Chapter 1342
He reached up instinctively, pressing his earpiece as he spoke with desperate urgency. “Overlord, Overlord! The plan has changed! Overlord p>
But the moment the words left his lips.
A sinister, spectral voice hissed through the comms. “Idiot p>
Just one word.
But it was cold enough to freeze the blood in his veins.
A sharp burst of static popped in his ear, and the encrypted line went dead.
Mordecai froze in absolute horror.
His face turned the color of ash.
He knew exactly what that meant.
He had been discarded.
Before his brain could even process the reality of his execution sentence.
Crash!
The heavy reinforced doors of the VIP Box were violently kicked off their hinges.
The thick mahogany slammed against the wall with an explosive crack.
Jerrick and Jasper swept into the room, assault weapons raised and leveled directly at his skull.
Simultaneously, Nicholas and Julian had successfully stormed the primary server room, taking the entire arena’s digital infrastructure completely hostage.
Tracing the virus Serena had planted that morning, they had completely infiltrated the tournament’s backend and the Obsidian Core’s internal network. Following the digital trail, they had ripped the rat out of the shadows-Special Envoy Mordecai.
Inside Pod 10.
The green toxic fog continued to billow.
Serena was in no rush to break out.
She thoroughly scanned the environment to ensure no secondary fail-safes or lethal traps remained active.
The ventilation vents were still spewing residual gas.
The security feed maintaining a one-way visual to the control room was still operational.
A dangerous smirk touched her lips.
She casually strolled over to the mangled, blood-splattered control console.
Reaching into the lining of her tactical jacket, she produced a compact decryption module.
It was barely the size of her palm.
Lowering her dark, thick lashes, she flawlessly hardwired the device directly into the pod’s primary terminal.
A few seconds later.
The module flashed a rapid blue light.
She had forcefully hijacked the local subsystem permissions.
Meanwhile, on the other end.
The viral payload she had embedded into the Obsidian Core mainframe that morning.
Was now being aggressively weaponized by Nicholas, ripping a massive, irreparable hole through the tournament’s secure firewall.
She was inside the kill zone.
Nicholas was in the server nexus.
Operating on completely isolated terminals, they moved in a terrifying, telepathe synchronization as they had dun this exact drill a thousand times before.
In the blink of an eye, the entire digital infrastructure of Pod 10 was cracked wide open by Serena and Nicholas.
Simultaneously.
Out in the main arena.
The massive global broadcast screens, which had been displaying nothing but a black feed for Pod 10.
Suddenly glitched.
And the live feed from inside Pod 10 aggressively dominated the monitors.
Millions of viewers in the live audience and across the global streams had been anxiously demanding updates on the blackout.
The sudden violently restored feed caught everyone’s attention instantly.
And without any warning p>
The world was forced to witness the terrifying reality of what was happening inside Pod 10.
One look was all it took for the entire internet to explode.
The screen no longer showed the pristine, sterile medical pod from the start of the broadcast.
It was a blood-soaked, post-apocalyptic slaughterhouse.
The reinforced steel flooring was caved in, multi-million dollar medical rigs were shattered into shrapnel and horrifying streaks of crimson painted the walls.
The entire pod was choked by a sickly, unnatural emerald fog.
And scattered across the ground were massive, mangled bodies.
No p>
They couldn’t even be classified as human anymore.
The corpses belonged to five hulking, grotesquely mutated monsters!
Their bodies were twisted and shattered at angles fundamentally impossible for human anatomy!
And standing dead center in that waking nightmare was the Elyndorian Captain, Serena Lancaster.
She was clearly injured.
Her pristine national uniform had
been shredded by claws, a permanent smear of blood stained her lips, and deep, violent lacerations Covered her arms and knuckles.