Chapter 351: Sniper
He fell with zero sound with a poisoned jagged trench knife held in a reverse grip, aiming directly for the base of her neck.
’It’s over...’
He expected an easy kill. That was all it was these days... He expected a scared civilian client walking blindly into a trap.
The man had no idea he was dropping onto a Lord.
Evelyn reacted with pure terrifying speed. The instant his boots left the steel beam, she pivoted cleanly on her heel.
CLANG!
Evelyn violently brought her forearm up, her wrist reinforced with a dense layer of hardened mana.
She flawlessly parried the falling assassin’s blade, deflecting the poisoned steel harmlessly away from her neck.
Before the man could even process the failed strike, Evelyn stepped into his guard.
She curled her gloved hand into a tight fist, channeled a massive surge of energy through her shoulder, and drove a brutal devastating punch directly upward into his descending stomach.
KRA-THOOM!
The concussive force of the blow sounded like a detonating artillery shell in the confined apartment.
The punch shattered the assassin’s ribcage on impact.
It knocked all the air and a heavy spray of blood forcefully out of his lungs.
The shockwave launched him backward through the air as his back hit the concrete floor with a sickening crunch.
Evelyn didn’t hesitate.
She stepped forward, planting her heavy boot firmly onto his shattered chest to pin him to the ground.
She reached down and violently peeled the white kanji mask off his face, tossing it across the room.
It revealed a rugged middle-aged man with a military buzzcut.
"Gah..."
He was groaning in agony with blood bubbling profusely from his lips as he struggled to breathe through his pulverized ribs.
Evelyn crouched down, her Kitsune mask mere inches from his blood-stained face.
Her dark eyes were devoid of mercy.
She clamped her thick leather-gloved hand directly onto the top of his skull with her fingers digging painfully into his scalp.
"Where is he?" Evelyn demanded, her magically enhanced voice vibrating with cold authority. "Tell me exactly where he is right now, or I swear to the Gods I will physically rip your head off your shoulders."
The middle-aged assassin stared up at her.
His eyes were filled with a mixture of immense pain and sudden terror.
He wasn’t afraid of her threat... He was terrified of something else...
’I have to do it.’
He opened his blood-filled mouth with his lips moving rapidly.
He wasn’t trying to confess, he wasn’t trying to beg for his life or betray his employers either.
He was whispering a harsh guttural activation phrase.
A complex jagged black runic curse seal suddenly flared to life on the back of his tongue, glowing with a violently bright purple light.
He had triggered his own suicide bomb to avoid interrogation!
Evelyn’s eyes widened.
She recognized the self-destruct mechanism of an elite silencing curse as she instantly threw herself backward, bringing her arms up to shield her face.
BOOOOM!
The man’s entire head exploded.
It wasn’t a clean magical burst... It was a visceral horrifying detonation of bone, tissue, and brain matter.
The concussive blast echoed deafeningly off the concrete walls of the small apartment.
A sickening wave of hot blood and gore splashed violently across the room, completely coating Evelyn’s painted Kitsune mask and soaking into the thick fabric of her gray hoodie.
She stood slowly back up in the silent ruined apartment, wiping a thick streak of the assassin’s blood off the cheek of her mask.
Her brother’s rejection was forgotten, replaced by the grim bloody reality of the undercity.
’Why does everything have to be so complicated...?’
It took everything in her not to vomit.
The deafening echo of the detonating curse seal slowly faded into the damp oppressive silence of the Shogitown alleyway.
Evelyn stood perfectly still in the center of the ruined cyber-rig. Her chest heaved with slow measured breaths.
She slowly lowered her arms, looking down at the gruesome catastrophic mess painted across the concrete floor.
The metallic sickening scent of vaporized blood and burnt bone marrow hung thickly in the stagnant air, mixing with the harsh ozone of the humming server racks.
She reached up with a trembling leather-gloved hand and wiped a thick dark streak of gore off the glossy cheek of her Kitsune mask.
’What happened to him?’ Evelyn thought, her dark eyes narrowing as she swept her gaze across the chaotic blood-stained apartment.
She pushed the lingering shock of the suicide-bomber aside, letting her ruthless self training take over.
She closed her eyes, extending her internal mana senses outward again, pushing the invisible ripples of her perception into the far corners of the room.
She probed for hidden compartments, lingering mana signatures, or any other hidden assassins clinging to the rusted ceiling beams.
Nothing...
The room was empty...
Evelyn opened her eyes, stepping carefully around the headless corpse on the floor.
The situation didn’t make any logical sense.
Jax himself was not an Awakened.
He possessed zero combat capabilities, no mana core, and no physical enhancements outside of a few minor neural implants to help him interface with his illegal computer rigs.
He was just a brilliant greasy civilian who sat in the dark and cracked World Council firewalls for a living.
Did a guy like that somehow offend somebody strong enough to the point that they could easily deploy elite curse-bound assassins to eliminate him?
’This is a massive problem,’ Evelyn calculated grimly, walking toward his primary workstation.
With Jax gone, her complex offshore money-laundering operations would have to be put on an immediate pause.
She couldn’t risk transferring any more stream revenue through the standard banking channels without his custom decryption algorithms shielding the source.
She would have to scour the grimy treacherous depths of the underworld just to find a broker who was even half as competent as the guy she had just lost.
More importantly, Silas needed his fake identity.
Without Jax, forging a bulletproof World Council-verified background for Lord Vespera was going to be an absolute nightmare.
It just didn’t seem right, though.
The guy was pretty unimportant in the grand hierarchy of Valoria City so what was the massive fuss about?
He was not an active sworn member of the many rival Syndicates operating in Shogitown.
From what she knew of his background, he fiercely valued his independence, preferring to act as a neutral third party who sold data to the highest bidder.
Could it be that he accidentally sold bad intel and deeply offended one of the major gang bosses?
’That is probably it.’ Evelyn deduced, stepping up to the polished metal desk.
She reached under the edge of the table, running her fingers along the underside where she knew Jax kept a hidden biometric lockbox.
He had shown it to her once during a late-night transaction... Evelyn found the latch and yanked the hidden drawer open.
Empty.
The heavy custom-built mana-pistol he always kept loaded for emergencies was not inside the compartment.
Evelyn crouched down, sweeping her flashlight over the cluttered floor beneath the desk.
Amidst a pile of crushed energy drink cans and tangled copper wiring, she spotted the dull gleam of gunmetal.
She knelt, ignoring the dampness of the concrete, and picked the heavy pistol up.
She checked the safety, popped the release, and slid the magazine out of the grip.
Her brow furrowed behind her mask.
Several bullets had been used.
The magazine was half-empty, and the barrel of the gun still held the lingering warmth of recently discharged kinetic magic.
That specific detail made her even more confused.
She stood up, checking the walls and the doorframe. There were no bullet holes... No shattered monitors and no scorch marks on the server racks.
Had the bullets actually impacted the person that attacked him? Or had he fired wildly into the dark before being subdued? If there was a shootout, why wasn’t there any—
A sudden sharp prickle of danger violently spiked at the base of Evelyn’s neck.
It wasn’t a sound.
It was the raw instinctual sixth sense of a veteran Vanguard who had survived countless ambushes.
Her core flared, screaming at her to move.
Evelyn whipped her head around, looking directly through the small, grimy window of the apartment that faced the opposing alley wall.
In the far distance, perched perfectly on the rusted fire escape of a taller building across the street, a ruby-red laser sight was cutting through the Shogitown smog.
The beam was painted squarely in the center of her forehead.
It wasn’t just a normal civilian-grade sniper rifle. Even from this distance, Evelyn’s enhanced eyes recognized the elongated glowing blue runic barrel of a specialized anti-Awakened marksman rifle.
The weapon fired dense depleted-mythril slugs designed specifically to shatter mana shields and pulverize Lord bones.
Before Evelyn could even dive to the floor and before the sniper’s finger could squeeze the heavy trigger—
A massive dark blur dropped silently from the sky above the sniper’s nest.
A boot swung in a brutal lateral arc as the kick connected directly with the sniper’s shoulder.
CRACK!
The sickening sound of shattering bone echoed across the alleyway.
The sniper was violently launched to the side, tumbling across the rusted metal grating of the fire escape as the heavy rifle clattered uselessly out of his hands with the red laser spiraling into the dark abyss of the street below.
Evelyn let out a massive shuddering sigh of relief with her tense shoulders dropping.
She didn’t waste another second inside the bloody apartment.
She turned, sprinting out the open iron door and launching herself into the damp neon-lit alley.
Evelyn channeled her energy into her legs as she bounded up the side of a nearby dumpster, using the momentum to leap toward the rusted fire escape of the adjacent building.
WHOOSH! WHOOSH!
She hopped effortlessly from rooftop to rooftop, her oversized gray hoodie flapping in the wind as she rapidly closed the distance to the sniper’s nest.
She landed gracefully on the metal grating of the target building with the rusted iron protesting under her boots.
Standing near the edge of the platform, with his hands casually buried deep in the pockets of his dark leather trench coat, was Silas.
Beneath him, the sniper was writhing on the metal grating, groaning in agony.
Silas had his heavy combat boot planted firmly in the center of the man’s gut, pinning him to the floor with the casual terrifying weight of a Lord.
Silas slowly turned his head with the glowing neon signs of the city reflecting off the polished silver fangs of his Oni mask.
"It was about time you showed up," Silas told her bluntly, his deep voice sounded uncaring. "I was getting bored waiting on the roof."
Evelyn walked forward, her heart still hammering against her ribs.
She was incredibly grateful for his reflexes.
Even though she was a Classic Lord, and she had subconsciously wrapped her body in a dense layer of defensive mana the second she sensed danger, that specific caliber of weapon was lethal.
If the sniper had pulled the trigger, she might have survived, but she would have been brutally wounded in the confrontation.
"Thanks," Evelyn muttered, stopping next to him.
Silas didn’t reply as he simply looked down at the writhing sniper.
Silas pulled his right leg back slightly, shifting his posture.
With precision, he brought the heel of his boot down directly onto the sniper’s right knee joint.
...He crushed it.
The joint inverted with a sickening wet crunch of snapping cartilage and splintering bone.
"AGGGHHHHH!"
The sniper threw his head back, screaming into the smog-filled Shogitown sky.
The agony was blinding, sending violent shockwaves through his nervous system.
Silas kept his boot planted on the ruined leg, looking over at Evelyn with calm unaffected golden-ringed eyes hidden behind the metal mask.
"Do your interrogation thing," Silas instructed. "I’m guessing your underground contact got kidnapped or something? This guy has been complaining about the weight of his rifle and the payday for a while now."
Evelyn raised a skeptical eyebrow beneath her Kitsune mask.
"How did you get the details of his internal monologue?" Evelyn asked, thoroughly confused by his omniscient awareness.
"I was standing directly behind him on the roof for a full minute before he aimed at you," Silas stated dryly. "He was muttering to himself. He has terrible situational awareness."
Evelyn turned her attention to the bleeding sobbing man pinned beneath Silas’s boot.
She knelt down, grabbing the man aggressively by the collar of his vest and hauling his upper body off the grating.
She examined his face. He had a glowing, red cybernetic eye enhancement surgically implanted into his right socket, whirring as it desperately tried to focus on her mask.
"Tell me exactly where Jax is..." Evelyn demanded as her voice sounded cold and merciless.
The sniper blinked his organic eye, spitting a wad of blood onto the rusted metal.
"Who?" the sniper gasped, his voice trembling with pain. "You mean... Fortune?"