They crossed the dark, damp drawbridge and left the downpour of Valdelobos village behind them. The towering silhouette of Salazar Castle finally rose into view.
In Leon's experience, the front gate of a medieval military fortress like this would be a kill zone bristling with defenders, capable of grinding any intruder into paste.
But when the group reached the heavy iron gate leading to the castle's front courtyard, what they saw brought every last one of them to a dead stop.
No fireballs raining from above. No shrieking cultists.
The castle's main gate, ten meters tall and nearly half a meter thick, couldn't be described as "damaged." It had simply ceased to exist. In its place gaped a hole over three meters wide, its edges fractured in a terrifying starburst pattern. The heavy door panels looked like they'd been hit head-on by a bullet train, ripped into massive chunks and flung dozens of meters to embed themselves in the stone sculptures of the courtyard.
"Wow..."
Luis Sera's eyes went wide and the half-smoked cigarette dropped from his lips onto his boot. He swallowed, circled halfway around the massive hole, and rapped his knuckles against a twisted steel plate, his voice carrying that trademark flippancy barely masking genuine shock:
"God... I remember when I snuck out through here yesterday, Salazar hadn't started this renovation project. Is this some kind of new minimalist interior design? Knock out the gate and the load-bearing wall in one go? Or did a meteorite hit?"
Sherry and Becky stood to the side and exchanged a glance.
They looked at the smooth point of impact and the absurdly violent damage pattern, and both of them twitched at exactly the same time. They knew this kind of destruction all too well. It wasn't an explosion. It was pure, brute-force kinetic energy taken to its absolute extreme.
Other than Uncle Ryan deciding that finding a key was too much hassle and punching the door open, I can't think of a single other explanation. Sherry screamed internally, biting her tongue to keep the words from escaping.
Given how the door panels warped, he didn't even use full force. One casual punch... Becky quietly looked away, her tactical glove drifting to the knife at her hip.
To protect Uncle Leon's fragile understanding of physics, the two of them silently agreed to keep their mouths shut.
Leon knelt on one knee in front of the rubble, pinched a bit of grey stone dust between his fingers and brought it to his nose, then swept his sharp gaze across the stress fractures around the site, his eyes intense and focused:
"No gunpowder residue. Not C4, not an RPG's shaped charge." He stood and calmly dusted off his hands, his tone carrying the steady gravity of a top-tier agent. "The force is concentrated at a single point, then explodes outward with kinetic energy comparable to a main battle tank's armor-piercing shell. No human could do this. There must be some kind of new heavy B.O.W. hiding inside the castle."
Sherry nearly lost it. She ducked her head and pretended to check her magazine to keep from laughing out loud. Becky nodded with a perfectly straight face and played along: "Uncle Leon's right. We need to be extra careful."
"Maximum alert, everyone." Leon raised his combat shotgun and took point. "The front door's been breached by force, so the castle's internal security is definitely fully active. Stay close."
They picked their way across the debris and entered Salazar Castle. Past the ruined entrance, they stepped into an extravagantly decorated audience hall.
From the elevated second-floor balcony at the far end of the hall, accompanied by a round of theatrical applause, three figures emerged.
The one in the middle stood barely five feet tall, dressed in ornate aristocratic finery, his face white as paper. Flanking him were two towering guards draped in black and red robes, their faces hidden.
The eighth castellan, Ramon Salazar.
"Welcome, welcome to my castle, Mr. Kennedy."
Salazar looked down at them from above, his shrill voice grating like fingernails on a chalkboard. "I don't know which rude beast made such a mess of my castle, but that won't interfere with this sacred ceremony. The holy blood inside that girl will become..."
Leon's brow furrowed. He had zero patience for villain monologues. His eyes went cold and his finger found the trigger:
"Who the hell are you..."
But before his gun barrel had even come all the way up.
A deafening blast erupted right beside him.
Sherry hadn't waited for Leon to finish. Her electromagnetic rifle fired instantly, and a high-velocity armor-piercing round tore through the air with terrifying force, screaming straight for the spot between Salazar's eyes.
The red-robed guard at Salazar's side reacted with inhuman speed, leaping from the second-floor balcony the instant the shot rang out, landing in front of Salazar and thrusting out a black chitinous claw said to be impenetrable even to heavy machine gun fire, reaching to catch the bullet bare-handed the way it always did.
It misjudged the weapon.
This was a custom kinetic weapon from Ryan.
No sparks. Only the shrill crack of shattering chitin.
The claw that was supposed to be an absolute defense splintered and blew apart on contact with the armor-piercing round, punching clean through like it was a thin cracker. Green fluid and black shell fragments exploded into the air. The round kept going, barely slowed, grazing past the ruined claw and skimming across Salazar's scalp, parting his fluffy white hair clean down the middle.
The guard looked at its claw, half the palm gone, and let out an incredulous shriek of pain, the eyes beneath its robe locked on Sherry below.
Dead silence.
Salazar's grand speech jammed in his throat. He reached up in a daze to touch his suddenly drafty scalp, then looked at his supposedly invincible guard now missing half a claw, and pure terror flooded his white face.
"My hair! You savages! You're the same as that lunatic from before, all of you, unreasonable savages!!"
Salazar was shaking head to toe, every scrap of lordly dignity gone. He hiked up his oversized aristocratic trousers and scrambled for the passage behind the balcony in a blind, stumbling sprint. Both guards closed ranks around him and vanished in an instant.
Leon held his drawn pistol and turned his head stiffly.
Sherry stood there with her electromagnetic rifle still trailing a wisp of smoke. She pouted, racked the bolt in one clean motion, and a scalding shell casing clinked against the stone floor.
"Sorry, Uncle Leon, what were you going to ask him?" She blinked, all innocence. "I saw that thing reaching out to catch the bullet, and I figured I shouldn't let up."
Leon stared at the puddle of green blood on the second-floor balcony, his mouth twitching.
He'd been about to draw and look cool doing it, and this girl had stolen his thunder so completely it wasn't even the same category anymore. That guard's speed when it moved to block had been too fast for even him to track, and one shot had blown its hand apart? What kind of monster-grade hardware were these two carrying?
"...I was going to squeeze some intel out of him first. Would it kill you to let the villain finish his lines?" Leon sighed.
"Uncle Ryan taught us," Becky said calmly from the side, "that when a villain starts giving a speech, that's when their guard is at its weakest. If you can shoot, never waste time listening."
"Brilliant." Luis gave a thumbs-up from the back. He'd latched onto Leon's group to stay alive, but now it looked like he'd picked the right people to stick with.
"Fine..." Leon rubbed between his eyebrows. "Since diplomacy's off the table, get ready to fight!"
With Salazar's retreat, the audience hall's defenses activated in full. Red-robed cultists armed with crossbows and tower shields poured in from every direction like a closing iron wall.
Leon's eyes narrowed and the presence of an elite agent snapped into place around him. "Cover me! I'm going upstairs to clear the crossbowmen!"
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