Chapter 1217
Commander Kaelen raised a hand, a nasty sneer curling his lip. “Slaughter them p>
At his command, the tension snapped.
The dozen mutated Augments unleashed a chorus of guttural, inhuman snarls and lunged for the battered Dragon-Thorn squad.
But in that exact moment, a sound interrupted the violence.
A single set of footsteps echoed out.
Tap.
Tap.
Neither loud nor hurried.
Yet, in the cavernous, echoing expanse of the underground garage, the rhythm cut
through the chaos with impossible clarity.
It felt as if each step was a deliberate strike against their racing hearts.
Like the slow, methodical swing of a hammer.
The Augments, mere inches from tearing into the operatives, froze in place.
Both sides instinctively snapped their attention toward the sound.
Beneath a flickering fluorescent bulb, a slender silhouette stepped smoothly out of the gloom.
She was tall and lean, dressed down in a baggy black hoodie and dark cargo pants.
The hood was pulled low over her brow.
Her stride was relaxed, almost infuriatingly casual.
Yet, an overwhelming, suffocating aura of icy dominance and raw lethality radiated from her very presence.
She was alone, but she walked with the terrifying gravity of a conqueror backed by a phantom army.
For one surreal second, the blood-soaked garage descended into total silence.
Commander Kaelen stared at the newcomer, his brow furrowing in confusion.
This was the secure subterranean garage of the tech center. It was bad enough an elite Elyndorian strike team had breached the perimeter.
How the hell did a teenage girl wander in?
“Who are you?” Kaelen demanded.
The girl stopped walking.
She slowly lifted her head.
From the shadows of the dark hood, a breathtakingly beautiful face emerged.
Her complexion was luminous, her features sharply elegant, but her
dark, bottomless eyes held
absolutely zero emotion.
She gave Kaelen a slow, apathetic look, her soft lips parting as she delivered a single word.
“Elyndorian p>
Taking in Serena’s excessively
young, gorgeous face, Kaelen
blinked in surprise before bursting into a condescending laugh.net>
For a second, he actually thought she was some hidden master.
What a joke.
She was just an arrogant kid who hadn’t learned how the real world worked.
“A clueless little girl wandering into a bloodbath p>
His eyes turned malicious. “Seems like you were in such a rush to die, you dug your own grave p>
Across the concrete.
The trapped operatives of the Dragon-Thorn squad braced themselves.
When Drake finally got a clear look at her face, his breath hitched.
It was her.
The Elyndorian girl he had passed at the hotel.
He had known right then that there was something incredibly dangerous about her presence.
But he never expected to see her here.
Had she followed them?
Or was the tech center her target all along?
The rest of the squad, oblivious to the encounter turned pale when they realized a young civilian had stumbled into a warzone..net>
“Kid, it’s not safe here! Run p>
“You have no business being down here. Get out of here now!” another operative barked urgently.
“Did you hear us? Run for the exit and don’t look back p>
“We’ll hold them off, just go p>
Every single one of them was bleeding out, staring down the barrel of their own gruesome deaths.
Yet, their absolute first instinct upon seeing Serena was to scream at her to save herself.
To these men, her motives didn’t matter. The strange aura surrounding her didn’t matter.
Faced with a pack of mutated, unnatural killing machines.
She was simply an unarmed citizen of their country, and it was their duty to protect
her.