Chapter 40: Chapter 40: Blood Ultimatum at the East Gate

The wheels of the stolen carriage didn’t just roll; they screamed. Every time the iron rims struck the uneven, jagged granite of the Industrial Sector’s streets, sparks erupted like tiny, dying stars in the darkness. The carriage rattled violently, a skeletal cage of wood and metal that threatened to disintegrate at any moment.

Dayat gripped the leather reins with his left hand, his fingers white-knuckled and trembling. His right arm, the one whose shoulder had just been violently reset in a dark alley, hung like dead weight at his side. Every jolt of the carriage sent a white-hot spike of agony through his nerves, turning his vision into a blurry, colorless haze for heart-pounding seconds.

Behind him, in the cramped, dark interior of the carriage, Dola was slumped against a stack of empty supply crates. She was smoking. It wasn’t a metaphor for speed; real, acrid steam vented from the pores of her synthetic skin. Her internal liquid cooling system had been compromised during Gravion’s gravity assault, and the pressure was forcing a viscous, dark red fluid—a horrific cocktail of synthetic blood and chemical coolant—to seep from her nose and ears.

“Master’s vitals… unstable,” Dola’s voice crackled. It sounded like a radio struggling to find a signal amidst heavy interference. Static glitches chewed through her syllables. “Heart rate: 145 bpm. Neural cortex: Critical status. Warning: If Master attempts another Manifestation within the next 60 minutes… probability of total brain death: 99.8%.”

“Shut up, Dol. Shut up and save your energy,” Dayat hissed through gritted teeth. His eyes, bloodshot and wide with terror, stared into the blackness of the road ahead. “We just have to reach the East Gate. Joldric… Gravion… they’re probably still dragging themselves out of that crater. We have a window. We have to take it.”

But Dayat’s mind was no longer on the road. It was trapped in the flickering shadows of the alley they had just abandoned. It was trapped with the two people who shouldn’t have been there.

The Narrow Alley, Slum Sector (Simultaneous Time)

Bara hit the brick wall with the force of a falling anvil. His heavy leather armor, which had seen him through dozens of goblin raids, was now a tattered rag, torn open from chest to belly. Fresh, steaming blood gushed from the jagged wounds, staining the grime of the alley.

Before him, the shadows moved with a predatory grace that defied human biology. Twelve of them. The Viperion Assassins.

Clang!

Bara parried a flying obsidian dagger with the flat of his greatsword, the vibration nearly shattering his wrist. But he was too slow for the second strike. Another blade buried itself deep into his left thigh, the venom on the tip burning like liquid fire.

“Dammit…” Bara spat a mouthful of copper-tasting blood. He was a Rank E adventurer, a man who survived on luck and grit. Against a Kingdom’s elite “Purge” unit, he wasn’t even a speed bump. This wasn’t a fight; it was an execution.

In the center of the narrowing circle of shadows, Lina stood with her back against Bara’s. Her breathing was a series of ragged, terrified gasps. Her primary wand was cracked, its mana-crystal dulled, and her reserves were a dry well after conjuring the mist that had allowed Dayat to escape.

“Surrender,” the voice of Voron, the Shadow Tracker, drifted from the darkness. It was a smooth, cultured voice that chilled the blood more than a scream. “Count Alaric has no use for your lives, but he requires your corpses as a grim message to the city. You do not have to suffer the slow death.”

Voron materialized from a patch of darkness directly behind Lina, his twin curved daggers poised like the fangs of a viper.

“LOOK OUT!” Bara didn’t think. He threw his massive, broken frame forward, tackling Lina and rolling her across the wet cobblestones.

SLAAT!

Voron’s daggers missed the girl’s throat but sank six inches deep into the muscle of Bara’s back.

“BARA!” Lina shrieked, her voice echoing in the dead silence of the slums.

Bara collapsed onto her, his weight pinning her down. His breath came in a series of wet, bubbling pops—the sound of a punctured lung. He looked up at her, his vision fading, his hand feebly gripping the hilt of his sword. “Run… Lin… catch up to… the kid… catch up to Lidi…”

Lina felt it then—the warmth of Bara’s blood soaking into her cloak, heavy and thick. Something inside the young sorceress snapped. The fear that had paralyzed her for the last hour vanished, replaced by a hollow, freezing despair.

She looked around. Thirteen killers. One monster of a captain. And her only friend in the world was dying in her arms because they had chosen to believe in a man who brought “Logic” to a world of magic.

They are the hope, Lina thought, her fingers finding the Mana crystal hanging at her neck—her mother’s heirloom, her only legacy. This world is too old, too rotten. It needs his light, not our shadows.

Lina gripped the crystal until the edges bit into her palm. Her eyes ignited with a blinding, incandescent white light that made the assassins recoil.

“You want a message?” Lina whispered, her voice no longer trembling. It was the voice of a martyr. “I’ll give you a message that will burn your souls.”

Voron’s snake-like eyes widened. He sensed the unnatural surge of energy. “Fall back! The girl is detonating her Core! SHIELDS!”

Lina didn’t pray. She didn’t chant. She simply crushed the crystal into her own chest, severing the flow of Mana that kept her heart beating. She redirected every scrap of her life force, her memories, and her magic into a single, terminal point of radiance.

[FORBIDDEN ART: SUPERNOVA SOUL]

“Run, Dayat… run for us…”

BOOOOOM!

A pillar of pure, silent white light erupted from the alleyway, reaching up toward the soot-stained sky of Bakasa. It wasn’t a fire; there was no heat, only a cleansing, absolute radiance that erased shadows and turned the very bricks of the buildings into dust.

The Road to the East Gate

Dayat nearly lost control of the carriage as the night sky behind him turned into artificial day for three heart-stopping seconds. The white light soared high, a lonely beacon in the smog.

Dayat knew that light. It wasn’t the roar of a Railgun or the hum of an EMP. It was the soundless cry of a soul being extinguished.

“Lina…” Dayat’s voice broke. Tears he didn’t have the energy to wipe away fell onto his hands, mixing with the sweat and grime on the reins. The agony in his shoulder was suddenly gone, replaced by a crushing, suffocating weight in his chest.

They were dead. Bara, the loud-mouthed warrior who called him a “peasant.” Lina, the shy mage who had shared her bread with him. They were dead because he was an F-Ranker who couldn’t protect his own.

“Master,” Dola shifted, her hand reaching through the carriage window to grip his left shoulder. Her touch was searingly hot. “Light spectrum analysis… confirms Total Mana Release. Unit: Lina. Probability of enemy survival in Sector 4… 0.02%. The rear path is clear.”

“They’re dead, Dol,” Dayat sobbed, his voice raw. He lashed the horse with a fury he didn’t know he possessed. “They’re dead and we’re the only ones left!”

“Then life is the only variable we can accept, Master,” Dola’s voice was a whisper, but it was laced with a strange, new resolve. “Do not let their data be erased in vain. We must cross the threshold.”

The carriage took a sharp, screeching turn, its right wheel lifting off the ground as it careened toward the East Gate. The gate loomed ahead, a massive structure of iron-oak half a meter thick, currently being lowered to seal the city.

But the gate was not empty.

Under the flickering orange glare of the guard torches, a giant figure stood waiting.

Joldric.

The Knight of the Wall no longer looked like the gallant hero of the Kingdom. His magnificent breastplate was a twisted wreck of blackened steel, exposing the charred, raw skin beneath from the Railgun’s previous shot. He was bloodied, he was broken, and he was absolutely, terrifyingly alive. He stood alone, having discarded his broken shield, gripping a six-foot claymore with both hands.

“DAYAT!” Joldric’s roar was a physical force that drowned out the thundering hooves. “A LIFE FOR A LIFE! YOUR BLOOD WILL SEAL THIS GATE!”

Joldric raised the massive blade. He wasn’t following Alaric’s orders anymore. This wasn’t a capture mission. This was a blood feud.

Dayat panicked. He tried to imagine a grenade, a rocket—anything to clear the path. But his brain was a static field of Syntax Errors. The needles of pain in his head were too many to count. He had nothing.

“I don’t have a weapon… I can’t… Dola, I can’t do it!” Dayat screamed as the carriage hurtled at sixty kilometers per hour toward the living wall of steel.

“Master,” Dola’s voice became eerily calm.

In one fluid motion, Dola leaped from the back of the carriage into the driver’s seat. She shoved Dayat aside and snatched the reins.

“Dol? What are you—”

“Master has zero energy reserves. This carriage has a mass of 800 kilograms. Velocity: 65 kilometers per hour. Target: Stationary.”

Dola’s eyes flickered with a rapid, staccato red light.

[CALCULATION COMPLETE]

[SOLUTION: KINETIC RAMMING]

[RISK: PERMANENT STRUCTURAL DAMAGE TO UNIT DOLA]

“Hold on tight, my Husband,” Dola whispered. It was the first time she had used the word without it being a logical status update.

Before Dayat could protest, Dola did the unthinkable. She didn’t slow down. She lashed the horse until the beast’s eyes rolled back in terror, pushing the carriage to its absolute limit.

When they were ten meters from Joldric, Dola stood up on the bench and leaped forward, mendarat di atas punggung kuda yang sedang berpacu.

Joldric swung his massive claymore in a horizontal arc, a strike designed to decapitate both the horse and anyone on the bench in a single, clean sweep.

“DIE, ANOMALY!”

Right as the steel blade was about to connect, Dola activated her Hydraulic Overdrive. She didn’t dodge. She kicked.

She slammed her right heel into the flat of Joldric’s blade with the force of a hydraulic press.

TRAAAANG!

The sound of clashing metal was like a bell from hell. The combined force of the carriage’s momentum and Dola’s leg succeeded in deflecting Joldric’s swing by a few crucial centimeters. The claymore missed the horse’s neck, instead slicing through the heavy iron lamppost beside the gate as if it were butter.

But Joldric was a monster of pure physical power. As the deflected blade passed him, he released his left hand and slammed his gauntleted fist directly into Dola’s right leg, which was still suspended in the air.

CRUNCH.

The sound of bending metal and snapping bone was a sound Dayat would never forget. Dola’s right leg was pulverized.

But momentum cannot be argued with. Dola’s body slammed into Joldric’s chest at sixty kilometers per hour, followed a millisecond later by the heavy carriage itself.

SMASH!

Joldric, the immovable tank of Bakasa, was thrown backward like a ragdoll. His body struck the iron-oak gate behind him with such incredible force that the hinges tore loose from the stone walls.

The East Gate was forced open by a sacrifice of wood and flesh.

The carriage swerved violently, its left wheel shattering against the masonry, and it skidded sideways out of the city. It dragged through the dirt and stone for ten agonizing meters before coming to a complete, shuddering halt in the tall grass outside the walls.

Silence fell over the plains.

Dayat crawled out from beneath the overturned wreckage. His body was a map of bruises, his old wounds reopened and bleeding.

“Dol?” Dayat called out, his voice trembling with a child-like fear. “Dola!”

Near the broken gate, under the cold, indifferent moonlight, Dola lay still. The horse had long since bolted into the darkness, leaving only the wreckage of the carriage and the dying embers of the city’s lights.

Joldric lay buried somewhere beneath the splinters of the gate. Dayat didn’t look at him. He dragged his feet across the grass toward Dola.

The sight was a scene of horrific physical trauma. Dola’s right leg, from the knee down, was a mangled mess of shredded synthetic skin and twisted metal. Deep red synthetic blood pooled on the dark earth, steaming in the cold night air. Dayat could see the white of her artificial bone protruding, but surrounding it were the silver fibers—her internal conduits—bent and vibrating faintly like a dying heart.

Dayat fell to his knees beside her. He touched her face; her cheeks were as cold as ice, her internal heaters failing.

“Dol…” Dayat’s voice choked.

Dola’s eyes flickered. A dim, fading blue.

“Damage… report…” Dola’s voice was a weary whisper. “Right chassis… destroyed. Energy system… 4%. Master… we are… outside the walls.”

“You’re insane…” Dayat wept, pulling her head onto his lap. “You’re crazy, Dol! Your leg… it’s gone!”

“It is only a chassis, Dayat,” Dola tried to offer a smile, but it was a pained, distorted thing. “A chassis can be rebuilt. But our… symbiotic bond… is irreplaceable.”

From the distance, the sirens of Bakasa’s reinforcement units wailed. The “Purge” was still coming.

“We have to move,” Dayat said, wiping his eyes with a bloody sleeve. His grief was being forged into a cold, hard iron. He had to save her.

He hoisted Dola’s broken body onto his back, ignoring the scream of his own shoulder and the exhaustion that threatened to drown him.

“Hold on, Dol. We’re walking.”

“Master… this is… highly inefficient per kilometer…”

“To hell with efficiency!”

Dayat began to limp toward the dark, ancient forest outside Bakasa. Behind him lay the city that had tried to cage him. Behind him lay the corpses of the only friends he had ever known. On his back lay the broken machine that had chosen to be his wife.

That night, the Innovator and his Machine became vagabonds. But they were no longer just running. They were surviving. And they were carrying a grudge that would eventually set the entire Kingdom of Brassvale ablaze.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep