Chapter 544: Fighting With Sand [Bonus - ]

Chapter 544: Fighting With Sand [Bonus Chapter]

She couldn’t afford to waste ten minutes dancing around with a decoy.

"Ugh... I really hate this," she sighed.

Evelyn took one last sharp pull on the Silver-Leaf, pinched the burning ember between her calloused thumb and forefinger to extinguish it, and dropped the crumpled filter into her pocket.

Her right hand opened.

SHING... VUMMMMMMM!

The space directly above her palm rippled with deep cerulean distortion as she reached into her Lord Inventory.

Her fingers closed around a familiar hexagonal hilt of frosted silver, and with a clean metallic hiss as she dragged her signature weapon into the physical world.

’My rapier...’

The blade was three feet of flawless crystal, glowing with an inner, liquid luminescence that hummed at a high frequency.

Evelyn stood up straight.

Her dark eyes, normally half-lidded and drowned in chronic fatigue, snapped wide open.

BA-THUMP!

Deep within the center of her chest, nestled behind her sternum, her spiritual core ignited.

It was a Blue Core.

One that was clear and brilliant as glacial ice.

’I’m not the best or the strongest either... Silas has a Gold core and even his Heroes are stronger than me, and let’s not mention all these nobles that average at Purple cores.’ She thought with her breath wisping out. ’And not only that but in terms of core strength, I’m one of the weakest Blue cores. Anyone in my position might have stopped or given up...’

Yet she had not stopped.

Through brutal years of holding the Unmovable Wall against relentless waves of monsters, through endless sleepless nights refining her soul pathways drop by agonizing drop, she had polished that blue stone until the mana flowing through her veins possessed the cutting density of a diamond drill.

WHIRRRRRR!

A brilliant misty haze of rich cerulean mana wafted off her skin like steam rising from a hot spring but the mana did not form an armor around her body.

It surged upward, flooding directly into the neural pathways behind her eyes.

Her dark pupils contracted, ringed by concentric circles of glowing cyan light.

Instantly, the blinding sandstorm ceased to be an impenetrable wall of dust as the individual trajectories of grinding silica grains slowed to a crawl in her perception with the moisture clinging to each particle illuminating the invisible thermal drafts and mana-currents moving through the intersection.

She could see everything.

GLUG... GLUG... GLUG..!

Beneath her sneakers, the water pooled in the cracked gutters and the moisture in the humid air began to vibrate, bubbling upward in tiny suspended spheres of pure pressurized liquid that orbited her blade like miniature moons.

She raised the translucent blue rapier, resting the flat of the crystal against the side of her forearm.

"Alright, sandbox," Evelyn murmured. "Come on."

The sand entity answered with slaughter.

SKRRRRRRR-BOOM!

The false Prince’s legs dissolved into a swirling cyclone of pressurized dust, propelling him across the sixty yards of ruined asphalt in seconds.

He arrived with the concussive force of a car with his right arm morphing from a humanoid limb into a massive cleaver of compressed sandstone three feet wide, whistling through the air as it cleaved downward toward Evelyn’s skull.

SWISH... SLAM!

Evelyn didn’t try to block it as she knew her physical limitations well.

She was a mana-caster whose physical strength without reinforcement was high but not that high... If she took a direct kinetic blow from an earth-construct of that mass, her forearms would splinter into nothingness.

Instead, she used her size.

The moment the massive stone cleaver descended, Evelyn dropped her center of gravity, ducking cleanly beneath the arc of the swing with an effortless fluid slide.

The displaced wind pressure tore the hood clean off her messy bun, but her scuffed sneakers glided along the asphalt on a micro-thin layer of lubricating water, sliding her directly between the creature’s wide-set legs.

SHING!

Her translucent rapier thrust upward like a needle striking through silk.

CRACK!

The crystal tip struck the hardened sandstone skin of the entity’s thigh though the armor was tough... dense enough that an ordinary steel blade would have shattered on impact but Evelyn had already flooded the crystal with vibrating water mana.

The point vibrated at thirty thousand cycles in seconds, acting as a microscopic hydro-jet that drilled cleanly through the petrified crust, punching straight out the back of the leg.

"Hah!"

Evelyn twisted the hilt as she completed her slide, popping out behind the creature.

The false Prince whipped around with terrifying speed with its left hand stretching outward into five razor-sharp spears of hardened quartz, thrusting straight for her face.

STAB! STAB! STAB!

Evelyn’s head bobbed and weaved with precision.

WHOOSH! WHOOSH! SWISH!

The stone spears grazed her cheeks, cutting stray strands of her black hair, but never finding purchase.

Her footwork was brutally efficient as she stepped inside the reach of the long clumsy construct, using her smaller frame to stay inside its guard where the massive weapons couldn’t properly accelerate.

’It’s times like this I thank the gods I’m not as tall as Silas...’

CLANG!

She deflected the fourth thrust with the forte of her rapier, spinning on her heel to redirect the force into the dirt, and brought her blade around in a horizontal slash.

SHIIIIING... CRACK!

The cerulean blade severed the creature’s neck.

The head of Prince Malikar detached cleanly from the shoulders, spinning into the air with a spray of loose yellow dust before hitting the asphalt and disintegrating into a pile of harmless sand but Evelyn didn’t celebrate.

’Decapitation doesn’t mean shit to a golem,’ she thought grimly.

Sure enough, before the headless neck could even finish crumbling, the sand within the chest cavity roared upward like a rising piston.

In the span of half a second, a new head burst forth... identical to the first, its sulfur-yellow eyes glaring down at her with mindless malice.

WHAM!

A massive flat backhand of solid stone caught Evelyn across the chest.

Even with her instinctive mana reinforcement flaring across her ribs, the shockwave sent her skipping backward across the pavement like a flat stone over a pond.

SKIDDDDDDD!

Her sneakers tore two deep grooves through the asphalt with her teeth rattling in her jaw as she came to a halt twenty yards away and a thin trail of blood trickling from the left corner of her mouth.

"Tch... yeah, that hurt," she grunted, wiping her chin with the oversized cuff of her red hoodie. "Hit like a brick wall, you ugly bastard."

The creature didn’t give her time to breathe.

It lunged forward again, the ground beneath its feet undulating like an ocean wave, launching dozens of jagged stone shards ahead of its advance.

TAT-TAT-TAT-TAT-TAT!

Evelyn’s rapier became a blur of pale blue light.

CLINK! CLANG! PING!

She parried, deflected, and shattered eighteen high-velocity stone spikes in the span of two seconds with her wrist working like an oiled piston.

Every time her blade made contact, a burst of high-pressure water erupted from the crystal tip, dampening the impact and cracking the structural integrity of the stone.

She closed the distance again.

SWOOSH!

She feinted a thrust to the chest, waited for the creature to raise its massive hammer-like forearms to catch the blow, and then vanished downward.

Evelyn dropped to her knees, sliding forward beneath the guard, her blade tracing a vicious rising diagonal arc.

SLASH... CRACK!

For the second time, the rapier cleaved through the neck, sending the newly regenerated head flying off into the dust yet as the head tumbled away, Evelyn didn’t look at the construct’s body.

Her glowing mana-enhanced cyan eyes were locked onto the ground beneath its feet.

Throughout the entire clash... the feints, the dodges and the parries, Evelyn hadn’t just been surviving.

Her blue mana had been seeping into the wet gutters, spreading through the saturated soil beneath the cracked pavement like an invisible net.

She had found it.

’There you are,’ she thought, her lips curving into a sharp grin.

The construct was indeed a hollow puppet.

Thirty yards behind it, near the shattered curb of the plaza where the storm drains emptied into the city’s underground reservoir, a tiny compact dome of wet sand... no larger than a soccer ball was crawling slowly toward the iron sewer grating.

It was moving under the cover of the howling winds, completely undetectable to an ordinary observer.

And inside that tiny, shifting sphere?

Every single liter of Prince Malikar’s extracted arterial blood, pressurized and insulated within a moisture-locked core.

"Clever parasite," Evelyn muttered, springing back to her feet as the headless torso began to sprout a third head of churning sand. "Too bad you’re dealing with someone who actually does logistics for a living."

She raised her rapier, channeling her mana to end the puppet once and for all...

WEE-WOO-WEE-WOO-WEE-WOO!

The sudden piercing shriek of sirens shattered the sandstorm.

SCREEEEEECH!

Four heavy black-and-white armored response cruisers from the Valoria City Police Department slid around the perimeter barricades, their massive runic-tread tires biting into the ruined asphalt.

The cruisers formed a defensive crescent sixty yards away with the reinforced gull-wing doors snapping open instantly as eight armored tactical officers spilled out with their assault rifles raised and their chest plates glowing with blue light.

Leading the unit was a tall, sharp-featured woman in a navy officer’s trench coat, holding a heavy scattergun against her shoulder.

"Lord Evelyn! Fall back!" the Captain’s voice boomed through an external loudspeaker mounted on the lead cruiser. "The Vanguard has established an overcharge perimeter and we are taking custody of the target!"

Evelyn stopped, lowering her rapier by half an inch, an irritated scowl spreading across her face.

"Are you serious right now?" Evelyn yelled back over the howling wind. "I literally just found the—"

"Stand back!" the Captain ordered, ignoring her completely. "Overcharge suppression rounds primed! On my mark—"

The officers raised their weapons, their barrels tracking the regenerating sand entity and then, every single officer hesitated.

The third head had finished reforming.

The face of Prince Malikar turned toward the police cruisers, his golden necklaces clinking softly in the gale, his pale noble features perfectly rendered in the sunlight.

"Wait... is that...?" one of the younger officers stammered, his finger freezing on the trigger. "The Third Prince of Khemet?! Captain, that’s a foreign dignitary! We can’t fire on—"

"He’s already dead, you idiots!" Evelyn screamed with her patience finally snapping. "It’s a fucking puppet! Shoot it or get out of my way!"

"Open fire!" the Captain roared, shaking off her shock. "Suppress, don’t execute! Light it up!"

TAT-TAT-TAT-TAT-TAT-TAT!

The tactical rifles fired in unison but they didn’t fire normal bullets.

They were high-voltage suppression rounds, designed specifically to capture rogue Awakeners without causing fatal internal trauma.

Dozens of glowing blue-and-yellow electrical slugs slammed into the sand entity’s chest, torso, and shoulders, discharging hundreds of thousands of volts of concentrated lightning upon impact.

BZZZZZZZZZT! CRACKLE!

The results were instantaneous, but completely wrong for the situation.

Under the intense heat of the electrical arcs, the loose moving sand of the construct’s outer layer began to superheat.

FZZZZZZT!

The granules fused together, vitrifying into brittle dark sheets of jagged glass as the creature’s movements seized, its arms locking in place as the glassy crust paralyzed its limbs.

"We have containment!" the junior officer cheered, lowering his rifle.

"No, don—!"

CRACK!

Right on cue, the brittle glass crust shattered outward in a violent spray of sharp shards!

The electrical charge did not shock the creature’s central nervous system... because it didn’t have one.

The loose sand beneath the street simply surged upward, sloughing off the crystallized shell and rebuilding the limbs with twice the mass and twice the aggression.

The entity’s blank yellow eyes snapped away from Evelyn and then it locked onto the squad of police officers.

WHOOOOOOSH!

The creature liquefied into a surging tidal wave of high-velocity sand, roaring straight toward the police cruisers with the unstoppable momentum of a landslide.

"SHIT! FIRE! RE-ENGAGE!" the Captain screamed, racking the slide of her scattergun, but it was already too late.

The wave crossed forty yards in a heartbeat.

The Captain blinked with her breath catching in her throat as the towering wall of yellow earth rose ten feet above her head, casting a massive suffocating shadow over the cruisers.

In the center of the wave, the gaping hollow maw of the false Prince opened wide, ready to swallow the entire squad whole and crush their bones beneath the force of pressure.

The Captain’s eyes widened in helpless terror with her finger frozen against the trigger as death loomed inches from her face—

SNAP.

A red-hooded figure appeared directly between the Captain and the falling tsunami.

Evelyn didn’t look back.

She simply planted her canvas sneakers into the cracked stone, raised her translucent blue crystal rapier horizontally with both hands, and unleashed the true depth of her mana pool.

"Dissolution Trench!"

VUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUM... BOOM!