Messing With Her? Are You Crazy! novel Chapter 1217

Commander Kaelen raised a hand, a nasty sneer curling his lip. "Slaughter them."

At his command, the tension snapped.

The dozen mutated Augments unleashed a chorus of guttural, inhuman snarls and lunged for the battered Dragon-Thorn squad.

But in that exact moment, a sound interrupted the violence.

A single set of footsteps echoed out.

Tap.

Tap.

Neither loud nor hurried.

Yet, in the cavernous, echoing expanse of the underground garage, the rhythm cut through the chaos with impossible clarity.

It felt as if each step was a deliberate strike against their racing hearts.

Like the slow, methodical swing of a hammer.

The Augments, mere inches from tearing into the operatives, froze in place.

Both sides instinctively snapped their attention toward the sound.

Beneath a flickering fluorescent bulb, a slender silhouette stepped smoothly out of the gloom.

She was tall and lean, dressed down in a baggy black hoodie and dark cargo pants.

The hood was pulled low over her brow.

Her stride was relaxed, almost infuriatingly casual.

Yet, an overwhelming, suffocating aura of icy dominance and raw lethality radiated from her very presence.

She was alone, but she walked with the terrifying gravity of a conqueror backed by a phantom army.

For one surreal second, the blood-soaked garage descended into total silence.

Commander Kaelen stared at the newcomer, his brow furrowing in confusion.

This was the secure subterranean garage of the tech center. It was bad enough an elite Elyndorian strike team had breached the perimeter.

How the hell did a teenage girl wander in?

"Who are you?" Kaelen demanded.

The girl stopped walking.

She slowly lifted her head.

From the shadows of the dark hood, a breathtakingly beautiful face emerged.

But he never expected to see her here.

Had she followed them?

Or was the tech center her target all along?

The rest of the squad, oblivious to the encounter, turned pale when they realized a young civilian had stumbled into a warzone.

"Kid, it's not safe here! Run!"

"You have no business being down here. Get out of here now!" another operative barked urgently.

"Did you hear us? Run for the exit and don't look back!"

"We'll hold them off, just go!"

Every single one of them was bleeding out, staring down the barrel of their own gruesome deaths.

Yet, their absolute first instinct upon seeing Serena was to scream at her to save herself.

To these men, her motives didn't matter. The strange aura surrounding her didn't matter.

Faced with a pack of mutated, unnatural killing machines.

She was simply an unarmed citizen of their country, and it was their duty to protect her.