Chapter 623: Warrior’s Heart [Bonus - ]

Chapter 623: Warrior’s Heart [Bonus Chapter]

The basalt flagstones of Sector Two were slick with black bile and shredded chitin, hissing faintly where acidic fluids ate through the sealants.

SHRIT-SHRIT!

Two ribbons of link-less tungsten chain whipped through the heavy dust, snapping taut with a hum that set the teeth on edge.

"Ptch!"

Tasmin didn’t look at the three bone-fiends flanking her from the alley... instead she pivoted on her left heel with her weight settling low into the hip as the twin daggers reversed in her palms.

The silver edges caught what little bruised sunlight filtered through the smoke, flashing an oily violet.

CLANG-CRACK!

The nearest beast... a four-legged scavenger whose skull had elongated into a serrated spade lunged forward with its jaw clicking like dry shears and Tasmin’s right elbow flicked.

The chain followed the snap of her shoulder, coiling twice around the monster’s snout before she yanked downward with the full rotational torque of her core.

THUD!

The beast’s face hammered into the curb, fracturing the stone.

Before it could thrash, Tasmin’s left foot drove into the base of its neck, pinning the vertebrae, while her secondary dagger drove smooth and clean through the soft junction beneath the cranial horn.

SPLAT!

There was no wasted motion at all as Tas pulled the blade free with a wet scrape, her thumb immediately nudging a pair of middle-aged shopkeepers toward the glowing starlight ward flickering fifty yards ahead.

"Don’t gawk," Tasmin barked, her voice cutting cleanly through the sirens. "The barrier is twenty paces... Keep your heads below the sill and move your legs. If you drop your parcels, leave them. The stone won’t wait for them at all!"

The two men scrambled over the shattered glass, their breath coming in ragged whistling sobs as they threw themselves through the permeable violet luminescence of Aeliana’s barrier.

The moment their heels cleared the threshold, the honeycombed runes rippled, deflecting a diving swarm of razor-winged carrion crows with a deafening PING-PING-PING.

Tasmin stepped back into the street, letting the chains reel back into the magnetic cuffs along her forearms with smooth, oily clicks.

Her short silver-streaked hair was damp with sweat, clinging to the nape of her neck beneath the high collar of her mantle.

’Fissures are multiplying in the lower levels,’ she assessed, her golden eyes darting across the cracked facades of the district. ’The surface is holding for now, but the crust feels like rotten timber.’

VUUUUUUUM!

A subtle displacement in the upper air caught her ear... it was a sound similar to the hum of a plucked harp string resonating through cold glass.

Tasmin crouched, her soles sinking an inch into the shadow pooled behind an overturned delivery van, and launched herself upward.

She cleared the fourth-story cornice with a single Shadow-Submersion Drift, bursting out from the shade of a decorative limestone gargoyle to land on the broad gravel-strewn roof of another building.

The gravel crunched once.

Before she could rise from her landing crouch, a soft freezing downdraft swept across the roof.

FLUTTER!

Aeliana drifted down through the smoke-choked sky with her slender, star-silver sabatons coming to rest upon the gravel without making so much as a pebble roll.

Her long pale gold hair floated behind her like spun thread, untamed by the wind and the constellation-etched plates of her midnight-blue cuirass gleamed with an immaculate mirror-like polish that defied the soot clinging to the rest of the city.

"You’re working the perimeter close to the ground, Commander," Aeliana said.

Her voice was melodious and carrying that infuriating effortless archon poise that always made Tasmin want to test a dagger against her shoulder plates. "Sector Three’s residential blocks are largely emptied of breathing people... I came across to verify this place."

"They’re moving," Tasmin said, rising and rolling her right shoulder until the joint clicked.

Her gaze swept the burning avenue below. "A bit slow on the uptake, but terrified enough to follow orders when the teeth start clicking behind them... How does the count look on your end, Aeliana? Still hovering above the filth and pretending your boots don’t touch dust?"

Aeliana’s silver-green eyes narrowed by a fraction of a millimeter with a tiny amused smirk touching the corner of her lips.

"My boots remain unsoiled because I understand the utility of elevation, Tasmin," the elf replied smoothly. "Down in the muck, you’ve routed... what? Three hundred? Perhaps three hundred and twenty?"

"Three hundred and forty-two," Tasmin corrected immediately, her tone sharpening with competitive bite. "Well not counting the ones Brida probably flattened by accident while trying to be helpful..."

Aeliana chuckled, it was a light angelic sound that grated against the background hum of the distant explosions.

"A respectable tally for someone crawling through gutters," Aeliana murmured, tilting her head.

’Is she trying to sound cool again...?’ Tamsin thought while rolling her eyes, Aeli always acted like this when she read a new novel.

"I have guided seven hundred and sixteen directly into the deep access hatches... Seven hundred and eighteen, if the two technicians hiding inside the generator room managed to crawl through the intake tube before the ceiling collapsed."

Tasmin turned her head, her golden eyes widening slightly in genuine surprise.

"Seven hundred?" Tasmin repeated, her brow furrowing. "Are you sure the underground bunkers are designed to hold that much people... If you’re stuffing seven hundred into those chambers, they’ll be suffocating on each other’s breath within forty minutes."

"They aren’t remaining in the bunkers," Aeliana said.

The archon’s smile faded, replaced by that deep stillness that usually accompanied her calculations.

She walked to the edge of the parapet, her silver fingers resting lightly upon the weathered coping stone.

"There is an active spatial current operating beneath the city," Aeliana explained. "The moment the citizens descend past the third security bulkhead, they are being caught in a wide-aperture field... It isn’t a simple blink, and it certainly isn’t a crude teleport spell either... The spatial power is terrifyingly refined with folded dimensions, anchored to an external coordinate miles outside this place."

Tasmin stepped up beside her, her hands resting on the pommels of her daggers.

"External? You mean someone is extracting them from Iunu entirely?"

"Yes," Aeliana nodded. "The signature possesses the exact same purity as my own star-weaving... well no, I’m stronger but they do have more mastery than me. It takes real concentration to fold space around ordinary civilians without their organs rupturing from the shear... Whoever is pulling the strings on the other side understands spatial power on a whole new level."

Tasmin’s eyes flickered with suspicion. "Is it an enemy? A second party from the Sovereign Realm taking advantage of the breach to harvest souls...?"

Aeliana shook her head, her pale hair swaying across her pauldrons.

"No," she said softly, a faint reassuring warmth returning to her eyes. "The frequency comes from someone near our Lord’s personal mana signature, woven together with the primordial fire of the Crimson Dragon."

’Do you really have to talk like this, Aeliana?’

"Talira is down there, working around the city alongside him. Between our Lord’s core and Talira’s breath, the refugees are being deposited safely into the southern side of this country beyond the dunes... The citizens are not dying in the dark, Tasmin. That much I can assure you."

Tasmin let out a long slow breath through her teeth, her shoulders easing by a bare half-inch.

"Good," she muttered. "That means we don’t have to worry about the retreat collapsing behind us... We just need to hold the surface until the sky runs out of vermin."

"Indeed," Aeliana said.

Then, she raised her chin slightly, her gaze flicking toward the sky three hundred yards above the library.

A small matte-black metallic cylinder, propelled by four silent micro-rotors, hovered lazily against the grey thermal haze.

A glowing amber lens on its underbelly rotated continuously, tracking the two women on the roof with persistence.

Further along the skyway, two more civilian media drones were circling like vultures, their broadcast diodes blinking rapid green pulses.

"If you haven’t already noticed," Aeliana murmured, her lips barely moving as she spoke without turning her head, "I think it’s the press and they’ve recovered their nerve... Those mechanical eyes have been trailing my starlight for the past twelve minutes. I think like in the novels, they’re broadcasting us across every network there is."

Tasmin’s jaw tightened. "Pests."

"I’ve read about these contraptions in the Blessed Land archives," Aeliana warned, dropping her voice to a strict whisper. "They pick up sound through atmospheric vibration so don’t speak Lord Silas’s name aloud. He walks this earth as Lord Vespera, and until he says otherwise, the public doesn’t get to connect us to his true identity... Use the title."

"I’m not an idiot, Aeli," Tasmin scoffed, crossing her arms. "I’ve been operating in the dark since before your ears grew points. I don’t give my commander’s name away to metal toys."

SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEECH!

The sky above the library violently groaned as the clouds were violently shredded by the sudden descent of a massive, bone-plated horror that dropped from the upper rim of a large fissure in the sky.

It was a Tier 4 Dread-Wyrm... a serpentine nightmare sixty feet from snout to tail, forged from interlocking plates of blackened petrified bone that crackled with sickly corrosive emerald plasma.

’Why are the monsters so big though...?’

It possessed no wings, instead the monster rode the air upon eight pairs of splayed, skeletal ribs that beat against the air like oars, its hollow eye sockets blazing with high-powered fire.

"GRAAAHHHHHHHHHH!"

The concussive shockwave of its roar shattered the remaining glass in the archive’s skylight, raining sharp shards down into the atrium below.

Tasmin’s chains hissed from her cuffs, her silver daggers dropping into her palms with instantaneous readiness.

Beside her, Aeliana’s starlight bow flared into existence, three purple spatial arrows nocking to the string in a single fluid heartbeat.

"What a big thing..." Tasmin commanded, her boots sinking into the roof’s shadow. "I’ll sever the rib-joints, you take the cranial core—"

"Wait," Aeliana whispered, her ears twitching violently. "Above it."

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSSSSH!

A sound like an atmospheric reentry vehicle tearing through the clouds drowned out the roar of the wyrm.

High above the beast, dropping through the smoky haze at high velocity, was a massive hurtling meteor of dark slate and flying auburn hair.

"GWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"

The booming ear-splitting laugh echoed off the building walls bare seconds before impact as the woman above wasn’t using a weapon...

She fell through the sky with her massive legs tucked and her right arm cocked back until the thick leather straps of her pauldrons shrieked under the strain of her expanding lats, her calloused iron-hard knuckles glowing with a red-gold hue.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The punch detonated the air around the monster!

Brida’s fist drove straight into the center of the sixty-foot beast’s skull and the ungodly force of the impact completely bypassed the bone armor, sending a visible comical shockwave of pressurized air and golden mana rippling down the monster’s entire spine.

CRACK-CRUNCH-SHATTER!

The Dread-Wyrm didn’t even have time to shriek.

Its skull disintegrated into powdery white meal with its sixty-foot spine shattered into hundreds of flying, jagged shards and the remaining forty tons of its calcified body were violently, horizontally blasted across two hundred yards of open air.

The corpse crashed into the side of an eight-story commercial bank across the boulevard, punching clean through three floors of reinforced concrete before collapsing into a mountain of pulverized brick and shattered bone.

THUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUM!

The roof beneath Tasmin and Aeliana violently lurched!

Brida hit the gravel on both feet with her landing impact driving a six-foot crater into the roof, sending fissures spider-webbing across the concrete deck and raining dust down through the cracked ceiling below.

The dust cloud puffed out in a wide circular ring.

Brida stood in the center of the crater, completely unbothered, dusting off the leather bracer on her right forearm with a broad, cheerful grin that showed off her thick blunt teeth.

The bright yellow poppy the little girl had given her was still tucked neatly behind her left ear, miraculously undamaged by the damage she had just caused.

"Whew!" Brida boomed, rolling her neck with a wet crack. "Now that was a decent head! Had some good crunch to it! Hey, girls! Beautiful day for a stroll, ain’t it?!"

Tasmin and Aeliana stood completely frozen, staring at the giant woman.

The roof was silent save for the distant sirens then, slowly, Tasmin’s pupils contracted.

Beside her, Aeliana’s silver-green eyes narrowed into sharp intense slits of pure, analytical shock.

Something was undeniably wrong.

Or rather... fundamentally different.

To high level Awakened of their caliber, the presence of another warrior was as distinct as a voice in an empty room.

Barely twenty minutes ago, Brida’s mana had been a broad unrefined boulder... It was heavy and immovable, but rough around the edges, leaking pressure like water splashing from an overfilled bucket.

But now...?

The air within ten paces of Brida felt... compressed.

Her sun-bronzed skin didn’t merely look tough, it carried a deep-rooted metallic luster that seemed to absorb the light around her.

Her core, usually roaring with boisterous vitality, had settled into an immovable iron-hard anchor that felt like she was truly Unmovable.

Tasmin stared at her, her eye twitching as she slowly lowered her daggers.

"What the unholy fuck happened to you?" Tasmin hissed, stepping forward and glaring up into Brida’s face. "You were gone for fifteen minutes... You look like you got dipped in melted star-slate and swallowed an iron anvil!"

Brida blinked, scratching the back of her head with a thick hand, her grin widening until her eyes crinkled.

"Oh, that?" Brida laughed, puffing her chest out so hard the dark star-slate armor creaked in protest. "I got a goal! A life goal! A genuine, honest-to-god warrior’s motivation, just like you girls have!"

Aeliana tilted her head, her golden eyebrows furrowing in genuine, bewildered curiosity.

"A goal? You abandoned your defensive sector to go philosophizing in an alleyway?"

"I didn’t abandon nothing!" Brida barked back defensively, planting her fists on her wide hips.

The attack had destroyed the drones nearby which made Aeli allow Brida speak.

"I was thinking! About what Silas said back in the mines and them about me having a fire in my belly that doesn’t go out and I found it! And the moment I figured it out... BAM! This crazy energy slammed into my chest, and my soul gave this giant thump, and suddenly everything felt ten times lighter! I think I’m going to call it Warrior’s Heart!"