in an ear-splitting intermittent rhythm.

Red fault indicators flashed across the flight console as the pilot... a middle-aged man named Bakr whose flight suit was completely saturated with dark rings of cold sweat wrestled frantically with the collective stick with his knuckles white and his foot stomping the anti-torque pedal as turbulent gusts of spatial displacement threatened to flip the airframe inverted.

"WE HAVE TO TURN AROUND!" Bakr screamed over the roar of the engines and the deafening shriek of the sirens, his voice cracking into panic. "ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR GODDAMN MINDS?! LOOK AT THE SENSORS! THE ENTIRE UPPER STRATOSPHERE IS CHOKED WITH HIGH-TIER MANA-SHEARS... IF A SINGLE RIFT CREATURE CLIPS OUR ROTOR HEAD, WE’RE DEAD BEFORE WE HIT THE ASPHALT! I’M ABORTING THE FLIGHT! I AM PULLING PITCH FOR THE SOUTHERN MOUNTAINS RIGHT NOW!"

"DON’T YOU DARE TOUCH THAT YOKE, BAKR!"

Standing by the open side-cargo hatch, leaning precariously out into the sub-zero, roaring slipstream with only a nylon safety harness keeping her from plunging into the abyss, was Nadia Khoury.

Nadia was thirty-two, an investigative war correspondent for the Mediterranean Broadcast Syndicate who had covered border insurgencies and illegal rift-mining operations across three continents.

Her windbreaker was whipping violently against her ribs with her short dark hair plastered against her forehead by sweat and freezing mist, but her hand clamped onto the broadcast microphone with the grip of a vice.

Beside her, braced against the bulkhead with his knees bent and his back braced against an avionics rack, was Samir, her veteran cameraman.

He had a heavy shoulder-mounted arcane optical rig pressed against his right eye, his calloused thumbs constantly tweaking the focal rings as he tracked the descending nightmare below with his jaw clenched so hard his molars ground together audibly.

"Nadia!" Samir yelled over his shoulder, his eye still glued to the glowing ocular viewscreen. "The global satellite uplink just synchronized... The feed went live on thirty-six international feeds! Views just cleared forty million, now eighty! It’s spiking exponentially! Every network in the Europa Directorate and the North American Coalition is rebroadcasting our feed!"

Nadia didn’t care about the numbers and she didn’t care about the corporate ratings either.

She turned her face into the stinging gale, looking directly into the high-definition lens of the arcane rig with her voice projecting through the microphone.

"If you are watching this broadcast anywhere in the civilized world... Listen to me!" Nadia spoke, the camera panning slightly to frame the apocalyptic horizon behind her. "This is not an unverified rumor... This is not a controlled military exercise. At fourteen hundred hours, following an unprecedented detonation that completely erased the Inner District of Iunu, It seems the Suppression Engine has suffered a failure!"

She pointed her trembling hand outward toward the city below.

"Look at your screens! Rifts to the Sovereign Realm are tearing open by the hundreds! The northern skyline of Khemet has completely ceased to exist! There is no barrier! Monsters of high-tier classification... creatures not seen since the Incursion are descending directly into residential districts! If this breach is not contained immediately, the chain reaction will propagate across Khemet within twelve hours!"

She leaned forward, her eyes wide, pleading with the look of someone watching their world burn in real-time.

"To the High Marshals of the World Council! To the standing armies of the Nine Powers! To any Lord or guild within traveling distance... Iunu needs help! We are facing a total extinction event! Send reinforcements! SEND—"

SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEECH!

A bone-scraping wail tore through the roar of the turbine.

"SAMIR! LOOK OUT!" the pilot shrieked.