Chapter 76: A Breathtaking Assassin
Chapter 76
"How did you do it? The decoys at the airport, the fake signature... You even had Doris play the traitor so perfectly that even I fell for it. Were you ever actually in danger tonight, even without my help?"
Nyx kept her eyes on the road as a faint, terrifyingly calm smile touched her red lips.
"In the underworld, Alex, if you aren’t the one holding the leash, then you’re the person wearing the collar. I knew Silas was alive the moment he started buying up all those western holdings six months ago. I let him think he was outsmarting me. I let him recruit Vaughan, who was easy to bait, and I let him think he had turned Doris over to his camp."
She glanced at him, with amber eyes that shimmered with a dangerous intelligence.
"I also planned to use this opportunity to confirm whether you were truly an Awakened or not. How do you think the meeting place between Doris and those two men happened to happen on the day you went shopping?"
Alex’s eyes widened in shock once he began to understand her meaning. How could he have been so dumb? There was no way Doris would have a meeting about something as important as killing Nyx in a mall. Now everything was beginning to make sense. This time his look at Nyx had changed to how one would see a monster.
’How the hell is she so smart. This is borderline insane.’
Alex continued his questioning.
"So my anonymous message was what made you confirm that I would definitely show up?"
"In a way, yes. But I didn’t know when you were going to show up, as you usually tend to have a habit of being late. Besides I knew that my snipers wouldn’t be able to make it in time..."
"So you needed someone who would help you deal with the enemy’s snipers and also handle the mercenaries."
"Yes." She replied, and focused her gaze back on the road.
"You really are a very terrifying person, Nyx." Alex muttered while clutching his clothes closer.
Nyx didn’t deny it. She simply just pulled the car into his apartment building and looked at him.
"And you, Alex, are a very interesting one. Now go get some sleep. You must be really tired from what you just did today."
Alex nodded and got out. By the time he finally shut his house door close, the sound of Nyx’s car already echoed faintly in the distance.
He walked toward the bed without even bothering to change his smelly clothes, and plunged into its softness as the weight of today’s revelation pressed down on him.
He lay there in the silence of his dark room and stared at the ceiling. To be honest, he didn’t know what exactly he felt for Nyx. On the one hand she was part of his women so it was bound to develop some feelings sooner or later, but today’s revelation had left him feeling confused and slightly wary of her.
Everytime he closed his eyes he could still remember the cool, melodic tone of her voice as she explained how she had used him like a pawn to contribute to her success.
He had walked into that shipyard thinking he was the hero of the story, or the secret protagonist arriving in time to save the beauty from the jaws of death, but reality was far humbling.
And the fact that she had manipulated him just to confirm whether he was an Awakened or not, didn’t exactly go well with him. If anything, he hated the feeling of being handled, of being used. It gnawed at his pride.
Even the extremely minor affection notification from earlier was now beginning to feel like a stupid victory.
With a sigh, he closed his eyes, intending to let that feeling of exhaustion pull him into the void of sleep. Just as his consciousness was about to drift away, a faint barely noticeable sound caused his ears to twitch.
It was the faint, almost imperceptible sound of footsteps moving against the floorboard. It was so faint that a normal human ears would not have been able to pick up the sound. But Alex was anything but normal. With his enhanced hearing it was as loud as a normal footstep.
Alex didn’t move or change the rhythm of his breathing, instead he just remained perfectly still and pretended to have already fallen asleep. His plan was simple, wait for the intruder to get closer, and when he was close enough, strike the bastard down and beat the crap out of him.
Soon the intruder was now very close, standing just inches away from him with their hand raised high to strike an attack at his head.
In one quick explosive motion, Alex threw the covers upward, and using the fabric as a momentary distraction, he launched himself off the bed, spun in mid-air and whipped his legs out in a roundhouse kick aimed straight at the figure’s head.
Clang!
His legs didn’t hit the familiar feeling of flesh, instead it hit a forearm reinforced by something hard, like... metal!
The intruder didn’t even stumble. Instead, she just used the momentum of his kick to pivot, her movement so fluid that it reminded Alex of a snake.
Gritting his teeth, Alex followed up with a barrage of punches. Even when weakened after his fight with Gnash, he was still stronger than an average Early Realm Awakened in term of physical stats, but this intruder was no slouch either.
The intruder retreated toward the wall, with his hands moving in a blur of defensive parries. Alex continued to press forward, knowing that his small apartment was working in his favour. Now, there was nowhere left for the intruder to run, and no room for him to establish distance.
With a final, powerful shove, Alex drove his shoulder into the intruder’s chest, pinning whoever he was, against the far wall near his desk. At first his brows furrowed in confusion when he felt a soft bulging chest.
Wasn’t the intruder supposed to be a man?
At that moment, the moonlight through the cracked window illuminated his assailant’s face. Alex breath hitched, though he didn’t dare loosen his grip. The person pinned against the wall was an extremely breathtaking woman, with a face that almost matched the beauty of Jade, the campus goddess.
The woman was draped in a black, skintight assassin’s bodysuit that left absolutely nothing to the imagination, tracing every curvaceous line of her hourglass figure. Her hair was a waterfall of midnight black, framing a face with high, aristocratic cheekbones and eyes so dark they looked like twin voids.
"Who the hell sent you?" Alex growled while pinning her wrist against the wall. "Are you one of Silas’s people? Or were you sent by Renzo? Or Marcus?"
The woman didn’t answer, she just flashed him a seductive smile. At that moment, a cold, chilling mist began to radiate from her skin, and the temperature in the small room instantly plummeted. Alex could even feel the moisture in the air crystallize.
"Ah. It’s too bad that you’re also an awakened, if not a handsome man like you would have made a good toy." She whispered, her voice velvety and smooth.
Suddenly, her palms glowed with an ominous, frosty black light, that blended with the dark room. Alex felt all the hair on his body stand up, and his gut screamed at him to move.
He threw himself to the side just as three jagged, petal-shaped, shards of obsidian coloured ice, sharp as diamonds and dense as steel, shot from her hands. They moved through the air with a speed that matched that of a bullet, and embedded themselves deep into the wooden headboard of his bed.
’Great just my luck. An Awakened with the power to shoot black petal-shaped, ice shards is trying to kill me. At this point I’m beginning to think that God hates me."
The woman didn’t give him time to breathe. She raised her hand again, more petal-shaped shards forming in the air around her like a halo of frozen midnight glass.
Alex, watching her movements, knew that he couldn’t play the long game. Those shards were moving at the speed of a high-caliber bullet, so If he gave her even three feet of space, she would turn him into a pin cushion.
He lunged again, ignoring the freezing air that was beginning to crystalize on his clothes, and closed the gap before she could fire. Grabbing her by the waist, he forcefully tackled her against the wall, causing a loud bang, to reverberate across the room.
The fight quickly turned into a brutal brawl. The assassin was really agile, her body constantly slipped through his grip like water, but Alex raw strength was still superior.
Alex used his weight to stifle her movements, then he grabbed her wrist, forcing her arms upward so that she wouldn’t be able to aim her palms at his chest.
"Get... Off... Me!" She hissed, her dark eyes flashing with frustration.