Chapter 606: New Application Of Lightning [Bonus - ]

Chapter 606: New Application Of Lightning [Bonus Chapter]

The lead Captain didn’t listen.

BOOM!

The stone beneath the Captain’s boots exploded into fine powder as he launched himself forward with terrifying acceleration...

’Huh?’

Harper’s astral spirit couldn’t even track the movement as the man moved faster than sound, his executioner’s blade igniting with three thousand degrees of blinding solar plasma, cleaving through the air in a downward diagonal executioner’s arc aimed directly at Harper’s neck.

’DODGE!’ Harper screamed internally but Nitocris didn’t dodge at all... The woman never planned to do so,

CLANG-SHRRRRRK!

With a terrifyingly casual flick of Harper’s right wrist, the First Khopesh rose.

The black sickle-blade caught the Captain’s three-thousand-degree plasma sword right at the sweet spot which was two inches below the crossguard.

"Hm."

She didn’t try to block the force of the attack as instead she rotated the curve of the khopesh by half a degree, sliding the Captain’s massive momentum effortlessly across her shoulder, completely unbalancing his center of gravity.

The Captain’s eyes widened in shock as his entire body pitched forward into the empty air.

"Your footwork is sloppy," Nitocris murmured softly, Harper’s physical lips parting with detachment. "You rely too heavily on the heat of your steel, rather than the memory of the stone."

Before the Captain could recover his stance—

SPLAT!

Nitocris’s bare left palm slammed directly into the center of his solar-quartz breastplate as a single concentrated pulse of black sand shot directly from her skin, bypassing the armor, penetrating the sternum, and violently erupting inside his chest cavity.

CRACKLE-SHATTER!

In the span of a single horrific second, the Guard Captain didn’t merely die... his entire body, from his steel boots to the crown of his helmet, petrified into oily black glass and instantly shattered into fine drifting powder before he even touched the ground.

The remaining two hundred and ninety-nine guards froze with their breaths catching in their throats, their eyes dilating in paralyzing horror as well.

...A seasoned Third Stage Captain, erased in half a second?

FSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSH!

The terrace fell into dead suffocating silence, broken only by the sound of shifting mineral as Nitocris slowly lowered the black khopesh.

From the pores of Harper’s skin, from the hems of her tailored trousers, from the sleeves of her charcoal coat, massive billowing rivers of coarse, lightless black sand began to aggressively leak out.

The black sand churned around Harper’s feet, rising into towering undulating serpents that blotted out the midday sun, casting the rose-quartz courtyard into the lightless gloom of an ancient eclipse.

Nitocris tilted Harper’s chin up with her radioactive green eyes burning through the darkness, locking onto the three hundred trembling soldiers.

"My warning has concluded," Nitocris proclaimed, her voice tolling like the bell of a funeral as she raised the First Khopesh, pointing the dark tip toward the palace gates.

"Now, you will all die."

Two hundred and ninety-nine imperial guards stood frozen across the terrace with their boots rooted to the tiles and their breath whistling through the slit visors of their star-iron helms.

The fine white and black dust of the dead commander still hung in the air, swirling lazily in the wake of the desert breeze.

FSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSH!

The coarse lightless black sand that bled from the cuffs of Harper’s tailored charcoal jacket coiled as though it was whispering against the stone with the sound of thousands of tiny starving mouths chewing through paper.

Floating three feet above her own physical right shoulder, Harper’s astral spirit was trembling so violently that the edges of her violet form frayed into static.

Her ghostly chest heaved with phantom panic.

’Look at them,’ Harper thought, her non-physical hands clutching at her own head. ’They’re not moving. Why aren’t they running?! Can’t they see what she is?!’

In the center of the terrace, Nitocris shifted Harper’s physical weight.

She lowered her center of gravity by a bare inch, settling her heels onto the flagstones.

Her green eyes, which were radioactive and burning with several calculations, swept over the interlocking lines of shields, halberds, and repeating arbalests.

"Now..." Nitocris whispered through Harper’s throat with her voice dry and carrying none of the grandeur mortals expected of monsters. "Watch closely, scabbard."

The words weren’t spoken to the courtyard.

They reverberated straight into Harper’s ethereal mind, vibrating along the silver soul-cord that anchored her consciousness to the meat of her skull.

"You possess lightning," Nitocris lectured, like a seasoned tutor tapping a chalkboard. "A common northern mutation which is impressive to peasants because it makes a great deal of noise and burns through cheap armor but raw lightning is crude... It disperses and it seeks the path of least resistance, which means half your output bleeds into the atmosphere as useless heat before your edge ever bites bone."

Across the courtyard, the two surviving Guard Captains snapped out of their stupor.

"FIRE!" the left captain roared, his voice cracking with the frantic hysterical edge of a man staring down an executioner. "DO NOT ENGAGE HER IN REACH! DROWN HER IN SUN-FIRE! RELEASE!"

TWANG-TWANG-TWANG-CLACK-TWANG!

A deafening volley of ninety heavy imperial mana-arbalests erupted simultaneously.

The six-foot bolts were forged from solid star-iron, their tips capped with pressurized solar-quartz crystals engineered to violently detonate upon resistance.

They tore through the air in a screaming horizontal sheet of golden fury, traveling at high speeds as the concussive pressure of the volley ripped the rose-bushes from their stone planters, shattering the decorative fountains into clouds of vapor.

’NITOCRIS!’ Harper’s spirit shrieked in blind reflex. ’MOVE! I DON’T WANT MY BODY TO DIE!’

Nitocris didn’t flinch at all.

CRACKLE!

Deep within Harper’s sternum, the secondary electrical pathways, the native purple lightning affinity Harper had cultivated since she awakened, violently ignited... however Nitocris didn’t project it outward like a storm.

With terrifying compression, she forced the purple current down Harper’s right arm, funneling the entire voltage directly into the sickle-curved steel of the First Khopesh.

BZZZZZZZZZZT-SHRRK!

The lightning was compressed so densely against the cutting edge that the violet arcs collapsed into ultra-thin microscopic filament threads, vibrating at millions of hertz, humming with a high-pitched mosquito-like whine that drowned out the roar of the incoming artillery.

"Do not project the arc," Nitocris commanded inside Harper’s head. "Compress the frequency until the metal itself acts as a conductor of void-suction... The sand provides the mass and the lightning provides the shearing frequency. Like this..."

STEP!

Harper’s physical right boot pushed off the quartz.

BOOM!

The flagstone beneath her heel vaporized into dust as she vanished... To the mortal eyes of the palace sentinels, the purple-haired woman simply ceased to occupy the space where the bolts landed!

KABOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

Ninety solar-quartz warheads detonated against the marble balustrade where she had stood a fraction of a microsecond prior, blowing a fifty-foot crater through the palace wall and throwing tons of smoking, pulverized stone into the gardens below.

"WHERE IS SHE?!" the right captain screamed, swinging his twin khopeshes in blind paranoia. "CEILING! CHECK THE SPIRES—"

THWIP!

A whisper of displaced air brushed against the back of his neck.

"Too slow," a woman’s voice murmured directly behind his ear.

The Captain’s blood turned to ice.

His Third Stage reflexes fired on pure survival instinct as he dropped his hips, twisting his torso with maximum force and bringing his left blade around in a horizontal decapitation arc while his solar mana flared into a barrier around his ribs.

It was a textbook counter-strike, executed with the brutal efficiency of a man who had survived a hundred sieges however Nitocris didn’t duck.

She simply leaned Harper’s upper body back by two inches, letting the burning edge of the Captain’s blade whistle through the empty air mere millimeters above her eyelashes.

The searing heat scorched a few stray strands of purple hair, but her balance remained undisturbed.

SHING!

In the exact microsecond the Captain’s momentum overcommitted, Harper’s right arm blurred.

The First Khopesh, wrapped in the buzzing filament of purple lightning, flicked upward in a reverse one-handed diagonal draw.

SHRIT!

There was no sound of armor resisting as the compressed purple frequency bypassed the star-iron plating of the Captain’s breastplate as if it were warm lard.

The sickle-blade entered his right hip, carved effortlessly through his pelvic bone, cleaved his spine in two, and exited through his left collarbone.

"Gah..." the Captain choked out.

He didn’t fall apart immediately... Because in the wake of the lightning cut, the coarse black sand followed...

SWOOSH!

The black grains poured out of the incision, instantly coating the severed edges of bone and flesh.

CRACKLE!

Before a single drop of blood could hit the ground, the Captain’s entire bifurcated body vitrified into oily black glass.

TAP!

Nitocris tapped the pommel of her khopesh against the glass statue’s chest.

SHATTER!

The seasoned commander exploded into millions of harmless drifting black motes that scattered across the ranks of his own men.

"Captain Thorn!" a young soldier in the second row screamed, his voice breaking in horror as the black dust coated his visor. "She just cut through his solar-plate like paper! What is that weapon?!"

"SHIELD WALL!" the surviving captain bellowed, retreating into the center of his formation, his eyes wide and bloodshot. "LOCK CORES! EARTH AND SUN POWER! SPREAD THE LOAD! DO NOT LET HER ISOLATE YOU!"

CLANG-CLANG-CLANG-CLANG!

Forty heavy infantrymen stepped forward, their massive rectangular tower shields slamming together edge-to-edge with the thunder of closing fortress gates.

They drove the spiked iron bases of the shields deep into the quartz tiles, their mana channels linking in a shared multi-layered defensive spell as a golden semi-translucent wall of interlocking runes flared to life, glowing with the combined weight of forty Awakened cores.

"HOLD THE LINE!" the sergeants roared. "HOLD FOR THE REINFORCEMENTS! THE HIGH MARSHAL IS ON HIS WAY!"

Nitocris stood ten paces away, watching the glowing barrier with Harper’s physical eyes.

A pitying sigh escaped her lips.

"A cooperative barrier," Nitocris murmured internally to Harper. "A sound doctrine against brute beasts... If a brute strikes this wall, the impact is distributed across forty nervous systems, diluting the shockwave so no single man is crushed but they make a fatal assumption, scabbard."

’What assumption...?’ Harper asked, her spiritual voice small yet helplessly drawn into the strength unfolding before her.

"They assume the ground beneath their feet belongs to them," Nitocris answered.

Harper’s physical left hand reached down with her bare fingertips lightly brushing the polished quartz floor.

"Every stone in this citadel was quarried from the Great Dunes," Nitocris whispered. "Every brick was baked in the southern sun. To an outsider, it is stone but to a Per-aa and her descendants, it’s merely asleep."

CRRRK!

Harper’s core shuddered... It was akin to a harmonic ripple, like a drop of water falling into an infinitely deep well.

CRRRRRR-SNAP!

The rose-quartz tiles beneath the forty shield-bearers dissolved.

In a fraction of a second, the solid stone flagstones reverted to their primordial state, thousands of tons of hyper-fine fluid sand as the foundation vanished beneath the infantrymen’s boots.

"WHAT?!"

"MY FEET, I’M SINKING!"

The forty soldiers pitched forward with their heavy plate armor dragging them down into the sudden churning quagmire of loose silt!

The perfect alignment of their shields fractured; gaps opened in the golden barrier as men flailed, fighting to keep their balance.

"Now," Nitocris instructed. "You do not strike the shield."

WHOOSH!

From Harper’s sleeves, two massive undulating tendrils of black sand shot forward but they didn’t crash against the failing golden shields... that would be too easy.

They flowed through the cracks in the formation like liquid mercury, wrapping around the ankles, thighs, and waists of the struggling men.

CRACKLE-CRACKLE-CRACKLE!

"NO! GET IT OFF—"

"MY LEGS! I CAN’T FEEL MY LEGS—"

"CAPTAIN! HELP US—"

The screams were cut short with terrifying synchronicity as the black sand climbed their bodies in a crawling oily wave, turning steel, flesh, and bone into solid black glass.

Within three seconds, forty elite infantrymen stood completely frozen in dynamic panicked poses with forty statues of jet-black obsidian sinking slowly into the sand.

Nitocris didn’t even look at them as she simply flicked Harper’s wrist.

BOOM!

A low-frequency wave washed through the formation.

CRASH-SHATTER!

All forty glass statues disintegrated simultaneously, collapsing into an enormous dark dune of pulverized black powder.

"Monster..." a young marksman whispered with his bow slipping from his numb sweat-soaked leather gauntlets.

He fell to his knees among the rose-bushes, his pupils dilated to pinpricks, staring at the empty courtyard where forty of his comrades had stood bare heartbeats ago.

"She isn’t human. This is the ancient rot... The curse has returned..."

"KILL HER! WHY ARE YOU STANDING THERE?! ATTACK!" the last captain shrieked, entirely losing his mind. He grabbed a soldier by the collar and hurled him forward. "DIE FOR THE PHARAOH, YOU COWARDS!"

Nitocris stepped into the center of the terrace.

FWOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The First Khopesh was thrust violently into the earth and from the point of impact, an apocalyptic wave of black sand, standing thirty feet high, crowned with screaming arcs of purple lightning, exploded outward in a complete three-hundred-and-sixty-degree circle.

The tsunami of lightless minerals tore through the courtyard like the scythe of an uncaring god...

SPLAT-SHRUNK-CRUNCH!

It didn’t matter if they raised their shields... It didn’t matter if they channeled their solar flames... The black sand ignored the heat, devoured the light, and drilled straight through their armor.

Tendrils of black glass impaled throats, sheared through torsos, and wrapped around skulls.

Men were lifted into the air, screaming, weeping, calling out for their mothers, their wives, their children, before their voices abruptly choked on crystalline bile.

CRACKLE-SHATTER! CRASH! CRACK! SNAP!

A continuous deafening cacophony of shattering glass echoed off the palace spires.