Chapter 605: Morally Grey...

Chapter 605: Morally Grey... [Bonus Chapter]

He stood frozen in the sunlight, terrified to even sound the alarm as his mind was paralyzed by the ancient superstitions that every soldier in Khemet was taught from childhood.

...

Deep within the infrastructure of the White Citadel, the world was a labyrinth of humming machinery, pressurized coolant pipes, and reinforced steel conduits.

SH-SH-SH-SH-SH!

The stream of black sand moved through the primary ventilation duct at high speeds.

Inside the swirling mass, Harper’s astral spirit drifted along, completely unharmed by the friction.

Her mind was a chaotic bleeding battlefield of contradictory emotions.

’If she keeps acting like this, how am I supposed to hate her with all my heart?’ Harper thought, her translucent hands curling against her chest.

She did hate her...

She had spent the last two hours terrified out of her mind as Nitocris had played her like an instrument, manipulating Harper’s desire to grow stronger, whispering sweet mentorship into her ear for all that time... all to steal her body and turn her into an executioner’s scabbard.

And yet, hearing the woman’s tragic history, watching her clumsy child-like wonder over a bowl of ice cream, seeing her bow with genuine sincere remorse, and witnessing her raw grief over the suffering of the common people, Harper couldn’t muster the pure blind hatred she wanted to feel.

Nitocris wasn’t an evil soulless demon who wanted to slaughter the world for fun.

She was a betrayed founder whose entire legacy had been defiled by her own sister, returning from the grave to balance the board... If it could be put that way.

’Why couldn’t she just be an evil villain?’ Harper lamented in the dark. ’If she were just a monster, I could hate her with every fiber of my being but she understands pain and she understands loyalty. Why couldn’t she just talk to me?! Why did she have to steal my body like a thief in the night?!’

As if hearing the desperate turmoil in Harper’s thoughts, Nitocris’s voice echoed gently through the flowing black grains.

"I promised to make you vastly stronger, Harper," Nitocris spoke, her tone steady as the sand surged through a narrow junction. "And a Per-aa never breaks her word... When I sever this soul fragment and die, I will not be able to guide your training directly. Therefore, as we move through this citadel, I am engraving the complete combat formulas of the First Dominion directly into the spiritual architecture of your soul."

Harper blinked, feeling a sudden warm harmonic pulse thrumming along the silver tether connecting them.

"The sand magic I wield now, it doesn’t belong solely to me anymore," Nitocris explained. "Your body has adapted to it and the black sand is yours to command... Watch closely, scabbard... Watch how I breathe... Watch how I fold the earth as this is the true power of Khemet."

Harper hovered in the dark with her heart hitching as a strange chilling question crossed her mind.

’Wait,’ Harper thought. ’Earlier, back on the ridge, she said I had Khemet blood in my veins that was distant, but real... If she wants to slaughter every single descendant of Nefertari, why doesn’t she want to kill me too?’

Was it because Harper was an innocent bystander? Or was it because, deep down beneath the ancient wrath, Nitocris carried a crushing weight of guilt?

WHOOSH!

The stream of black sand suddenly executed a sharp ninety-degree banking turn, narrowly avoiding a massive high-pressure industrial water exhaust pipe that was flushing boiling coolant toward the cooling towers.

Nitocris navigated the sprawling multi-tiered duct system with astonishing spatial awareness.

Even though she had never seen the modern architectural schematics of this modernized citadel, her sensory perception swept through the concrete walls, mapping every elevator shaft, every security checkpoint, and every structural load-bearing pillar with flawless precision.

HUMMMMM!

Suddenly, an obstacle appeared ahead.

Blocking the primary ventilation junction was a mana-barrier, a dense vibrating mesh of woven solar runes and spatial distortion fields designed to incinerate any rogue elemental or gaseous intrusion attempting to breach the palace interior but Nitocris didn’t slow down.

’Watch, Harper,’ Nitocris commanded.

Instead of trying to smash through the barrier with brute force, Nitocris subtly adjusted the internal mana frequency flowing through Harper’s cellular structure.

She twisted the flow into an inverted counter-clockwise spiral, perfectly mirroring the harmonic frequency of the solar barrier...

’Huh?!’

SHUUUU!

The black sand didn’t collide with the glowing runes.

It slipped effortlessly between the microscopic spatial gaps of the energy like water passing through a loose fishing net, completely bypassing the automated alarms without triggering a single warning light.

’Incredible...’ Harper marveled internally, despite herself.

The effortless mastery required to perform such a delicate calculation in a fraction of a second was beyond anything she had ever seen.

The ventilation duct began to slope steeply upward.

VUUUUUM!

The black sand surged up a vertical exhaust shaft, bursting through a decorative brass vent on the highest terrace of the White Citadel; however the black sand didn’t merely spill onto the ground after all that...

It shot sixty feet into the air, gracefully curving over a three-hundred-foot marble balustrade, and landed lightly upon the secluded elevated sun-terrace of the palace’s private domestic wing.

SWOOSH!

The black sand swirled together, condensing instantly into the physical form of Harper Whitmore.

Her beige cotton cloak dissolved, revealing the sleek charcoal suit beneath.

Her long vibrant purple hair thrashed in the gentle breeze with her hands resting easily at her sides and her green eyes blazing with a cold look.

’And suddenly she doesn’t want to hide my identity anymore...?’

Floating right behind her, Harper’s astral spirit gasped, taking in their surroundings.

The terrace was private, paved with polished rose-colored quartz, surrounded by hanging gardens of blooming night-lotus and gentle bubbling fountains of clear spring water.

In the center of the terrace, standing near a gilded drying rack of freshly laundered silk tunics, was a woman.

She was young, barely twenty years old, with soft delicate features, wearing a flowing loose-fitting gown of pure white linen.

Her belly was prominently swollen as she was heavily pregnant, carrying a child barely two months from birth.

Sitting on a low velvet cushion beside her, playing with a set of carved wooden toy chariots, was a little girl of five with her hair tied in golden ribbons, giggling softly as she rolled the wheels across the quartz tiles.

Before Harper’s sudden arrival broke the moment, the little girl looked up from her toys, tilting her small head at her mother with the guileless curiosity only a five-year-old could manage.

"Mama," the little girl piped up, still rolling one wooden wheel idly against her palm, "is it really alright that you go visit Grandpa’s chambers so late at night? You already have a whole new baby brother growing in your tummy... Does Grandpa know you’re going to have another one?"

Zahra’s cheeks flushed a deep mortified crimson.

She reached down quickly, smoothing a hand over her daughter’s hair with a soft, flustered laugh.

"Hush now, sweetling. That’s grown-up business. Go on, play with your chariots."

The little girl only shrugged and went right back to rolling her wheels across the tiles, humming a small, tuneless song to herself.

Standing five paces away, holding a ceremonial short-sword, was a personal royal guard wearing the white-and-gold livery of the domestic watch.

The pregnant woman paused, turning her head toward the sudden rustle of air with her gentle dark eyes widening as she saw Harper materialize on the terrace.

"Who... who are you?" the pregnant woman asked softly, her hand instinctively rising to shield her swollen belly. "How did you get up here? This is the private pavilion of—"

Nitocris didn’t ask for a name.

Her senses flared for a single microscopic second, locking onto the unmistakable inherited genetic frequency running through the woman’s veins, through the little girl’s heart, and through the unborn child in the womb...

’Nefertari.’

Behind that cold flare of certainty, something else flickered through the shared consciousness Nitocris and Harper now occupied.

’So the rumors that were whispered through the Inner zone hadn’t been idle gossip after all...’

Sound traveled much better underground and even on the streets, it was being talked about so she could hear... The old Pharaoh was sharing his dead son’s bed with his dead son’s wife, right beneath the same roof where his granddaughter slept.

Nitocris’s stomach turned at the thought with a fresh private layer of contempt for the rot her own bloodline had curdled into, separate from the sentence she had already come here to carry out.

SHING-CRACK!

There was no hesitation as Nitocris’s right arm blurred with terrifying, speed.

A massive razor-sharp spike of jet-black sand erupted from the terrace flagstones directly beneath the pregnant woman’s feet.

SPLAT-SHRRRRK!

The spike punched straight through her pelvis, tearing upward through her abdomen, impaling her clean through her chest and the little girl didn’t even have time to scream.

A secondary tendril of black sand whipped across the tiles, wrapping tightly around her tiny neck and torso.

CRACKLE!

Before the guard could even draw his short-sword from its scabbard, the horrific lightless calcification claimed them both.

The pregnant woman’s skin instantly turned to brittle oily black glass with her swollen belly freezing into solid dark crystal.

"N—"

The little girl, her mouth open in a silent wail of terror, petrified into a tiny statue of black glass.

"No! No! No!" The royal guard let out a choked horrified gasp, lunging forward with his blade...

SNAP!

A third tendril whipped through the guard’s throat, turning his armor, flesh, and weapon into black glass within half a heartbeat.

SHATTER!

Nitocris flicked her wrist and a concussive shockwave of compressed wind slammed into the three statues.

CRASH-CRUNCH!

The pregnant woman, the unborn child, the five-year-old girl, and the royal guard violently shattered into millions of microscopic black glass shards that clattered uselessly across the rose-quartz terrace with their souls entirely devoured by the void-sand.

Harper’s astral form watched the butchery in horror.

"NOOOOO!" Harper’s spirit wailed, tears streaming down her ghostly face. "WHY?! SHE WAS PREGNANT! THAT WAS A BABY! YOU MONSTER! YOU SICK, TWISTED—"

Harper’s spiritual voice choked on its own grief.

Because in that exact second, Harper looked at her own physical face.

...Nitocris was standing perfectly still.

The green fire in Harper’s physical eyes remained bright, but across the left cheek, a microscopic involuntary muscle twitched violently.

The corner of Harper’s physical lips trembled, dipping downward in a silent agonized spasm of pure suffocating grief.

Nitocris didn’t look proud and she didn’t look triumphant as well...

She looked like a woman who had just swallowed a cup of molten lead...

WEEEEWOOOOOO!

An ear-splitting siren shattered the silence of the White Citadel as pillars of blinding red light shot from the palace spires into the afternoon sky, casting blood-red text across the terrace.

[CODE RED BREACH DETECTED! HIGH CITADEL DOMESTIC PAVILION! DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED!]

FWOOOOOOM!

The rose-quartz tiles beneath the terrace violently churned as from the solid stone, dozens, then hundreds, of high-ranking royal palace sentinels began to manifest, utilizing high-tier earth and solar-meld techniques.

Within five seconds, over three hundred elite guards surrounded the terrace, clad in heavy star-iron armor adorned with golden cobra crests with their hands wielding halberds, curved khopeshes, and heavy repeating mana-arbalests.

WHISTLE!

A sharp piercing sound cut through the air and with a subtle casual tilt of Harper’s neck, she swayed three inches to the left.

THWIP!

A six-foot-long armor-piercing bolt grazed the tips of her purple hair, slamming into the marble balustrade behind her with enough concussive force to blow a ten-foot crater into the stone.

SHING!

In Harper’s physical right hand, the First Khopesh of the Khemet Dominion materialized in a burst of black static lightning.

Nitocris stood in the center of the terrace, facing the three hundred elite guards... her green eyes sweeping across their ranks with cold dead authority.

"Clear the way," Nitocris spoke, Harper’s voice echoing through the courtyard with the crushing weight of a collapsing mountain.

From the front rank of the sentinels, three men stepped forward.

They were massive, over six and a half feet tall, their breastplates adorned with four golden sun-seals, the Imperial Guard Captains, seasoned Third Stage commanders who had held the borders of Khemet for decades.

The lead captain, a scarred man with a brutal square jaw and eyes burning with white-hot solar mana, pointed his broad curved executioner’s blade straight at Harper’s throat.

"Treasonous whore!" the Captain bellowed, his voice laced with incandescent rage. "You dare step into the sacred house of Al-Mansur?! You dare lay your filthy hands upon Lady Zahra, the favored consort of the late Crown Prince?!"

Off to the side, one of the younger sentinels, barely out of his teens, muttered something under his breath to the man beside him, too rattled by what he’d just witnessed to fully guard his tongue.

"Consort of the Crown Prince, my ass. Everyone below the third floor knew whose bed she’d really been warming since the funeral—"

"Silence in the ranks!" the Captain roared without even turning his head, his blade never wavering from Harper’s throat. "You slaughtered her, her daughter, and the seed in her womb... There is no grave deep enough to hold your severed limbs! Surrender your core, or we will flay the flesh from your bones and feed your intestines to the drakes!"

Nitocris looked at the three captains.

Then, she looked past them, looking into the eyes of the young soldiers holding the line, men with trembling grips, men with wives waiting in the lower districts... These were the same as the men whose families she had sworn to protect two thousand years ago.

"Part," Nitocris warned softly, her tone carrying a sorrowful gravity. "There is no victory for you here. I seek only the blood of Nefertari... If you step aside, you will live. Do you not have families? Do you not have children waiting to feel your embrace when your shift ends? Why throw your lives away for a family of parasites?"

"DIE, WITCH!"