Chapter 396: Red Hope and the Crimson Road

The air grew cold and stagnant, smelling of ozone and old medicine. He reached a heavy, reinforced door and pushed it open.

The room was silent, save for the rhythmic hiss of a high-grade respirator. There, in a bed surrounded by flickering monitors and humming mana-conduits, lay an old man. His skin was the color of parchment, stretched thin over a skeletal frame. This was the true patriarch of the Brooks family, the man who held the secrets that had kept them relevant for decades—now reduced to a dying shadow.

"Father," Daniel whispered, his voice trembling as he reached into his inner pocket and pulled out a small vial of shimmering crimson liquid. "Ethan... the boy did it. He took the entire coast. The world is breaking apart out there, but he sent this. There’s hope."

Jayce’s eyes fluttered open, milky and unfocused. Daniel carefully lifted his father’s head, pressing the vial to his pale lips. "Drink this. You won’t believe who your granddaughter’s lover turned out to be. I almost ruined everything, Father. I nearly forced Chloe to marry that McKenzie idiot, almost driving her away from the Colossus that is Royal. I nearly buried our legacy out of sheer stupidity, but Ethan... by some miracle, he doesn’t hold a grudge."

As the red potion slid down Jayce’s throat, a violent tremor racked his thin frame. The gray, sickly hue of his skin began to flush with a sudden, aggressive warmth. The monitors, once steady in their decline, began to scream with renewed vitals.

Jayce coughed, a deep, rattling sound that cleared his lungs for the first time in years. He gripped Daniel’s wrist with surprising strength. "Royal...?" he rasped, his voice sounding like grinding stones.

"He’s declared war on the entire Union, Father," Daniel said, tears of relief blurring his vision. "He stood in the Capitol and spat in the Deacon’s face. He’s annexed the East, but we have to move. Now. We’ve already offended the Scavengers by breaking the engagement, and they are coming for our heads. Even with Royal’s shadow over us, they’ll try to wipe us out before we reach their borders."

Jayce sat up slowly, the mana-conduits around his bed sparking as his own internal energy began to circulate again. He looked at his son, his gaze sharp and piercing once more. "Daniel... you are the Patriarch. Your decisions are the family’s fate. If you have chosen to bind our soul to this Ethan, then I will support you—even if it means our extermination."

"Then let’s get you to the sky," Daniel said, helping the old man stand.

The extraction was a chaotic symphony of roaring engines and shouting guards. Outside the estate, the Royal helicopter loomed like a black vulture, its rotors kicking up a storm of dust and dead leaves.

"Get the Patriarch into the bird!" Daniel bellowed over the noise. "Chloe, Leo, get in! The ground convoy moves in thirty seconds!"

The armored SUVs roared to life, forming a protective ring around the trucks carrying the family’s research and archives. As the helicopter lifted off, banking sharply toward the Royal border, the ground team accelerated onto the main highway.

They hadn’t even cleared the estate’s outer woods when the first explosion rocked the lead vehicle.

"Ambush!" a guard screamed over the radio. "Scavenger interceptors! Three o’clock!"

Blacked-out tactical vehicles burst from the treeline, their turrets spitting lead. The Scavengers weren’t trying to capture them anymore; they were trying to erase the "insult" the Brooks family had caused.

"This is Royal Escort Lead to Ground Convoy!" a voice cracked from the helicopter above. Ethan’s elite soldiers, clad in matte-black power armor, leaned out of the chopper’s bay doors. "Keep your foot on the gas, Mr. Brooks. We’ll handle the trash."

One of the Royal raised a sleek, oversized rifle soldiers—a weapon that hummed with red laser energy.

"Targeting Scavenger lead," the soldier said calmly.

The weapon in his hands didn’t look like any rifle Daniel had seen in his life; it was sleek, modular, and pulsed with a steady, menacing crimson light.

With a sound like a whip cracking through a vacuum—*Snap-Hiss!*—a beam of pure ruby light lanced down from the sky.

It didn’t explode like a shell. It *punctured*. The lead Scavenger interceptor was hit dead center on the engine block. In a fraction of a second, the steel turned to white-hot liquid, and the vehicle flipped, its frame glowing red as it tumbled into the treeline.

"What in the hell was that?" Leo shouted from inside the helicopter looking his sister. "That’s not a standard railgun!"

"Holy shit..." Daniel breathed, his knuckles white as he swerved around a patch of melting asphalt. He glanced at his father in the rearview mirror. "Father, it seems Royal has even more cards up his sleeve than he let on. That’s a stabilized laser array."

Jayce Brooks, leaning back against the leather seat as the red potion surged through his veins, stared at the retreating glow of the laser strike. His ancient eyes, once clouded by death, were now sharp with the cold calculation of a master strategist. He watched the next beam streak down, vaporizing a Scavenger’s reinforced door as if it were made of wet paper.

*Could I counter that?* Jayce wondered, his fingers twitching with a ghost of his former power. He had faced spiritual blades, and even tactical nukes in his prime, but a weaponized light that moved at the speed of thought... that was a different beast entirely. He wasn’t sure if his strongest barriers could refract something that precise.

The Scavenger radio frequency, which Daniel was monitoring, erupted into a cacophony of sheer terror.

"Command! We’re being picked off! I can’t see the projectiles! My sensors are—"

"Help! Someone help! It’s a laser! They have a goddamn—"

A static-filled scream was cut short by the roar of an explosion. Another crimson bolt had found a fuel tank, turning a pursuit vehicle into a localized sun.

"Clear path ahead!" the Royal pilot’s voice crackled over the intercom, sounding bored, as if he were discussing the weather. "Ground Convoy, maintain speed. We’ve neutralized the primary interceptors. Scavenger reinforcements are ten minutes out, but by then, you’ll be crossing the Massachusetts border into the Royal Neutral Zone."

"Copy that," Daniel said, his heart hammering against his ribs. He looked at the smoking wrecks behind them, the smell of burnt ozone filling the cabin. "Stay focused, everyone. We aren’t safe yet, but the King’s shadow is covering us now."