Chapter 620: Bickering Women [Bonus - ]

Chapter 620: Bickering Women [Bonus Chapter]

RAHHHHHHHHHHH!

Driven mad by the mockery and the suffocating pressure of the domain, the remaining horde surged forward in a suicidal mass-wave assault.

WHOOOSH! WHOOSH! WHOOSH!

They came from the front, from the sides, leaping across the black water with teeth bared and their claws outstretched, desperate to tear the single woman to pieces by weight of numbers.

"Hm? Good doggies."

...Tasmin didn’t retreat.

She leaned forward with her heels digging into the shadow lake and her arms whipping backward as she prepared to release the chains in a full-perimeter [Voltaic Chain Execution]...

Suddenly... her scalp prickled.

A sharp deafening spike of raw force slammed directly against her sensory field from outside the domain.

’Wait... what the—?!’

Tasmin’s eyes snapped wide.

’FUCK!’

CRACK-SHATTER-BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The reinforced shadow-ceiling of her domain was completely obliterated from above.

A massive golden-red projectile... moving at roughly Mach 4 tore through the top of the dark dome like an artillery shell punching through paper.

The atmospheric displacement was so monstrous that the sound wave blew the liquid shadows apart, exposing the burning sun and the soot-choked air of Sector Two in a single concussive flash.

’Fuck you...’

Tasmin reacted on pure hard-wired muscle memory.

SWOOSH!

She severed the domain’s mana flow, launching her body backward in a desperate triple-rotation backflip with her boots skidding across thirty feet of shattered asphalt just as the projectile slammed into the street.

KABOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The intersection cratered.

’I hate you bitch.’

A thirty-foot-deep basin opened in the concrete, throwing hundred-pound chunks of asphalt, sewer pipes, and pulverized rock three hundred feet into the air.

The hundreds of surviving monsters that had been charging Tasmin bare milliseconds ago were instantly flattened beneath forty thousand pounds of pure descending physical mass with their bones and guts vaporized into a crimson grease-stain on the crater floor.

From the center of the dust cloud, rising above the screeching sirens and the roar of the blast, came a booming unapologetic roar of laughter.

"GWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"

The dust parted under a sudden violent backhand of wind.

Standing in the center of the shattered crater, resting an eight-foot-long broad-headed cleaver against her right shoulder, was a woman who looked like she had been carved directly from a mountain range.

She was tall... easily six feet four inches of powerful muscle and sun-bronzed skin.

’Ah, she’s using that new skill?’

Brida had gotten a new skill that increased her physical power by a lot and also made her taller as well, it was quite unfair.

Her wild unbraided mane of thick auburn hair whipped in the gale like a war-banner as she wore heavy unpolished plate armor of dark star-iron that clung to her massive shoulders and thighs, completely unadorned by runes or decorative gold, held together by thick leather straps that creaked under the bulk of her frame.

Brida, Grand Titan Bastion of Blessed Land, sniffed the air, spat a glob of dust onto the mangled remnants of an abyssal crawler, and blinked down into the street.

Her round boisterous eyes caught sight of Tasmin crouching on the curb, covered in soot with her twin daggers drawn and her silver-streaked hair standing slightly on end from the shockwave.

"Huh?" Brida boomed, scratching her broad jaw with a thick calloused thumb. "Oh! Hey, Tas! You were down there?"

Tasmin remained frozen in her crouch for two full seconds and her right eye twitched violently.

Beneath her high leather collar, the veins along Tasmin’s neck bulged with dark murderous mana.

Her fingers clamped onto the grips of her silver daggers so hard that the metal let out an agonizing, high-pitched creak.

’I am going to kill her,’ Tasmin’s thoughts snarled, every nerve ending in her brain screaming with homicidal rage. ’I am going to slip into her shadow tonight, drag her into the deepest drainage ditch in the Basin, and cave her thick pig-headed skull in with a cobblestone... I am going to punch her until her face is an unrecognizable lump of bruised meat...’

She drew a long trembling murderous breath through her nose, slowly straightening her spine.

"Brida," Tasmin said, her voice dropping into a tone so quiet and so terrifyingly polite that the nearby asphalt actually began to frost over. "Did you, by any chance, notice the thirty-meter sphere of pitch-black magical energy occupying the center of this thoroughfare before you decided to drop from the heavens like a brainless boulder?"

"Sure did!" Brida grinned broadly, completely oblivious or indifferent to the murderous intent rolling off the smaller woman.

She hoisted her massive titan-cleaver with one hand, resting the flat of the blade against her nape. "Looked like a giant bruised plum sitting in the road! Figured some oversized slug had laid an egg, so I came down to smash it! Didn’t know you were inside playing in the mud! Gwahaha!"

"I was refining my domain," Tasmin hissed through clenched teeth, taking three rigid strides toward the edge of the crater. "I had the targets perfectly contained... I was harvesting their cores to temper my Shadow Heart and you... you oversized farm-animal... you dropped out of the sky and splattered them into fertilizer!"

"Well, your little dome was tiny!" Brida retorted, pouting her lower lip with exaggerated disappointment as she looked around the intersection. "Seriously, Tas, you call that a domain? It was barely bigger than the new shed behind the barracks! A girl can’t even stretch her legs in a closet like that! How was I supposed to see you in all that gloom?"

THUMP!

Brida hopped lightly out of the thirty-foot crater.

The simple casual jump caused the surrounding sidewalk to violently shudder, sending a fresh ripple of cracks tearing through the facade of an adjacent alchemical supply shop.

Tasmin didn’t flinch.

She simply crossed her arms with her daggers hanging loosely from her fingertips and her sharp eyes narrowing into razor-thin slits of pure competitive spite.

"Enough of your excuses, brute," Tasmin snapped. "Let us talk numbers. How many civilians have you evacuated to the underground shelters?"

Brida stopped.

Her broad cheerful brow suddenly furrowed into an intense painful knot of deep intellectual labor.

She blinked once, twice, and then slowly raised her massive, gauntleted left hand to eye level.

She extended her thumb.

"One..."

She extended her index finger.

"Two..."

She reached her pinky.

"Five..."

She stared at her empty palm, then looked back at her fingers with her mouth moving silently as she attempted to calculate how many times she had cleared a collapsed tenement block.

Tasmin rolled her eyes so hard she nearly strained an optic nerve.

"By the void, you truly are an illiterate ape," Tasmin sneered, her voice dripping with acidic disdain. "You have five fingers on that hand, Brida... You can’t even count past ten without taking off your iron boots. There is a grand library in Blessed Land containing four thousand volumes of mathematics, basic arithmetic, and business logistics... Master Silas spent thousands of UP stocking those shelves. If your tiny, pea-sized brain requires tutoring, you could always swallow your pride and ask Reina to teach you how to count on an abacus!"

Brida’s face flushed a deep indignant crimson as she lowered her hand, scowling down at Tasmin with genuine wounded pride.

"I can count, you skinny little bat!" Brida barked, crossing her massive plate-armored arms over her chest. "I saved... it was a lot! It was at least... over a hundred and fifty! Maybe two hundred! I hauled an entire school bus out of a sinkhole by its bumper three blocks back! That’s gotta be worth like sixty points right there!"

Tasmin’s lips curved into a smug triumphant sneer that looked like it had been carved from polished marble.

"Two hundred and thirty-seven," Tasmin stated with coldness in her voice.

FSSSS!

Before Brida could open her mouth to argue, Tasmin’s right hand subtly twitched.

Twenty yards down the street, near the smoking ruins of a baker’s pavilion, three panicked civilians... a mother and her two teenage sons were cornered against an iron fence by two leaping shadow-hounds.

Tasmin didn’t even turn her head.

SH-SH-SH!

From the shadows beneath the fence, three thin ribbons of darkness whipped forward.

They caught the three civilians gently around their waists, yanking them fifty feet across the street with weightless momentum, sliding them directly through the blast-rated hatch of the civil bunker.

CLANG!

The hatch slammed shut behind them with the automated locking bolts engaging with a definitive green flash, the Civilians could open it when they needed to enter with a code.

’At least that’s what I heard them say...’

Tasmin slowly turned her golden gaze back to Brida, her smirk widening until her eyes curved into mocking crescents.

"Two hundred and forty," Tasmin corrected herself smoothly. "Keep up, Bastion or our Lord’s reward will be resting in my quarters before the sun touches the dunes."

Brida’s eyes narrowed into fierce competitive embers.

The air between the two women grew thick and crackling with suppressed mana.

This wasn’t merely about the crisis in Iunu...

A week ago, down in the ore veins beneath Blessed Land’s ridge, Silas had turned an ordinary mining shift into a competition between the two of them, laughing that whoever pulled the higher amount of ores could ask him for whatever they wanted in return.

Neither of them had let it go since and today was that day... the day that settled it all.

Brida glared down at Tasmin, her massive jaw setting into a stubborn immovable line.

"Oh, you think you’re so clever with your little shadows, huh?" Brida muttered, her fingers twitching against her thighs.

"I don’t think," Tasmin replied sweetly. "I calculate... Heh... While you waste thirty seconds smashing a single lizard into paste, I have already routed forty citizens to safety. You are a sledgehammer, Brida. In a rescue operation, a sledgehammer merely breaks what is already fragile."

"Is that so?" Brida’s voice dropped into a low deceptively cheerful rumble.

"It is."

SWOOSH!

Brida’s massive armored frame suddenly blurred.

To anyone who didn’t know her, a woman of her size should have moved with the slow ponderous momentum of a glacier but Brida possessed the explosive agility of a high-tier monster.

Before Tasmin’s heightened spatial reflexes could even register the displacement...

GRAB!

Brida’s iron-hard right hand clamped down with vice-like ferocity around Tasmin’s left ankle.

Tasmin’s pupils snapped wide in pure shock.

"What in the—?!"

"Oops!" Brida roared, a wide grin splitting her bronze face. "Oh no! My hand slipped! My grip is just so clumsy today, Tas!"

"BRIDA, YOU WHORE, PUT ME DOW—"

Brida didn’t put her down.

She planted her heavy iron sabatons into the cracked asphalt, twisted her massive hips with the rotational torque of a crane and reared her entire upper body backward.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The asphalt beneath Brida’s boots violently exploded into powder as she hurled Tasmin straight up into the sky.

The shockwave was so monstrous that it blew the windows out of the three adjacent buildings, creating a horizontal cone of displaced air that flattened a lamppost thirty yards away.

"HAVE A NICE FLIGHT, TAS!" Brida bellowed, cupping her hands around her mouth and waving frantically toward the heavens. "DON’T WORRY ABOUT THE GROUND DOWN HERE! THE GRAND TITAN BASTION HAS IT COMPLETELY UNDER CONTROL! GWAHAHAHAHA!"

"BRIIIIIIIIIDAAAAAAAAAAAA!"

Tasmin’s furious high-pitched screech tore through the air as she broke the sound barrier, rocketing straight toward the clouds like an anti-air missile.

The city of Iunu tilted, spinning wildly beneath her vision as the wind whipped her cloak into a frenzied roar.

In less than three seconds, she cleared four thousand feet of elevation with her body hurtling directly toward a swirling cluster of high-altitude rift fissures.

Tasmin gritted her teeth so hard that a tiny bead of crimson leaked from her lower lip.

’That brainless... overgrown... SOW!’ Tasmin raged in the freezing gale, her fingers twitching frantically. ’When we return to the territory, I am going to salt her rations... I am going to pour acid into her bathwater! I will make her life an unceasing waking nightmare!’

She twisted her torso mid-flight, fighting the terminal velocity drag, and looked forward.

Directly in her trajectory, descending from a five-hundred-foot tear in the sky, was an entire flock of sixty Abyss Skystrikers... grotesque four-winged avian horrors with razor-sharp beak-spurs and leathery bodies that crackled with jagged arcs of corrupted green lightning.

Beyond them, the massive wide tear in the sky hung like an open wound with the colossal skeletal hand still gripping the dimensional edge.

’My Lord’s orders were absolute,’

Silas’s voice echoed in her memory.

’Contain the perimeter, protect the civilians and avoid entering the gates at all costs.’

Tasmin’s golden eyes narrowed into deadly focused slits.

"Fine," she hissed into the howling wind. "If you want to throw me into the sky, Brida... then the sky belongs to me."

CLINK!

Tasmin released the silver daggers from her hands but they didn’t fall.

The thirty-meter tungsten chains wrapped around her forearms uncoiled with terrifying fluid speed, the blades spinning around her body in a dual whistling orbit that formed an impenetrable sphere of humming razor-sharp steel.

VUUUUUM!

Her right foot kicked out in mid-air but she didn’t have wings as she didn’t possess Aeliana’s flight.

Instead, a flat, three-foot platform of dense solidified black shadow materialized directly beneath her boot.

CRACK!

She used the shadow platform as a springboard, altering her body by forty-five degrees with an explosive concussive push.

WHOOSH!

Tas shot toward the lead Skystriker like a falling black star.

SHRIIIIIIIIIIK!

The beast screeched, opening its jagged beak to unleash a concentrated bolt of green lightning but Tasmin didn’t even blink.

STEP!

She vanished into the creature’s own shadow with Shadow-Submersion Drift!

POP!

She materialized instantly upon the beast’s scaly back!