Chapter 257: Savior

The building fell away as if swallowed by the ground.

In the aftermath of the fall, only a yawning, smoking crater remained. Millions of tons of shattered masonry, reinforced titanium girders, and pulverized concrete had plummeted down creating an apocalyptic pit.

High above the wreckage, a towering, gargantuan mushroom cloud of dense black soot, chemical fumes, and burning ash billowed into the sky, mimicking a bomb detonation.

Down in the ruins, severed high-voltage conduits hissed against the rubble, spitting cascades of white sparks across pools of leaking stasis fluid. Overturned diagnostic consoles and chemical cooling tanks caught fire, sending tongues of oily orange flames licking up the rubble.

It resembled a graveyard.

Then, amidst the smoking slag, the air subtly rippled.

A silhouette flickered into existence, passing smoothly through the solid face of a fallen ceiling slab as if it were nothing more than morning fog.

Arius stumbled onto the surface of the rubble.

The knight was in a state of ruin. His coat was shredded into charred ribbons, soaked in dirt and his own hot blood. His right shoulder was a open crater of torn muscle and exposed bone where his arm had been severed.

Blood poured freely down his flank, dripping through his trembling fingers as he used his left arm to steady his balance.

Coughing and spitting out mouthfuls of soot, his single eye swept frantically across the burning debris, searching for the broadsword he had hurled before the collapse.

Rattle.

Not twenty paces behind him, a slab of cracked foundation shifted.

Arius reacted on terrified instinct. He leaped backward, landing in an awkward, one-armed crouch on a heap of broken tiles, his breath catching in his throat. Every nerve ending in his body screamed that the silver-haired demon had crawled out from the grave to finish him.

He had nothing left. His mana was depleted, his arm was gone, and his body was broken. If the boy struck now, Arius could not even raise a guard.

Yet, the figure crawling from beneath the stone was not Hide Volter.

A small, slender hand emerged from a narrow fissure, followed by a cough that rattled with agony. Pushing aside a splintered piece of drywall, a young girl dragged herself out into the open air.

She was small, clad in dark gear. The smooth porcelain mask she had worn earlier was shattered down the center, its pieces clattering onto the gravel to reveal a pale, dirt-streaked face framed by messy, cropped grey hair.

Arius’s eye widened in disbelief.

“Kiko…?”

The shock vanished instantly, replaced by a wave of furious contempt.

“What the fuck are you doing here?!” he snarled.

Ignoring his own bleeding socket, he marched toward her, his boots crunching over the glass. Reaching down with his left hand, he seized a fistful of her grey hair yanking her upward.

“AHHHH!”

Kiko shrieked in agony. Her left leg dangled limply below her—the limb was completely crushed.

She should have been ground into crimson paste beneath thousands of tons of concrete. But at the time of the cave-in, she had unleashed her threads, tethering the falling slabs directly above her to distant structural anchors across the complex. She had deflected ninety percent of the crushing weight away from her body, escaping the fate of the buried scientists by a hair’s breadth.

Arius leaned down, his scarred, bloodied face inches from hers, his breath foul.

“I asked you a question, you little rat,” Arius barked, shaking her by the roots of her hair. “Did the Commander send you?!”

Kiko swallowed the bile rising in her throat, tears of pain tracking through the ash on her cheeks, but she stubbornly shook her head. “No one… no one sent me…”

Arius’s sneer deepened.

Without a word of warning, he drove his knee straight into her diaphragm.

THUD!

The breath exploded from her lungs in a choked gasp.

“Then what the hell are you doing here?!” Arius spat, his voice trembling with fury. “This facility is strictly off-limits to a lowlife like you! You’re not supposed to be here, you useless bitch!”

Kiko hung from his grip, trembling violently.

She had spent her entire life terrified. She had been an orphan plucked from the gutter, brought into Julian’s elite vanguard purely out of pity, treated as an expendable tool who was choked, beaten, and discarded. She had cowered before Julian, and she had cowered before Arius.

But as she looked into Arius’s pathetic, mutilated face—a proud knight reduced to a one-armed, limping dog crawling through the dirt—something inside the fragile girl finally broke.

Gritting her teeth, Kiko swung her right arm with every ounce of strength remaining in her bruised frame.

SLAP!

The sharp, ringing crack echoed across the silent crater.

Arius’s head snapped to the side.

He froze.

A Peerless Knight. A veteran exterminator who had butchered and brought down Calamity Lords. He had just been struck across the face by an orphaned mongrel whom they kept around like a stray hound. Not even his own commander had ever laid a disrespectful hand upon him like this.

A roar of blind, demonic rage ripped from Arius’s chest.

“YOU DARE?!”

He didn’t bother using a blade. He threw his entire body weight forward, hurling Kiko across the broken concrete.

Her light, fragile body skipped across the rubble like a discarded doll, crashing against the base of an overturned generator. She lay there in the ash, coughing blood, unable to move her crushed leg.

Arius turned to her, trying to summon his spear.

Nothing happened.

A cold realization struck him: his spatial storage ring had been resting on the middle finger of his right hand.

“Damn it! DAMN IT ALL!” Arius roared at the sky.

THWACK.

A loose piece of concrete, dislodged by the shifting heat of the fires, dropped from an overhanging beam above and struck Arius sharply across the forehead.

A fresh ribbon of dark crimson trickled down his temple, blinding his remaining eye for a fraction of a second. He wiped the blood away with a trembling forearm, glaring across the crater at Kiko with murderous intent.

“You should have stayed in the dirt where Julian found you,” Arius hissed, limping toward her.

Lying in the dirt, Kiko looked up at him through her matted grey hair. Despite the agony in her shattered bones, a broken, bitter laugh escaped her bloodied lips.

“You asked me why I’m here… didn’t you, Arius?” she whispered, her raspy voice carrying a strange, eerie calm. “I didn’t come for the Corporation. Fuck you, fuck Julian and fuck the commander. I no longer work for you. I came to save Hide Volter.”

Arius halted, his brow furrowing in disgust.

“And look at you now,” Kiko continued, her laugh growing louder, mocking and hollow. “Look at the great Peerless Knight. You are the one who needs saving. You’re bleeding out like a slaughtered pig… and I am not going to lift a single finger to save you.”

Arius sneered, baring his bloody teeth. “Hah! Look at yourself first, you crippled little bitch! Don’t you dare tell me who needs saving!”

Before the words could fully clear Arius’s throat, the earth ceased its trembling.

From the deepest, darkest epicenter of the collapsed crater, an immense presence rose like an ancient titan waking from the core of the world.

Arius and Kiko both froze, their breath catching in their chests.

Slowly, a towering silhouette pushed through the dense curtain of smoke.