Chapter 619: Thump! [Bonus - ]

Chapter 619: Thump! [Bonus Chapter]

Martha blinked.

Kenji and the three bodyguards stared at Eluned as if she had spoken in ancient tongues.

"A... a private jet?" Lia echoed, her voice squeaking again. "Big Brother... bought a private jet?!"

’Who is Evelyn... is it that black haired girl that he left with that day?’

"I believe so," Eluned smiled innocently, completely unbothered by the astronomical financial absurdity of the statement. "Lord Silas seemed quite pleased with her efficiency..."

’What kind of ridiculous corrupt billionaire world did my brother fall into?!’ Lia grabbed her own hair with both hands, groaning in disbelief.

Seeing the girl’s flustered state, Eluned’s smile softened into fondness.

She reached into the wide, embroidered folds of her flowing silver-white robes, her fingers searching for a moment before pulling out a sleek handheld camera.

She held the device up with delicate elegant curiosity.

"Before the transport arrives..." Eluned said, a faint charming blush touching her cheeks once more, "would you... would you be willing to take a photograph with me?"

Lia blinked. "A picture?"

"Yes," Eluned murmured, looking at Lia, Martha, and Penelope with earnest sincerity. "You are Lord Silas’s family in this waking world. You are the foundation of everything he fights to protect. I... I have heard him speak of you with such deep reverence in our quiet moments. If it pleases you, I would like to get to know each and every one of you. I wish to know what kind of life my husband cherishes."

Lia looked at the camera, then up into Eluned’s earnest radiant face.

Despite the madness of the situation... Despite the flying monsters and the fact that this beautiful overpowered woman had just claimed to be her sister-in-law, It was impossible to stay defensive against someone looking at her with such pure warmth.

"Well..." Lia muttered, crossing her arms and looking away with an awkward huff. "...I guess one picture won’t hurt but only if you tell me what he’s actually like over there! Does he really act like an emperor, or is he still a giant dork?"

Eluned’s eyes lit up with delight as she knelt beside Lia, angling the lens toward them. "Oh, Lord Silas is..."

...

Two miles away, in the heart of Sector Two’s commercial transit hub.

SHRIIIIIIIIIIK-SPLAT!

A clean crescent arc of lightless black cleaved through the air with the sharp hiss of a hot wire slicing through silk.

The eight-foot-wide head of an Abyssal Chitin-Crawler slid smoothly from its armored torso, hitting the cracked pavement with a heavy wet thud.

Black acidic ichor sprayed across the concrete, sizzling as it ate into the stone, but not a single drop touched the high-collared shadow-cloak of the woman standing over the corpse.

Tasmin, Shadow Commander of Blessed Land, flicked her wrists.

CLINK!

The twin daggers she held spun effortlessly across her knuckles before snapping into a reverse grip.

Her short jet-black hair, streaked with vivid ribbons of moonlight-silver, barely stirred in the wind as her sharp eyes swept over the burning street with cold detachment.

"Keep moving!" Tasmin’s voice rang out, sharp and commanding as a whip-crack. "Head for the lower maintenance hatch! Form a double line and do not stop to collect baggage!"

A hundred yards down the avenue, dozens of terrified civilians were scrambling toward an open reinforced bunker entrance set into the plaza bedrock.

CRUMBLE-GROAN!

A sudden violent crash echoed from the facade of an alchemical pharmacy three doors down.

A massive slab of reinforced concrete, severed by a falling rift-beast, collapsed outward, pinning an elderly Khemet man beneath two tons of smoking rubble!

"FATHER!" a young woman screamed, desperately clawing at the stone with bleeding fingernails.

SWOOSH!

In a fraction of a second, Tasmin vanished from the center of the street.

Her silhouette simply sank into the dark pavement like a stone dropped into ink with the help of Shadow-Submersion Drift.

POP!

She materialized instantly out of the shadow cast by the falling slab.

"Hold on!"

Tasmin didn’t even draw a breath, the woman drove her bare left hand beneath the two-ton block of reinforced concrete with her muscles flaring.

"Hup..."

With an effortless single-armed heave, she hoisted the massive slab off the ground and hurled it twenty yards down the street, where it pulverized three approaching scavenger-hounds into paste.

GRAB!

She scooped the injured old man up by his collar, thrusting him firmly into his daughter’s arms.

"Can he walk?" Tasmin barked, her golden eyes boring into the sobbing girl.

"Y-Yes! Yes, thank you—"

"Save your gratitude for the bunker," Tasmin cut her off cleanly, her hand pointing toward the illuminated shelter hatch thirty yards away. "Move... Now..."

The woman dragged her father toward the doors, scrambling inside just as the heavy blast-rated iron began to slide shut behind them.

Tasmin turned back to the street, letting out a slow irritated breath through her teeth.

SCREEECH! ROOOOAR! HIIIIISS!

The sounds were deafening.

From the alleyways, from the shattered roofs, from the cracks in the skyway overpasses... hundreds of abominations were converging upon the intersection.

Bone-beasts, shadow-stalkers, and multi-jointed trench crawlers flooded the street in a churning ravenous tide, drawn by the scent of human blood and the lingering mana of the shelter.

Within seconds, the intersection was completely surrounded.

A circular perimeter of death closed in on Tasmin from all three hundred and sixty degrees, cutting off every escape route as Tasmin stood alone in the center of the crossroads.

"Heh."

If she was cornered, she could use her badge to call for help which was a new feature that Thora had designed with the help of her sister and the other dwarves... however Tas didn’t call for Aeliana’s artillery or Brida’s shield.

She slowly tilted her head back, rolling her neck with a muted click with her lips curving into a dry condescending smirk.

"Honestly..." Tasmin murmured, her voice laced with razor-thin boredom. "You creatures are so utterly lacking in refinement... All this mindless gnashing and pointless screaming, it’s quite tedious."

She tapped the pommels of her daggers together.

CHIME!

The sunlight filtering through the smoke seemed to dim.

The shadows cast by the buildings, by the abandoned cars, by the piles of rubble... began to crawl.

They didn’t stretch with the angle of the sun at all... the shadows expanded, pooling outward across the asphalt like thick viscous black tar, swallowing the light.

Tasmin’s pupils dilated until her eyes were pools of lightless obsidian.

’Aeliana is turning the sky into a fireworks display,’ Tasmin reflected. ’While Morwenna is down by the canals carving up sea-horrors like a fishmonger... If I rely purely on single-target executions, those loud-mouthed women will take the honors before dinner.’

Her core flared deep within her chest and a cold suffocating pressure dropped over the intersection, pinning the charging monsters mid-stride as the temperature plunged to freezing.

"Might as well test this out once more," Tasmin whispered into the dark.

STEP!

She took a single quiet step forward, directly into the center of the charging horde.

"Domain..."

FSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSH!

The world went pitch-black.

The shadows beneath the charging horde erupted into an ocean of living liquid void that surged fifty feet into the air, and this time the tide didn’t stop at the monsters...

It reached for her too... but Tasmin didn’t step back from it.

She let it take her.

GULP!

The black wave closed over her head at the exact same instant it swallowed the first line of shrieking beasts, and for a single, suspended heartbeat, the entire intersection, predator and prey together, simply ceased to exist on the surface of the world.

There was no falling sensation and there was no cold...

WHOOSH!

There was only a vast starless dark that stretched in every direction at once, and somewhere within it, a hundred voices of frightened furious monsters were already screaming, disoriented and blind in a territory that belonged to someone else entirely.

Tasmin’s eyes opened in the black as the only two points of light in the domain.

"Welcome," she said quietly, to no one who could see her smile, "to my home turf."

CRK! CRK! CRK! WHOOSH!

Inside the inverted hemisphere of her domain, sound felt suffocated.

The sky, the burning high-rises of Sector Two, the choking amber dust of the Khemet desert... all of it had been sheared away by the absolute lightless boundaries of Tasmin’s domain.

To the abominations trapped within the perimeter, the ground had ceased to be cracked asphalt.

It had become a bottomless viscous lake of pitch-black liquid shadow that clung to their hocks, weighed down their leathery wings, and swallowed the sound of their frantic, scraping claws.

The beast turned in blind frantic circles.

Their yellowed compound eyes and burning corpse-fires flickered weakly against the crushing absence of light.

"GRAH! GRA! GRUH!"

They snarled, their jaws snapping at empty air, utterly unable to orient themselves in an artificial expanse where up and down were dictated solely by the will of the woman standing at its center.

Tasmin exhaled with a thin ribbon of pale frosted vapor drifting from her lips and dissolving instantly into the gloom.

’These monsters are varying from Tier 2 to Tier 3,’ she calculated with cold detachment, her pupils sweeping across the pack. ’Not a single Tier 4 is among them... They’re just gutter-dross that tumbled out of the rift’s fissures.’

Even within the notorious Umbral Basin back in the Sovereign Realm... where the darkness bred monsters that were quite strong, Tasmin had rarely seen this specific strain of abyssal vermin gathered in such dense concentrations.

Here, unmoored from the suppression of the world and driven mad by the sudden influx of oxygen, they were quite reckless.

FSSSSSSSS!

A ripple broke across the surface of the black pool beneath her boots but she didn’t drop into a defensive crouch.

"I’ll take you all out..."

Tas merely inclined her head by a fraction of an inch as three Tier 2 razor-fiends... bipedal horrors with exposed calcified ribs and forearms that ended in curved scythe-like bone blades lunged from her blind spot.

SWOOSH!

They didn’t strike flesh...

From the liquid floor, three serrated tendrils of solidified shadow erupted like coiled steel springs.

WHOOSH! WHOOSH! WHOOSH!

They impaled them from below, driving upward through their lower jaws, spearing their brains, and detonating their cranial cores with a soft wet pop.

SPLAT!

The three fiends dissolved before their bodies could hit the ground, their physical mass breaking down into black thread-like filaments that were instantly reabsorbed into the lake beneath Tasmin’s feet.

’Too slow,’ Tasmin thought, her pulse picking up with a dark electric hum beginning to vibrate behind her collarbones. ’Much too slow.’

She took a slow, leisurely step forward and the lake rippled beneath her soles with the resonance of struck crystal.

SHRIIIIK-CRACK!

A Tier 3 Bone-Raptor... an eight-foot predator whose spine was crowned with iridescent needles that glowed with corrosive acid burst through the gloom from her upper flank.

WHOOSH!

it moved with soundless acceleration with its serrated tail whipping forward in a horizontal arc aimed straight for Tasmin’s neck.

’Ah... fast.’

Tasmin brought her right forearm up to meet the blow, testing the power of the monster.

CHOP!

The raptor’s tail cleaved clean through her right wrist and the severed hand, still clad in its fingerless leather glove, spun into the air.

Yet, there was no spray of crimson blood and there was no white flash of severed bone either.

"Hehehehe~"

There was only a quiet hiss as thick, pressurized ribbons of pure, pitch-black shadow poured from the stump, coiling through the air like hungry blind serpents.

THUMP!

Deep within Tasmin’s chest, the Shadow Heart beat once as an iron vibration echoed through the entire domain.

FWOOOOOOOOOM!

The shadows spilling from her severed wrist turned viscous and boiling hot.

They expanded outward in a jagged, spiraling wave of black spikes that swept through the surrounding twelve meters!

CRUNCH-CRUNCH-CRUNCH-SHATTER!

The Tier 3 Bone-Raptor didn’t even have time to retract its tail.

The black spikes bored through its armored carapace, punched through its chest cavity, and violently ripped its internal organs to shreds.

Six other monsters charging in its wake were instantly impaled, hoisted ten feet into the air, and crushed into fine, necrotic mulch.

SNAP!

The severed right hand reached the apex of its arc, dissolved into black mist, and flowed straight back down into the stump.

The muscle re-braided as the skin sealed over and the leather glove rematerialized without a single stitch out of place.

"This is good..."

Tasmin flexed her newly formed fingers, listening to the small sharp clicks of her knuckles settling into their sockets.

A wide grin cut across her face, exposing white teeth against the darkness of her domain.

"Marvelous," she whispered, her voice husky with rising adrenaline. "The rate of mastery is climbing... The more of these wretched things I drag into the dark, the faster my Heart purges the impurities."

The surviving monsters shrank back with their animalistic instincts finally screaming at them that they weren’t trapped in a feeding pen... they were locked in a slaughterhouse with a butcher who didn’t even bleed as low terrified growls rattled in their throats.

Tasmin’s daggers slid from the hidden magnetic sheaths along her lower back with a dual singing ring.

CLINK!

The twin blades of silver gleamed with a oily purple sheen and wrapped around her forearms were thirty-meter lengths of ultra-fine link-less chain forged from shadow-tempered tungsten, their links crackling with licking embers of dark fire.

"What’s the matter?" Tasmin mocked, her eyes blazing with cruel amusement as she took another stride. "You broke through the heavens to feed on human cattle, didn’t you? Come, then. Fill your bellies."