Chapter 598: Penelope’s Worries [Bonus - ]

Chapter 598: Penelope’s Worries [Bonus Chapter]

The driver looked at the crumpled cash, looked at Silas’s immaculate charcoal suit, swallowed hard, and opened the window properly.

"Sure sire!"

...

The high-grade security gates of the Silverleaf estate parted with a smooth silent glide.

The yellow cab rolled away into the quiet tree-lined avenue, leaving Silas standing alone on the pristine cobblestone driveway.

The sharp clean scent of manicured pine trees, blooming mountain jasmine, and filtered air washed over him, completely purging the rancid reek of Sector Six from his senses.

Silas let out a long luxurious exhale, loosening his silk tie by half an inch.

’Home.’

He walked up the sweeping driveway with his fingers lightly brushing across the sleek chassis of the Zenith IVR luxury cruiser parked under the portico.

He climbed the wide marble steps, unlocked the reinforced front door with his biometric thumbprint, and swung the heavy oak panel open.

"I’m back," Silas called out softly, stepping into the grand foyer.

CREAK!

He stopped as the person standing in the center of the polished hardwood hallway, staring straight at him, was Penelope Whitmore.

The eleven-year-old girl was frozen like a porcelain doll.

Her vibrant purple hair, identical in shade to her older sister Harper’s, was tied into neat twin pigtails, but her usually pristine clothes were rumpled with her stockings slightly twisted.

Her face was as pale as fresh chalk with her large eyes wide, bloodshot, and rimmed with red... They were trembling with an intensity that looked completely unnatural on a child.

Silas’s brow furrowed as he immediately slipped off his leather shoes, stepping onto the indoor mat.

"Hey, Penelope," Silas said, keeping his tone gentle and grounded. "What’s wrong? Why are you standing in the dark? Where’s Harper?"

He’d noticed Harper’s absence at the World Council Summit earlier that morning.

He’d assumed that House Whitmore, while prominent in commercial trade, simply lacked the standing to sit at the Grand Table alongside the Nine Powers.

Elora hadn’t been in the chamber either, which hadn’t made sense given the classified nature of the proceedings.

Penelope didn’t answer with her usual bratty sharp-tongued arrogance.

Instead, a violent shiver rippled through her small frame.

Her teeth clicked together as she pressed her back against the wall, making way for him to enter with her hands trembling so hard she had to tuck them into her skirt pockets.

Silas stepped into the main living room, his instincts flaring with quiet cold alarm.

"Welcome home, Master Silas!"

Martha hurried out from the adjoining kitchen, wiping her hands on her immaculate white maid’s apron.

The petite middle-aged woman had visible lines of worry etched across her warm forehead, her dark eyes darting nervously toward the purple-haired girl.

"She’s been sitting on that rug since after you left, Master Silas," Martha whispered, leaning close so her voice wouldn’t carry. "She hasn’t eaten a single bite... She hasn’t had a sip of tea and she wouldn’t speak to me, she wouldn’t speak to the young miss... she just kept staring at the front door waiting for you."

On the expansive velvet sofa, Lia and Kaede were huddled together, looking at Penelope with deep agonizing concern.

Lia’s large brown eyes were wide with the tiny crescent scar on her forehead catching the sunlight as she fidgeted with the hem of her oversized knit sweater.

Beside her, Kaede, the dark-haired exchange student from the eastern sector, sat with her hands folded neatly over her pleated skirt with her expressive dark eyes darting between Silas and her purple-haired friend.

’This isn’t a child throwing a tantrum,’ Silas realized instantly. ’Something has gone terribly wrong.’

Silas walked over, kneeling down on one knee in front of Penelope so his eyes were level with hers.

He reached out with his right hand, gently resting his calloused palm against the girl’s trembling shoulder.

"Penelope," Silas said softly. "Look at me... I’m here so tell me what happened."

The touch broke whatever fragile dam was holding the girl together.

"Gah..."

Penelope swallowed hard with a ragged choking sob tearing from her throat as tears finally spilled over her lower lashes, carving clean tracks through the dust on her cheeks.

"My sister..." Penelope wept, her voice trembling so violently she could barely string the syllables together. "Silas... my big sister is gone. She’s... she isn’t herself anymore!"

Silas’s jaw tightened. "Take a breath. What do you mean she isn’t herself?"

"She... she left the estate early this morning," Penelope cried, shaking her head frantically, her twin pigtails whipping across her shoulders. "She was supposed to be preparing the trade manifests for the port authority but when she was about to leave... she looked right through me! Her face was completely stiff, like a frozen mask and her eyes... Silas, her eyes weren’t purple anymore! There was this... this horrible sickening green glint spinning behind her pupils!"

The girl grabbed Silas’s sleeve with both hands, clutching the fine charcoal wool as if it were the only lifeline in a storm.

"She talked to me like... like she didn’t even know who I was!" Penelope sobbed, her voice cracking. "She spoke in this dry voice... she just packed a single leather case, walked out to the airfield, and left! Before I came here, even though I didn’t want to, I ran to the city enforcers, but the desk sergeants laughed at me! They said Lady Harper was an adult and had the legal right to travel on business! Nobody would believe me! Nobody! Only you would know... only you can help her! Please, Silas... someone is controlling her! Something is inside her head!"

A cold heavy dread dropped straight into Silas’s stomach but he didn’t hesitate.

He pulled his black phone from his pocket, his thumb rapidly unlocking the screen and navigating directly to Harper’s secure messaging thread.

’Empty...’

His breath hitched.

The screen was completely blank.

A series of twelve encrypted notifications showed that Harper had transmitted an array of urgent messages to his private number before today but he hadn’t even checked upon arriving.

Every single message had been remotely purged from the server side.

’A clean wipe,’ Silas analyzed with his pulse quickening. ’Whoever took her knew she had my number so they scrubbed the text logs to prevent a trace.’

"Hold on," Silas muttered, his fingers flying across the glass.

He tapped into the secondary background locator.

BEEP!

A tiny pulsing red dot materialized on the holographic continental map and Silas stared at the coordinates.

The dot wasn’t in the Europa Directorate... It wasn’t in Columbia, nor was it heading toward the eastern sectors...

It was currently moving at six hundred miles per hour over the southern maritime trenches, cutting straight through international airspace, vectoring directly toward the desert continent of Khemet with the destination being Iunu.

The Sun-Crown’s capital city.

A terrible suffocating chill clamped around Silas’s heart.

’Khemet?’ Silas thought, his mind racing through the events of the morning. ’Pharaoh-President Menes Al-Mansur was pale as a corpse at the Grand Table so why the hell is Harper being flown straight into the heart of the Sun-Crown if she’s mind controlled?!’

"Silas... please," Penelope begged, her small hands tugging frantically at his jacket with her face buried against his chest as she wept openly. "She loves you so much... she talks about you every single night! She talks about wanting to marry you, about building a grand estate together... you have to be her husband! You have to save her! Please don’t let them hurt my sister!"

Lia rose from the couch, her hands clasped tightly against her chest, her brown eyes shiny with unshed tears.

"Big brother... we have to help Lady Harper."

Silas looked down at the weeping girl clutching his coat.

If this were anyone else, he might have paused to calculate the fallout.

He might have questioned whether getting tangled in the internal affairs of the Sun-Crown was worth the risk.

’Harper...’

He closed his eyes for a single second and he saw her bright, mischievous purple eyes.

’That idiot...’

His hand trembled slightly, not with fear, but with a cold rage that made the gravity in the foyer dip by a fraction.

’If anyone touches a single hair on her head,’ Silas swore silently, his teeth locking together, ’I will burn the white walls of Iunu to absolute cinder...’

He opened his eyes with his expression completely calm, not mirroring the rage echoing in his soul.

"We’re going to save her," Silas said firmly, gently patting Penelope’s head. "I promise you, Penelope... I will bring Harper back, and whoever put that green light in her eyes will pay for it a thousand times over..."

He rose to his full height, turning his gaze toward the kitchen.

"Martha."

"Yes, Master Silas!" Martha answered instantly, standing at attention, her apron strings pulled tight.

"Pack our travel cases and book five private first-class flights on the next transport out of the central terminal heading directly to Iunu..."

Martha blinked, her eyes widening. "F-Five, sir?"

Silas looked back at Lia and Kaede.

"Lia," Silas said, offering his little sister a gentle reassuring smile. "You said Valoria Academy had a seasonal recess starting next week, right?"

Lia nodded slowly, her fingers fidgeting. "Y-Yes, but... Big brother, is it safe?"

"It’s completely safe," Silas said smoothly. "Why don’t we turn this into a family trip? We’ll take a little vacation to the southern sun."

He turned toward the dark-haired girl on the sofa.

Kaede’s bright expressive dark eyes lit up with sudden vivid excitement with a charming blush dusting her round cheeks as she sat up straight.

"A trip?!" Kaede gasped, her hands clapping together. "To Khemet?! Oh, I have to call my brother right now! He will definitely let me go if I tell him I’m traveling with Lia’s family! I’m going to pack my sun hats!"

Silas let out a quiet sigh, a massive invisible sweatdrop practically forming behind his ear.

’I’m not sure this is exactly the time for sun hats, kid,’ he thought, shaking his head.

Yet, he knew his sister.

If he tried to leave Lia behind in Silverleaf while he flew off to a hostile superpower, Penelope would scream, Lia would spend three days crying into her pillow, and their household security could be compromised by whatever faction had abducted Harper.

’It’s safer to keep them within my sensory range,’ Silas resolved. ’I’ll book the most heavily fortified, five-star luxury suite in the diplomatic district of Iunu... I’ll leave Martha, Lia, Penelope, and Kaede inside a high-grade place with enough defensive wards to stop an orbital strike and while they’re safe in the hotel... I’ll go hunting.’

He looked down at his phone, watching the red beacon blink steadily across the digital map.

’Hold on, Harper,’ Silas thought, his eyes turning cold as winter ice. ’I’m coming...’

[Republic of Columbia, Deep-Level Research Facility No. 95]

Night had fallen over the western continent.

Deep beneath the jagged red mesas of the Columbia frontier, thirty stories beneath the desert bedrock, Research Facility No. 95 hummed with the staggering multi-billion-credit energy of a nation preparing for war.

President Julian Vanderbilt Senior stood in the primary observation corridor, his iron-gray hair slightly disheveled, wearing a crisp white alchemical laboratory coat over his charcoal pinstripe trousers.

Large protective polarized goggles rested over his spectacles, and a massive self-satisfied grin was plastered across his face.

It was, without question, the greatest night of his entire political career.

Sure, Blessed Land had humiliated him and sure, that monstrous woman Kara White had squeezed forty billion credits out of the Columbia treasury like water from a dry sponge but forty billion was paper! It was numbers on a screen!

What rested inside the reinforced titanium containment chamber ten feet ahead of him was the holy grail of military sorcery... the Mana-Bypass Gloves as he called it.

’Forty billion?’ Vanderbilt scoffed inwardly, his signet rings clicking rhythmically against the stainless-steel handrail. ’The moment we reverse-engineer this artificial neural weave and adapt it to our mechanized infantry suits, Columbia will control the global arms trade for the next century... We’ll make four hundred billion within the first fiscal quarter! That greedy unrefined slum bitch practically handed us the keys to the world!’

And the sweetest part of all was that the World King himself had endorsed the project...

The heavy pressurized blast doors at the end of the corridor slid open with a hydraulic hiss.

HSSSSSSS!

A man stepped into the white sterile light of the observation wing.

Vanderbilt turned, his chest swelling with reverence.

The man approaching looked barely fifty years old, walking with a steady commanding posture, wearing long flowing scholar’s robes woven from midnight-blue star-silk embroidered with silver geometric mandalas.

His gray hair was neatly bound behind his neck, his face stern, weathered, and etched with the profound arrogant confidence of someone who had unraveled the secrets of the cosmos.

This was Grand Master Varun and he was a living legend on the terrestrial plane.

He was over two hundred years old, a great-grandfather of an entire lineage of rune Lords, and widely regarded as the absolute apex runemaster in modern history.

Centuries ago, Varun had been a Lord in the Sovereign Realm, commanding his own territory but when his core was fractured during a disastrous territorial siege and his people died, he had been forcibly ejected from the realm, returning to Earth as an independent adventurer.

Rather than succumbing to despair, Varun had spent the next century and a half dedicating every waking second of his unnatural lifespan to the mastery of runes.

It was an open secret among the high ministries that if any member of the World Council ever perished, Varun was the primary candidate slated to ascend to a seat.

"President Vanderbilt," Varun spoke.

"Grand Master Varun!" Vanderbilt beamed, stepping forward to clasp the scholar’s hand with aggressive corporate warmth. "Words cannot express the Republic’s gratitude for your presence... The World King personally promised your expertise, and Columbia is honored."

Varun offered a stiff thin smile, adjusting the silver sleeves of his robes.

"Let us dispense with the political theater, Julian. I am not here for pleasantries. I was told you secured an anomaly, an external conduit capable of forcing secondary multi-elemental pathways through an Unawakened’s physiology."

"Indeed," Vanderbilt chuckled, gesturing toward the reinforced observation window. "Come. See the future of human warfare."