Chapter 626: Number 5 [Bonus - ]

Chapter 626: Number 5 [Bonus Chapter]

Martha didn’t hesitate for half a second.

"Up, children," Martha commanded with authority.

Kenji and the Yamato bodyguards moved instantly, two of them carefully lifting the unconscious Harper onto an emergency stretcher, while the other two formed a tight escort around Penelope and Kaede as they bolted up the ramp into the pressurized interior of the jet.

Lia stood up from the grass with her small hand lingering for a moment against the soft fabric of Eluned’s flowing sleeve.

She stopped at the foot of the ramp, looking back over her shoulder.

Eluned remained standing upon the blooming turf, her silver-green hair drifting in the turbine draft as her emerald eyes watched the little girl with infinite patient gentleness.

She raised her slender hand, offering a soft graceful wave.

"Eluned..." Lia called out, her voice trembling slightly over the engine roar. "Will... will I see you again?"

Eluned’s smile widened, bright and radiant as the morning sun breaking over the mountains.

"Of course you will, Little Sister," Eluned replied softly, her voice carrying clearly through the gale. "I am bound to Lord Silas for an eternity... As long as he walks this earth, my place is at his side. We are family now so you will never be rid of me."

A small genuine smile broke across Lia’s face, it was the first real smile she had worn all day.

"Okay," Lia nodded firmly. "Take care of him... He forgets to eat lunch when he’s busy."

"I shall ensure he is thoroughly nourished," Eluned bowed her head gracefully.

Lia turned and sprinted up the ramp with her small boots disappearing into the warm, illuminated cabin of the jet.

Evelyn remained standing by the hatch, taking another sharp puff from her cigarette as her sharp eyes locked onto the ethereal nature deity standing in the middle of a blooming garden.

’Fuck... I can’t stop myself from asking.’

Evelyn’s brow furrowed slightly, her gaze flicking over the miraculous tree roots holding the skyscraper.

"Is he alive?" Evelyn asked, her voice blunt, direct, and stripped of corporate pretense. "Silas. Is he alright down there?"

Eluned slowly rose to her full height with her expression settling into calm confidence.

"My Lord is whole, Lady Evelyn," Eluned answered smoothly. "He has already severed the primary root of this calamity so proceed with the extraction. I shall ensure your departure is unmolested..."

Evelyn exhaled another stream of smoke, nodded once, and tapped the hydraulic door control. "Don’t let him do anything stupid."

CH-H-H-H-H-CLANK!

The heavy airlock door sealed shut, the locking pins driving home with a heavy pressurized thud.

SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEECH!

Above the garden, the sky darkened once more.

Drawn by the massive heat and mana exhaust of the supersonic turbines, an entire swarm of over eighty winged carrion-horrors and three four-winged wyverns dove from the clouds with their talons outstretched, hurtling toward the climbing jet like a falling iron net.

Inside the cockpit, the pilot shoved the throttles forward and the twin turbines roared with deafening fury as the jet leapt off the pavement, rocketing upward toward the open sky.

Eluned stood alone in the center of the empty street.

"I should help..."

She casually raised her right hand with her index finger pointing straight at the descending swarm and her thumb cocked back like the hammer of a pistol.

Her emerald eyes flashed with cold divine authority as her lips parted.

"Bang."

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

A concussive invisible blast of razor-sharp wind mana erupted from the tip of her index finger.

The single burst expanded into an shockwave that tore through three thousand feet of open air as all eighty carrion-horrors and the three colossal wyverns were instantly pulverized into a fine drifting red mist.

’Good luck, Evelyn and thank you for keeping them safe...’

The secondary displacement wave slammed directly into the tail-end of Evelyn’s private jet... not with destructive force, but with a perfectly calibrated push that accelerated the aircraft to Mach 4 in less than half a heartbeat, hurling the transport straight through the upper storm clouds and out of sight beyond the horizon.

The sky fell quiet.

Eluned slowly lowered her hand, letting out a soft delicate sigh that rustled the jasmine blossoms at her feet.

"Achoo!"

She paused, blinking with her nose twitching as she sneezed softly into the silk sleeve of her robe.

She rubbed her nose with the back of her wrist, her emerald eyes narrowing as she looked northward toward the flooded streets of Sector Two.

’Someone’s speaking of me,’ Eluned thought, a sharp haughty pout touching her lips.

Her chin tilted upward as her eyes flashed with disdainful mockery.

’Morwenna. It can only be that uncouth, foul-mouthed pirate...’

Eluned smoothed down her silver skirts, turning her gaze back toward the deep crater where Silas’s mana burned bright.

"Tch," Eluned muttered under her breath, her voice dripping with divine pettiness.

"That virgin."

...

The sky above Kaldmir was rotting.

A hundred and forty miles north of the smoking crater that had once been the White Citadel of Iunu, the horizon had turned the color of bruised plums and curdled milk.

The dry desert wind that usually blew clean and hot off the Great Dune Sea had died completely, replaced by an unnatural wind.

On the roof of the administrative guildhall in the heart of Kaldmir, a woman knelt on one knee upon the sun-cracked terracotta shingles.

Her long sea-green hair whipped across her face in erratic violent snaps with the strands catching against the dark leather of her high collar.

’Is this what our ancestors faced?’

The thought felt heavy in her chest, settling like lead into the pit of her stomach.

She had read the sanitized histories in the libraries and she had studied the woodblock prints of the First Incursion... The legendary catastrophe thousands of years ago when the sky first tore open and the creatures of the Sovereign Realm had poured into the mortal cradle like ants into honey.

But reading about an apocalypse in a leather-bound folio was a different thing from feeling the tectonic foundations beneath your boots shudder under the weight of a dimensional rupture.

And this... this was only the northern part of Khemet.

A single engine in the south had suffered a catastrophic blowout, and already, across five provincial cities, twenty trade towns, and hundreds of miles of paved desert expressway, reality was fraying at the edges.

SHING-CRACK!

Below her, in the wide cobblestone avenue fronting the fountains, a four-legged bone-stalker... its ribs exposed and its snapping jaw dripping acidic black bile lunged at the entrance of an abandoned textile shop.

Before its claws could scrape the limestone, a flash of pure violent violet light cleaved the gloom.

SPLAT!

A woman clad in layered amethyst silk and lacquered star-iron stepped out of the beast’s blind spot.

Her sickle-curved khopesh, humming with an overcharged frequency of purple lightning, flicked upward in a reverse one-handed draw.

The stroke entered the abomination’s pelvic joint, carved cleanly through its petrified vertebrae, and exited through its opposite clavicle.

BOOM!

The severed halves of the monster hit the stones with two distinct wet thuds before dissolving into black oily steam.

"Haah..."

The green-haired woman above... Lady Sarya, an Awakened Baroness sworn to the defense of Khemet let her violet core mana settle back into her meridians.

Her eyes flashed, the royal purple hue receding as her Hero sheathed her blade with an oily snick.

"Kaldmir is empty, My Lady," the Hero called up, her voice steady and shorn of fear. "The sixth and seventh residential rings are devoid of breath as the streets are dead."

Sarya looked out across the rooftops.

It was true.

A city that had housed three hundred thousand merchants, artisans, and foreign travelers barely two hours ago now stood like an ancient necropolis.

Windows banged loose in the rising draft, banners fluttered from abandoned fruit stalls and half-eaten lunches sat cooling on cafe terraces.

Yet, there were no piles of mangled corpses lining the gutters and there were no rivers of arterial red soaking the dust.

’The World Council actually intervened...’ Sarya thought, her fingers tightening around the edge of the clay parapet.

Usually, when a regional crisis occurred, the Council moved with the agonizing pace of an empire bogged down in tripartite committee hearings, diplomatic clearances, and budget allocations.

By the time a strike team cleared customs, entire places were usually reduced to smoking craters but not today.

The moment the high-altitude satellites confirmed the total vaporization of the Royal Carrier in the southern skies, the Council had executed an emergency override.

Every licensed Lord within three hundred nautical miles had received a direct mandate to their emails stamped with the golden seal of the World King.

And more terrifying than the lords... were the two shadows that had descended directly from the Council’s central sanctum.

Number 9 and Number 5.

Sarya slowly tilted her head back, shielding her eyes against the strange purplish glare of the sky.

It was almost impossible to make out with the naked eye, but two miles above the city, suspended motionless at the edge of the troposphere, was a silhouette.

It was a tall, impossibly broad figure draped in heavy ceremonial robes of leaden gray.

His arms were spread wide to his sides, pointing toward the eastern and western horizons like the arms of a colossal sundial.

His face was hidden behind a featureless porcelain mask etched with nine golden circles.

From his outstretched palms, two undulating ribbons of pale crystalline mana... each ribbon thirty paces wide stretched across the sky for hundreds of miles, following the precise curve of the northern desert perimeter.

’Number 9 is anchoring the whole thing,’ Sarya realized, her skin prickling with cold awe.

The strategy was brutal in its simplicity.

The primary Terrestrial Suppression Engine beneath Iunu’s White Citadel had been completely shattered with its internal mechanisms short-circuited and vaporized by a mysterious entity.

But Khemet was an ancient land.

Across the northern and eastern frontiers, other secondary Sub-Suppression Engines still operated deep within the crust.

They had shuddered during the initial detonation with their conduits groaning under the feedback loop, but their cores had held.

Number 9 was currently weaving those secondary engines together with his own Fifth-Stage mana.

He was raising a continental-scale containment barrier across the entire northern territory.

A dome of glass that would seal Iunu, Kaldmir, and the surrounding wastes into a single isolated kill-box.

Nothing would get out so not a single monster would cross into the populated southern valleys or the coastal trade ports...

Humanity was walling off its own arm to stop the poison from reaching the heart!

CLACK!

A sound echoed from the alleyway directly beneath the guildhall as Sarya looked down.

A family of five... a father carrying a toddler on his shoulders, a mother gripping her daughter’s wrist, and an elderly man limping heavily on a wooden cane sprinted out from the shadow of an apothecary.

They threw open the heavy, reinforced iron hatch of a civil protection shelter set into the foundation stone of the avenue and they scrambled down the dark concrete stairs.

CRACKLE!

The moment the grandfather’s trailing foot cleared the third step, the air inside the stairwell violently warped.

There was a brief high-pitched static discharge like silk tearing across ice accompanied by a flash of pale silver runes that flickered across the concrete threshold.

And then... the stairwell was silent as the five life-signatures simply ceased to exist in Kaldmir.

Sarya’s breath hitched.

’Number 5.’

The Fifth Seat of the World Council which was the architect of the invisible corridors.

It was an incomprehensible feat of space.

Across twelve different cities and thousands of regional bunker access points, every single mortal who stepped below the threshold was being caught in a seamless teleportation spell.

The moment their feet touched the concrete, they were instantly displaced across two hundred miles of physical space, deposited into the guarded reception encampments erected outside the containment perimeter in the southern side of Khemet.

’She is holding thousands of spatial anchors open simultaneously,’ Sarya thought with cold sweat beading beneath her bangs. ’To maintain that many microscopic wormholes without a single one collapsing... how much mana does that woman possess?!’

And yet, despite the awe, a cold gnawing terror lingered behind Sarya’s ribs.

What had killed the Pharaoh-President?

The emergency military bulletins had spoken of "an aerial anomaly of black mineral composition."

...A wave of black sand that had wiped nine armored carriers out of the sky in the span of three heartbeats, followed immediately by the total erasure of the White Citadel.

Black sand.

The legends of Khemet spoke of only one entity associated with that specific light-devouring mineral.

An ancient nameless shadow from the First Dominion that was supposed to have been buried in the deepest reaches of the outer abyss ten thousand years ago.

FWOOSH!

A sudden displacement of air broke her concentration.

An Awakened scout, his light courier plate humming with wind-mana, landed on the parapet ten paces away.

His face was gray beneath his visor, his chest heaving with ragged breaths.

"Baroness Sarya!" he gasped, snapping his knuckles against his gorget. "High Command mandate! Number 9’s containment barrier has achieved sixty percent synchronization and this perimeter will lock permanently in twenty minutes... All units are ordered to conduct one final sweep of their assigned grids and fall back to the central extraction points immediately to move to another location"

Sarya stood tall, snapping a flawless salute.

"Affirmative. Kaldmir’s primary sector is clear..."

The scout nodded, launching himself back into the turbulent sky to relay the order to the outer garrisons.

Sarya turned to her Hero waiting in the courtyard below.

"You heard him," Sarya commanded. "Rendezvous with the other nine at the western gate and comb the perimeter alleys one last time. If there is a single child left shivering in an attic, you find them."

"By your command, My Lady," the purple-haired warrior bowed, dissolving into an electric blur as she sprinted toward the thoroughfares.

Sarya remained on the roof for a moment, her gaze drifting south toward the distant bruised horizon where Iunu lay buried under clouds of ash.

’I wonder what Number 5 is doing right now...’ Sarya mused, her heart aching with quiet sympathy. ’To maintain this continental evacuation... she must be locked in a deep meditative trance inside an armored bunker somewhere, burning her core to ash to save our people.’

...

Forty miles to the south, high above the burning ruins of Iunu.

"Let me down, Kara White."

The voice was irritated and came from roughly three feet above the smoking canopy of a cedar tree.

"I won’t," Kara White replied with an unrepentant smirk. "Tch. You’re remarkably tiny, aren’t you? What are you, five-foot-two? I’m like five-nine or five-ten, and I’m towering over you even when I’m slouching. Hehe~"