Chapter 561: Three Countries Out [Bonus - ]

Chapter 561: Three Countries Out [Bonus Chapter]

Maya didn’t have her spear, so she used her elbows, her knees, and the void-ivory plating on her forearms...

CRACK! WHAM! BOOM!

She delivered a brutal five-strike combination directly to Yuri’s ribs, kidneys, and jaw.

Every blow shattered rock, drew blood, and tore muscle yet Yuri’s laughter only grew louder and more terrifying.

’Why don’t you fucking fall already...?’

WHAM!

"WEAK! IT’S NOT ENOUGH!"

CRACKLE!

The boiling blue aura around his chest exploded outward in a shockwave, violently shattering the granite cuffs around his ankles and blowing Maya ten yards backward across the sand.

Yuri pulled Maya’s quartz spear from his shoulder, tossing it aside like a useless toothpick as his eyes rolled back as though he was intoxicated.

’I don’t like Bide abilities and I never will... all their users are crazy.’

His physical mass seemed to have swelled, the muscles in his arms bulging with dark pulsing veins that hummed with enough power to level a high tier barrier.

Yuri raised his massive star-steel greathammer with both hands, the weapon screaming as pure compressed energy wrapped around the head like a miniature sun.

"THIS IS THE END, AMAZON!" Yuri roared, his voice vibrating the mountain peaks as he lunged forward, crossing thirty yards in seconds while his hammer was raised high for a strike that would leave nothing but a smoking crater in the earth.

Maya planted her boots with her breath ragged and her hands trembling as she crossed her forearms.

’I’m going to do it...’ She thought as she began preparing to burn every single drop of her remaining Purple Core to manifest an earth-bastion to protect herself. ’Is there going to be enough ti—’

TWANG!

The sound was tiny.

In the middle of the roaring gale, amidst the apocalyptic thunder of Yuri’s charging hammer, the mechanical release of a star-iron bowstring was practically a whisper.

Yet in the air twenty feet above Yuri’s left flank...

A bright emerald-green projectile tore through the sky.

It wasn’t an arrow meant to pierce his skull and it wasn’t an attack meant to deal heavy physical trauma that his Bide ability could consume either.

It was an arrow carrying a high-frequency sonic wind-vortex!

POP!

The arrow detonated three inches from the side of Yuri’s left ear, while the concussive shockwave didn’t break his bones... It did something far more lethal to a berserker mid-stride.

It violently ruptured his left eardrum and scrambled the delicate fluid balance inside his inner ear canal.

SKR-STUMBLE!

In the middle of his unstoppable full-speed charge, Yuri’s balance completely dissolved.

His left leg gave out beneath him, his center of gravity violently listing to the side as his eyes twitched erratically and the massive glowing greathammer pulling him off course like a dragging anchor.

"WHAT—?!" Yuri snarled with his vision spinning in nauseating circles. Maya to her credit didn’t ask where the arrow came from.

A veteran strike officer never questioned an opening... she exploited it with merciless violence.

Maya’s eyes flared with dark-purple fire.

’I’ll end all of this...!’

She poured every single shred of her remaining Second Stage mana straight into her right arm... The void-ivory gauntlet on her hand groaned, the gold filigree burning white-hot as she seized the jagged five-foot shard of granite that had broken from her earlier barrier.

WHOOOOOOSH!

Maya stepped inside the off-balance berserker’s guard, swinging the massive razor-sharp granite slab like an executioner’s axe.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The granite slab struck Yuri Volkov squarely across the temple and the concussive force sounded like that of falling rubble!

Even with his Bide ability boiling at its peak, the human brain could not overcome the violent instantaneous deceleration of a five-hundred-pound stone moving at two hundred miles per hour.

The shockwave violently disconnected Yuri’s consciousness from his nervous system as his bloodshot eyes rolled completely into the back of his head, his hands went limp and the massive star-steel greathammer crashed harmlessly into the sand.

THUD!

The hulking berserker hit the ground face-first, completely unconscious.

Ten paces away, Svetlana Morozova lay equally motionless in the dirt, her body trembling faintly in deep coma.

Maya stood over the fallen giant with her chest heaving in violent, agonizing gasps and blood dripping freely from her knuckles and chin.

She dropped the shattered remains of the granite slab, turned her head, and looked up at the sky.

Floating gently down to the sand twenty feet away with her bow lowered and her hair blowing softly in the desert wind, was First Princess Aki.

Beside her, Leona was leaning against an outcropping, resting her hands on her knees while grinning through her split lips.

"Nice shot, Princess," Leona panted, raising a trembling thumb.

Aki offered a tired fragile smile, her fingers still shaking slightly inside the midnight-blue glove.

"Thanks."

Before Maya could reply, the bodies of Yuri Volkov and Svetlana Morozova began to react.

WHOOSH!

A pair of bright, ethereal white beacons erupted from the emergency transponder badges pinned to their lapels.

The spatial fabric around the two fallen northern champions warped and rippled with dense magic as their physical bodies, their weapons, and their discarded armor plates dissolved into thousands of shimmering motes of pure white light, surging upward into the clouds as the World Council’s automated extraction protocols yanked them clean out of Sector Forty-Four.

The representatives of the Tsardom of Borealis were officially eliminated.

Maya collapsed onto her rear in the sand, leaning back against a boulder with a long groaning sigh of relief.

"Gods above," Maya wheezed, wiping the sweat and blood from her eyes. "My ribs feel like someone ran a mining drill through them."

Aki walked over, reaching into her pocket to pull out a clean cloth to help Maya clean the laceration on her brow.

Yet before Aki’s hand could touch her forehead—

BZZZZZZZZT!

The massive broadcast array embedded in the ceiling of the Sovereign Realm roared to life once more, echoing across the vast expanses of the mountains, the jungles, and the distant dunes.

"Notice of Official Elimination."

"The representatives of the Tsardom of Borealis have been incapacitated and extracted from the field."

Aki and Maya shared a satisfied glance however the broadcast continued.

"The representatives of the United Hegemony of Shogya have been incapacitated and extracted from the field."

Maya froze as her hand stopped halfway to her canteen.

"The representatives of the Republic of Columbia have been incapacitated and extracted from the field."

Silence followed and the broadcast chime died out, leaving only the desolate empty whistling of the Wastezone wind.

Aki blinked once... Twice...

Leona’s jaw hung completely open with her hazel eyes staring blankly at the purple clouds above.

Maya looked from Leona to Aki as her face was completely pale beneath the dust and blood.

"Wait..." Leona stammered, her voice cracking in disbelieving confusion. "Shogya... and Columbia...? Both of them?!"

Columbia’s armored shock-corps and Shogya’s synchronized twin-swordsmen...

Four of the most funded combat scions on the face of the Earth... These were teams that had commanded private armies and trained in spatial simulation chambers for a decade, eliminated in the exact same eight-minute window?!

Aki’s head slowly turned.

She looked out across the vast rolling expanse of the yellow dunes, staring past the emerald jungle toward the jagged, smoking crown of the central volcanic caldera five miles away.

A tiny breathless whisper escaped Aki’s lips.

"...What in the world is Kara doing over there?"

After that singular thought, she forced the sudden image of Silas out of her mind. ℴ

In an arena like this, wandering thoughts got you gutted.

Silas had carved his way through the Umbral Basin long before she had ever laid eyes on him; whatever hell he was orchestrating miles across the basin was his business.

Her business was keeping her throat intact, holding onto her retainers, and seeing the two-hour clock bleed to zero.

Behind her, Captain Leona finished wiping the dark crust of dried blood from the corner of her split lower lip with a rough swipe of her leather bracer.

Her breath was steady now, falling back into the regular breathing of a seasoned trench scout.

She drove the broad point of her deep-sea trench-machete back into the friction-sheath strapped along her lumbar with a shlick.

"That broadcast just changed the whole board," Leona said, her hazel eyes scanning the sharp ridges of the western mesa. "Columbia’s armored shock-corps folded and Shogya’s twin swordsmen were wiped in the exact same breath while Borealis dissolved right at our boots... The weaklings and the loudmouths are off the grid and that leaves the real bastards."

Maya Da Silva knelt on one knee in the coarse grit, using the flat of a combat dagger to pry a jagged wedge of frozen granite from between the articulated joints of her void-ivory greaves.

She tossed the rock aside with a dull click, her dark face set into a rigid humorless grimace.

"Khemet," Maya muttered, her voice dropping into a tired tone that rasped over the dry desert wind. "The terrain belongs to them... You drop Tariq Al-Mansur and Safira into thousands of square miles of sun-baked dunes, and you’re basically fighting two sharks in their own blood-slicked pool. Every grain of silica out there is an eye, a snare, or a localized kinetic spike. If we try to push through the dunes toward the eastern basin, we won’t even see the blades that sever our Achilles tendons."

Aki nodded once, a cold certainty settling into the hollow of her chest.

She raised a gloved hand, pointing past the crumbling foothills toward a wide, snaking band of dense emerald-green jungle that followed the course of an ancient riverbed.

"Then we abandon the dunes entirely," Aki said. "We stick to the plan. We set up our perimeter above the Safe Zone... Once we dismantle whatever squad is foolish enough to try camping the barrier, we break straight for the tree line."

Maya looked up from her greaves, squinting toward the thick canopy winding through the basin floor as a slow approving nod tugged at her chin.

"Smart," Maya grunted. "None of the high houses cultivate Nature magic... House Bloom is pure combustion and shadow-stepping while Indus relies on superheated volcanic magma and psychic compression fields. If we pull the battlefield under that canopy, Khemet loses their infinite medium of sand, and the snipers lose their long-range sightlines."

"Sound logic, Princess," Leona chimed in, crossing her arms over the pearl-white chest plate of her prototype armor. "Except for one glaring operational reality... Our mounts took a two-thousand-foot header off the mountain wall when Yuri shattered the shelf. Traversing six miles of broken badlands on foot while carrying sixty pounds of combat gear is going to eat half our stamina."

Aki turned her head, her azure eyes dropping toward the base of the shattered cliff where the avalanche had settled into a towering scree of pulverized stone.

A bitter knot formed in her stomach.

"They fell with the rock," Aki murmured with her shoulders tightening. "Without anything to cushion the drop, the impact alone—"

Maya chuckled as she pushed herself up from the dirt, slapping the yellow grit from her thighs.

"Who told you they hit the ground?" Maya said with an arrogant grin splitting her dark features.

Aki blinked. "What?"

Maya stepped to the edge of the shelf, planting her heavy boots right where the rock sheared away into the abyss.

She closed her eyes, rolling her neck until the vertebrae popped like firecrackers and then she extended her right hand downward with her fingers splayed wide and the Second Stage Purple Core within her chest flared with a deep violet glow.

"Trust me..."

She made a sharp upward-pulling motion with her forearm.

RUMBLE!

The base of the mountain groaned.

Two thousand feet below, in the shadowed hollow where the landslide had settled against the canyon wall, the compacted mound of shattered granite and red silt began to shift like a living mass.

The stone liquefied for three fractions of a second, parting like soft mud, and three golden-furred shapes scrambled violently out of the subterranean hollow.

"AROOOOOO!"

The Dune Wolves tore up the rocky slope, leaping from boulder to boulder with terrifying muscular agility.

Their thick coats were caked in yellow silt and powdered shale, their flanks bruised from the initial impact, but their powerful limbs were intact.

The makeshift reins Aki had braided from star-iron cord were still cinched securely behind their wide pointed ears.

The massive alpha wolf bounded up the final ledge, skidding to a halt three feet from Aki, dropping its broad snout into the dirt and letting out a low huffing whine of recognition.

"I manifested a small pocket beneath their descent while Yuri was trying to cave my face in," Maya explained, rolling her right shoulder to work out a lingering knot. "Buried them under eight feet of loose sand to insulate them from the falling boulders, then reinforced the chamber ceiling with a stone spell... after all Frontier deployment rule number four states that you should never abandon your transport if you can build a cellar around it."

...

[Author’s Note]

Thanks for the castle and the support too! Every single bit matters... Phew~ Let’s get more GT! Also make sure to join the Discord.

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