Chapter 543: Authorized To Kill [Bonus - [

Chapter 543: Authorized To Kill [Bonus Chapter[

The shockwave began with the violent displacement of mass.

BOOOOOOOOOOM!

The reinforced poly-glass facade of Le Jardin Doré exploded into millions of needle-fine diamond fragments, carried outward on an ocean of pressurized sun-baked sand.

The interior of the dining hall ceased to exist in a fraction of a second.

Teakwood tables, cast-iron candelabras, high-back velvet chairs, and porcelain soup tureens were caught in the grinding circular torrent of yellow silt, shredded down to composite kindling and chalky dust before they even breached the sidewalk.

The blast blew outward across the four-lane boulevard, ripping the steel canopies off the luxury storefronts opposite the plaza, snapping the decorative light posts at their bolt plates, and drowning the entire district in a roaring blinding tidal wall of earth.

CRASH... SHSHSHSHSH!

From thirty feet above the shattered stone plaza, a ball of turbulent churning liquid ruptured straight out of the apex of the erupting dune.

SPLASH!

"Haah!"

Evelyn burst free into the open air.

She wasn’t dead, though her oversized red hoodie was soaked through at the cuffs and hem.

In that final microscopic window before the ceiling had caved in, she hadn’t tried to trade raw concussive force against thousand-ton geological pressure.

That would be stupid...

She had collapsed her mana inward, pulling every droplet of atmospheric moisture in the dining room... along with the ice water from her table and the condensation weeping along the wine coolers into a spinning hydro-barrier that had wrapped around her body like a lubricated cocoon.

The sand had scraped across the pressurized water, deflecting off the slick centrifugal skin rather than pulverizing her ribs into chalk.

It was heavy and reeked of dredged silt, but it had worked.

"Tch... fucking hell," Evelyn spat through gritted teeth, coughing out a mouthful of gritty sediment as her sneakers cleared the top of the blast.

The ground below her was a roiling pit of shifting dunes, but the sand wasn’t done.

The moment her silhouette broke free of the main geyser, the turbulent mass beneath her surged with violent intelligence.

FSSSSSH... WHIP!

Six thick whip-like tendrils of braided high-velocity sand shot skyward from the collapsing crater with their tips sharpening into rotating drill-cones that hissed through the air like screaming vipers.

Evelyn didn’t panic as her face remained set in that permanent irritated exhaustion that defined her morning shifts, but her body moved with the terrifying movement of a frontline commander who had survived years of war at the Unmovable Wall.

In mid-air, with no solid footing beneath her, she twisted her core.

SWOOSH!

The first tendril tore through empty space an inch past her shoulder with the friction singeing the frayed red cotton of her sleeve.

She kicked off the air by manifesting a paper-thin pressurized disc of surface-tensioned water beneath the sole of her scuffed sneaker for a secon.

THUMP!

The tiny platform popped, propelling her two yards to the left just as the second and third tendrils crossed in a lethal scissor-snap where her throat had been.

CRACK!

The fourth and fifth spikes converged on her descent but Evelyn pulled her knees tight against her chest, somersaulting between the twin corkscrewing drills, feeling the coarse grains graze her shins before kicking off another temporary splash-disc with her left heel.

SWISH... SLAM!

She cleared the final whip, her momentum carrying her horizontally toward the sheer glass face of an adjoining twelve-story office tower.

THUD!

Her canvas sneakers hit the vertical pane of structural glass at an angle but she didn’t slip.

A thin film of moisture anchored her rubber soles to the smooth surface with her knees bending deeply to absorb the concussive inertia before she pushed off, vaulting up five yards to plant herself sideways against the concrete mullion between the fifth-floor windows.

"Fuuu... Been a while since I had to push myself like that."

She looked down into the ruins of the plaza.

The settling dust parted like an opening curtain, revealing the center of the deep circular crater where the restaurant’s foundation had been and standing in the center of the pit was Harper Whitmore.

Except it wasn’t the untouchable multi-billion-credit CEO anymore.

The immaculate ivory-white pantsuit was still draped over the figure’s shoulders but the fabric was stiff, bloated with internal pressure, and crusted in yellow clay and the face...

Evelyn scrunched up her nose, her dark eyes narrowing with pure revulsion.

The left half of the woman’s visage was still smooth, pale, and striking, framed by rich waves of vibrant purple hair.

But the right half had completely collapsed into a sloughing nightmare.

The cheekbone had dissolved into thick, crumbling clumps of grit that slid down her jawline like drying mud, leaving behind a hollow empty crater where her right eye socket should have been.

The lips were split down the center, one side soft and painted with gloss and the other side a line of coarse sandstone grinding against itself with an audible sickening crunch.

CRUNCH! GRIND!

The creature stood motionless amidst the rubble with its left purple eye wide and glazed over with a dull luminescent yellow film.

"You’re not her, are you?" Evelyn called down. "What the hell are you...?"

However the entity did not offer a spoken reply, instead, the throat of the woman bulged outward like a swallowing serpent.

A dry rasping hiss tore from the ruin of its mouth...

HSSSSSSS!

The thousands of tons of sand drowning the plaza began to churn in violent concentric circles as the ivory suit ripped down the spine, tearing into shreds as the shape underneath began to warp, distend, and flow.

The woman’s silhouette melted away like tallow under an open flame.

The shifting dunes rushed upward, climbing the collapsing frame, packing together with speed until the silhouette thickened, broadened, and rebuilt itself into a completely different form.

Within three seconds, standing in the crater was no longer Harper.

It was Prince Malikar of Khemet.

The body was broad-shouldered, draped in the simulated likeness of his gold-embroidered linen tunic and heavy lapis sash, perfectly rendered down to the turquoise stones hanging around his neck.

But there was no living flesh on that frame... His skin was pale, grainy, and shifting constantly in tiny vibrating waves of loose silt, his kohl-lined eyes looking like blank unblinking pools of pure sulfur-yellow.

’A Rogue Awakened,’ Evelyn thought with the muscles along her jaw clenching tight.

That was the formal classification for a Lord like this...

An Awakened individual abusing the authority of Lords within the boundaries of a civilian sector.

Under the global protocols established after the Apocalypse, Lords were strictly barred from unsealing their powers inside civilian zones without direct authorization from the regional safety bureaus.

The city had defense barriers, response protocols, and designated duel grounds for a reason but to detonate a high-tier spell inside a crowded midday restaurant, butcher a foreign dignitary, and reduce thirty civilians to bone-dust wasn’t just a regular breach...

It was a Class-A atrocity!

And under the harsh unvarnished laws of the World Council, when an Awakened went completely rogue like this, there was no courtroom waiting for them.

They were an existential contagion that had to be put down like a rabid dog before the regional infrastructure collapsed.

The sand around the false Prince’s boots began to coil upward, forming four massive spiraling vortices that began grinding the asphalt of the plaza to dust.

BZZZZZZT! BZZZZZZT!

Inside the deep front pocket of Evelyn’s oversized red hoodie, her black mobile began vibrating violently with the shrill obnoxious ringtone of the local dispatch frequency cutting through the low rumble of the forming storm.

’Eh...? Not again...’

Evelyn didn’t take her eyes off the creature in the crater as she reached into her pocket, tapped the screen without looking, and held the glass to her ear.

"I’m a little fucking busy right now," she snapped into the receiver.

"This is Dispatch Officer Vuleptope, Valoria City Police Department, Central Ward," a woman’s voice barked through the speaker, sounding strained with barely contained panic. "We are tracking a seismic spike and massive unauthorized mana-discharge in Sector Seven! Our orbital surveillance grid has identified your registered transponder so you are currently the highest-ranking combat asset in the immediate perimeter!"

’Vuleptope is a crazy name though... Who does that to their kids?’

That aside, they had probably picked up on her other Lord identity which was Lord Evelyn of course. Lord Sky was done differently and she was grateful for that.

"Yeah, no shit," Evelyn muttered, watching the sand creature’s neck twist at a grotesque ninety-degree angle as its sulfur eyes tracked her up on the wall. "I’m looking right at it."

"Under Section Nine of the Metropolitan Defense Edict, the Valoria City Police Department formally invokes emergency conscription!" the officer yelled over the sound of screaming sirens in the background. "You are ordered to intercept and subdue the Rogue Awakened immediately! If non-lethal containment is impossible, you are authorized... repeat, authorized to execute the target on sight!"

"Listen to me, dispatch," Evelyn sighed, rubbing the space between her eyebrows with her left thumb. "I’m off the clock so at the very least, if you want me to... What’s the hazard pay on this? Does the department cover property damage or am I going to get another—"

BOOM!

She didn’t get to finish the sentence.

A column of compressed sand that was five feet wide and traveling at the speed of an artillery shell, pulverized the concrete directly beneath her sneakers!

SHATTER!

The entire fifth-floor facade blew inward, three plate-glass windows disintegrating into a cloud of sparkling dust as the pillar struck the structural pillar.

Evelyn was already airborne.

The instant she felt the air pressure shift beneath her feet, she had vaulted backward off the glass, pushing off with enough force to send her flying in a wide controlled arc across the open street.

"Yeah, yeah, fine, I’ll kill it," Evelyn muttered into the phone, her voice completely deadpan as she descended through the air. "Just make sure the paperwork has my name spelled right this time..."

BEEP!

She hung up, placed the phone straight into her inventory, and hit the ruined asphalt of the boulevard with a clean low crouch.

TAP!

She didn’t immediately draw a weapon.

She stayed crouched on the cracked pavement, reached into her cargo pocket with two fingers, and pulled out a fresh unlit Silver-Leaf cigarette.

"Fuu..."

She clamped it between her lips, flicked a cheap brass lighter with her thumb and took a long burning drag of smoke into her lungs.

FSSSSSSSSSH!

The yellow-and-white cylinder flared blue in the dust-choked midday light.

Across the ruined intersection, sixty yards away, the creature was losing whatever humanoid composure it possessed.

The body of Prince Malikar was spazzing out violently.

His shoulders twitched in erratic spasms and his jaw unhinging until his mouth was a dark gaping cavern from which loose silt poured like a waterfall.

The thousands of tons of sand that had erupted from the restaurant were no longer sitting dormant... they were rising, caught in a massive, spinning centrifugal vortex that was rapidly turning the entire three-block radius into a blinding howling miniature sandstorm.

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH!

The wind screamed, tearing the paint off parked vehicles, pulverizing the remaining brickwork of the storefronts, and reducing visibility to less than ten feet in every direction.

Yet Evelyn remained completely stationary, sitting back on her haunches, her hoodie flapping wildly in the gale.

She drew a second deeper lungful of smoke, letting the chemical burn steady her frayed nerves, and then blew it out smoothly through her nostrils in two neat gray streams.

’Think, you idiot,’ she told herself, her eyes tracking the shifting silhouettes in the dust. ’Don’t just swing like a brute... Use your damn head.’

The Rogue didn’t make tactical sense.

She had watched the person or was it even a person... drain Prince Malikar with her own eyes.

It had clamped its hand over his skull and violently sucked every drop of moisture, plasma, and arterial blood out of his biological frame within four seconds. But why?

A pure earth or sand-affinity entity had no use for mammalian blood as blood was full of iron and biological proteins... it fouled up earth magic, adding unnecessary weight and friction to high-velocity particle manipulation.

If it was an elemental construct, drinking blood was counterproductive.

’So what did it do with it?’ Evelyn analyzed, her gaze sweeping through the blinding yellow haze. ’It didn’t consume it for fuel so I can guess that it was an extraction.’

And then, there was the storm itself.

The miniature sandstorm wasn’t just an offensive weapon designed to grind her down... it was an impenetrable visual screen.

In a major metropolitan hub like Valoria City, with orbital satellites and police drones overhead, a three-block dust screen completely severed overhead thermal tracking.

’It’s moving the blood,’ Evelyn realized with a cold prickle of clarity settling behind her eyes. ’It drained the blood, and while it keeps me occupied in the middle of this street, it’s using the drainage or a secondary sub-construct to transport that blood out of the sector.’