Chapter 617: Strange Beautiful Woman [Bonus - ]

Chapter 617: Strange Beautiful Woman [Bonus Chapter]

Her hands trembled slightly... It was not from fear, but from the boiling excitement coursing through her meridians.

’This whole thing... It’s a game.’

Before Silas had dispatched them across the burning districts of Iunu, a silent unspoken decree had rippled through the ranks of the ten summoned women...

Whoever earned the greatest amount of UP in the Lord’s eyes would receive a single personal reward upon their return, one he’d refused to name aloud, only smiling that casual devastating smile of his when the girls demanded details.

Aeliana’s breath hitched in her throat with her chest heaving as she remembered that smile.

’I don’t even know what it is,’ she thought, her cheeks burning so hot they melted the frost forming on her cheekbones, ’and I already want it more than I have ever wanted anything in my entire existence... Whatever it is, it looked so sweet on his face when he refused to say it out loud... I want it for myself, and I will not share it with anyone.’

’Brida is currently anchoring the southern boulevard with her titan shield! Morwenna is down there, laughing like a drunken cutthroat while she cleaves through monsters! Tasmin is already drowning the western shadows as well! If I spend too much time speaking to people, those shameless vixens will overtake my tally!’

SCREEECH!

Above her, an entire descending formation of two hundred winged chitterers and three massive four-winged rift-beasts broke through a newly formed fissure, diving straight toward her rising silhouette.

Aeliana looked up.

WHOOSH!

"I haven’t gotten to use the extent of my power before... I guess I can test it out on you all."

She simply threw her arms wide, letting her head tilt back into the freezing wind.

’I will not lose to them!’

WOOOOOOO!

The atmospheric pressure around Aeliana’s body violently warped, bending the light, bending the wind, bending the very fabric of space until the clouds began to swirl around her like a celestial whirlpool.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

A multi-layered nova of purple spatial energy exploded outward from her chest, with Aeliana standing at the epicenter of the blast.

The heaven-shattering detonation tore through the sky, obliterating all two hundred monsters into subatomic dust, lighting up the sky in a beautiful flash of starlight.

’I need to kill more...’

[Three Miles Away.]

The penthouse floor of the Grand Oasis Palace was a fortress of luxury that had suddenly been transformed into a chamber of suffocating terror.

RUMBLE-SHAKE!

The thirty-story hospitality tower groaned beneath its foundations.

Through the massive, floor-to-ceiling panoramic glass windows that wrapped around the private lounge, the panoramic view of Iunu was a vision of the end of days.

The once-gleaming white limestone avenues were choked with black smoke, burning vehicles, and swarms of dark writhing shapes that poured from the sky like an endless plague of locusts.

Inside the suite, Penelope was pressed against the back of an upholstered sofa, her small hands clutching Lia’s oversized grey cardigan so tightly that her knuckles were bloodless.

Her vibrant purple hair was loose, thrashing against her cheeks as her wide dilated eyes stared out through the glass.

’Big sis...’ Penelope’s thoughts were a frantic bleeding spiral of guilt and terror. ’Silas... where are you...?’

...They were out there.

Somewhere in that burning ocean of falling rifts and screaming monsters, her older sister was either dead or trapped inside the body of a monster and Silas... the man who had looked her in the eyes, smiled, and promised he would bring Harper home had vanished into that exact same abyss.

’It’s my fault,’ Penelope wept silently, her lower lip trembling violently. ’If I hadn’t panicked... if I hadn’t run to their estate and begged Silas to come to this place... they wouldn’t be in this city. None of us would be here.’

Beside her, sitting on the Persian carpet with her knees drawn tightly against her chest, was Lia Graves.

The ten-year-old girl was hyperventilating, her small chest heaving with rapid shallow gasps of air.

Her face was pale as chalk, her large dark eyes reflecting the fire burning across the distant rooftops.

"Martha..." Lia whispered, her voice cracking into a tiny fragile whimper. "Is... is Big Brother going to be okay? The sky... the sky is broken. Why is the sky broken?"

Martha knelt immediately beside the two girls, her starch-stiff maid’s apron rustling as she wrapped her strong steady arms around both of their shoulders, pulling them firmly against her chest.

Despite the blaring sirens and the violent tremors rattling the crystal chandeliers overhead, Martha’s expression was a mask of cold immovable composure.

"Hush now, little miss," Martha murmured softly, her fingers gently smoothing down Lia’s hair. "Your brother is not an ordinary man. Master Silas is a Lord that has walked through the gates of the Sovereign Realm... A few stray rifts and noisy beasts will not claim his life. He gave his word that he would return for dinner, and Master Silas has never once broken a promise to this household."

Standing near the balcony doors, arms crossed over her chest, was Kaede.

The girl’s dark eyes were fixed on the sky with her jaw set and behind her, standing in a tight disciplined diamond formation, were the four elite Awakened bodyguards her older brother Minamoto had assigned to the charter.

Unfortunately they were Adventurers or they would have been able to summon people from their territory.

They were massive men, draped in traditional armor of lacquered black plates and woven spirit-silk with their faces hidden behind dark mempo masks.

The lead guard... a Third Stage veteran named Kenji whose core hummed with steady earth mana stepped forward, his voice carrying the calm confidence of a seasoned military professional.

"Do not distress yourselves, Lady Kaede, Young Miss Graves," Kenji spoke through his mask. "The Grand Oasis Palace was engineered to withstand high-magnitude seismic events and rift incursions... The primary barrier enveloping this tower is an independent Class-Four one, anchored directly to deep bedrock generators. It is designed to deflect bombardment from heavy artillery and aerial beasts so nothing short of a Tier 4 monster could breach this perimeter... We are completely safe within these w—"

Before the shadow ever touched the glass, the sound arrived first.

CREEEEEAK... CREEEEEAK... CREEEEEAK...

A slow groan of shifting obsidian scales against reinforced concrete, each plate the size of a dinner table dragging across the building’s exterior wall like a mountain being slowly skinned alive.

Beneath it, a deep pulse thudded through the floor.

THUD... THUD... THUD... KRA-KRA-KRA-KRA-BOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The sentence was violently severed by an impact so monstrous that the entire thirty-story tower shrieked like tearing metal...

The Class-Four barrier didn’t deflect the blow as advertised...

CRACK-SHATTER!

The golden hexagonal energy dome enveloping the penthouse shattered into millions of blinding useless sparks in a fraction of a second.

CREEEEEEAK-CRUNCH!

A shadow coiled violently around the exterior of the upper three floors.

It was an abyssal horror of nightmarish proportions... a colossal six-hundred-foot-long Demonic Dune-Serpent.

Its scales weren’t bone or reptile skin... they were thick, overlapping plates of jagged pitch-black obsidian that ground against the concrete with the deafening sound of an industrial rock-crusher.

Hundreds of glowing, crimson compound eyes lined its titanic triangular skull, and its maw, lined with rows of translucent six-foot-long fangs dripping with acidic green bile, spanned forty feet across.

The beast constricted.

CRUNCH! SNAP! GROAN!

The structural steel ribbing of the penthouse crumpled like dry paper... The thirty-story tower violently tilted sixty degrees to the side, throwing furniture, grand pianos, and marble tables sliding across the floor in a chaotic avalanche.

"LOOK OUT!" Kenji roared.

SMASH!

The massive, horned snout of the serpent drove straight through the panoramic floor-to-ceiling glass as ten tons of reinforced, shatter-proof crystal exploded inward in a hurricane of flying shards.

The howling gale-force desert wind flooded the suite, carrying the sickening rotten stench of the serpent’s breath... a smell like boiling copper and decaying organs that instantly made Penelope choke and gag.

"EVACUATE!" Kenji bellowed, his Third Stage earth mana flaring violently around his boots.

"SECURE THE PRINCIPALS! GO! GO!"

The four bodyguards moved with flawless military synchronization.

Kenji lunged forward with his heavy arm scooping Kaede against his chest.

A second guard dove across the tilting floor, grabbing Martha by the waist, while the remaining two guards threw their bodies forward to shield Lia and Penelope.

SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEECH!

The serpent opened its colossal throat, releasing a deafening concussive blast of pure sonic energy.

BOOM!

The shockwave hit the room like a freight train! ℴℴ𝘮

The two guards reaching for the girls were violently blasted backward with their heavy armor denting as they slammed through the interior drywall.

Martha screamed, her hand slipping from Lia’s fingers as the force tore them apart.

WHOOOOOOSH!

The floor beneath them completely gave way as the entire outer half of the penthouse suite broke off from the central elevator core, sliding out into the empty three-hundred-foot abyss.

"Ahhhhh!"

Penelope shrieked as she tumbled through the broken window frame, caught in mid-air by the third guard who wrapped his massive, armored arms around her, desperately firing his grapple toward the lower concrete ledges.

Kenji leaped into the void with Kaede, his earth mana coating their skin in a dense crystalline skin, preparing to slam into the lower roofs to absorb the shock.

And Lia...

"LIA!" Martha screamed from mid-air with her hand reaching out into the empty sky as she fell.

Lia Graves was alone.

The ten-year-old girl tumbled through the freezing three-hundred-foot drop while spinning wildly out of control...

The wind tore the breath from her throat, whipping Lia’s hair across her eyes, turning the burning city into a spinning blur of asphalt and smoke.

The ground was rushing toward her at terminal velocity...

Three hundred feet... two hundred feet... one hundred feet...

She looked down at the cold cracked pavement of the avenue below as her small hands clutched the fabric of her dress.

’Am I...’

The thought was small.

’...am I going to die?’

WHOOSH!

There was no sound of bones breaking and there was no cold crushing impact against concrete either.

In a fraction of a second, the roaring slipstream simply... vanished.

Lia’s falling momentum decelerated with impossible gentleness, as if she had fallen into a deep warm drift of silk feathers.

TAP!

Lia’s head landed softly.

"Huh?"

She blinked, her breath coming in tiny trembling gasps with her eyes slowly opening.

"Ah..."

She wasn’t on the asphalt.

Her head was resting upon a pair of impossibly soft warm delicate thighs draped in diaphanous flowing robes of spun silver-white silk that smelled intoxicatingly of blooming mountain orchids.

Lia slowly tilted her chin upward and her breath completely caught in her throat.

...Looking down at her was a woman.

A woman so breathtakingly beautiful that the concept of mortal beauty seemed like a crude unrefined sketch by comparison.

She possessed a face that looked as though it had been sculpted from living moonlight, framed by long flowing tresses of pale silver-green hair that drifted gently in the breeze like the weeping branches of an ancient willow tree.

Her eyes were deep emerald pools that carried the serene warmth of a forest... eyes that held no fear, no anger, only an infinite maternal gentleness that instantly washed the terror clean from Lia’s shivering soul.

Floating around them in the air, twenty feet above the street, was a gentle undulating sea of radiant emerald-green energy.

Lia looked over the edge of the woman’s lap.

Every single person who had fallen from the thirty-story tower... Kaede, Kenji, the other three bodyguards, Penelope, and Martha was suspended weightlessly in mid-air, cradled safely within soft glowing cocoons of warm green mana that drifted down toward the pavement like dandelion seeds.

A slender cool finger, soft as a flower petal, gently brushed across Lia’s left cheekbone.

Lia blinked.

Bare seconds ago, a stray shard of window glass had carved a bleeding scratch across her skin.

Yet, the moment the woman’s fingertip touched the wound, a soothing tingling warmth flared and the blood vanished.

The torn skin sealed over instantly, leaving behind flawless smooth flesh without so much as a speck of dried crimson.

FLUTTER!

The woman lowered them gently toward the street and the moment the emerald-green energy touched the cracked soot-stained asphalt of the avenue, an extraordinary miraculous phenomenon occurred.

CRACKLE-BLOOM!

From the fissures in the pavement... vibrant, lush green grass exploded outward in a rolling carpet.

Buds of white lilies, radiant blue lotus flowers, and sweet-scented jasmine burst into full fragrant bloom, transforming the burning, war-torn intersection into a breathtaking secluded garden that seemed detached from the burning apocalypse raging above.

’I feel so happy...’

Kaede, Penelope, Martha, and the four guards touched down upon the soft grass, completely unharmed, stumbling slightly as they looked down at their boots in utter disbelieving shock.

"Lia!" Martha gasped, tears of hysterical relief flooding her eyes as she bolted across the grass, dropping to her knees beside the girl. "Lia! Are you hurt?! By the heavens... are you alright?!"

Lia didn’t look at Martha.

She remained sitting on the grass, her wide dark eyes locked entirely onto the silver-green-haired woman who was kneeling gracefully beside her.

"Who... who are you...?" Lia asked, her voice a tiny awe-struck whisper.

SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEECH!

Before the woman could answer, a deafening ear-splitting shriek ripped through the air.

High above the street, coiled around the leaning, shattered frame of the Grand Oasis Palace, the six-hundred-foot Dune-Serpent looked down.

Its hundreds of crimson compound eyes locked onto the glowing garden, its massive obsidian jaws parting as it released a hiss.

Accompanying it, over thirty grotesque, four-legged trench-drakes and a swarm of winged carrion horrors broke away from the surrounding high-rises, diving straight toward the secluded street with hungry snapping jaws.

Kenji’s eyes dilated in terror.

"DEFENSIVE FORMATION! THE SERPENT IS DIVING! SHIELD EVERYONE—"

The silver-green-haired woman’s deep emerald eyes simply... flashed.

HUM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

In the sky above the street, dozens of silent concentrated detonations of pure emerald-green nature mana erupted simultaneously.