Chapter 439: Breaking Point III
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Sekhmet made his choice at that exact moment. He did not step back. He did not call for retreat. He did not gamble on Raka surviving long enough for the twins to finish their own enemy and come help him. That would have been too slow. Too wasteful. Too uncertain.
Instead, he opened the Void Land.
The dark gate tore itself into existence beside the broken pillar with a deep ripping sound, like the underground itself had just been cut open by a god’s fingernail. Blackness folded outward. Cold air rushed through it. The floor near the opening cracked under the pressure.
Everyone saw it.
The armored woman saw it.
The dark-clothed man saw it.
Raka saw it.
The surviving guards and hired killers saw it.
And then two women dropped out of it and landed hard on their backsides in the middle of the chamber.
"Ouch!"
That came from Sofia first.
Natasha hit the ground beside her a heartbeat later and made a far less dignified sound than she probably would have preferred. She caught herself on one hand, looked around, and froze.
For one strange second, the entire chamber held still.
Not because the battle was over.
Because everyone had just seen two women fall out of a piece of darkness that should not have existed in the middle of the underground market.
Sofia looked at the floor, then at the chamber, then at Sekhmet, and finally at the blood, bodies, broken stone, and screaming around them.
Her silver hair was half loose around her face. Natasha’s black eyes had gone wide for the first time since he had met her.
The armored woman was the first to move again. She stepped back from Sekhmet at once, not out of fear, but because a new unknown had entered the room and she was not stupid enough to ignore it.
The dark-clothed man did the same on the other side. He turned just enough to keep the twins in one line of sight and the new arrivals in another.
Sekhmet looked at Sofia and Natasha and said, "I found your use."
That reached them more sharply than the gate had.
They rose at once.
No more pain sounds. No more surprise on the surface. They stood fast, looked around properly, and understood what they had been thrown into.
A live battle.
A bloody one.
Raka and his remaining people were still fighting for their lives. The twins had the dark-clothed man occupied. Sekhmet stood with blood running down his side. The armored woman faced him with a wound in her shoulder and another in her thigh. Iron House guards and hired killers were still pressing from the far side.
Sofia’s eyes sharpened.
Natasha’s did too.
Sekhmet held their gaze and said, "Kill those two."
He did not need to explain which two.
The chamber itself explained it.
The woman.
The man.
The real threats.
Then Sekhmet brought out the control ring.
It flashed in his hand under the shaking underground light. Sofia saw it first. Natasha saw it immediately after. Both of them understood what it meant. Their bodies went still in a deeper way.
Sekhmet said, "Now it is time to prove your words."
The armored woman and the dark-clothed man both sensed the change in the room, even if they did not yet understand it.
Sofia’s voice was low when she answered. "So this is the test."
"Yes."
Natasha looked at him without blinking. "If we do this, then you will know."
"I will know that you are useful," Sekhmet said. "The rest comes later."
That answer should have insulted them.
It did not.
Sofia smiled instead.
That meant she understood what mattered.
Sekhmet lifted the ring and unlocked the next seal.
The effect was immediate.
The pressure around Sofia and Natasha changed so suddenly that three wounded lesser fighters nearby staggered from it. Their original half-god power remained sealed, but what he released was enough. More than enough. Chaos Rank Five poured back into both of them in a hard clean surge. Their bodies straightened. Their eyes changed. The blood in the room itself seemed to notice.
The armored woman’s expression sharpened with real alarm then.
At last.
Now she understood that the battle had changed again.
Sofia rolled one shoulder slowly as if remembering what it felt like to stand in proper strength. Natasha exhaled once through her nose, and the air around her seemed to darken by half a degree.
Sekhmet said, "Now serve."
That was enough.
They moved without hesitation. No pretty entrance. No speech.
Sofia went for the armored woman. Natasha went for the dark-clothed man. They crossed the chamber fast enough that most of the lower fighters barely understood what direction the danger had taken before it reached its new targets.
The difference between them before and now was brutal.
At Chaos Rank Three, they had been dangerous prisoners.
At Chaos Rank Five, even with their true half-god power still sealed, they became monsters.
That was the cruel truth of vampires at higher rank. In the same rank, they were almost unbeatable unless they met some absurd genius born to make other geniuses feel ordinary. Their bodies were too hard to kill, their speed was too sharp, and their instincts became uglier the longer battle lasted.
Sofia hit the armored woman first.
The impact sounded like iron hitting iron under a collapsed roof. The woman got her blade up in time, but that only saved her from dying in the first second. Sofia’s strike still drove her backward hard enough to crack the floor under her heel. Then Sofia smiled, all silver hair and blood-bright eyes, and attacked again.
The armored woman had been strong before.
Now she was simply outclassed.
She blocked high. But it was too late for her.
Sofia’s second hand hit from the side and shattered the rhythm of her guard. Her third motion came from below and drove blood-shaped claws through the damaged line in the woman’s thigh. The woman cut back in fury and managed to score Sofia’s side, but the wound did not matter enough. Sofia stepped into it instead of away from it and slammed her forehead into the woman’s face hard enough to make bone crack.
On the other side of the chamber, Natasha reached the dark-clothed man and ended all the clean beauty of his defense in less than five breaths.
The twins did not even seem offended that she had taken over their prey.
They understood at once.
This was not an insult.
This was a slaughter.
The dark-clothed man was good. Better than most. Fast, controlled, dry in the way all true professionals became after enough blood. But Natasha moved around his skill instead of through it. She did not try to match his neat killing lines. She broke them. One hand caught his wrist. Her other claws opened his shoulder. He turned. She was already behind him. He cut backward. She took the blade partly through her sleeve and answered by driving her fist into the side of his spine with enough force to drop him to one knee.
Then Vera and Vela joined again, not to take the kill from her, but to close escape.
The chamber changed under that.
All at once, the enemy line felt it.
Their two strongest fighters had just lost control of their own battles.
That was enough to shake the rest.
Raka saw it and roared, "Push!"
His people obeyed with all the ugly hunger left in them. The surviving lesser vampires and wounded enforcers surged again. Behind them came another wave.
It was not from the tunnels this time.
From the Void Land.
Sekhmet opened the gate wider and let the summon bats come through.
They poured into the underground market chamber like a black storm cut into dozens of bodies. Not mindless. Not elegant. But useful. They hit faces, throats, hands, and eyes. They slammed into wounded guards trying to rise. They dragged screaming hired killers off balance. They turned every surviving Iron House fighter’s fear into something physical and immediate.
One guard lost an eye under a bat swarm before a lesser vampire even reached him. Another tried to swing wildly at the air and got his wrist torn open by claws from below. A hired killer tripped over a dead body while fighting off two bats and died under Raka’s blood-shaped claws before he finished falling.
The rest collapsed quickly after that.
It was not the true threat. It was the scraps. The guards. The hired men.
The late arrivals from Iron House who had come believing they were entering a damaged underground fight and instead found themselves trapped in a butcher yard filled with bloodline monsters, summoned beasts, and two newly unleashed high-rank vampires.
Dickoff’s people died badly.
Raka’s people liked that.
The armored woman did not die badly.
She died hard.
Sofia tore her sword arm open first. Then she broke her ribs. Then, when the woman still tried to fight through it, Sofia caught her by the throat, lifted her partly off the ground, and bit deep into the side of her neck.
The woman screamed once. Then... she stopped.