Chapter 611: Black Sand [Bonus - ]

Chapter 611: Black Sand [Bonus Chapter]

She soared over the grand transition boulevard and in the distance, towering majestically against the bruised purple sky, the White Citadel gleamed... It was a colossal stepped pyramid of polished white titanium and gold with its dome piercing the heavens like the crown of an ancient empire.

’I need to get there—’

Suddenly... the world stopped.

To Silas’s heightened Gold Core perception, the flow of time seemed to violently seize, dragging physical reality into an agonizing crawl and high above the White Citadel, the dome... simply ceased to exist.

FLASH!

A microscopic point of blinding absolute lightless black materialized at the very tip of the golden spire and then... the heavens tore open.

KABOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The detonation was so monstrous that the sound didn’t register as an explosion... instead it registered as a violent concussive blow directly against the inner ear.

A heaven-piercing pillar of swirling radioactive black sand and blinding divine golden plasma erupted through the ceiling of the White Citadel, blowing the three-hundred-foot marble dome into subatomic dust before tearing ten miles straight into the stratosphere.

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH!

The concussive shockwave hit Kara while she was still a mile away in mid-air.

The atmospheric pressure spiked to forty atmospheres in a second as Kara’s single right arm snapped across her chest... Her Gold Core flaring with a barrier of compressed wind mana instantly.

CRUNCH!

The blast wave slammed into her barrier like an iron mountain!

Kara was violently hurled backward through the sky.

"Fuckin—!"

She tumbled three hundred yards across the rooftops with her boots skidding across the reinforced copper tiles of an administrative tower, tearing a fifty-foot furrow through the metal before she slammed her right heel into a concrete parapet, forcibly arresting her momentum.

"Guh..."

She coughed with the sudden vacuum created by the detonation dragging the air from her lungs as her cloak whipped frantically in the violent back-draft.

Kara managed to stabilize her footing, wiping a speck of dust from her lips, and slowly raised her head.

The blood in Silas’s heart dropped straight into his stomach.

"No..." Kara whispered, her voice trembling in genuine horror.

The Inner District was gone.

Where the White Citadel, the grand ministerial palaces, the lush hanging gardens, the luxury hotels, and the private residential villas of seventy thousand souls had stood bare moments ago... there was only a terrifying void.

A colossal smoking crater, three miles in diameter and four hundred feet deep, yawned in the center of the capital like an open grave carved into the crust of the earth!

There were still a few untouched residential fringes along the outer perimeter walls, but that did nothing to change the horrific reality of the three-mile-wide abyss.

The walls of the crater were smooth vitrified sheets of solid lightless black glass that hissed and bubbled with residual divine heat.

’So many people...’ Silas thought, his hand trembling beneath the folds of his cloak. ’They’re all dead...’

Seventy thousand lives had been deleted in half a second yet, as Kara pushed her vision through the swirling heat mirage, her eyes widened.

There were no bodies.

Not a single mangled corpse lay among the vitrified stone... No severed limbs, no pools of crimson blood either.

There was only a thick undulating sea of coarse pitch-black sand that churned lazily across the floor of the crater, whispering against the glass.

SH-SH-SH!

Fifty yards below her, resting upon the surface of the black sand sea, a single thumb-sized tendril of black mineral shifted.

It possessed no eyes, yet the moment Kara’s boots touched the rim of the crater, the tendril froze as it turned with its tip vibrating in the air, locking directly onto her Gold Core mana signature.

SCREEECH!

A high-pitched metallic shriek ripped from the sand and in an instant, the entire three-mile basin of black sand violently awakened.

Tens of thousands of undulating razor-sharp tendrils erupted from the floor of the crater, twisting together into colossal serpentine leviathans that rose two hundred feet into the air with their faceless needle-sharp maws turning simultaneously toward the single-armed woman on the ledge.

"Fucking hell," Kara snarled through her teeth.

WHOOSH!

The three closest tendrils blurred forward, aiming straight for her throat, her chest, and her legs but Kara didn’t dodge.

SNAP!

Her right hand thrust forward with her fingers splaying wide as she took a deep breath.

"Incineration Ray!" she barked.

BOOM!

A colossal white-hot beam of concentrated fire erupted from her palm!

The flames unraveled the atomic structure of the incoming tendrils, incinerating the black mineral and all the tendrils near them into drifting white ash before they could touch her coat as the concussive back-blast cleared a hundred-yard circle of empty air around her.

Kara lowered her hand with smoke curling from her palm, and looked out over the sea of black sand.

...Nothing had changed.

The ash of the incinerated tendrils drifted down like dirty snow, and beneath it the sand simply closed over the gap as if she had dropped a pebble into a pond.

Fifty yards below, a fresh forest of tendrils was already braiding itself upward, thousands of them this time, every one turned toward her Gold Core signature with the blind hunger of something that had never once been full.

’It really does get everywhere,’ Silas thought, a grim humorless smirk tugging at Kara’s lips.

She flexed her single hand, raised it again, and let the heat gather in her palm as the sand rose to meet her.

...

Four thousand feet beneath the surface of the earth.

The air parted with a violent concussive screech as a figure shot downward through a sixty-foot shaft bored straight through the bedrock!

FWOOOOOOSH!

It was Harper’s body.

Her tailored charcoal trousers and silk blouse were torn at the cuffs, coated in fine silt with her long vibrant purple hair whipping wildly around her face as she plummeted toward the core of the earth but her eyes... her eyes were burning with an emerald fire.

Harper’s physical hands were thrust downward, parting the solid bedrock with massive churning waves of coarse black sand that dissolved stone into fluid dust with a terrifying hiss.

"Ah..."

A voice broke from Harper’s throat, a deep one layered over the soft timbre of the young woman’s vocal cords.

"It is truly... marvelous!"

Ititius threw Harper’s head back, letting out a delighted purring chuckle that echoed off the descending stone walls.

He raised Harper’s hands, turning the pale delicate fingers over in the dark, watching the coarse black sand flow between the knuckles like living liquid mercury.

"When I was cast into the abyss by that treacherous whore Nefertari," Ititius mused. "when my glorious original flesh was devoured by those wretched worms upon entering the Sovereign Realm all that time ago... I believed this sublime power had been stripped from me forever! Ten thousand years I spent wandering the fragmented tiers of the Sovereign Realm, for time races there while this sluggish mortal sphere crawls, and two thousand years dragged past up here while I endured ten thousand down there... I ascended to true godhood... I bound domains... I forged divine artifacts and yet... throughout all those millennia, despite becoming a deity, I somehow couldn’t wield this black sand!"

His green-and-gold pupils flared with psychotic triumph.

"And now? After leaving the other half of my soul asleep in this world... after wiping that sweet little splinter out as though she had never existed, and drinking every last one of her memories into my essence... I can wield this power as though it were second nature!"

He gritted Harper’s teeth with a cold shudder running down his spine.

’I... am a Deity.’

Deities were meant to emulate their natures well.

Many people complained about sand... Mortals whined that it was coarse, rough, irritating, and that it got everywhere...

But they were fools! Blind, uneducated insects!

That was the very definition of supreme authority... To get everywhere... To infiltrate every crack, every vessel, every breath!

Ititius prided himself on being like a cockroach.

Regardless of whatever was thrown at him, regardless of whether his avatar was swatted out of the sky, drowned in a tomb, or purged from a vessel’s core, he would survive as sand stuck and sand endured.

In his own case, he had contingency plans woven into the very fabric of the cosmos.

’I am only living up to the legend, after all...’ Ititius thought, thoroughly pleased with his own genius.

Perhaps, eons ago, before the First Rift tore the sky, he had once been a woman named Nitocris... but why in the heavens would he ever remain as Nitocris?

It wasn’t that he possessed a petty hatred for men or women.

It was far simpler... the god that humanity had worshiped, the Ititius that he had prayed to as a naive child before the Apocalypse, didn’t exist as the heavens had been empty.

So, he had simply decided to embody that Ititius!

He wasn’t some tragic misunderstood anti-hero... He wasn’t like those melodramatic people he had met all those millennia ago who whined about ’justified vengeance’ and ’the tragedy of the rifts.’

Ititius was a remarkably simple creature... he only wanted to rule.

His foolish little soul-fragment had possessed the tiny pathetic ambition of a peasant as she had merely wanted to slaughter Nefertari’s children and crawl into a hole to die.

’What a waste of fine plan!’ Ititius laughed internally.

He didn’t just want House Al-Mansur dead... He wanted it all to extend outward! He wanted to force this entire world to submit to him!

And once he conquered humanity, once he forced all eight billion mortals to bow their heads in the dirt and worship his holy name, all that vast divine power he had lost from splitting his soul so many times and being killed across the eras would be gloriously regained.

With that restored power, he would use humanity as his divine engine to contest with Odin, to challenge Ra, and to war against all the other higher gods of the cosmos and then... the entire Sovereign Realm would belong to him!

...That was his goal.

That was his goal from the very beginning.

Why else would a god bother ruling humanity? He wanted to make them submit and harness their collective spiritual power to increase his own!

"And I must extend my deepest, most sincere gratitude to you, my dear descendant," Ititius purred aloud, Harper’s vocal cords vibrating with mock tenderness. "Truly, all the odds went in my favor!"

Deep within the lightless suffocating prison of her own core, Harper’s tiny compressed violet spirit blinked in sheer terror.

’Wh-what is he talking about...?’ Harper wept, her ghostly form curled tight against the crushing weight of the divine intruder.

Ititius chuckled, it was a cold slimy sound that echoed through their shared soul-space.

"Not only did I use my old soul-fragment as a gateway to step back into this mortal sphere, bypassing even the barriers humanity erected to prevent beings of the Sovereign Realm from spilling into their world, but I also required a proper vessel in order to anchor my presence!"

He turned Harper’s wrists in the dark, admiring the delicate bone structure.

"And what were the chances of picking a vessel that was directly related to me?"

Harper’s spiritual mind froze.

’Related to him...?!’

"When I was still a human," Ititius explained casually, like an elder recounting old family lineage, "before Nefertari threw me into the rift... I had children as well. Two died in the chaos, but it seems one of them managed to survive the collapse! They fled north with their bloodlines intermingled across the centuries, and that is where you came along from! Oh, my splinter knew, of course... The sentimental fool spun you some pretty tale about a wayward concubine, all to avoid admitting she couldn’t bring herself to spill her own blood!"

He let out a delighted mocking laugh.

"It really doesn’t matter whether your bloodline is mixed with common northern water now! As long as there is a sliver of my blood living within your marrow, you are the perfect vessel for my soul and with this vessel... I will do something that will make my conquering of humanity so much easier!"

FWOOOOOOSH!

Ititius parted the earth one last time with an explosive sweep of Harper’s arm and the tight sixty-foot stone shaft suddenly opened into a colossal void.

At this point, it was a pure unimpeded freefall downward through the darkness...

Far below in the deep abyss, cutting through the pitch-black shadows, a radiant blue glow began to bleed upward, illuminating Harper’s falling silhouette in brilliant azure light.

Harper’s physical lips curved into a wide smirk as Ititius gazed down at the colossal azure machinery suspended in the chasm below.

"These Suppression Engines..." Ititius whispered, his voice echoing through the falling wind.

"How about we destroy the one below Khemet?"