Chapter 629: The System Wants To Be Rich Too [Bonus - ]

Chapter 629: The System Wants To Be Rich Too [Bonus Chapter]

She appeared directly at the junction of the eighty-foot skeletal wrist an the titanic bone, dense enough to withstand high grade artillery, met the edge of the Second King’s steel.

...There was no resistance.

The thousands of screaming humanoid skulls embedded in the bone didn’t even have time to shriek as the primordial dawn light bypassed their necrotic enchantments, severing the atomic bonds of the petrified marrow, carving through the eighty-foot wrist in a horizontal flash of golden execution.

FLASH!

Kara burst out through the opposite side of the two-mile sphere, tumbling through the open air three thousand feet below the tear!

Behind her... reality unraveled.

CRACK-CRACK-CRACK-SHATTER!

The colossal two-mile domain orb violently imploded with the black-and-green glass disintegrated into millions of harmless, drifting spatial motes that vanished into the wind and as for the colossal tenement-block-sized skeletal hand...

SNAP!

The severed joint gave way.

The colossal hand which was cut clean at the wrist lost its grip on the edge of the dimensional rift!

CREEEEEEAK-GROAN!

A deafening roar of pure baffled agony echoed from the depths of the Sovereign Realm behind the tear as the titanic armless shoulder was violently sucked backward into the lightless void.

POP!

Without the physical anchor of the hand holding the dimensional fabric open...

The wide rift violently contracted and like an elastic band snapping shut, the colossal tear in the sky sealed itself completely, smoothing over until the upper thermosphere was once again empty and blue.

The severed hand plummeted into the clouds below and the sky fell dead silent.

WHOOSH!

Kara was free-falling.

Her long midnight-blue cloak whipped violently against her back with her wild black hair thrashing in her face as she tumbled through the empty air at two hundred miles per hour.

She held the glowing Dawn Blade loosely in her hand, looking up at the blue sky where a wide rift and an apocalyptic Tier 6 abomination had been threatening the world bare heartbeats ago.

Kara blinked once and then she blinked twice.

A look of bewildered shock spread across her face.

"What the fuck..." Kara muttered into the falling wind, her voice cracking with pure disbelief.

"...that actually worked?"

The freezing draft at seven thousand feet tore through the fabric of Kara White’s unbuttoned midnight-blue traveler’s mantle, snapping the wool like the sail of a dying galleon.

FWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH!

The woman was in a dead-weight freefall.

The sky above Iunu, purged of the dimensional tear by the sudden, violent retraction of the severed arm, had collapsed back into an eerie bruised dome of leaden purple and ash-gray clouds though the horizon was still a jagged ring of distant, burning spires and billowing columns of black industrial smoke, but the monstrous cosmic eye that had threatened to swallow the sky was gone.

In Kara’s right palm, the Dawn Blade felt... ordinary.

It had no humming aura now as it radiated none of that heaven-shattering room-clearing solar radiance that had bleached the stratosphere in pure gold bare heartbeats ago.

’It feels normal...’

Resting against her calloused leather glove, it possessed the dull balanced heft of a standard three-foot imperial sidearm forged from unpolished star-iron... neither hot nor cold with its runic grooves sitting dormant and dark like dry irrigation ditches.

’This really is an incomprehensibly bizarre piece of steel,’ Kara mused internally, her dark eyes squinting through the rushing air as her hair whipped wildly across her eyelashes.

When she had channeled her Gold Core into the pommel... forcing every cubic millimeter of her compressed mana down through the hilt, the blade hadn’t resisted at all.

It hadn’t heated up, it hadn’t warped under the strain, and it certainly hadn’t leaked shockwaves into her wrist.

It had simply absorbed thousands of units of output in a single seond, converted the entire load into a razor-thin filament of conceptual severing, and cleaved clean through eighty linear feet of petrified skull-encrusted necrotic bone as though she were pulling a heated copper wire through cold lard.

And speaking of that ungodly limb...

THUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUM!

Two thousand feet below Kara, the severed hand of the titan finally met the earth.

The petrified, eight-story skeletal fist... weighing hundreds of thousands of tons slammed into the northern fringe of the High Market District like an iron asteroid.

The shockwave traveled through the bedrock with the roar of a collapsing mountain range as three multi-tier warehouses, an ancient aqueduct viaduct, and an entire city block of abandoned limestone tenements simply ceased to exist in their vertical configurations, crushed beneath forty million pounds of calcified bone and displaced foundation shale.

A massive circular mushroom plume of pulverized masonry and blinding white bone-dust exploded outward, scouring the surrounding streets and rattling the teeth in Kara’s skull even from her vantage point high in the clouds.

’Well,’ Kara grimaced, her jaw tightening as she watched the dust ring expand across the ruins, ’at the very least, the immediate extinction-level crisis is resolved so nobody is getting crushed by an active fifty-foot claw anymore.’

Yet, as she stared down at the cratered monument of pale bone resting among the ruins, a prickle of cold hair-raising intuition brushed against Kara’s spine.

That arm hadn’t merely been a heavy piece of meat.

The atmospheric pressure around the impact zone had plummeted by twelve millibars and the lingering necrotic chill radiating from the marrow was so intense that the surrounding concrete foundations were actively frosting over with crystalline pale-green frost.

’A limb of that caliber doesn’t just wander out of a common rift,’ Kara thought, her eyes narrowing into cold slits. ’System... wait. Give me more information on what the hell that th—’

Her mental query was clumsy.

With her left arm now fully functional and unpinned, Kara reached instinctively into the empty air before her face, flicking her fingers in a reflexive swipe to clear the visual feed.

BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZT!

She accidentally clipped the edge of his dormant status icon, violently uncoupling the silent notification damper she had done so for quite a long time.

’Fuck...’

In less than a few seconds, the physical sky vanished behind an avalanche of blinding translucent blue holographic tabs that slammed directly into her eyes with the subtlety of a collapsing bookcase.

PING! PING! PING! PING! PING!

[TASMIN HAS ENGAGED IN CONTINUOUS COMBAT AND IS NEARING ADVANCEMENT.]

[TASMIN HAS REACHED THE SECOND STAGE OF SHADOW HEART!]

TASMIN HAS SEVERED 12X TIER 3 ABYSSAL SKYSTRIKERS. REWARD: +480 UP!]

[HERO: BRIDA HAS EXECUTED TITAN-CRUSH COUNTER. REWARD: +20 UP!]

[HERO: FENNA HAS ELIMINATED 1X MUTATED SCOUT. REWARD: +2 UP!]

[HERO: MORWENNA HAS INITIATED CONTINUOUS AQUATIC MASS-PURGE... 412X KILLS REGISTERED.]

[YOU HAVE GAINED 2,000 UP!]

[YOU HAVE GAINED 1,450 UP!]

[YOU HAVE GAINED 3,800 UP!]

The blue windows stacked three feet deep before her eyes, blinking, vibrating, and scrolling text at roughly four hundred lines per second.

The overload was so much that Kara literally lost her peripheral vision mid-freefall, tumbling blindly through a cloud bank with tabs advertising dead bone-crawlers and displaced water-sprites plastered across her forehead.

"Gah—!" Kara choked out, letting out an involuntary nervous wheeze of hysterical laughter.

’The girls...’ Kara thought, shaking her head until her cheeks wobbled in the freezing slipstream, ’...they haven’t just been holding the perimeter. They’ve been running a high-efficiency abattoir across four different quadrants!’

Silas had expected a solid payout.

When you unleash several S-Rank and SSS-Rank immortals into an unfiltered rift breach choked with hundreds of thousands of low-tier invaders, the return was bound to be significant.

But watching the numbers roll in was like watching an automated stock exchange print currency in real-time.

By the time the dust settled over Khemet, his UP Balance... wouldn’t merely be healthy, they would be disgustingly obscenely swollen.

Her eyes lingered for a fraction of a second on the prominent, gold-bordered notification pinned to the top of the cascade.

[TASMIN HAS REACHED THE SECOND STAGE OF SHADOW HEART.]

A genuine warm smile broke through the cold mask of his female persona.

’Second stage...’ Kara thought with the pride swelling thick behind her ribs. ’Good. She earned every scrap of it.’

Tasmin had spent the last few weeks bleeding into the dark soil of the Umbral Basin, pushing her soul to the verge of collapse, refusing to take an extra hour of sleep even when Rowenna had threatened to dose her evening tea with high-grade sedative tinctures.

The woman ran on pure devotion so she deserved every single stat point, every microscopic advancement in her shadow-conduits, and every ounce of authority her newly evolved core could muster.

’As long as they remain rooted in Blessed Land,’ Kara vowed silently, watching the clouds part below her, ’they will never hit a ceiling... Nobody is going to dictate how far my people can climb.’

GROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWL!

A deafening vibration echoed from the misty deck beneath her boots as cutting through the gray moisture like a crimson torpedo, an eighty-pace serpentine silhouette broke through the thermals.

Talira.

The Ancient Crimson Dragon banked sharply on a forty-five-degree horizontal axis with her massive bat-like wings cupping the air with a concussive thwump that displaced several tons of freezing cloud-mist as she positioned her broad flat spinal ridge directly along Kara’s falling vector, matching her velocity with effortless grace.

TAP!

Kara’s boots touched down upon the glowing ruby scales between her shoulder blades with her knees absorbing the landing with a soft practiced dip.

"Nice timing, Talira," Kara murmured, patting the hot iron-hard ridge of her neck.

"ALWAYS, MY LORD!" the dragon’s voice echoed proudly in his consciousness, her scales heating up slightly with delight at the praise.

Sitting six paces behind her, tucked cross-legged against the base of a dorsal spine, was Number 5.

The Fifth Seat of the World Council hadn’t moved an inch.

Her midnight-violet robes were neatly arranged across her shins, her hands tucked deep inside her wide sleeves with her porcelain half-moon mask tilted upward to look at Kara White with an expression of deeply suspicious bewilderment.

"Are you having a stroke, Kara White?" Number 5 asked,. "You were waving your single arm at empty air like an epileptic windmill, and then you started giggling at a cloud... If your Gold Core is leaking cerebrospinal fluid from atmospheric decompression, inform me now so I can calibrate an emergency medical ward."

"I am perfectly balanced, thank you for your deeply touching concern," Silas retorted in Kara’s raspy voice, completely ignoring her as he turned his focus back inward to the interface hovering before his nose.

’System,’ Kara commanded inwardly. ’Query... Identify the origin, classification, and authority of the severed skeletal limb currently embedded in the ground.’

DING!

A single blood-red prompt flashed over his eyes.

[SYSTEM INQUIRY REQUIRES ACCESS TO HIGH-TIER DIVINE CLASSIFICATION RECORD.]

[COMPENSATION REQUIRED TO BYPASS CLASSIFIED VAULT ENCRYPTION: 1,000 UP.]

Kara nearly choked on her own tongue.

"One thousand?!" Kara’s physical vocal cords barked aloud into the open wind, her voice cracking in pure outrage.

Number 5 tilted her head, her porcelain mask gleaming. "One thousand what? Are you hallucinating debts?"

Kara ignored the masked woman completely, glaring at the blinking red cursor hovering six inches from her eyelashes.

’You shameless parasite!" Kara hissed mentally, her eye twitching with a lot of venom. ’You see me out here breaking my back, severing titan limbs, and dragging an entire continent out of an extinction event... you see a few thousand points roll into the account and suddenly you want a thirty percent transaction tax just to read a damn identification tag?! Fuck you! Keep your secrets! I’ll go down there with a chisel and figure it out myself!’

Kara aggressively jerked her head to the right, turning her face away from the prompt with a childish stubborn scowl while crossing his arms over his chest.

’...Fuck you.’

The prompt didn’t vanish.

It hovered and blinked.

...Five seconds passed like that with the wind howled over Talira’s ruby horns.

Kara slowly, painfully turned her eyes back toward the glowing letters.

’...Fine,’ She growled through her teeth with her soul weeping digital tears of blood. ’Whatever. Take the grand, you extortionist bastard. Just give me the damn dossier...’

CHIME!

[1,000 UP DEDUCTED FROM CURRENT BALANCE.]

[DECRYPTING ARCHIVE...]

The blue light shifted, coalescing into a block of text framed by spinning obsidian runic wheels.

[Target identification: The Right Hand of Thanat-kor, The Seventh Scythe.]

[Classification: Minor Deity Of Entropy And Corporeal Cessation (tier 6 peak / semi-primordial ascendant).]

[In the stratified pantheons of the outer void, death is not a monolithic monarchy, but an armed oligarchy... the sovereign realm recognizes eleven high death gods and forty-four minor death deities. thanat-kor commands the seventh dust-trench, governing the calcification and metabolic severing of skeletal houses.]

[The full manifestation spans approximately 1.4 miles in vertical height and total bone mass exceeds 800,000 tons.]

[Domain radius: 12 miles.]

Kara stared at the text, her brain grinding to a screeching paralyzed halt.

’One... point... four... miles... tall?’