Chapter 282: Chapter 282: The Sandoria Request
Alexander had to drag Ben and Leo by the collars of their shirts out to the Lamborghini, their legs still trembling so they could barely stand. He drove them back to their respective residential sectors, dropping each one off at their front doors. Fortunately, their parents were absent, saving him from having to give any explanations about why their sons looked brain-fried and exhausted.
Once he was back behind the wheel of the Temerario, Alexander pulled out his TMC cellphone.
"I need to grind out more missions to build up capital," Alexander muttered, his brow furrowing as he accessed the local TMC mercenary network grid.
He expected a list of available contracts after the recent sweeps, but as he scrolled down, his jaw tightened. The list was empty. There was only one lingering contract remaining on his dashboard: a low-priority escort mission to take a young girl outside the city limits. There was nothing else available.
"What the hell? Didn’t they say there was a shortage of personnel after the massacre?" Alexander cursed, tapping the screen. "Why aren’t they feeding me contracts? Or is the system locked because I haven’t cleared this low-tier garbage yet...? Fuck, I really didn’t want to waste my time on an escort job. Whatever."
He hit the acceptance key.
The terminal pinged, displaying a set of coordinates located in a decaying, industrial outskirts zone. Ten minutes later, the silver Lamborghini pulled up down the block from a crumbling ruined concrete house. Alexander stepped inside the dark, dusty living space, his eyes landing on a small girl. She looked less than six years old terrified, and clutching a ragged doll.
"Are you... are you going to help me?" the girl whispered, her voice trembling.
"Yeah," said Alexander, keeping his voice flat and professional. "Where do you need to go?"
"I want to go back to Sandoria," she said.
"Sandoria?" Alexander repeated, his brow furrowing as he pulled out his terminal to check the GPS map. "Where the hell is that? What even is Sandoria?"
"Sandoria is my birthplace," the little girl murmured.
Alexander stared at his screen, waiting for the route to calculate. The GPS arrow remained static, and the mission details failed to update. The interface was frozen, the glowing screen stuck on the acceptance page. "What is wrong with this piece of shit? Is the network lagging?"
"It’s not lagging. I manually blocked the signal," a cold voice whispered into his ear.
Before Alexander could even process the sound, a sharp edge of a knife pressed firmly against the side of his throat from behind. The ambush was seamless; he hadn’t detected any shred of presence.
Alexander slowly raised his hands, his eyes narrowing as he looked ahead. "Can I know who the hell you are? I don’t recall having any personal beef with anyone in this sector."
"Who I am is irrelevant," the voice hissed from behind, the steel biting a millimeter deeper into his skin. "The only thing that matters is that I need a favor from you. And I am prepared to give you an obscene amount of what you people call money."
The figure made a gesture with their free hand toward a dark corner of the room. A tarp was pulled back, revealing a iron chest filled to the brim with gleaming gold bars, alongside six aluminum briefcases stuffed with high-denomination bills.
"According to your local currency, that is more than fifty million dollars in cash, and another fifty million in gold," the voice continued smoothly. "All you need to do is get us out of this grid now and drive us to the mountain ridges two hours north of here."
"Alright, alright... look, we can talk about this," Alexander said, his voice dropping into a low, cooperative tone. "There’s no need to get so aggressive over a deal. For that kind of price, I’ll take you wherever you want..."
Feeling the compliance, the figure loosened the pressure of the blade against his throat.
That millimeter of space was all Alexander needed.
He drove his right elbow back with explosive force, slamming it hard into the attacker’s ribs.
Crack!
A gasp echoed behind him. Alexander followed up with a vicious backward snap of his left elbow, catching the attacker squarely in the face. He spun around on his heel, cocking his fist back to deliver a bone-shattering punch to the jaw—but as the figure staggered back, the hood fell away, and Alexander’s fist froze an inch from the target’s face.
It wasn’t a man at all. It was a woman, her pale features taut with adrenaline.
The woman didn’t waste the second of hesitation. She dropped low, executing a lightning-fast sweep kick against his ankles. Alexander leaped back to avoid it, but she rose into a vertical axe kick that came crashing down toward his skull. Alexander twisted his torso out of the way.
BOOM!
The woman’s heel slammed into the concrete floor shattering the stone structure and sending a cloud of dust and debris into the air.
Alexander’s hand flew to his waist to draw his sidearm, but his fingers gripped empty air—he hadn’t brought his loadout to the academy or the gym. He locked his eyes onto the woman, preparing to lung forward, but as the dust settled, he noticed she wasn’t even looking at him anymore. She looked terrified, her eyes darting toward the broken windows and the ceiling spooked by the loud, explosive noise their brief scuffle had just created in the silent neighborhood.
"You better start explaining what the hell is going on now, or—" Alexander growled, stepping into a low combat stance.
"Shh...! Shut the fuck up!" the woman hissed, her voice cracking with desperation as she looked toward the broken entryway. "Liora, get down! Shit, shit... we have to move now. Dammit, I really didn’t want to kill anyone today..."
The little girl, Liora, stepped forward from the shadows, her small face losing all traces of fear. "I’ll handle him."
Suddenly, the little girl’s eyes began to glow with a vibrant pink light. She reached down and pulled her ragged tunic open, letting the cloth fall to the floor to reveal her bare, childlike body. The mystical energy in the air rippled outward, aiming for Alexander’s mind.
"Now... you are my slave..." Liora commanded, her voice echoing with an hypnotic resonance.
Comments