Chapter 562: Moving Forward [Bonus - ]

Chapter 562: Moving Forward [Bonus Chapter]

Aki breathed a quiet genuine sigh of relief.

She stepped forward, reaching out with her gloved hand to run her fingers over the coarse wire-stiff fur between the alpha’s ears.

The beast leaned its heavy weight into her palm, its feral yellow eyes blinking with submissive calm.

"Thank you, Maya," Aki said softly, the tension bleeding from her shoulders as she glanced over her shoulder at Leona. "Do you have any water left?"

Leona unclipped a heavy insulated steel canteen from her harness and tossed it across the terrace.

CLACK!

Aki snatched the metal cylinder out of the air, twisted the cap with a hiss of released seal-pressure, and lifted it to her lips.

She took three deep greedy gulps of the chilled, mineral-heavy water, letting the cold rush cut through the dry, sulfurous heat coating her tongue and throat.

It cleared the chalky dust of the mountain from her lungs and grounded her pulse.

She recapped the canteen, tossed it back to Leona, and swung her left leg over the alpha wolf’s broad muscular back as her fingers gripped the coarse star-iron cords, gathering the tension until the beast’s ears snapped back in ready anticipation.

"Haaahhh..."

As the wolf stood up to its full intimidating five-foot shoulder height, Aki’s gaze drifted back toward the south.

Across the shimmering heat haze of the salt flats, far past the jagged perimeter of the central caldera, the sky remained dark, churned up by ripples of lingering mana.

The broadcast had announced the simultaneous extermination of two major powers within an eight-minute window.

’Did Silas already run into Alexander...?’ Aki wondered, her knuckles turning white against the star-iron rope. ’Or did he tear through the perimeter just to clear the board for us?’

She didn’t have time to ponder the answer.

"Reins tight," Maya commanded, vaulting onto the back of the second wolf with a dull creak of void-ivory armor settling into place. "We drop into the western canyon, hug the shadow line of the rock wall, and push directly for the bluffs overlooking the Safe Zone... If anyone is crouching in the crags waiting for the barrier to drop, we take their heads before they even register our heat signatures."

"Understood," Aki said, leaning her torso low over the alpha’s shoulders, locking her knees against the dense muscle of its ribs.

"AROOOOOOOOOO!"

The three beasts surged forward in an explosive sprint as their clawed paws tore into the hard-packed clay, leaving gouges of red dust behind while they plunged down the switchback paths with their bodies moving like fluid golden shadows beneath the towering cliffs of Sector Forty-Four.

[Minutes Earlier]

WHOOOOOOSH... BOOOOM!

The blur tore through the low canyon first, shearing the atmosphere around them into a howling vacuum.

The sound followed a fraction of a heartbeat later... a violent, concussive boom that ripped a twelve-yard-long six-foot-deep trench straight through the sun-baked clay floor!

Marcus Vanderbilt dropped his center of gravity, throwing his entire torso violently to the right.

SKID-CRASH!

His heavy combat boots carved deep lines through the gravel as the displaced vacuum snatched at his tailored charcoal tunic, shearing the top three brass buttons clean off the fabric.

He rolled across the jagged stones, scrambled back to his feet in a frantic wide-legged crouch, his right hand slamming down onto the heavy custom-forged kinetic sidearm holstered along his hip.

"What in the hell is wrong with you?!" Marcus roared, his voice cracking with fury as he glared across the smoking trench. "We haven’t been on the ground for three minutes! You’re burning your signature draw on an opening skirmish?!"

Forty yards away, perched on the flat, elevated spine of a fractured sandstone ridge, Ren Minamoto let the single katana in his right hand settle into a lazy horizontal low-guard.

The white silk haori of the United Hegemony whipped violently around his slender frame, snapping like a war banner against the dry desert wind.

His shoulder-length black hair hung forward in loose damp strands that completely obscured his eyes, but the thin razor-sharp smirk tugging at the corner of his lips was bright and dangerous too.

The cold steel of his blade hummed with a high-pitched vibrating whine, wreathed in a crackling pale-blue film of azure lightning that licked across the edge like living wire.

...Lightning Sword.

It was the first and most foundational of the four ancestral techniques belonging to the Minamoto sword-clans of the Yamato Sector.

Ren had practiced the draw from the hour his fingers could wrap around a wooden hilt.

While other children were learning regional geography and corporate accounting, Ren was standing waist-deep in freezing mountain rapids, cutting downstream leaves in half before they could pass his shins.

When he encountered a martial artist he deemed worthy of respect, he drew both of his paired matched blades.

Against Marcus Vanderbilt? A single sword was an act of deliberate, condescending charity.

Ten yards behind Ren, seated cross-legged upon a sun-bleached granite boulder, Fang Zhao was running a silk cloth soaked in clove oil down the length of his own curved katana.

The second representative of the United Hegemony looked uninterested in the shouting match below.

His white haori was unfastened at the throat, revealing a collarbone cross-hatched with old dueling scars from the southern island trials.

His gaze was distant, drifting far past the boundaries of the Wastezone, crossing the continental divide toward the western Directorate.

’I hope Shiori is doing well in Europa...’ Fang mused silently, turning the blade slightly to catch the ambient light along the hamon line. ’The academies in the capital are filled with arrogant nobles... If one of those bastards tries to touch her hair, I’ll commandeer a military unit and cut down their whole family.’

"Oi! Fang!" Ren called out over his shoulder with his blade not wavering an inch from Marcus’s silhouette.

Fang sighed, lifting his eyes from the steel with slow exasperation.

"What is the holdup, brother? We are supposed to clear this sector, lock down the central caldera, and establish an intercept perimeter before the others consolidate themselves."

"I am adjusting our operational objectives," Ren announced, his grin splitting wider with his white teeth catching the light.

He shifted his footing, dropping his hips by two inches into a formal high-crane stance.

"I am going to face Lord Vespera."

A dead heavy silence fell over the ridge.

Down in the clay trench, Marcus Vanderbilt stared up at the swordsman as though Ren had just stripped naked and begun howling at the sun.

Fang paused his cleaning cloth in mid-air. He looked at his twin, blinking twice with utter unvarnished fatigue.

"You have completely lost your mind," Fang said flatly. "There is a broad perfectly reasonable gulf between possessing healthy martial pride and being suicidal... You crossed that gulf, built a fortress on the other side, and started planting crops."

"The old men in the capital call me the Strongest Sword of Shogya!" Ren shouted back, his laughter booming over the canyon gale. "The intelligence reports claim she is a Second Phase Gold Core! They claim she shattered a barrier over the Citadel with a flick of her wrist! If a swordsman spends twenty years cutting stones under waterfalls and never tests his edge against a sovereign, then his entire life is an empty lie! I want to taste the pressure of her blade!"

Fang rolled his eyes so violently he looked like he might pull a cranial nerve.

’Why does he sound like a Cultivation novel’s protagonist...?’

"She does not even carry a blade, you illiterate lunatic... She would crush your internal organs with raw pressure and toss you away without a thought. If she flares that Gold Core aura within fifty yards of you, your nervous system will violently reject itself and you will soil your silk trousers before your thumb can even nudge the tsuba..."

"Then I’ll cut the pressure!" Ren barked, his eyes blazing with mad electric joy behind his dark bangs.

While the two eastern swordsmen traded insults like bickering siblings on a training field, Marcus Vanderbilt’s face darkened into an ugly mottled mask of malice.

His left hand dipped slowly behind the heavy ballistic weave of his combat tunic with his fingers wrapping around a palm-sized rectangular remote crafted from matte-black carbon composite.

"You eastern primitives," Marcus whispered under his breath, his knuckles turning white as his thumb slammed down onto the red actuator button. "You stand on your rocks and talk like you own the earth. Die in the fire!"

BEEP! BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM!

The entire thirty-yard expanse of the sandstone ridge erupted into an apocalyptic wall of white-hot fire.

Sixteen high-powered seismic plasma charges... planted in secret by the guards that they had bribed before the formal deployment detonated in a perfectly coordinated overlapping grid.

The concussive violence sheared the bedrock into flying razor-shards, sending a towering superheated mushroom cloud of black soot and pulverized stone roaring three hundred feet into the sky as the heat alone was enough to instantly vitrify the loose sand into black glass.

SWOOSH!

Ren Minamoto tore straight out of the heart of the fireball.

His white silk haori was singed at the hems with faint embers dancing across his shoulders but his posture was terrifyingly clean.

He cut through the smoke like a white arrow, his single katana extended forward, the azure lightning screaming along the blade as he aimed straight for Marcus’s exposed throat.

CLACK-HSSSSSSSS!

Marcus didn’t attempt to parry with steel.

The Columbian scion leaned backward, his spine curving into a deep arch as two miniature high-output combustion thrusters embedded into the heels of his combat boots ignited with deafening shrieks.

WHOOOOOOSH!

The concentrated thrust launched him vertically into the air as he rocketed thirty feet upward like a surface-to-air missile, flipping through the smoke like a ballerina while Ren’s lightning blade cleaved empty air beneath his soles.

Hovering thirty feet above the smoking crater on twin plumes of pale-blue plasma exhaust, Marcus spread his arms wide with a venomous sneer contorting his face.

"You like the hardware, sword-boy?!" Marcus shouted down, his voice carrying over the roar of the thrusters. "Custom-fabricated by Sterling Bio-Dynamics! You eastern fools spend forty years bleeding in the mud trying to cut trees! In the Republic of Columbia, the only god that matters is capital and with enough money—"

WHOOSH!

A sickly luminescent emerald mana pulsed outward from his core and from the soles of his thruster-boots, crawling up his shins, calves, thighs, as well as the torso, overlapping plates of a dark gunmetal alloy began violently expanding across his flesh.

The mechanized plating snapped together efficiently as it locked into airtight pressurized joints that glowed with internal coolant lines.

CLACK-CLACK-SHLICK!

Heavy hydraulic actuators hissed along his spine and shoulders and a reinforced star-iron faceplate slammed shut over his features with a whirring sound as two burning crimson optical visors flaring to life in the shadow of the smoke.

He wasn’t a regular Awakened anymore... he was a walking mechanized siege engine wrapped in three tons of classified ballistic alloy.

Fifty yards away, concealed in the dense shadow of a fractured boulder on the western perimeter, Talia Knox lay completely motionless in the dirt.

Columbia’s second representative had not uttered a single word since landfall.

Her breath was slow and suppressed, her right eye pressed tightly against the ocular interface of an anti-material rail-sniper.

The long fluted barrel of the weapon was charged with pressurized gravity-mana, humming at an inaudible frequency as she tracked Ren Minamoto’s landing trajectory.

’Just need to snipe him out without him noticing...’ Talia thought, that wouldn’t be that hard if she was to be honest.

His guard was completely let down.

’A little bit more...’

Her finger rested on the cold steel of the hair-trigger, her crosshairs locked dead center on the bridge of Ren’s nose...

SWOOSH!

The air pressure above her skull simply ceased to exist.

Fang Zhao dropped out of the sky directly above her prone form with his white haori settling around his shins like a funeral shroud.

His right sandal descended with the velocity of falling rubble.

CRACK!

The reinforced sole of his sandal drove the back of Talia’s skull straight through the heavy titanium receiver of her rail-sniper.

The delicate optical prisms, gravity-mana batteries, and fluted steel disintegrated into a shower of twisted springs and crushed composite glass with her forehead shattering the granite bedrock beneath the weapon.

Fang didn’t pause.

’I hate women like this...’

His heel rose and fell three more times in rapid, piston-like succession.

BOOM! CRACK! WHAM!

’What weaklings...’

Each stomp discharged seismic shockwaves that fractured the bedrock, caving in her cheekbones, shattering her orbital bones, and snapping her left collarbone like dry balsa wood.

Talia slumped sideways into the broken stones with her limbs twitching once before going limp, her consciousness extinguished as dark blood pooled around her ruined visor.

"You should be lucky I’m not trying to kill you..."

Fang stepped off her spine, shaking a wet speck of blood from his heel with his curved katana still resting undisturbed inside its wooden saya.

"Boring," Fang muttered into the dust.

Thirty feet in the air, Marcus’s red optical sensors flared as his internal feed registered the flatline of Talia’s vitals, she was really about to die.

"Useless corporate dog," Marcus snarled through his external speakers as his voice warped into a grating growl. "Couldn’t even provide five seconds of covering fire..."

CLACK-SHLICK!

The heavy alloy plates across Marcus’s pauldrons and chest snapped open, revealing two twelve-tube micro-missile pods.

The warheads inside glowed with superheated mana, arming with high-pitched electronic whines while Ren Minamoto stood in the dust below, his smile widening until his jaw muscles ached.

He brought his left hand up, gripping the hilt of his katana with both palms, sinking his weight into a deep aggressive forward stance.

"Now that is a proper target!" Ren laughed. "Let’s see if those gears of yours can turn fast enough to catch a lightning draw!"

[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.

https://discord.gg/fa72E7e5m