novelraw Chapter 367: President
Chapter 367: President
The desert sun was a relentless hammer by the time Ethan emerged from the jagged mouth of the canyon. It was nearly midday. His clothes were torn, caked with dried mud and streaks of glowing blue residue, and his face bore the grim exhaustion of a man who had spent the night wrestling with demons.
To the few locals and "laborers" scattered near the trailhead, he looked like a ghost rising from a grave.
Ethan didn’t spare them a glance. He walked with a heavy but steady stride toward his SUV, the gravel crunching under his boots. He climbed in, ignited the engine, and tore away, leaving a plume of dust in his wake.
At the top of a hill, a man dressed in the heavy-duty gear of a construction foreman watched the vehicle disappear. Without hesitation, he pulled an encrypted satellite phone from a hidden pocket.
"Speak," a cold, professional voice answered.
"Sir, the situation has escalated. Three days ago, a traveler entered the forbidden sector. He stayed until sunset and walked out intact. Yesterday, he went back in. He spent the entire night down there. He just surfaced."
There was a sharp, pregnant silence on the other end.
"You’re telling me he survived a night in the Black Canyon? No one survives after the sun falls. The structural shifts alone should have crushed him, let alone the... inhabitants. Is he dead?"
"No, sir. He looks battered, but he’s very much alive. I thought he was a corpse for sure, but—"
"WHAT?!" The voice on the phone erupted into a jagged roar. "Contact the Deacon immediately! This is a Code Black emergency! You idiot! Why wasn’t I informed the moment he went down the first time?!"
The foreman stammered, his confident facade crumbling into pure panic. "Sir... the first day he came back like it was a morning stroll! I thought he was just a lost tourist or a reckless explorer. I didn’t think—"
"Curse you! We need to know who he is! No—wait. If he walked out of that hole alive, attempting to detain him is suicide. We cannot let him know we are watching. Do not follow him! Do you hear me? If he catches a whiff of us, we’re all dead!"
"Boss... Boss, wait! I have a photo. I caught a long-range shot before he hit the main road."
"Send it. Now!"
A few seconds later, a chime signaled the arrival of the image. On a balcony hundreds of miles away, a Union executive stared at the screen. His blood turned to ice.
"It’s him... Lord have mercy, it’s him. Give the order: total stand-down. No one approaches him. No one breathes in his direction. If a single person does something stupid, I’ll personally feed them to the pits. Understood?!"
He slammed the phone down, his hands shaking.
An hour later, a man shrouded in a dark, heavy coat stepped into the executive’s office. The Deacon. His presence alone seemed to dim the lights in the room.
"Why the frantic summons?" the Deacon asked, his voice a calm, terrifying silk.
The executive pushed the tablet across the desk. "He’s back. Ethan. He was at the Black Rock site. He spent the night in the lower vaults and walked out."
The Deacon leaned in, studying the photo. He didn’t look surprised; he simply nodded, a thin, enigmatic smile playing on his lips. "Inform the monitors to maintain a five-mile perimeter. Do not engage. If he breathes, I want to know the frequency, but do not touch him."
The Deacon turned and walked toward a corner of the room. He traced a sequence of runes on a hidden wall panel, and a shimmering transport matrix flared into life. He stepped through, vanishing in a pulse of silver light.
The air he stepped into was thick, humid, and smelled of copper and ozone. He was in a dense jungle, where the trees grew so tall they blotted out the sky. Massive, prehistoric beasts watched him from the ferns, their yellow eyes glowing, but they didn’t dare move. They felt the death radiating from him.
He walked toward a clearing where the sound of metal clashing and guttural screams echoed.
"Look who’s back! I thought you’d be busy coddling orphans in the city, Deacon! Hahaha!"
A massive, bearded man with a face like a jagged cliffside—Fire Axe—swung a colossal weapon. CRACK! The blow shattered the energy shield of a desperate fighter, cleaving the man in two.
The clearing was a slaughterhouse.
"Shut up," the Deacon said coldly. "The Outlanders have breached the perimeter again."
He looked at the ground. Twenty corpses lay scattered, their blood soaking into the jungle floor. The five remaining intruders, seeing they were overwhelmed, triggered their own cores. BOOM! The self-destruction rocked the clearing, killing several Union guards and wounding dozens more.
"Tough day," Fire Axe grunted, wiping blood from his beard. "We lost forty men to kill twenty-five of those freaks. At this rate, they’ll grind us down to nothing."
Healers rushed from a nearby stone fortress, beginning the grim work of tending to the survivors. Among the chaos stood the elite—the leaders of the guilds affiliated with the Union. Two elderly men stood apart from the rest. One looked like a scholar in a flowing toga, his eyes fixed on the empty void as if reading a map only he could see.
The other had a gaze like a hawk. He looked like an ordinary man, but he was the President of the Union. When the twenty-five Outlanders had ambushed them, he was the first to react, holding back the entire wave single-handedly until reinforcements arrived. He had personally decapitated fifteen of them. His position wasn’t held through politics or favors; he was the raw, terrifying power that allowed the Union to exist.
"Ethan is moving again," the Deacon said, walking up to the President. "He found the Trigram Vaults."
The President didn’t look back. He watched the healers work, his voice a low rumble. "Let him hunt. If he finds what’s down there, he’ll either become our greatest asset... or the reason this world finally burns. Either way, the game has changed."