The Almighty Dominance (by Sunshine) novel Chapter 684

The wormhole tasted like lightning and old copper.

Alex felt it before he understood it — that electric wrongness on his tongue, the metallic pull at the back of his throat, as the old man carried him through the tear in space.

Ragnar was there too, limp and silent, the old man bearing both of them through the fold in reality as though he'd done it a thousand times.

Alex had no idea where they were taking him. He knew only one thing with terrible certainty: he would not survive the journey's end.

Whatever mercy had kept him breathing until now would end the moment they stepped through the other side.

Move.

His nascent soul power surged from that buried place, and Alex threw every fragment of it against his own chains.

His muscles screamed.

His vision strobed white.

And then — the invisible lock cracked.

He didn't think. He twisted, drove his elbow back, and slammed it into the old man's chest with everything he had left.

The attack caught the old man off guard. He let out a moan — a short, wet expulsion of breath — and his grip failed.

Alex dropped to the tunnel floor.

And in those ancient, cold eyes, something new ignited. Something that had never been there before.

Disbelief.

"You—" He spit blood, chest heaving.

But Alex was already falling. Already tumbling out of the tunnel's current, the dimensional tide no longer carrying him but spitting him sideways, out and away.

The old man's arm shot forward.

The thunder came with no warning.

It struck Alex mid-fall, a lance of white-gold electricity that hit him square in the spine and detonated through every nerve ending simultaneously.

His body locked — every muscle seizing at once, joints fused, limbs rigid — as though someone had poured concrete into his veins and let it set.

He couldn't fly. Couldn't steer. Couldn't even scream.

He hit the tunnel wall like a stone thrown against glass.

The wormhole rejected him.

And then he was through, and everything turned upside down, and there was nothing at all.

He hit the street.

Not a landing. A collision. Cobblestone met the length of his body, and the impact punched the remaining air from his lungs, his palms skidding across the stone, the world spinning and refusing to stop.

He lay there for a moment, cheek pressed to the ground, blinking at a sky the color of a bruised peach.

Then the pain arrived, and it was thorough.

He pushed himself upright.

He was in a narrow alley wedged between two buildings.

Five men stood in a loose arc, staring at him.

He became aware, distantly, that he was naked. What remained of his clothes was scorched carbon clinging to the edges of nothing — the thunder strike had taken care of the rest.

He didn't have the energy to feel embarrassed. He barely had the energy to breathe.

At the far end of the alley, half-pressed into shadow, was a woman. She wasn't standing with the men. She was standing away from them, her body angled toward the wall, toward escape.

Alex understood the situation in the space between two heartbeats.

He looked at the five men.

"Whatever you were about to do to her," he said, voice stripped of everything except the quiet at the center of a storm. "Forget it."

The closest man tilted his head, and something almost like amusement crossed his face — the particular amusement of a person who has never once been told no and found the novelty of it quaint.

He held a tile-shaped object loosely in his left hand. His right hand came up with the casual authority of someone turning a doorknob.

Fire bloomed from his palm.

It came fast — a tight lance of it, orange-white and focused — and Alex's body responded before his mind fully caught up, pulling on his power, shaping a barrier, trying to shield him.

But something was wrong.

He felt it immediately. His cultivation, usually a steady current beneath his skin, moved like broken water.

Turbulent. Fragmented. The old man's thunder strike hadn't just paralyzed him. It had destabilized something fundamental — cracked his core like a hairline fracture running through the foundation of a building.

The energy he reached for frayed and scattered at the edges, and the barrier he'd managed to form was thin.

He let the fire hit it and felt the impact shudder through him like a bell being struck.

The core was damaged. Deeply. It would take time — real time, measured in months or years.

He exhaled slowly.

Alex rolled his neck once, felt something crack.

Fine, he thought. Then we do this the hard way.

He rushed to the nearest man and drove his fist straight into the man's face.

The impact was clean. Economical. The man's head snapped back and he crumpled before his body even understood what had happened.

"Get him," one of the others snapped.

They came all at once. Electric bolts. Streams of pressurized water. A lash of plasma that smelled like burning ozone.

The attacks converged on Alex from three directions, and he stood in the center of it and let them come.

Each strike hit him like a firm shove.

He moved through the barrage without hurrying, without wasted motion, one man at a time.

A palm to a throat. An elbow to a temple. A grab, a twist, a body folding to the cobblestones with a sound like laundry dropped from height.

Four strikes. Four men down.

He looked down at himself, naked.

He considered the five men.

Anyone who cornered a woman in a dark alley in a city they apparently owned wasn't going to miss one suit.

His gaze moved across them and settled on the best-dressed — a deep charcoal jacket with clean lapels, trousers that nearly fit.

He dressed without ceremony, ignoring the ache in his ribs, and began to go through their pockets with the quiet efficiency of someone performing a necessary task.

Tile-shaped objects. One from each of them — flat, humming faintly with stored energy, clearly significant in ways he didn't yet understand.

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