Chapter 261: So You're The One I've Been Looking For?

Alex stared at the ruins in front of him, and for a few seconds his brain refused to work, because what the actual fuck!

His house. His baby. His… his penthouse, Le Sommét Imperial, the place he had bought with his own money and loved like it was his very own child. Yes that particular pent house was gone!

The once mighty and beautiful walls were shattered into a million pieces. The roof was beyond recognition at this point. The balcony where he used to sip coffee in the morning hung from a twisted metal frame, and the fancy front door lay flat in the dirt like a broken cluster of dead leaf. Worst of all, smoke curled out of the totaled floors, and his expensive furniture, food stuff… everything! were all scattered across the rubble like broken scraps.

“My house,” he whispered. His voice cracking as he continued to survey the scene. “My… my beautiful house.”

[No, no, no. This can not be happening! Our house! The one we spent close to a fortune just to call it our little home!]

Even the system, who always joked about everything, sounded like she was about to cry. She had grown attached to that place too. It was the first house in this life that Alex could truly call his own. Every corner of it held a memory. The couch where he had watched bad soap operas with the system. The kitchen where he would eat quietly at midnight.

And with this being only 2009, buildings like this would be worth a fortune in the future. Now it was nothing but a pile of broken stone.

Alex’s fists shook at his sides. It didn’t exactly take long for his sadness to turn into something nasty. Someone was going to pay for this. Someone was going to pay a lot! Yes he was rich and all, but that didn’t mean someone could just destroy the house he had bought with his clean hard earned money.

Then he heard a small cough, and moved his eyes across the rubble, past a broken wall, until they landed on the open space in front of the ruins. Where what he saw made his blood run cold.

A man stood there with his back straight and his head held high. He was tall, in a dark coat, with a face that seemed neither ugly nor handsome. His expression was calm, maybe even almost bored. In one hand he was holding something… Or should he say someone. And it took Alex at least half a second before he could recognize who it was.

Celine!! The soon to be dead man was holding her up by the neck, with her feet barely touching the ground. Her black hair was a mess. Her clothes were torn and stained with dirt and blood, and one of her arms hung at a strange angle. Her beautiful face that could put most women to shame was pale and covered in small cuts, most likely from the fight, but the small cuts were already healing on their own.

Despite the fact that the odds seemed to not be in her favor, her eyes were still burning with the same fierce, stubborn light that Alex knew so well.

The man only chuckled upon seeing her expression and slowly moved his free hand toward her lower stomach, right where an Awakened’s primordial core was located. His fingers hovered there, ready to pierce and remove the core in one swift stroke.

“Okay, let’s try this one more time, I only want one thing from you. Tell me who the man under the black skull mask is. I want you to give me his full name and his face, and maybe I’ll consider letting you go.”

Celine looked at him for a long moment. Then she gathered a mouthful of blood and spit it straight onto his face, making the man momentarily freeze as a red drop slid down his cheek.

“Go burn in hell,” Celine said coldly.

For a moment, nobody moved. Then the man slowly wiped his face with his sleeve and laughed softly, like someone who had just heard a good joke.

“Wow,” he said. “What a stubborn woman. You really are something. I can see I’ll have to change my approach.” His fingers pressed gently against her stomach, and Celine’s body stiffened. “Since you clearly don’t want to talk I guess I just have to do something that will make you say exactly what I want to hear. But don’t worry I won’t kill you, I’ll just keep you as an experiment to be used since you’re also an Awakened.”

Alex didn’t remember when he moved. One second he was standing in front of the ruins, and the next, there was a loud sonic boom as his legs exploded off the ground and crossed the entire distance in less than a blink, appearing right beside the man before the man could even turn his head.

Then he punched forward with right fist to turn the man’s head into bloody chunks of meat and bone.

BOOM!

The sound of it cracked across the whole neighborhood. But instead of the sound of breaking bone, there was a loud clash of power. At the last possible second the man had turned around and thrown a punch of his own, causing the two fists to collide in the middle with so much devastating shockwave that it almost spread out to a 2km radius.

Caught off guard by the punch, the man was forced to let Celine go, who dropped and tumbled onto the hard ground. Alex and the man were both thrown back, sliding across the dirt with their shoes digging two long deep grooves in the earth, until they stopped after four or five steps back.

Alex stood there in shock, while feeling his arm now tingling all the way up to the shoulder from just that single exchange.

‘What the hell…?’

From that punch just now it was clear this man was not in the Master Realm, he was most likely an Ascendant Realm fighter… Even with that, this was not supposed to happen because that punch just now had enough force to send even a prepared Ascendant flying through several buildings in the very least.

It just didn’t make any sense. An Ascendant shouldn’t have such level of strength.

Across from him, the man looked at his own fist but his expression didn’t change for even a second. He only flexed his fingers slowly, before looking up at Alex, with a small smile across his lips.

“Oh,” he said happily. “So you’re the one. The one I’ve been looking for.”

“Interesting. Very interesting. But I have to say, you’re remarkably strong for your realm. No wonder you were able to take care of those two Ascendant mercenaries back at Marcus’s estate. I was starting to think the stories were exaggerated.”

He straightened his coat and rolled his shoulders like a man getting ready for a small workout.

“Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to see for myself how strong you really are, that is, before I decide to end both of your lives and go on my merry way.” He bowed slightly, with that same small smile. “Oh, and before I forget, my name is George. It’s a habit of mine. I like to give my victims the honor of knowing my name before they die.”

Alex didn’t care about the name, and he didn’t care about the speech. He ignored all of it. His eyes had already moved past George and landed on the woman lying on the ground.

He walked to her side and crouched down, and his voice, which had been so cold a second ago, turned soft.

“Celine. Are you okay?”

Celine pushed herself up on one elbow and gave him an annoyed look, though her lips were trembling a little from pain. Blood dripped from the corner of her mouth.

“I’m fine. It’s just a few broken bones. Nothing too serious.”

“You call a few broken bones nothing too serious?”

“Just shut up.”

Alex let out a small, tired breath that was almost a laugh. He placed a hand gently on her shoulder, careful not to touch her broken arm.

“Stay put, and don’t move. After I’m done taking out the trash, I’ll heal you. And then I’ll make you the best breakfast you’ve ever had, to make up for the dinner I missed yesterday.”

Celine looked away, and her cheeks turned a faint pink.

“Who needs your help?” she muttered. “And I don’t need your stupid breakfast.”

[Ding! +10 Desire Points Gained]

[Ding! +8 Desire Energy Gained]

She was quiet for a moment. Then her voice dropped, and she looked straight at him with a very serious face.

“Alex. Be careful. This guy is crazy strong. He’s not even in the Master Realm, but he beat me using nothing but pure strength and speed. He didn’t even use his ability once during our entire battle.”

Alex’s eyes darkened at those words. He gave her a small nod.

“I understand.”

He stood up slowly. And as he did, something about him changed. The warm look on his face drained away like water down a drain and his forest green eyes turned cold and sharp, like the surface of a frozen lake. The air around him seemed to turn colder by the second, and the grass around him began to show frosts which earned a surprised look from Celine.

He turned and stared at George who was already staring back at him with the same calm and cold expression. In a way it was like two apex predators, standing in the ruins of a home, staring at each other from across the smoke as they prepared to fight.

sorry guys