Chapter 603: A Tale Of Betrayal [Bonus - ]

Chapter 603: A Tale Of Betrayal [Bonus Chapter]

She turned her green eyes toward Harper’s trembling ghostly form with a cruel mocking smile playing on her lips.

"I can sever this connection in a single second," Nitocris said, her tone dropping into a terrifying intimate whisper. "I can step out of this vessel right now, return control of this shattered meat to your spirit, and watch you tumble back into this flesh just in time to feel your lungs fill with your own blood... I will watch you die in agony on this burning sand, and then I will simply claim another vessel from the millions walking the streets of Iunu..."

Nitocris leaned Harper’s bloody face closer to the weeping spirit.

"So I ask you, little mortal, do you wish to die right now? Or do you wish to remain quiet, keep your fragile little soul intact, and pray that your pathetic little prince arrives before I finish burning this continent to ash?"

Harper couldn’t speak.

She hovered in the air with her spiritual form shaking so violently that her outline blurred and tears of pure terror pouring silently from her eyes.

She slowly shook her head, clutching her hands against her mouth that was completely stripped of every scrap of defiance.

Nitocris let out a soft satisfied hum.

VUUUUUM!

A radiant wave of dense black sand surged through Harper’s thoracic cavity.

CRACK-CLICK-SNAP!

In the blink of an eye, the shattered ribs knitted together with rapid sickening clicks.

Fresh cardiac tissue braided itself back into existence like living thread... the severed arteries reconnected, the skin sealed over without a single scar and the blood coating the white blouse dried and flaked away into dust with a soft clean pop.

THUMP-THUMP. THUMP-THUMP!

Harper’s physical heart resumed its steady beat as Nitocris casually wiped her bloody fingers against her trousers, turning her gaze back toward the gleaming white walls of Iunu.

"Like I was saying..." Nitocris began smoothly with her voice echoing across the desert dunes like the tolling of a funeral bell as she began moving once again. "...I have an ancient tale to tell. Listen closely, Harper. It begins with the woman whose bones are buried beneath that city..."

The golden expanse of the Great Dunes blurred into streaks of blinding ochre and white heat beneath Harper’s physical boots.

FWOOOOOOSH!

The displacement of air flattened the crests of three-hundred-foot dunes into glassy trenches, sending plumes of pressurized silt screaming across the desert like artillery shells but Nitocris didn’t tire.

’She’s using my body better than me... Why...?’

Floating a pace behind her own shoulder, Harper’s translucent soul trailed along like a kite bound to an iron mast.

The glowing silver tether connecting her astral sternum to the base of her physical neck hummed with sickening resonance, dragging her through the blistering slipstream.

’I’m still a passenger in my own skin,’ Harper wept in the silent suffocating privacy of her mind.

Every time her physical feet touched the earth, she could feel the phantom vibration, not as pain, but as an obscene violation of ownership.

Nitocris tilted Harper’s chin upward, her green-lit pupils narrowing against the blinding horizon, and spoke.

Her words echoed directly within the marrow of the skull, vibrating through Harper’s ethereal ears with the heavy intimate gravity of stone grinding against stone.

"Once upon a time..." Nitocris began, her tone carrying a strange hollow melancholy that sounded jarringly human coming from lips that had just feasted on the slaughter of a fleet. "I was revered as a great hero."

She took a massive bounding stride, clearing a jagged outcropping of sun-baked shale by forty yards before hitting the sand with a soundless weightless glide.

"You modern children speak of the Sovereign Realm as though it were a grand colosseum," the entity mused with Harper’s physical fingers adjusting their grip on the black-hilted khopesh. "A place where nobles flaunt their bloodlines, where merchants barter for spirit cards, and where lords play at war under the amused gaze of the Nine Powers... You have forgotten the beginning... When the first rifts tore through reality during the Apocalypse, there were no cities of marble and there were no World Council decrees... The Earth wasn’t merely bordering the Sovereign Realm, it was being violently consumed by it."

Harper’s translucent form flickered in the wind.

She wanted to cover her ears and she wanted to scream at the monster to stop talking but the terror from earlier, the memory of watching her own hand punch through her ribs and rip her living heart to pieces, kept her tongue locked in paralyzed submission.

"The sky turned the color of bruised copper," Nitocris continued, leaping over a dried riverbed of cracked clay. "Monstrosities crawled out of the tears, things that didn’t possess flesh, things that fed upon the collective sanity of entire settlements... Most of the chosen ones, those who felt the initial stirrings of an Awakened core, panicked as they fled directly into the Sovereign Realm, throwing themselves into the foreign territories, desperate to hide behind the system’s defensive shields but I refused."

Harper’s physical lips curved into a bitter nostalgic sneer.

"I was the First Per-aa of the Khemet Dominion. The First Pharaoh-President... What kind of ruler abandons her people to be digested in the dark while she cowers in an unformed citadel? I didn’t descend into the realm. Instead, I anchored my soul directly to the bedrock of this desert and with nothing more than the unrefined fire of a freshly awakened core and this very blade, I slaughtered them."

SH-SH-SH-SH-SH!

A low tremor rippled through the dunes beneath their path, as if the desert itself remembered the carnage.

"One million," Nitocris whispered, Harper’s voice dropping into a tone that made Harper’s spirit tremble. "One million nightmares carved from the dunes without ever properly ascending as a lord... I fought until the sand turned into a knee-deep swamp of black bile... I fought so that mothers could sleep with their children in their arms, so that families could share bread without waiting for the sky to fall... And when the others, the cowards who had fled into the Sovereign Realm, finally returned with their granted system powers and their shiny territorial titles, they found an empire already waiting for them as together, we drove the last of the abyssal rot beyond our borders..."

Nitocris slowed her stride with her bare feet carving a smooth decelerating arc through the sand as they reached the crest of a colossal ridge.

She stood motionless as the hot desert breeze whipped her long vibrant purple hair around her face.

Harper looked through her physical eyes.

In the vast distance, rising out of the shimmering heat mirage, the colossal white perimeter of Iunu stretched from east to west.

It wasn’t simply a city at all... it was an artificial mountain range of polished limestone, white titanium, and solar-jade barriers, spanning so wide across the horizon that even from this elevated vantage point, the eye could find no boundary.

"It’s much larger than it used to be," Nitocris observed softly, her green pupils contracting as she studied the monolithic skyline. "And yet, nothing has truly changed..."

She let out a dry rattling sigh that sounded like sand pouring through a sieve.

"Do you know how I fell, scabbard?" Nitocris asked, not waiting for an answer. "It wasn’t a beast from the rift... It was an expedition into the corners of this desert to eliminate a Primordial Abomination, a creature whose very breath withered the water aquifers of the southern basin and my entire Squad was eradicated. Every loyal knight, every sworn commander, shredded to bone. In the end, only two souls stood over the beast’s severed skull. Myself... and my older sister."

The air around Harper’s physical body abruptly froze.

The temperature plummeted as frost crystals began spider-webbing across the sand grains beneath her heels.

"Her name was Nefertari Al-Mansur," Nitocris spoke, each syllable laced with ancient calcified hatred. "She had failed the divine trials of the First Rift... The core within her chest was flawed, weak, unable to process the pure power of the crown... She had watched from the shadows as the people chanted my name, as the armies knelt before my khopesh and there, in the quiet blood-soaked dark of that cavern, while I was broken, bleeding from fourteen shattered ribs and paralyzed from the beast’s venom, she carried me."

Nitocris raised Harper’s physical hand, looking at the calloused palm.

"She carried me on her back," Nitocris said, her voice dropping into a mocking poisonous imitation of gentle comfort. "She whispered that we were going home and she whispered that the nightmare was over as well. However, she stopped before an open unstable portal leading into the deepest unmapped abyss of the Sovereign Realm... She looked into my dying eyes, told me how utterly sick she was of living in my shadow, and pushed me through."

Harper’s translucent jaw dropped.

Despite the suffocating terror gripping her soul, the horror of the betrayal struck her like a physical blow.

"She took my khopesh from my paralyzed fingers," Nitocris continued coldly, tapping the dark blade against her thigh. "The very weapon you bought at that frivolous little auction as she returned to the surface alone, probably weeping false tears of grief, claimed I had perished saving her, and crowned herself the second ruler of Khemet but she was a fool... She didn’t understand the true nature of the steel she held... from what I can see."

Harper’s physical face turned slightly, her green eyes locking dead onto Harper’s hovering astral form.

"I knew what she was," Nitocris whispered. "I had seen the rot in her eyes for years so before we ever marched into that trench, I severed a sliver of my own soul and wove it into the core of this khopesh. My true body, the original vessel, was swallowed by the endless void of the Sovereign Realm but this fragment, I remained asleep within this blade, century after century, passing through the hands of ungrateful heirs, waiting for the day the seal would crack."

"You’re... a fragment?" Harper finally found her voice with the words coming out as a reedy trembling gasp from her spiritual lips.

"I am the wrath she left behind," Nitocris affirmed simply. "I have inherited some of the memories of what my true body suffered on the other side, enough to know that the woman who pushed me down must pay..."

Nitocris paused, taking a slow deep breath of the hot desert air.

The white towers of Iunu gleamed in the distance, bathed in the midday sun.

"My goal is remarkably simple, Harper Whitmore," Nitocris said, carrying only the certainty of an executioner reading an edict. "I am going to butcher every single soul that carries Nefertari’s blood... Whether it’s an old woman withering in a silk bed, or a suckling infant in a golden cradle. I will end the royal bloodline of Khemet down to the final drop."

Harper’s astral form shuddered.

"You... you can’t... an infant? That’s madness! That’s—"

Before Harper could finish, Harper’s physical body did something unexpected.

Nitocris lowered her arms as she bent her waist, Harper’s head dipping forward in a deep respectful bow toward Harper’s floating soul.

"I apologize, Harper," Nitocris said softly, her green eyes softening by an almost imperceptible fraction. "Truly... During the time we spent speaking in the quiet of your room, I came to appreciate your spirit... You possess ambition, yet you carry an earnest heart so under different stars, we might have been genuine friends and I know that what I am about to do using your flesh is an unspeakable, monstrous thing. But I give you my sacred unbreakable word as the First Per-aa... the moment the last Al-Mansur stops breathing, I will return your body to you intact."

Harper blinked, completely stunned by the sudden eerie shift in demeanor.

"You... you’ll give it back?"

"I have no desire to live in this modern cage," Nitocris replied, straightening her spine. "Once Nefertari’s blood is extinguished, my purpose is fulfilled. I will shatter this fragment of my soul. I will kill myself, and you will walk away as the sole master of your body once more... I have no interest in whatever madness my true self is cultivating in the dark."

Harper swallowed hard with her ethereal form drifting closer, driven by a desperate instinctual need for clarity.

"Your true self..." Harper asked, her voice shaking. "Back in the dunes, you said Ititius. Who is Ititius, really?"

Nitocris slowed her pace, walking leisurely toward the lower highway leading into the capital.

"Ititius was a god," Nitocris explained, her tone dripping with disdain. "Or rather, the name of a god our ancestors foolishly worshiped before the First Rift shattered the heavens. When the gates opened, we learned the truth... all manner of ancient terrifying entities exist across the cosmic strata, but ’Ititius’ was merely a myth, a bedtime story invented by desert nomads to explain the shifting sands so why my other half, the broken remnant of my true body in the Sovereign Realm, chose to drape herself in the shroud of a fictional deity, I cannot fathom but whatever she’s orchestrating, it cannot be good. It’s better that she and I remain severed..."

She paused at the edge of the asphalt highway, looking down at Harper’s clothes.

"Now," Nitocris murmured, Harper’s physical fingers weaving a subtle complex mudra. "We cannot enter the city looking like an unwashed nomad."

SH-SH-SH!

A delicate paper-thin layer of golden sand flowed out from Harper’s pores, coating her skin, her hair, and her clothes in an optical refraction spell.

Within seconds, the vibrant purple hair shifted to a common dusty chestnut brown; her sharp noble features softened into the plain, forgettable face of a mid-tier merchant’s clerk; and her blood-stained suit transformed into a modest traveling cloak of beige desert cotton.

"There," Nitocris smiled, Harper’s physical lips curling with genuine satisfaction. "This should ensure you aren’t implicated in the coming unpleasantness."