Chapter 667: Kidnapping...? [Bonus Chapter]
The silence in the alley hung heavy in the air and Evelyn didn’t move.
"Haah..."
Her worn combat boots stayed planted on the cracked cobblestones with her hands buried deep in the front pouch of her oversized dark-gray hoodie.
A thin plume of blue-gray smoke drifted lazily from the slim cigarette clamped between her teeth and the moisture dripping from the rotting pine fire escape overhead fell in slow deliberate intervals, measuring out the stillness until the tension became almost suffocating.
"I can sense you, you know," she said, her voice dripping with a bit of exhaustion.
The alley didn’t answer, but the air stiffened.
The nearly imperceptible shift in mana pressure made the damp brickwork feel colder like a wire drawn too taut across a bare knuckle.
Evelyn cleared her dry throat, tilting her chin up just enough for her messy black bun to brush against the inside of her cotton hood.
"People, rather. Plural... You’re not exactly subtle with that suppression field, It leaks like a cracked pipe."
From the shadows behind a cluster of dented waste bins forty paces back, boots scraped against wet gravel.
A figure stepped out into the dull, filtered light of the alleyway.
He was broad-shouldered, tall, and moving with the practiced movements of a trained soldier.
Across his torso was a fitted tactical breastplate laced with intricate cerulean runic veins that hummed with a suppressed high-frequency drone.
It was a sleek vacuum-sealed kit... the kind of gear that cost an obscene mountain of Spirit Credits to license outside the World Council’s core districts.
Evelyn slowly turned her head over her shoulder with her sharp dark eyes hooded beneath the cotton rim.
’Third-generation mana-weave alloy,’ she cataloged instantly, her instincts processing the plating before her cigarette ash could drop. ’Adaptive kinetic baffles, inertia dampening... These are high-tier private security or an elite strike team, not your standard back-alley scavengers.’
"Stand down, Miss Evelyn," the lead man said. "We have no intention of harming you... Step away from the main thoroughfare and come with us quietly, It will save everyone involved an unnecessary amount of grief."
Evelyn pulled the cigarette from her lips with two calloused fingers, exhaling a dense aromatic stream of white smoke into the cold air.
She laughed.
It was a short dry chuckle that carried zero warmth.
"Come with you?" she asked, her voice scraping like sandpaper. "What, are we doing an impromptu kidnapping in broad daylight now?... I thought the local precinct at least pretended to have bylaws around here."
The man’s expression didn’t waver.
His jaw remained set and his eyes fixed firmly on her slender frame, completely unbothered by her mockery.
"We don’t need bylaws for this," he replied steadily. "Comply, and this remains a civil escort... Refuse, and we will take you by force... The outcome does not change."
Beneath the visor of his tactical helmet, his mind was cold and single-minded.
’I’m only doing this for Lady Elora,’ he reminded himself with his breathing disciplined and his mana pathways quietly pre-loading the arrays in his gauntlets. ’For some reason, the City Lord’s daughter, Miss Elora Verinda, specifically requested that this woman be brought in untouched... I have my orders so I simply have to deliver.’
He raised his right hand with two fingers snapping outward.
"Down... Secure her limbs..."
CREAK!
Two figures dropped from the rusted fire escapes above with their boots striking the cobblestones on either side of her, and two more slipped from the narrow recess of an adjoining service corridor, cutting off her route back to the main street.
Four operatives and a squad leader, all clad in matched composite armor with their hands already drawing shock-batons and suppression cuffs laced with nullification runes.
’Five of them,’ Evelyn counted, almost bored. ’Six if the guy hiding behind the bins counts but he doesn’t.’
In the second between the squad leader’s fingers snapping and his hand returning to his side, Evelyn moved.
She kept her hands in her pouch and she kept the cigarette in her mouth.
The only thing she did was shift her weight onto the ball of her right foot, and a concussive pop of compressed water-mana detonated beneath the heel of her boot.
BANG!
It launched her forward like a released catapult string, and the forty paces between them vanished in an eye-blink.
’Too fast—!’ the squad leader had time to think.
Before his adaptive armor could flare its kinetic baffles, Evelyn’s left hip torqued and her torso twisted horizontally mid-air.
Her combat boot whipped out in a vicious rising kick with the steel-capped toe driving up beneath his chin and straight through the exposed seam of his gorget.
CRACK!
His head snapped back with a wet thud and the shock rattled down his cervical spine, lifting his two-hundred-pound armored frame clear off the cobblestones and hurling him backward into a pile of rotting wooden crates.
The alley erupted.
"Engage! Suppress her!"
The two operatives from the fire escapes closed in from her flanks.
The one on the left lunged with an electrified baton with the tip crackling with jagged arcs of blue lightning aimed straight for her kidneys, while the one on the right dropped low and swept a heavy titanium-reinforced leg meant to shatter her knee.
Evelyn landed between them with the cigarette still burning with a perfect inch of ash hanging from its tip, and her sharp eyes flicked sideways.
’Again... who’s trying to kidnap me?’
She sank her center of gravity and let the low sweep shave harmlessly beneath her thighs, hopping over the follow-up with a lazy little skip like a kid jumping a rope.
As the lightning baton screamed down toward her collarbone she raised her left forearm, and a dense shimmering glaze of solid light-mana hardened over her skin like a translucent diamond gauntlet.
CLANG-ZZZZT!
The high-voltage baton hit her light-reinforced arm with the ringing shriek of steel on an anvil.
...The blue lightning crawled across the radiant barrier, found nothing to bite, and grounded itself harmlessly into the damp air.
"What the—" the operative started behind his visor.
"My turn," Evelyn muttered through her teeth.
Her right fist shot forward, wrapped in a pressurized vortex of swirling water-mana that condensed into an iron-hard hydraulic fist.
THUD!
It landed dead center on his chest plate and the hydraulic shockwave went straight through the exterior plating and into his thoracic cavity.
BOOM!
The air exploded out of his lungs in a strangled wheeze as he folded over her knuckles and he was unconscious before his knees hit the wet stone.
The sweeper was already back on his feet with a combat knife clearing its sheath, and Evelyn didn’t give him the half-second he needed.
She pivoted on the ball of her left boot without resetting her feet and whipped her right elbow around in a backward reverse-strike.
CRACK!
’I’m a bit good at hand to hand...’
The reinforced elbow caught the side of his tactical helmet, shearing the visor’s mounting brackets and shattering the tempered glass.
The man spun twice from the torque, bounced off the brick wall, and slid down into the muck completely limp.
Two down in less than three seconds, and the ash on her cigarette still hadn’t fallen.
The remaining two operatives from the service corridor hesitated with their boots freezing in the puddles.
One of them slapped a disc the size of a coaster against the cobbles, and a translucent dome of nullification light began to climb up from it like a rising tide.
"Back up! Back up, deploy the containment field—"
"Too loud," Evelyn breathed.
FLASH!
She vanished in a blinding flicker of light and the dome closed over an empty patch of cobblestones with a soft useless hum.
The warp displaced the air with a hollow pop as a second later she materialized between the two men, hovering inches above the ground, and her hands shot outward with the palms open.
Two miniature rings of blinding light-mana detonated point-blank in their faces.
FLASH-BANG!
The pure luminosity seared straight through their visors, overloading their eyes and cooking their equilibrium.
They were still clutching their eyes and screaming when Evelyn dropped, swept both of their lead legs with a low scything kick, and hammered their temples with two short, mana-hardened palm strikes as they fell.
THWACK! THWACK!
Both men went ragdoll with their heads bouncing off the cobblestones before settling into stillness.
Evelyn stood up straight, rolling her shoulders with a soft aching grimace.
She plucked the slim cigarette from her mouth and tapped a neat cylinder of gray ash into a puddle.
"Garbage," she muttered. "Corporate lackeys who think shiny armor makes up for garbage reaction times."
From across the alley, amidst the splintered wreckage of the wooden crates, a deep hum began to rise.
VUUUUUUUUUM!
The shattered wood was forcefully repelled outward by a dense, expanding geometric field of dark-amber mana as the squad leader rose to his feet.
His tactical gorget was dented, a thin line of dark blood trickled from the corner of his split lip, and his stance was rock-solid.
The shock that should have paralyzed a normal combatant had been absorbed by something far denser than armor.
His entire core was circulating, not with basic elemental fire or wind, but with structured mana.
’What a weird signature... Is he one of them?’ Evelyn thought, she was a bit sure of it... He was a constructor-type Adventurer.
After losing their territories, most cores underwent a mutation... An Adventurer would never be as strong as a Lord of the same rank however some cores went through transformations and lost their elements.
"I see," the leader spat, wiping the blood from his chin with the back of his armored glove. "The intelligence report didn’t mention light displacement... You’re not just some back-alley Lord."
Evelyn narrowed her eyes slightly with her casual posture settling into a sharper one.
’An architect, huh?’ she noted, her tactical mind categorizing the mana signature. ’That’s probably why my kick didn’t snap his neck... He pre-cast an internal spell over his vertebrae.’
The man slammed his palms together.
CLACK!
"Bound!" he roared.
CRACKLE-CRUNCH!
The cobblestones beneath Evelyn’s boots surged upward as four slabs of dense, mana-reinforced stone ripped free of the ground and folded inward like the jaws of an iron bear trap, ready to crush her legs.
She couldn’t jump, and she knew it as the light above her was already fluctuating... the man actively anchoring it down to stop a second warp.
’Smart bastard,’ she thought.
Instead of retreating, she thrust both palms downward.
A dense sheet of pressurized water erupted from her sleeves and flooded the narrow gaps between the rising slabs.
"Flash-Freeze!"
The water turned to ice in seconds as jagged crystalline wedges expanded through every seam and locked the slabs mid-clasp with a groan of straining stone, and the raw hydraulic force of the freezing cracked their structural integrity down the middle.
The leader didn’t pause.
He charged, his boots leaving glowing amber runes on the cobblestones with every step, and in his right hand the mana condensed into a massive hexagonal hammer forged from solid crystallized mana.
’It’s pretty useless... well unless for certain situations.’
He swung it in a horizontal cleave with the roar of a falling boulder.
Evelyn leaned her torso back with the flat of the hammer missing the tip of her nose by two inches as the displacement tore her hood off and sent her messy black hair whipping around her face.
SWOOSH!
The hammer slammed into the brick wall behind her and turned three feet of solid masonry into a shower of red dust and flying shards!
Before he could pull it back, Evelyn stepped into his guard.
Her light-gauntleted left arm came up and caught the haft, pinning the hammer against the wall, and her right hand shot out like a viper with the palm open, aimed at his exposed throat.
CLANG!
A geometric amber shield snapped into existence between her palm and his neck, and the impact sent a jolt of kinetic feedback up her forearm.
The man smirked behind his bloodied lips.
"You rely too much on speed. My constructs are—"
"Loud," Evelyn interrupted coldly.
She kept her palm pressed flat against his shield and didn’t pull back an inch.
Deep within her core, the light and water currents surged together and spiraled into a hyper-compressed volatile needle at her fingertips.
She fed it into the barrier, not as a blow but as a pressure that kept building with the light finding every hairline seam of the construct while the water behind it pushed in like a flood against a dam wall.
The shield began to hum then it began to crack.
"Wait, what are you—" the leader started as his smirk was gone.
SHATTER!
The hexagonal barrier burst, and the concussive backfire shattered the gauntlet on his right arm and stripped his armor down to the bare arming coat.
The man staggered back with his balance broken as the backlash sent a wave of internal bleeding through his chest.
Evelyn followed through instantly.
She skipped the spell and stepped forward, anchored her left heel, and whipped her right boot up in a clean ruthless high kick that took him flush on the side of the temple.
WHAM!
His eyes rolled back into his skull as his two-hundred-pound frame left the ground and crashed onto the fractured cobblestones, skidding three feet through the damp gravel before it finally stopped.
The alley fell silent once more, with nothing left but the steady dripping of the rusted drainage pipe.
Drip! Drip! Drip!
Evelyn stood over him with her chest rising and falling in shallow breaths.
Her oversized gray hoodie was dusted with brick powder, and a single lock of black hair hung across her forehead.
She flicked the remaining ash from the cigarette and took a slow deep drag with the glowing cherry lighting the sharp tired angles of her face.
She stepped on the man’s broken wrist with just enough grinding pressure to force consciousness back into his battered skull.
"Aaargh!" The leader gasped and his eyes fluttered open with blood leaking from his nose and mouth as he stared up at the dark silhouette looming over him.
"You’re going to talk," Evelyn said, her voice dropping into a quiet monotone. "I don’t have the patience for posturing, and my cigarette is almost down to the filter... Who gave the order?"
The man gritted his teeth, his bruised face twisting with pain and stubborn pride. "I told you... standard client privilege... you can’t just—"
Evelyn’s heel pressed down harder with the sound of shifting carpal bones echoed sharply off the alley walls.
"Wrong answer," she said softly.
A needle of pure light mana ignited at the tip of her forefinger and hovered half an inch above his right eye, the heat singeing his eyelashes. "Try again."
The man’s resolve shattered under the cold unblinking certainty in her dark eyes.
He had faced hardened mercenaries before, but there was something unnatural in her presence, perhaps a microscopic bleed of true Lord aura that pressed against his soul like an iron tombstone.
"L-Lady Elora!" he choked out, his voice cracking in terror. "Elora Verinda! Miss Elora ordered it! Directly!"
Evelyn froze as the needle of light hovered motionless above his pupil.