CHAPTER 145: Insurrection-14

CHAPTER 145: Insurrection-14

The night weighed like a slab over the house. Marcus and Agnes breathed at slow intervals, lulled by exhaustion; Fénix, on watch, looked at his phone in the dim light: 34 missed calls from Enid, dozens of unread messages. He didn't want to read them. Not yet. He put the phone back in his pocket and returned his gaze to the window, attentive to the silence.

A creak on the roof tiles made him sit up. Footsteps, light but deliberate, moved across the roof. Fénix approached the bedroom door and, with a gesture, shook Marcus and Agnes awake.

"Wake up!" he whispered firmly. "Something's happening up there."

Marcus opened his eyes abruptly. Agnes, startled, grabbed the pistol she had left by the bed. The three of them stayed still, listening. A sharp metallic whistle announced the entry: a smoke grenade fell through the window, filling the house with a white veil that smelled of gunpowder and burnt rubber.

"Quick!" Marcus shouted. "To the car! Now!"

Groping through the curtain of smoke, they headed for the exit. The night outside was controlled chaos: the street, once quiet, now vibrated with mixed sounds—footsteps, muffled voices, the hum of a distant engine.

When they reached the car, Agnes fumbled with the lock on the back door. A gleam in the darkness, and before anyone could react, a figure emerged from the shadows. Mara Voss appeared as if the night itself had brought her: thin, lethal, cold-eyed.

With a sharp movement, Mara grabbed Fénix by the hood and the lapel of his jacket, lifted him, and threw him with bestial force against a lamppost. Fénix's body slammed into the metal; he spun and fell onto the pavement, dazed. He didn't even have time to react.

"Mara!" roared Marcus, and drew his gun in a leap. "Back off!"

Gunfire filled the street. Marcus pulled the trigger furiously, but Mara was already in motion: she threw a knife that sliced through the darkness. The blade hissed, and Marcus's gun thundered grotesquely; a dry sound, as if something internal broke. The stock recoiled in his hand; the weapon was useless, smoking.

"Marcus!" Agnes screamed, horrified.

Mara approached Fénix with measured steps, cold as a sentence. It wasn't a word fight: her intention was to dominate. She lifted him by the collar of his jacket and shoved him against the sidewalk; her fists began to rain down on Fénix with clinical precision. Each impact was calculated to weaken him, not to kill him. Fénix struggled, tried to get up, but Mara was a machine in hand-to-hand combat: she blocked, counterattacked, unbalanced him.

"Fight back," Mara spat between blows, her voice under control. "Uber Lycan."

Fénix tried to respond, his mouth cut by a blow, but his words were lost between one hit and the next. Marcus, with his useless pistol, looked for another option: a crowbar, a stone, anything. Agnes could barely watch; her hands shook so much she couldn't manage to load a second cartridge.

The beating was crude in execution, not in bloody details: Mara subdued him with speed and coldness. Fénix fell several times, got back up, but Mara's advantage wasn't just technical—it was also strategic: she was wearing him down, stealing his breath, his posture, his will for an instant.

The night rain slammed onto the asphalt as Mara continued flaying Fénix with a lethal choreography; her blows were bursts, precise and too fast. Fénix managed to land a few—a cross, a clumsy hook—small flashes of strength in a tide dragging him down. A cold thought stuck in his head: *She's faster than Alex. Much faster.* He could barely read her hand movements; dodging was a luxury he bought in seconds.

When he finally landed a right hook on her jaw, Mara staggered just enough for Fénix to hardly believe it. He breathed, pain in his face and ribs, and drew the Matilda Mk II from its holster. He aimed with the hand that still responded and pulled the trigger. The bullet fired with a dry snap… and barely grazed Mara. The impact was almost ornamental: the silver-nitrate bullet penetrated the fabric, scratched her shoulder, but Mara didn't even blink. The woman was a storm with skin.

She landed two more blows to his face; each impact reoriented him. She threw him into the street as if he were a broken doll. Mara drove her hand into his back and, with a fluid motion, drew a gleaming sword from her side. The metal shone sinisterly for an instant under the streetlights. Mara sought a clean, professional decapitating arc.

Fénix, in an animal instinct, reached out and caught the blade. It was pure silver: the edge burned his palm as if biting fire. The pain exploded, searing, and tore a choked scream from him; yet he managed to hold the sword just long enough for the steel to graze his cheek in a line that opened the skin and left a warm trail.

Mara threw herself on top of him, ready for the final cut. Fénix's world slowed down: the tip of the sword seeking the nape of his neck, Mara's face rigid with concentration. And then an earth-shattering blast tore through the night: a Kestrel-12 shot. The shotgun's shockwave detonated so close it raised a rain of water and dust. Mara flew in a brutal arc and landed several meters away, like a shattered doll. A second of silence swallowed the scene.

Agnes, unarmed moments before, had received the shotgun from Marcus when he saw the desperation. Trembling, with her aim skewed by fear, she pulled the trigger. The Uber-Slag shell exploded in a wall of brute force that detonated against Mara's torso and knocked her out of combat—or so it seemed. She lay there, motionless, in a dark puddle.

Fénix, with a scorched palm and an open cheek, pulled himself up jerkily. The world hurt in every seam: his breath a dagger, his vision blurred by the blood running down his temple. He leaned against the car's railing, his legs like jelly, and looked at Mara a few meters away on the ground, apparently unconscious.