Outcast Queen: Her Return from Hell novel Chapter 479

"I'll go with you. I don't feel good about you going alone," Phoenix smoothly played along.

"Alright, hurry up then."

Phoenix raised an eyebrow and probed testingly, "Are you still in your original spot? Or are you already near the courtyard?"

"No, I'm waiting for you by the corridor."

"Got it, be right there."

Ending the transmission, Phoenix inhaled a breath of the cool night air. Moving like lightning, she dashed straight toward the corridor.

She glanced at the watch on her wrist. The countdown had hit the twenty-minute mark. She had exactly ten minutes left to locate the Patriarch and make a clean getaway.

Navigating past a rock garden, she indeed spotted an anxious guard standing in the corridor ahead, craning his neck as he waited to rendezvous with 'Lyle.'

Phoenix pressed the walkie-talkie button again, deliberately making her breathing sound ragged. "Sorry, I... I can't make it! That guy came back..."

Before finishing the sentence, she abruptly cut the signal.

"Lyle! Lyle?!" The guard paled in shock. Cursing under his breath, he abandoned his wait and sprinted deep into the corridor.

Phoenix shadowed him silently, glued to his trail.

Before long, the guard stopped in front of an unassuming single-story building.

Though the structure looked completely unremarkable on the outside, its door was outfitted with a top-tier security system.

The guard rapidly punched in a code, and with a heavy clunk, the massive door slowly swung open.

Seeing the guard slip inside, Phoenix immediately accelerated her approach.

However, the split second her foot was about to cross the threshold, every hair on her body stood on end!

Something was wrong!

It was too easy.

Everything felt like a meticulously calculated script. The eerie sensation of being led by the nose instantly spiked to the maximum.

Phoenix snapped her gaze up, staring dead at the open door, her pupils contracting sharply.

Without a microsecond of hesitation, she forcefully killed her momentum, dug her heels in, and pivoted to retreat.

In the exact moment she turned, an overwhelming shadow of death crushed down on her like a falling mountain!

Relying purely on beast-like instinct, Phoenix dove fiercely forward.

"Bang, bang, bang—!"

A volley of scorching bullets roared past, practically grazing her scalp, and shattered the bluestone pavement where she had just stood.

A trap!

Phoenix had no time to think. Using her momentum, she rolled like an eel into the blind spot of an adjacent alleyway.

Immediately, another dense hail of gunfire swept over, bullets clipping the edges of her coat and blasting her cover into flying shards of stone.

Had she not endured the hellish, life-and-death crucible of Blackwood Penitentiary under Yara's tutelage—engraving danger perception into her very marrow—she would have been perforated into a sieve right then and there.

However, she didn't make it far before her path was blocked dead.

Dozens of heavily armed guards with twisted, murderous faces stood like an iron wall before her. Rows of dark muzzles all locked precisely onto her vital spots.

"Hehe, run! Why did you stop running?" A skeletal man, toying with a cold, gleaming dagger, sauntered out from the crowd with a sinister grin.

Faced with an absolute dead end, Phoenix's cold eyes instead erupted with a terrifying, bone-chilling ferocity.

"Get the hell out of my way!"

She let out a sharp roar. Pushing off the ground with explosive force, she transformed into an arrow off the string, charging fearlessly straight into the dense wall of guns toward the skeletal man!

The skeletal man's face drastically changed. He never imagined that, trapped in a ten-to-one lethal scenario, this woman would dare to launch a preemptive strike.

"Fire! Turn her into a sieve!"

At the same time, the dark underbelly of Highcrest was churning with violence.

A devastating campaign of annihilation targeted at Astraea Group unfolded in tandem with Phoenix's night raid.

Swarms of masked thugs violently smashed through Astraea Group's doors, rounding up every employee working late inside the building.

Simultaneously, every faction that partnered with Astraea Group received a blood-soaked death warning.

It was only in this moment that the masses jolted awake.

Quentin, the local warlord who had entrenched himself in Highcrest for years, had finally bared his most gruesome fangs!

Tonight, he wasn't just casting an inescapable net; he fully intended to slaughter Phoenix, the overpassing dragon, once and for all within this boundless night.