The scarlet blast didn’t just illuminate the pitch-black study; it tore through the room like a physical shockwave.
Inside Scarlett’s mind, the quiet era was dead.
The sudden disintegration of the neural block was violent, forcing three hundred years of locked secrets and buried agony to the surface all at once.
She couldn’t process the memories yet, but the raw power they unlocked was absolute.
The star-shaped scar on her wrist bled a pure, glowing ruby light, and with a single extension of her palm, the half-ton steel door was ripped entirely off its hinges, crashing into the opposite corridor.
As the dust swirled in the dark hallway, Scarlett’s vision violently fractured.
Images she had never seen before began to flash before her eyes like a broken film reel.
A freezing stone floor in Sector 4, wet with rusted water.
A blinding, white laboratory light burning into her retinas while faceless people in heavy coats injected something glowing into her veins.
A long, narrow corridor painted entirely in fresh, dripping blood.
And then, a sound—a desperate, terrifying scream of a young boy whose face was completely blurred out in her mind, crying out her real name over and over.
”Ah…!” Scarlett gasped, clutching her head as she took a shaky step forward.
The flashes vanished as quickly as they came, leaving behind a cold, hollow mystery that made her chest ache with a profound sense of wrongness.
Who was that boy?
What had they done to her?
She didn’t know, but the unrefined energy burning under her skin demanded an outlet.
Surrounded by a thick, glowing mist of her own unleashed power, she strode toward the exit.
Down in the rain-drenched courtyard, the universe broke for Valerius.
The exact moment Scarlett’s mental wall collapsed, the vampire king gasped and stumbled back, clutching his temples.
For three centuries, his mind had been an untouchable fortress of absolute, perfect silence.
He had chosen Scarlett because her neural block provided a quiet sanctuary from the chaotic, deafening thoughts of the mortal world.
But now, that sanctuary was completely obliterated.
A roaring tidal wave of her raw, agonizing thoughts slammed into his brain like a physical sledgehammer.
He could hear the dripping blood from her memories, the heavy clanking of execution chains, and the wild, frantic panic she felt for the human boy lying in the mud.
The sheer emotional violence of her awakening was overwhelming, forcing dark vampire blood to leak slowly from his left ear.
Yet, as he dropped to one knee in the mud, gasping for air, a dark, twisted smile stretched across his pale lips.
The pain was agonizing, but the creepy obsession inside his heart only multiplied.
He didn’t want to shut her up to regain his peace; he wanted to swallow her beautiful, chaotic storm whole and lock it inside his own chest.
”Secure the anomaly!” Julianus Thorne roared, sensing the extreme danger.
Five elite High Council enforcers lunged forward, throwing heavy energy nets.
Scarlett, emerging through the shattered glass of the conservatory, moved like a phantom.
She sliced through the nets with a crescent blade of raw aura, twisted the wrist of the first agent, and kicked the second straight into the stone fountain, shattering it into pieces. Find the original chapter at novelping.com.
But Julianus was a veteran of the High Council, not an opponent to be underestimated.
His obsidian cane spun rapidly through the air, instantly deploying a massive violet gravity sphere directly over Scarlett’s head.
”Kneel!” Julianus hissed.
The pressure multiplied by a hundred.
Scarlett’s knees buckled as the immense weight pressed down on her lungs.
Her glowing aura flickered under the purple suppression, pinning her to the cracking concrete.
But instead of submitting, Scarlett forced her head up, her silver-ruby eyes glaring through the rain.
With a fierce scream, she gathered the exploding energy around her and threw a concentrated shockwave upward, shattering the gravity sphere into thousands of violet sparks.
Julianus didn’t pause.
The moment his sphere broke, he closed the distance with terrifying vampire speed.
His obsidian cane struck forward, surrounded by heavy, crushing gravity fields.
Scarlett blocked the first strike with her bare forearms, her ruby aura clashing against his purple magic with loud, thunderous cracks.
Julianus swept his cane low, forcing her to leap back, before unleashing a volley of localized gravity blades that sliced through the concrete driveway, tearing her clothes and leaving shallow, glowing cuts on her skin.
Scarlett was fighting fiercely, but Julianus’s centuries of combat experience were pushing her back, step by painful step.
From the mud, Lucas watched the exchange in absolute shock.
His breathing was shallow, his chest burning from his broken ribs, but his amber eyes were wide with terror and confusion.
This isn’t her, a voice whispered inside his mind.
The girl he had protected in the dark cells of Sector 4 had been quiet, fragile, and human.
The woman standing before him now was an ancient storm of forbidden magic, destroying elite agents with her bare hands.
The raw, suffocating pressure radiating from her didn’t feel human at all.
A deep chill of fear ran down his spine, but it was immediately swallowed by a fierce, protective concern.
He could see her body trembling under the weight of her own power; she was burning herself from the inside out.
She’s going to die if she keeps this up, Lucas realized desperately.
Using the last ounce of his strength, he dragged his broken body through the mud, reached his fallen silver plasma dagger, and fired a localized kinetic blast directly at Julianus’s flank.
The blast hit the High Justice’s shoulder, breaking his stance and forcing his gravity shield to waver for a crucial fraction of a second.
Free from the suppression, Scarlett lunged forward, channeling every ounce of her remaining energy into a direct strike.
Julianus reacted with lightning speed, raising his heavy wood cane to block her path.
BOOM!
The collision of her ruby mana against his gravity defense created a deafening explosion.
The shockwave completely shattered the remaining iron gates of the estate.
While Julianus managed to deflect the lethal force, the sheer impact pushed the High Justice backward, forcing him to slide twenty yards across the wet concrete, his cane sparking violently against the ground.
He wasn’t defeated, but he was temporarily pushed out of the fight. The source of this chapter is g.com.
Scarlett stood panting in the pouring rain, her physical body trembling as her aura began to spark dangerously.
She reached her hand out toward Lucas, her lips forming his name.
But before her fingers could touch him, a freezing shadow blocked her view.
Valerius appeared between them.
Without a single word, he wrapped his cold, powerful arms around her waist from behind, pulling her flush against his chest.
A massive dome of absolute frost erupted from the ground, locking them inside a protective ice barrier and cutting them off from Lucas, Julianus, and the rest of the world.
Inside the freezing dome, the chaotic noise of the storm vanished, replaced by a deadly, suffocating silence.
The walls of thick ice reflected their glowing auras like a hall of mirrors.
Valerius buried his face deeply into the crook of her neck, inhaling her sweet, metallic scent while completely ignoring the roaring torrent of memories still playing inside his own brain.
His grip was bruisingly tight, his pale fingers locking her arms down against her sides so securely that she couldn’t even lift a finger.
”You destroyed my silence, Scarlett,” Valerius whispered against her skin, his voice dripping with a terrifying, absolute fascination that bordered on madness.
“Your mind is a beautiful, agonizing disaster.
I can hear how much you want to save that human boy.
I can hear the screams of the faceless people from your past.
I can hear every single secret you just unlocked.”
Scarlett struggled against his hold, but her body was completely exhausted from the mana outbreak.
The sudden rush of those mysterious flashes—the blood-covered corridor, the crying boy—was making her head spin with confusion.
“Let me go, Valerius…
I don’t even know who I am anymore…”
”It doesn’t matter who you were,” Valerius murmured, his dark eyes staring coldly at the ice wall as his arms tightened further, trapping her against his freezing chest.
The sheer possessiveness in his gaze was absolute; he looked like a king who would gladly let his entire kingdom burn down just to keep his prize.
”Your silence belonged to me, and now your storm belongs to me too.
I don’t care if your thoughts drive me insane, my love.
You will burn inside this cage with me forever.”
The silence has been shattered!
Scarlett’s forbidden power has clashed with High Justice Julianus in an epic, multi-round explosion, and a glimpse of her dark, 300-year-old past has finally surfaced!
But instead of letting her run to Lucas, Valerius has locked her away inside an absolute ice barrier, choosing to embrace her chaotic mind rather than lose his possession!
Question for the readers: Who was the crying boy in Scarlett’s memory flash?
Now that Valerius can hear everything—including her deepest secrets—will his twisted obsession turn even darker inside the ice dome?
And can Lucas find a way to break through Valerius’s absolute frost?
The real struggle begins now!