Chapter 574: Strange Attack [Bonus - ]

Chapter 574: Strange Attack [Bonus Chapter]

Devan Varma stood at the edge of the drop with his muscular torso bare except for heavy gold armlets forged in the likeness of coiling nagas and a sash of deep saffron silk.

His skin was deep bronze, marked with ancient glowing volcanic runes that pulsed with slow magma-mana.

He slowly twisted his neck from side to side, the vertebrae popping with the dull thuds of striking stones.

Standing half a pace behind his right shoulder was Ananya Rao.

Her long black hair was woven with gold beads while her body was adorned in crimson silk and delicate gold filigree armor.

She did not look at the other fighters.

Her dark almond-shaped eyes were fixed entirely on the broad scarred profile of Devan’s back, her face glowing with quiet unshakeable adoration.

’Look at them,’ Ananya thought, a reverent shiver running down her spine. ’Insects scrambling in the dirt... None of them understand what stands before them. From the day that my Lord was born, no warrior has ever managed to draw a single drop of blood from Devan’s skin... His volcanic aura is the purest and most terrifying manifestation Indus has ever produced, therefore he is not a mere scion... he is the foundation of a new pantheon. He has the potential to ascend beyond mortality and become a living god and I will stand at his side, his chosen woman, when the world bends the knee.’

Devan looked down upon the basin, his gaze sweeping over Lucian, Kira, Gareth, Isolde, and finally landing on First Princess Aki.

A slow rumbling breath escaped his chest, pluming into a cloud of black volcanic ash that drifted across the rocks.

"A crowded field," Devan rumbled, his voice sounding like two grinding tectonic plates. "Good... Weak flesh burns quickly."

Silence fell over the basin.

The factions stood locked in a rigid suffocating standoff.

Seventy paces separated the nearest fighters and two hundred yards spanned the entire perimeter.

The Safe Zone barrier hummed quietly in the distance with its blue light washing over the tense frozen faces of humanity’s elite scions.

Nobody moved and nobody breathed.

Every single person on the field understood the mathematics of the situation.

It was a powder keg.

The moment the first strike landed, the field would dissolve into a chaotic bloodbath where every alliance was temporary, every blind spot was fatal, and every fighter would seek to cannibalize the wounded to secure their own survival.

Aki stood with her boots planted in the sand with her bow lowered and her azure eyes darting between the distinct factions surrounding them.

Her knuckles were white against the star-iron grip of her weapon.

’This is an all-out war,’ Aki realized with the cold reality sinking deep into her gut. ’Europa wants us gone to win... Australis wants the same, Albion is treating this like an afternoon fox hunt, and Indus is looking to incinerate the entire field to show their godhood.’

Leona slid up beside Aki’s shoulder with her trench-machete held in a low, defensive guard and her hazel eyes flicking toward Isolde with sharp wariness.

"They’re circling," Leona whispered under her breath, barely moving her lips. "Everyone is waiting for the first idiot to draw mana so they can jump the flank."

Maya did not look back.

She stood five paces ahead of them with her broad back straight and her void-ivory cuirass catching the pale blue light of the Safe Zone dome.

She slowly lowered her chin with her amber eyes locking dead center onto Lucian de Montmirail’s pale face.

"Listen to me, both of you," Maya muttered, her voice dropping into a deadly unshakeable tone that cut through the whistling wind. "When this starts, do not look for clean formations and do not look for elegance. Give everything you have from the first breath... Burn your reserves, crack their bones, and fight like you have nothing left to go home to. We survive this bracket, or we don’t leave the sand."

Aki swallowed hard, then nodded. "Understood."

Leona’s lips pulled back into a grim ruthless smirk. "Let’s crack some teeth."

Maya took a slow, deep breath through her nose.

The tension in the air was so thick it could be cut with a dull knife.

Every fighter was coiled like an iron spring, their gazes locked across the divide, waiting for that single microscopic spark that would detonate the entire basin into violence.

Maya Da Silva had no intention of waiting for someone else to write the opening line.

She would be the spark.

WHOOOOSH!

Maya’s Second Stage Purple Core violently detonated as a suffocating aura of deep, tectonic brown mana erupted from her frame, roaring twenty feet into the air like a geyser of liquid mud and pulverized bedrock.

The physical gravity of her release struck the surrounding desert like a physical hammer, cracking the stone beneath her boots and blowing the loose yellow sand outward in a violent fifty-foot ring.

Across the basin, every single fighter stiffened as Lucian’s ice-blue eyes widened with his rapier twitching in his grip.

Gareth Pendelton’s broad smile vanished as his hand clamped onto the hilt of his broadsword while Devan Varma’s brow pulled down, his volcanic runes flaring with sudden reactive crimson heat.

’What is she doing?!’ Kira Bennett gasped from the ridge, her fingers trembling against her mudra.

Maya didn’t lunge forward yet...

She dropped her center of gravity by six inches, sinking her hips into a stance.

Her left foot slid forward three inches, carving a line through the rock while her right arm coiled back against her ribs and her fist clenched so tightly that the skin across her knuckles turned chalk-white.

Leona recognized the stance instantly and her hazel eyes dilated with raw alarm-bell terror.

"AKI, JUMP!" Leona screamed but she didn’t wait.

She grabbed Aki by the shoulder of her tunic and detonated every drop of her wind-mana, launching both of them forty feet vertically into the air.

Aki’s instincts responded instantly with her left hand clamped into a fist inside the midnight-blue glove, releasing an explosive high-pressure updraft of emerald wind-mana beneath her boots that propelled her higher into the sky.

Down below, Kira Bennett’s hands snapped shut.

"TEAR HER APART!" Kira shrieked.

BOOM-BOOM!

The sand directly beneath Maya’s planted boots exploded outward as an armored subterranean Spirit Beast... a thirty-foot-long chitinous Dune-Crusher Scylla with eight serrated mandibles and a barbed, venomous tail erupted from the bedrock.

Its monstrous tooth-lined maw tore through the earth, lunging upward to swallow Maya whole from the waist down!

Simultaneously, fifty paces away, a second massive beast burst from the sand behind Lucian de Montmirail with its massive claws sweeping to pin the European scion to the earth.

Maya didn’t even look down.

Her stance was set, her core was locked and the earth itself was answering her marrow.

So she did the one thing she could do in this situation...

She punched.

BOOOOOOOOOOM!

For one fraction of a second, the world fell completely silent as there was no sound and there was no wind either.

...Then, reality caught up to the strike.

A concussive shockwave of pure tectonic pressure detonated from Maya’s knuckles as the thirty-foot Dune-Crusher Scylla erupting beneath her boots didn’t even get to bite.

The apocalyptic pressure of the punch struck the beast’s skull before the teeth could close and the monster’s head simply ceased to exist.

The thick, reinforced chitin, the compound eyes, the mandibles, and the brain-matter were violently pulverized into a red liquefied mist that splattered across twenty yards of sand but the force didn’t stop moving.

The atmospheric shockwave tore straight through the dead beast, surged across the fifty paces of open sand, and blew through the second Spirit Beast attacking Lucian, blowing a clean four-foot hole through its torso before slamming squarely into Lucian de Montmirail’s chest.

WHAM!

’Huh?’

Lucian didn’t even have time to scream!

His ice-blue eyes bulged violently out of their sockets with the sclera turning dark red as the capillaries instantly burst under the crushing deceleration.

Thick dark veins popped up all over his pale face, his throat, and his forearms like writhing worms as the shockwave blew through his defensive mana like paper.

CRACK-CRUNCH!

His breastplate shattered inward, driving his ribs straight into his lungs and Lucian was launched backward like an artillery shell with his feet tearing clean off the dirt as he rocketed horizontally across the desert.

BOOOOOOM!

He struck a seventy-foot sand dune three hundred yards away, tore straight through the center of the massive earth-mound, obliterating the dune into an explosive avalanche of falling sand, before tumbling violently across the rocks on the other side.

Maya stood in the center of the pulverized crater with her right arm extended and the brown tectonic aura smoking off her bare knuckles like boiling mud.

She slowly drew her arm back, settling into a wide immoveable combat guard as she wiped a speck of beast-blood from her cheek with the back of her wrist.

"Heh..."

Her amber eyes scanned the frozen horrified faces of the remaining fighters with defiance.

"We better get this war under way, shouldn’t we?" Maya rasped, her voice booming across the basin.

The next moment...

The entire battlefield erupted into madness.

...

The thunderous roar of the collapsing dune three hundred yards to the south rolled across the salt flats like a localized tectonic fracture.

High atop an elevated promontory of compacted quartz sand, Genevieve de Montmirail did not flinch.

Her posture remained completely straight with her feet planted cleanly within the coarse silt as the concussive wind from Maya Da Silva’s tectonic shockwave whipped her tailored teal-colored coat against her shins.

She lowered the heavy matte-black receiver of her anti-material rifle by two inches.

Her cold gray eyes, framed by emerald-green bangs that cascaded down past her delicate jawline like braided river moss, tracked the flying debris where Lucian had disappeared.

’Taken out in the opening volley,’ Genevieve thought, letting out a melodic sigh through her nose.

She felt neither panic nor burning outrage.

An exasperated weariness washed through her chest instead.

Her cousin had spent the past few hours boasting about his peerless dueling style and the immaculate lineage of the Montmirail family.

He had insisted on orchestrating the opening strike... demanding that she prime the target with an alchemical beacon so he could swoop in for an elegant decisive decapitation before the eyes of the High Council.

’What an idiot,’ she reflected dryly, her thumb clicking the rifle’s internal cooling cycle. ’You don’t charge an Amazonian earth-shaper in the middle of a dry bedrock basin while her feet are still touching the ground... You bleed her from four hundred yards out.’

Yet, beneath the icy layer of aristocratic irritation, a small quiet knot tightened in her throat.

The concussive thud of that punch had sounded like a siege hammer splitting an oak door.

The dispersion had fractured the stone beneath Lucian’s boots before his body even cleared the ground.

’He’ll survive,’ Genevieve reassured herself with her jaw tightening by a fraction of a millimeter. ’The Montmirail bone-grafts are reinforced with flexible titanium mesh... If he dies from a single blunt-force redirection, he had no business carrying the family crest into this arena anyway.’

She dismissed her cousin from her mind after that.

In an active war zone, mourning the incompetent was a luxury that earned you an early grave.

Genevieve shifted her footing, pivoting three inches to the southwest.

She brought the heavy rifle back to her shoulder with liquid grace and the cold star-iron cheek-rest pressed smoothly against her cheekbone as her right eye aligned with the internal optics.

The crosshairs drifted across the chaotic airspace above the pulverized crater.

...They locked onto the silhouette of First Princess Aki.

The girl was currently suspended forty feet in the air with her combat gloves channeling pressurized emerald drafts to arrest her upward momentum.

Her pale delicate features were framed by blue hair that billowed wildly in the wind and her posture looked tense as she surveyed the multi-faction battlefield unfolding beneath her boots.

’Aki,’ Genevieve mused, her finger resting lightly against the hair-trigger. ’Kara named her, didn’t she?’

A private smirk tugged at the corner of Genevieve’s lips.

’It’s a pretty name for a remarkably pretty woman... I can certainly understand the Lord of Blessed Land’s aesthetic tastes. Soft eyes, unblemished skin, and the kind of quiet delicate grace that makes powerful monsters want to build high walls around her... Too bad that aesthetic appreciation doesn’t buy diplomatic immunity in Sector Forty-Four.’

Her index finger began to apply pressure to the star-iron trigger.

The battery beneath the barrel whined, priming a high-power cartridge laced with an alchemical neurotoxin designed to shut down motor functions within three heartbeats.

Her crosshairs settled dead center on the hollow between Aki’s collarbones.

Then...

The short hairs along the nape of Genevieve’s neck prickled with sudden violent heat.

It was an immediate suffocating spike in local air pressure that felt like the door of a blast furnace swinging open directly behind her skull and Genevieve did not turn her head to look.

She did not verify the threat with her eyes.

SWOOSH!

She let go of the rifle’s forward grip, abandoned her stabilized shooting stance, and threw her entire body sideways off the elevated sand promontory.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!