Chapter 838: Fruits Of Training [Bonus - ]

Chapter 838: Fruits Of Training [Bonus Chapter]

Harper took a deep breath, and her ribs creaked under the weight of it.

’Hah...’

She was standing in the center of a private training room on the lowest level of the LAB building, an eighty-foot cube of reinforced alloy lined with hexagonal shock-absorbing tiles.

The gravity had been cranked up to three times normal, and every inch of the room was heavy as hell.

Her knees ached under the load.

Her lungs had to fight for every breath, and the sweat on her forehead didn’t bead so much as drag itself straight down her face and drip off her chin onto the floor... Even her ponytail felt like it was made of lead.

Harper rolled her shoulders slowly, and her spine crunched.

’This isn’t anything I can’t handle.’

Around her, spread out in a wide half-circle, stood her opponents.

Holograms given solid form, built out of hard light and spatial engineering, as real as steel and twice as unforgiving.

The whole set had cost her a little over a hundred million, and she’d bought it on a whim one sleepless night after deciding that sparring partners who were afraid to hit her were a waste of her time.

...There were twenty of them.

Hulking brutes in black plate armor stood on her left, gripping warhammers and poleaxes taller than she was.

On her right crouched lean, wiry skirmishers with twin daggers humming in their hands.

In the back stood a row of heavy gunners behind tall riot shields, the barrels of their rotary cannons already beginning to spin.

Every one of them had the same cold glowing blue eyes, and every one of them was locked onto her throat.

Harper dropped into a low stance, and a slow wicked smirk curled across her lips.

The sand stirred around her boots as she settled her weight... It still amazed her sometimes, the way it answered her now like a big dark animal curled at her feet.

When she’d first inherited it, she could barely lift a handful without it spilling through her fingers but now it moved before she even finished thinking about it.

"Come at me!"

The room exploded as the first brute was already swinging.

WHOOSH!

Harper ducked under the warhammer with an inch to spare, and the wind of it tore at her bangs.

CRASH!

The floor where she’d been standing caved in.

’Too slow, big guy...’

Purple lightning crawled up her right arm and coiled around her knuckles.

CRACKLE!

She drove her fist up into the underside of his helmet.

KRAKOOM!

The lightning detonated on contact as the brute’s head snapped back, his whole body left the ground, and he crashed down onto his back hard enough to crack the tiles.

Two skirmishers came at her spine from both sides at once.

SHING!

Harper didn’t even turn around.

...Black sand boiled up out of the floor behind her and hardened into a curved wall in the space of a heartbeat.

THUNK! THUNK!

Both sets of daggers bit into the sand and stuck there, buzzing uselessly.

"My turn," Harper purred.

She slapped her palm against the back of the wall and poured her lightning straight into it.

BZZZZT!

Every grain of sand lit up violet, and the wall cracked apart and unraveled into three long crackling whips of electrified sand.

She swung.

CRACK!

The first whip took the left skirmisher across the chest and blew him apart into shards of blue light.

CRACK!

The second wrapped around the other skirmisher’s neck and yanked him off his feet.

Harper grabbed the whip with both hands, planted her heels, and used the room’s own gravity against him, hauling him over her head and slamming him straight down into the floor with three times his own weight behind it.

THOOOM!

The tiles buckled, and the construct burst into fading pixels.

’Two down,’ Harper thought, grinning. ’Eighteen to go...’

WHIRRRRR!

The gunners in the back opened fire.

TAKATAKATAKATAKA!

A storm of hard-light rounds ripped across the room, chewing up the floor in long, smoking trenches as they swept toward her.

Harper ran.

Every step under triple gravity felt like dragging an anvil, but she poured lightning into her heels and zigzagged across the room in sharp violent bursts, each one leaving a scorch mark on the tiles behind her.

ZAP! ZAP! ZAP!

A round clipped her left arm.

SHHK!

It tore a hot line across her bicep, and blood sprayed across her black tank top.

Harper hissed through her teeth, and the pain lit her up like gasoline on a fire.

She glanced down at the cut, then back up at the gunners, and her violet eyes narrowed into slits.

’Oh, you’re definitely dying first...’

"Not bad for a bunch of glorified calculators, you’re worth the money!"

She slammed both palms down onto the floor and the sand answered her.

It erupted upward in a churning wave twenty feet high, then poured down around her forearms and packed itself tight into thick black gauntlets that hummed with weight as she flooded them with lightning.

BZZZZZT!

Violet light raced through the sand and burst out of her fingertips in long crackling claws.

Harper charged straight into the gunfire.

BANG! BANG! BANG!

The rounds hammered against her crossed gauntlets and shoved her back a step with every hit, but the sand held, grinding each bullet to dust before it could reach her face.

She closed the distance and dropped into a slide, skidding across the floor on her knees right under the barrels.

SKRRRRT!

She jammed her claws into the seam between two riot shields and ripped them apart.

SCREEEECH!

The shields peeled open like tin cans with Harper coming up out of the slide and drove her elbow into the first gunner’s visor.

CRUNCH!

She spun on her heel and kicked as a spike of black sand shot out from the sole of her boot and punched straight through the second gunner’s chest, pinning him to the ceiling forty feet above.

THUNK!

The third gunner pressed his cannon against her temple however Harper caught the spinning barrel in her bare gauntlet and crushed it in her fist.

CRUNCH!

She yanked him forward and headbutted him in the face.

CLANG!

Lightning arced off her forehead straight into his head, and he burst apart into blue mist.

The next wave was already on her.

Harper laughed out loud.

She couldn’t help it... Her heart was pounding, her arm was bleeding, the gravity was trying its hardest to fold her in half, and she was having the time of her life.

"That’s it?" she called out, tossing her sweaty ponytail over her shoulder. "I paid over a hundred million for you guys! Put your backs into it!"

The constructs answered by coming faster.

Four brutes rushed her at once from four directions with their weapons raised high and Harper stomped.

BOOM!

Four pillars of black sand exploded out of the floor beneath their feet and launched all of them into the ceiling.

KRASH!

They hung there for half a second, pinned by their own weight against the tiles, and then gravity remembered them and dragged them back down three times harder.

THOOM! THOOM! THOOM! THOOM!

’Ouch,’ Harper thought cheerfully. ’That’s gotta hurt.’

A skirmisher lunged at her face with both daggers.

She caught his wrist, twisted it, and sent lightning straight up his arm.

BZZRT!

It didn’t stop at him.

The bolt leaped from his shoulder to the skirmisher behind him, then to the one behind that, chaining through four bodies in a single crackling line until all of them burst apart at once.

POP! POP! POP! POP!

’With this... I’m sure I can take that bitch Sera on easy, I won’t end up like a corpse.’

A poleaxe came whistling at her neck from the left.

Harper ducked, grabbed the shaft, wrenched it out of the brute’s hands, and swung it around in a full circle.

CRACK!

She broke it over his own helmet, and he dropped as a warhammer came down at her from behind.

WHOOSH!

She stepped sideways, and the hammer smashed into the floor beside her ear.

KRAAANG!

She hopped onto the head of the hammer, ran straight up the brute’s arm, and drove her knee into his face.

CRUNCH!

She flipped off his shoulders before he even hit the floor and landed in a crouch just as a dagger came spinning through the air at her eye.

Harper kicked it.

TING!

The dagger flipped up into the air... She caught it by the handle without looking and whipped it across the room into the visor of the last gunner, who was just raising his cannon to fire.

THWACK!

He toppled backward and dissolved before he hit the ground.

When the noise finally died down, Harper was standing in the middle of the wreckage with her chest heaving.

Her tank top was soaked through and clinging to her stomach. Her arm throbbed where the round had cut her.

Her thighs burned from fighting the gravity, and her knuckles were split and dusted with black sand But her violet eyes were blazing.

She looked down at her hands and flexed her fingers.

’Look at this...’ Harper thought. ’A while ago, thirty seconds in this room would’ve snapped my legs...’

Her smile slipped, just a little.

Not long ago, she’d been lying on cold stone in the dark of a secret realm, bleeding out from a hole in her chest.

She’d stood in front of a pack of Lords and held the line because she’d wanted to prove she could stand beside him and she’d lost.

She’d been torn apart... She remembered lying there, unable to lift her own arm to cover herself, trying not to cry because she didn’t want him to see her looking like that.

She remembered Silas kneeling beside her, pressing his hand to her chest and pulling her back from the edge of death like it was nothing.

Harper remembered how her legs had been too weak to stand afterward, and how he’d turned around, knelt, and told her to climb on.

He had carried her on his back and then, after all of that, the second time she had to prove herself... She couldn’t even use her own body.

’Ah, I truly have suffered...’

Something ancient had reached inside her and taken the wheel, and she had been trapped somewhere deep inside her own head, helpless and silent, while the people she cared about fought to get her back.

She had been weak in Khemet... She had been a burden, and a liability, and a body someone else could borrow...

Harper’s hands curled slowly into fists, and the sand around her knuckles tightened until it groaned.

’Never again...’

She was going to be strong enough to stand beside him... Strong enough that the next time something came for the people he loved, she’d be the one standing in front of it, and he’d be the one watching her back.

She lifted her head as seventeen constructs lay shattered across the floor, slowly dissolving into drifting blue light.

Only three were left.

They were the final wave, the best units in the entire set, and they had been standing perfectly still at the far end of the room this whole time, waiting.

The first was a tall, four-armed swordsman with a vibrating broadsword in every hand and eyes that glowed a deep ugly red.

The second hovered ten feet in the air on humming thrusters with two plasma lances crackling at its sides and the third was an eight-foot executioner carrying a double-bladed axe as big as a door, wreathed in black writhing energy.

Their eyes all lit up at the same time.

VMMMM!

The pressure in the room seemed to double... The air hummed against her skin, and the tiles under the executioner’s feet cracked with every slow step he took toward her.

Harper wiped the blood off her arm with her thumb, looked at it, and flicked it away.

She’d fought harder things than this.

She’d lost to harder things than this, too, and she’d promised herself on the night she sat shivering on cold stone inside Silas’s coat that she was never going to lose like that again.

She rolled her shoulders back, shook out her hands, and let the lightning creep back up her arms, slow and lazy, until her fingertips sparked.

Harper cracked her neck and grinned.

"Finally... Something fun..."

They came at her together.

The flier dove from above with its lances screaming.

The swordsman blurred across the floor with four blades weaving into a cage of steel aimed at her arms and legs while the executioner leaped high into the air and brought his axe down in a two-handed swing meant to split her in half.

Harper sank low and pulled every grain of sand in the room toward her feet.

Purple lightning raced up her spine and crackled through her hair until the air smelled like a storm, and she gathered it all into one massive pillar, ready to blow the whole room apart...

BZZZ!

BZZZ!

Something buzzed across the room, and her heart did a strange little jump before her brain even caught up with it.

It was her phone, lying on the bench by the observation window sixty feet away, rattling against the wood...

Harper’s eyes flicked toward it in the middle of a dodge.

The screen was lit up, and a single name glowed in clean white letters across the top.

It was Silas.