Chapter 567: Khemet’s Weakness [Bonus - ]

Chapter 567: Khemet’s Weakness [Bonus Chapter]

Tariq Al-Mansur lay horizontally suspended in a pressurized sheath of liquefied silica, his limbs coated in a three-inch-thick membrane of liquid-gold earth-mana.

The dense quartz silt pressed against his skin with the crushing weight of twenty atmospheres, but his ancestral channels drank the pressure like mother’s milk.

Beside him, suspended in the same current, Safira floated like a serpent in dark water, the green-and-bronze scales of her ceremonial mail shifting rhythmically as she filtered microscopic air pockets through her throat.

Their breathing had ceased five minutes ago as they were running purely on the ancient Khemetian lung-stasis arts, circulating the minerals in their blood to feed their brains while their senses spread outward through the sand.

Through the infinite sands of the dunes, they felt everything. They felt the twitch of a horned viper burrowing into the cool sand seventy yards to the north.

They felt the steady low-frequency hum of the realm’s underground fluid conduits three miles to the south.

And right above them... standing directly over the ceiling of where they had dove into, they felt the searing oppressive weight of an active volcano.

’She is not leaving,’ Safira’s thought pulsed through their shared link, the mental transmission vibrating with cold static. ’Tariq... the surface signature did not dissipate after the explosion... It is still reading above two thousand degrees and the sand up there is melting into slag. How does she have that much persistent output without entering an active casting stance?’

’Shut your mind down and crawl,’ Tariq answered sharply, the psychic command ringing like iron inside her skull. ’This is our soil... The dunes belong to the Pharaohs. She is an atmospheric burner as she commands open air and surface fire but down here, she has no line of sight, no directional medium, and no leverage. We drop our depth to sixty feet, skirt the lower granite shelf, and surface directly inside the focal point of the third snare... Once she steps onto the quicksand trigger, we pull her down thirty feet, lock the quartz cuffs around her throat, and let the pressure cave her lungs in before she can strike a spark.’

They shifted their weight with their cores pulsing in unison as they prepared to part the dense silica ahead of them.

Then...

The sand around their faces violently contracted.

TZZZZZZZZT!

It was a sudden sickening spike in conductivity that tore straight through the earth like an electric arc as Tariq’s eyes snapped open in the pitch darkness.

The cold soothing yellow quartz surrounding his forehead and chest abruptly flashed into a blinding crimson.

The loose sand grains pressing against his cheeks and eyelids suddenly went from cool silt to superheated lead, hissing violently as they vaporized the protective mana membrane coating his pores.

’WHAT IS THIS?!’ Safira shrieked through the link, her mind staggering under a wave of blistering agony as the scale-mail across her ribs began to scorch her skin! ’HOW IS SHE REACHING THROUGH FORTY FEET OF SOLID BEDROCK?!’

’MOVE!’ Tariq bellowed, his voice tearing through the mental channel in a roar of raw panic. ’SURFACE NOW!’

BOOOOOOOOOOM!

The ceiling of the subterranean chamber vaporized as Seraphina Bloom had not bothered to dig.

She had planted her right heel on the center of the sand dune and dumped a continuous, concentrated spike of three-thousand-degree solar flame straight downward, using the silica’s natural mineral density as a direct conductor.

The heat traveled through the quartz strata with terrifying speed, flash-melting thousands of metric tons of sand into boiling bubbling lakes of liquid red glass that collapsed into the hollows like molten wax.

WHOOOOOOSH!

The superheated backdraft roared through the pocket and Tariq as well as Safira had no choice.

Remaining underground for another two seconds meant having their lungs filled with liquid quartz and their flesh fused to the bedrock.

CRACK-SHATTER!

Sixty paces north of the original impact point, the surface of the dune ruptured in a violent geyser of smoking sand and shattered glass.

Two bodies shot upward into the daylight, spinning through the air before hitting the dry hard-packed earth with staggering thuds.

Tariq hit the ground on one knee and one forearm, coughing violently, spitting out thick mouthfuls of scorched dust and bile as the bronze plates of his greaves hissed against the arid wind.

His scale-mail was blackened, smoking from the collar with the skin beneath his leather undergarments red and blistered from the radiant power.

Beside him, Safira rolled across the dirt, scrambling into a low, three-point crouch with both khopeshes drawn, her dark hair wild and caked in white ash as her kohl-lined eyes went wide with panting horror.

Fifteen paces away, standing casually on the raised rim of the newly formed glass crater, Seraphina Bloom was waiting for them.

She had not moved an inch.

Her arms were folded loosely over her black strike cuirass with her boots resting cleanly on the glowing red-rimmed edge of the vitrified pit.

The desert wind caught the loose strands of her crimson hair, fanning them out behind her head like living ribbons of fire.

She looked down at the two panting soot-stained scions with an expression of pure amusement.

"Look at you two," Seraphina purred, her melodic voice slicing through the crackle of cooling glass like a silver blade. "The proud scions of Khemet and the undisputed sovereigns of the eastern dunes... You are standing in the middle of your ancestral biome, surrounded by thousands of square miles of your favorite element and your first tactical maneuver is to bury your faces forty feet into the dirt like frightened field mice. Aren’t you embarrassed?"

Tariq’s teeth ground together with a harsh sickening scrape, his hands trembling where they gripped the hilt of his broad-khopesh.

Seraphina tilted her chin, looking down the slope of her nose with cool disdain.

"Seriously. If this were an active volcanic area... if we were standing on a sea of boiling basalt where House Bloom claims dominion, I cannot begin to comprehend the gut-wrenching humiliation of diving under a rock to hide from an outsider. Is this what passes for royal education in the Pharaoh’s court these days? Or does your whole family just inherit a genetic urge to cower in holes whenever someone raises the temperature?"

"Hold your tongue, woman!" Tariq snarled, his voice cracking with humiliated rage as his liquid-gold core surged behind his ribs, sending a visible shockwave through the sand around his boots.

"Tariq, do not engage her words!" Safira hissed, her voice tight and strained to the breaking point as she caught his shoulder with the flat of her bracer.

Her eyes were fixed on the terrifying wavy air distortion rising off Seraphina’s leather armor.

"She is trying to draw out a direct physical exchange! Look at the glass beneath her feet! She is sustaining three thousand degrees without even manifesting a formal casting circle! If she lands a flame lance on your chest, the silica in your veins will solidify!"

That was the fatal unalterable reality of the high lineages of Khemet.

Through centuries of ritual breeding and deep communion with the sacred silica strata of the Sun Basin, the royal houses of Khemet carried dense concentrations of microscopic quartz particulates fused into their cellular walls, their blood serum, and their skeletal marrow.

It was the source of their legendary physical resilience.

It allowed them to dissolve their flesh into fluid sand, shrug off trauma that would pulverize ordinary bones, and purge deadly biological poisons by crystallizing the foreign matter and expelling it through their skin.

The royals used this natural vitrification process for dozens of medical and martial advantages... they could petrify their own muscle fibers to form instant, natural tourniquets around severed arteries, they could turn their bone marrow into dense quartz to withstand crushing blunt-force impacts and they could crystallize chronic viral infections within their organs, cutting the diseased glass from their bodies and regenerating the tissue with sand-shaping arts in less than an hour.

But concentrated fire was their nightmare.

Under temperatures exceeding the melting threshold of quartz, the silica flowing through their blood and tissue underwent instantaneous vitrification as their flesh did not merely burn...

It turned into rigid brittle glass.

And once that organic glass shattered, the damage was completely irreversible.

Unless a master of sand-transmutation was physically present to weave the shattered glass back into organic bone and meat within an hour, the victim died of systemic shock and internal exsanguination.

In this open desert, against any other opponent, they were gods but against Seraphina Bloom, the very blood in their veins was a powder keg waiting for a match.

"We do not need to run," Tariq growled, his voice dropping into a harsh vibrating bass as he violently knocked Safira’s bracer away.

His gold eyes flared with savage cornered ferocity. "There are two of us. There is one of her. Fire cannot burn without atmosphere so we will drown her in the dunes! We bury her under fifty tons of quartz and let the weight crush her throat!"

Tariq stomped his right heel into the earth with deafening concussive force.

BOOM!

"Maw of the Great Devourer!"

The thirty paces of hard-packed earth separating them did not simply crack... the entire landscape liquefied into an ocean of churning roaring sand.

From the boiling yellow sea, eight massive serpentine constructs crafted from abrasive silica erupted into the sky, their jaws lined with three rows of spinning quartz teeth that screeched like circular saws as they descended on Seraphina from eight converging angles.

Seraphina’s lips curved into a sharp cruel grin.

WHOOSH.

Her core flared with a ruby flash that turned the shadows beneath the dunes into blinding noon as a thirty-foot disc of roaring horizontal solar flame detonated from her waist with the explosive report of a heavy mortar.

BOOOOOOOOOOM!

The sand serpents did not even reach within ten feet of her leather armor.

The attack truck the incoming constructs mid-lunge, instantly superheating the silica past its melting point as the abrasive sand heads froze mid-air, their spinning teeth and thrashing necks vitrifying in a single microsecond into fragile hollow statues of glowing translucent red glass.

SHATTER!

Before the glass could even fall, the concussive expansion of Seraphina’s aura smashed into them, reducing the eight massive constructs to millions of glittering razor-sharp shards that rained down across the desert like a blizzard of red diamonds.

SWOOSH!

Through the glittering cloud of falling glass, a shadow blurred forward at fast speeds.

"Haah!"

Safira had not waited for the serpents to land.

She had dematerialized her lower body into a swirling high-velocity sand vortex, skimming three inches above the ground at eighty miles per hour.

She crossed the twenty-yard gap in the blink of an eye, her twin khopeshes spinning in an intricate figure-eight pattern that whistled through the air like screaming scythes, aiming straight for Seraphina’s exposed throat and left flank.

CLANG! CLINK!

Seraphina drew both curved hunting daggers in an upward reverse-cross.

The blades collided with an ear-splitting shriek of grinding metal, spraying showers of white-hot sparks across their faces.

Safira was terrifyingly fast, her balance shifting with unnatural liquid fluidity as she constantly dissolved and reformed her center of gravity to slip past Seraphina’s leverage.

She pressed the attack with feral desperation, the bronze edge of her left khopesh sliding along Seraphina’s dagger spine, dipping down to slice toward the soft gap between her cuirass and gorget.

Seraphina tilted her head back by half an inch, feeling the cold, displaced air of the bronze blade whistle across her throat while her ruby eyes danced with wild sadistic delight.

"Fast!" Seraphina laughed, her breath hot as a furnace blast. "A little sloppy on the follow-through, but at least you have some vinegar in your blood...!"

WHAM!

Seraphina snapped her left wrist outward, deflecting the khopesh into the dirt, and drove her armored right knee violently upward into Safira’s solar plexus.

The breath exploded from Safira’s lungs in a wet choke with her eyes bulging as she stumbled backward—

SHLICK!

Seraphina spun on the ball of her right foot, her right dagger tracing a clean horizontal scarlet arc through the air.

The serrated tip caught Safira across the meat of her upper bicep, cleaving through the bronze scale-mail and slicing a four-inch gash through the muscle.

"Tariq!" Safira screamed through the blinding pain, leaping backward as the laceration hissed with immediate third-degree cauterization.

From the sky directly above Seraphina’s head, a shadow eclipsed the sun!

Tariq had launched himself thirty feet into the air on the crest of a compressed sand pillar with his broad-khopesh gripped with both hands and his liquid-purple core burning with every ounce of mana his soul could force through his channels.

"Fall of the Obelisk!"

BOOOOOOOOOOM!

He brought the massive blade down with the full momentum of his descent, dragging a seventy-foot pillar of solid compressed quartz sandstone down behind the strike like a falling mountain.

’I do like the names of his moves though...’ Sera thought as she brought both daggers up in an emergency cross-block to meet the descending monolith!

BOOM!

The concussive violence of the collision blew a twenty-yard crater into the bedrock beneath her boots, sending shockwaves rolling through the dunes that flattened the surrounding sand ridges.

The physical mass of the seventy-foot sandstone pillar was immense and even with Seraphina’s peak second Stage Lord Core bracing her musculature, the crushing momentum drove her three inches into the stone.

A three-foot slab of sheared quartz bypassed her cross-guard, slicing across the meat of her left shoulder.

SHLICK!

A line of bright crimson blood welled up, soaking through the dark leather of her collar.