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ArabicArknights: The Scarlet Devil of Terra — Chapter 15
Chapter 15: devastating Explosion
“Are you looking for me?”
A familiar, childish voice rang directly in her ear, sending a spike of ice deep into her bones.
Ivanova stiffly turned her head, desperately trying to look over her right shoulder toward the source of the sound, only to feel a sudden, piercing sting on the left side of her neck.
“Flandre thanks you for washing your neck so clean.”
Through the vanity mirror, Ivanova watched her own demise in absolute terror. A young girl was leaning over her back, her small, unnaturally sharp teeth sinking effortlessly through flesh and tearing into her aorta. At the exact same moment, another completely identical girl floated casually in the air nearby, tilting her head and greeting the dying woman with a bright, innocent smile.
It was exactly like back in the village.
Ivanova wanted to scream for the guards. She wanted to fall to her knees and beg for mercy. But as she opened her mouth, the only sound that escaped her ruined throat was a wet, rattling gasp. As the blood rapidly left her body, her fading mind drifted back. How long had it been since she last heard a sound like that? It was the exact noise her son had made right before he died, when he had desperately wanted to say something to her but simply couldn’t.
‘So that’s how it is…’
A single tear rolled down Ivanova’s pale cheek before the darkness took her completely.
After quickly draining the sweet, warm blood of the woman in her arms, Flandre stepped back. She gave the newly formed mummified corpse a light squeeze, watching with fascination as it instantly crumbled into fine gray dust.
Hearing a faint noise, Flandre turned her head toward the hallway. A young Ursus girl had just stepped out of a neighboring room to fetch some water and had frozen in place, witnessing the entire gruesome scene through the open doorway.
Flandre offered a polite, sweet smile. She pinched the edges of her skirt with both hands and performed a flawless, ladylike curtsy to the terrified witness—exactly as her older sister had taught her—before vanishing into thin air.
A second later, a piercing, hysterical scream echoed through the quiet corridor. Doors slammed open as people rushed out to see what had happened, but the trembling girl could only point a shaking finger at the empty spot where the little vampire had just been, entirely unable to form a coherent word.
With her primary target dealt with, Flandre skipped happily straight toward the Confidential Documents Room.
Although the intelligence stored here was vital to the military, the internal defenses were surprisingly lax. Aside from two heavily armed guards stationed at the heavy iron doors, there were no additional security measures inside. She slaughtered the two guards with a casual swipe of her hand, their bodies dropping silently to the floor, and pushed open the heavy doors.
Looking at the towering rows of filing cabinets and the countless neatly arranged dossiers inside, Flandre tapped her chin and scratched her head.
There were simply too many papers. If she only used her ‘Eye’ to destroy them one by one, it would take entirely too long, and Flandre hated being bored.
Fortunately, she had a much more entertaining method.
“Laevateinn!” she cheered, raising her small hand high into the air. A massive, crackling longsword forged entirely of intense, roaring flames manifested in her grasp.
“Hahahaha!”
The little girl darted through the aisles with a silver-bell-like laugh, spinning like a dancer. The flaming greatsword swept across the metal cabinets and paper stacks, igniting them instantly upon contact. In less than a minute, the entire Confidential Documents Room was transformed into a roaring inferno.
“What is going on out there!”
The Confidential Documents Room was situated deep within the core sector. The thick, acrid smoke billowing from the sudden fire immediately caught the attention of the Fourth Army Group’s top brass.
“Report! An enemy has infiltrated the command camp and burned all the intelligence in the Confidential Documents Room!”
The disastrous news arrived at the command center almost instantly. Upon hearing the report, the commanding officer standing near the entrance of the Command Headquarters turned pale with absolute rage. This was the beating heart of the Fourth Army Group. If an enemy could infiltrate this deeply without triggering the perimeter alarms, did that mean the assassin could take his head at any moment?
He pointed a trembling finger at the adjutants around him and launched into a furious, spit-flying tirade about their incompetence.
Then, a sweet, girlish voice chimed in from right beside him.
“You’re right, you know. Killing you on the way here is actually quite easy.”
The officer tried to whip his head toward the voice, but he suddenly realized his subordinates were no longer looking at his face. They were staring in absolute, paralyzed horror at his chest.
Looking down, he saw a massive, gaping hole where his uniform used to be. The space where his heart should have been beating was now completely empty, the edges of the wound cauterized by an unnatural heat.
“No wonder some monsters only like eating hearts. This flavor really isn’t bad!”
That cheerful review was the very last sentence the Ursus officer ever heard.
“A Blood Fiend attack!”
One of the surviving adjutants lunged for the emergency console and slammed his fist down on the red button. Instantly, a shrill, deafening alarm began to blare, echoing across the entire military encampment.
“In the name of the Sanguinarch’s Court!” Flandre declared, flashing a wicked, bloodstained smile as Laevateinn materialized in her hand once more.
She swung her blazing weapon and charged directly into the terrified crowd of high-ranking officers. After a brief, violently one-sided slaughter, she deliberately left two lucky survivors cowering in the corners, destroyed every piece of communication equipment in the room, and dashed out the shattered front windows.
Across the base, thousands of soldiers had just woken up and were casually discussing what they would have for breakfast in the mess hall. The sudden, shrill wail of the base-wide alarm left everyone stunned for a precious few seconds.
“Move, move, move! Enemy attack alarm!” The harsh roars of the non-commissioned officers finally snapped the men out of their daze.
After sprinting to the nearby Armory and grabbing their standard-issue weapons, the soldiers began to form up rapidly on the massive parade ground outside. Under any other circumstance, such an efficient, disciplined gathering would have earned high praise from their superiors.
But this time, no commanding officers arrived to take charge. Instead, a tiny Blood Fiend girl wielding a flaming greatsword charged out from the burning wreckage of the Command Headquarters, loudly proclaiming the glory of the Sanguinarch’s Court.
If Flandre’s ability to destroy all things was an absolute terror against single targets, then Flandre wielding Laevateinn was an unmatched engine of mass slaughter.
The magical weapon expanded in her hands, transforming into a blazing blade dozens of meters long. With every cheerful, sweeping swing, she crushed, incinerated, and scattered the heavily armored Ursus soldiers charging bravely toward her.
“Hurry, hurry! The enemy is a Blood Fiend Caster! Where is our Caster Regiment!”
Seeing that the little girl’s combat power was completely defying logic, the surviving squad leaders desperately screamed for heavy Originium Arts support. As for the high command, the moment the soldiers saw the girl leap from the burning headquarters, they knew no one inside had survived.
The Ursus Caster Regiment quickly mobilized and joined the meat grinder.
As volleys of offensive Originium Arts rained down, interfering with her movements, Flandre’s killing speed finally began to slow. Realizing that the Blood Fiend was devastatingly lethal in close-quarters combat, the infantry stopped their blind, suicidal charges. Instead, they pulled back, allowing countless military drones strapped with high-explosives to swarm Flandre from all directions, perfectly coordinated with the Casters’ bombardment.
“You think Flandre doesn’t know Danmaku?”
Facing the overwhelming, multi-layered assault, Flandre giggled. Her form blurred, instantly splitting into four identical copies. Intense magical ripples expanded from their tiny hands, transforming into dense, blinding waves of colorful Danmaku that filled the sky, precisely intercepting the incoming drones and Originium Arts.
Deafening explosions erupted continuously across the parade ground as the two opposing barrages collided in mid-air. But Flandre was ultimately just one person. Once the massive Ursus military machine fully awakened and organized its ranks, she could only rely on her absurd mobility to maintain a chaotic stalemate against the ten-thousand-strong army.
Meanwhile, near the heavily guarded Armory, Joseph watched the mobilized troops rushing past his position. He knew his one and only opportunity had finally arrived.
He reached into his pocket, his fingers gently tracing the cold metal of a self-made transmitter.
It was a custom detonator, wired to activate a massive batch of heavy explosives that had already been fitted with remote fuzes. These specific munitions were stored in a deep inner vault, an area heavily shielded and completely isolated from external radio signals. The detonator could only connect to the fuzes if the signal was broadcast from directly inside the main warehouse gates.
Normally, as a mere Uniforms Administrator, Joseph would never have the clearance or the physical means to enter that restricted zone.
As for why such devastating explosives were pre-installed with remote fuzes, it was a dark reflection of the current Ursus national strategy. These munitions were designated for the mobile warships. To ensure rapid deployment when a warship docked for resupply, a ready-to-use stockpile was kept on standby.
Joseph walked steadily toward the main gates, his expression calm. Because he was wearing a standard Ursus military uniform, and because the fierce battle raging across the base had thrown the logistics chain into absolute chaos, dozens of soldiers were rushing in and out to grab extra ammunition. He slipped into the frantic crowd and passed through the heavy blast doors without issue.
“Brother, which unit are you from? Why don’t I recognize you?”
Not long after crossing the threshold, a sharp question broke through Joseph’s focused daze. He turned his head. A logistics guard was holding a loaded hand crossbow, aiming it slightly downward but watching Joseph with deep suspicion. Clearly, his overly calm demeanor in the midst of a base-wide panic had given him away.
Joseph offered a gentle, tired smile. “It’s me. Joseph, from the Clothing Management Department.”
“Ah, the Uniforms Administrator.” The guard squinted, sizing the older man up. The face gradually matched the reputation of the notoriously short-tempered quartermaster, and the guard’s hostile tone softened considerably. “Why aren’t you hiding in your quarters? What are you doing in the munitions vault!”
“Me?” Joseph’s smile widened slightly, a deep sense of peace settling over his weary features. “I’m here to do what I must.”
Without a second of hesitation, Joseph pulled the transmitter from his pocket and pressed the trigger.
The guard’s eyes widened in sudden realization, but before a single sound could escape his throat, a cataclysmic eruption of fire and force detonated from the deepest depths of the warehouse.
The initial blast triggered a massive chain reaction. Thousands of high-explosive shells and Originium charges detonated in sympathetic harmony, instantly blowing the entire, heavily reinforced Armory straight into the sky.
Miles away, the lookouts stationed on several High-speed Warships that were rushing toward the base to provide reinforcements could only watch in stunned silence as the entire northern sector of the military camp was vaporized in a blinding dome of light.
‘We’re screwed.’
That was the only thought running through the minds of the surviving Ursus commanders.
Even Flandre, who had been actively preparing for the blast, was caught off guard by the sheer magnitude of the shockwave. The concussive force picked her up and threw her hundreds of meters through the air like a ragdoll.
“Ah, ptui! Uncle Joseph, this power is way bigger than you said!”
Rubbing her head, her vision spinning slightly from the impact, Flandre sat up and looked at the apocalyptic sea of fire consuming the base. She couldn’t help but pout and mutter her complaints to the empty air.
Although she didn’t know exactly how the old man had planned to evacuate after succeeding, Flandre knew it was definitely time for her to run. Glancing at the horizon, she could already see the massive silhouettes of the High-speed Warships closing in from all sides.
Lowering her altitude, she hugged the treeline and flew away as fast as her wings could carry her. Even if an Ursus spotter managed to notice her escape trajectory now, the military had absolutely no spare capacity to chase after a single assassin.
The destructive yield of the chain reaction was far more terrifying than Joseph had ever calculated. The resulting firestorm directly engulfed more than half of the massive military installation. But the true horror lay in the payload itself; the stockpile had included a massive quantity of high-explosive Originium charges. As the munitions vaporized, a thick, deadly cloud of active Originium dust was carried by the shockwave and the wind. Within minutes, the Originium concentration across a ten-kilometer radius spiked to the highest possible threat level.
Thousands of surviving Ursus soldiers breathed in the dust, becoming part of the Infected before they could even comprehend what had happened.
The sheer scale of the explosion shook the entire Ursus Empire to its core.
A quarter of the Fourth Army Group’s top brass had been wiped out in a single morning, and the casualty rate among the enlisted soldiers was catastrophic. After military intelligence aggressively interrogated the hundreds of traumatized survivors, every single piece of witness testimony pointed directly south toward Kazdel—specifically, to the Sanguinarch’s Court serving under the Sanguinarch.
Many of the Old Nobility in the capital initially slammed their fists on tables, clamoring for immediate, bloody retribution. But as the true scale of the disaster became clear, their furious demands slowly faded into an eerie, fearful silence.
Deep inside the impenetrable walls of the Holy Steed Fortress, the current Emperor of Ursus, Fyodor, was holding a highly classified meeting with Minister Witte.
“Why would a Blood Fiend suddenly appear in Ursus territory, and why would they specifically target the Fourth Army Group?” Fyodor demanded, his voice tight with suppressed anger.
“Your Majesty, we haven’t received a complete intelligence picture yet,” Minister Witte replied smoothly, bowing his head. “We only know there were at least several operatives involved. One elite asset was responsible for causing chaos and pinning down the main garrison, while the others took advantage of the distraction to infiltrate the Armory and detonate the primary stockpile. But their exact motives and strategic goals remain entirely unclear. Some within the intelligence bureau speculate it might be retaliation for the incident this past spring, when the Eastern Military District marched south and clashed with the Sarkaz forces.”
Witte adjusted his glasses, softly recounting the compiled reports from the military staff. “After all, according to the official records, both sides suffered heavy losses during that skirmish, and our forces managed to kill several well-known experts belonging to the Sanguinarch’s Court.”
“But it’s been almost an entire year since that border incident.” The Emperor frowned deeply, clearly unsatisfied with the theory.
“There is an old proverb in Yan, Your Majesty: ‘A gentleman’s revenge is a dish best served cold, even after ten years.’ The Blood Fiends are long-lived creatures. Their perception of time is inherently different from ours. It is entirely possible they formulated this strike months ago and simply waited patiently until they found the perfect opportunity to execute it.”
“I don’t need ‘perhaps’or’possibly’!” Fyodor snapped, his patience fraying. “Arrange for our diplomats to question that Regent in Kazdel immediately. Ask Theresis if he can truly afford the price of launching a terror attack on Ursus soil, and whether the Sarkaz are prepared to face our wrath!”
Although Emperor Fyodor had deep, fundamental political disagreements with the commanders of the Fourth Army Group—and had secretly wished to purge those arrogant warmongers for years—an external attack was an entirely different matter. ultimately, those dead men were still Ursus citizens, and the fallen soldiers were still the loyal warriors of his empire.
Logically and emotionally, as the absolute ruler of Ursus, he had to step forward and project unbreakable strength.
On the other side of the frozen wilderness.
After escaping the blast zone, Flandre took a massive, winding detour through the forests to ensure no Ursus scouts were tracking her before finally making her way back to the Reunion Movement’s hidden base.
It was pitch black by the time she arrived. However, the operational Command Headquarters of the Reunion Movement was still brightly lit, the tension inside thick enough to cut with a knife.
The sheer concussive force of the morning explosion had been so immense that the low, rumbling thunder of it had been heard clearly dozens of kilometers away. After their forward scouts sent back frantic reports of the mushroom cloud, Talulah and the other leaders immediately deduced that Flandre’s mission must have been a success.
Otherwise, how could it be such a massive coincidence that the little vampire had departed yesterday, and the entire Fourth Army Group had gone up in flames today?
However, Flandre had not returned, and their hidden informants embedded within the Army Group had gone completely dark. Without any communication, the Reunion leaders had no idea what had actually transpired or if Flandre had survived the blast.
And so, they had remained in the command room, waiting anxiously for any sign of her return.
Just as the night deepened and the mood in the room shifted from triumphant high spirits to a heavy, suffocating dread, the heavy wooden door suddenly creaked open.
A small, familiar head poked cheerfully into the room.
“Good evening Talulah, Yelena, and Bo… Old Stubborn!” Flandre chirped, having long ago decided that the name Buldrokkas’tee was entirely too difficult for her to remember, and that ‘Old Stubborn’ was much more efficient.
Seeing the little girl completely unharmed, Talulah instantly rushed across the room and pulled Flandre into a tight, desperate hug.
Standing nearby, the beautiful Frostnova reached out a hand a fraction of a second too late. Realizing Talulah had already embraced the girl, Yelena slowly let her hand drop back to her side, a rare flicker of relief and slight regret crossing her cold features.
“You’re not hurt, are you?” Talulah asked, her voice trembling with lingering fear as she checked the girl for injuries. “This operation was simply too dangerous. I never should have let you go in there alone…”
After allowing Talulah a moment to calm down, the towering, armored figure of Patriot looked down at Flandre, his glowing red eyes solemn.
“What exactly happened? Tell us the details of the operation.”
Flandre happily wiggled out of Talulah’s grip, found a comfortable chair to sit in, and began to recount the entire adventure—from her departure the previous day, to her chance meeting with Joseph, the slaughter in the command center, and her chaotic escape after the devastating explosion.
As she finished her cheerful report, a heavy, mournful silence fell over the command room.
“Joseph… he’s probably…” Talulah started, her voice suddenly dry and hollow.
“This was his own choice. We must respect his sacrifice,” Yelena said softly, her tone solemn and respectful.
Based on Flandre’s detailed explanation of the base layout and the old man’s final actions, none of them believed Joseph had possessed nearly enough time to breach the inner vault, manually trigger the remote signal, and then sprint back to a minimum safe distance.
However, because the explosion was so utterly devastating, and the list of the dead and missing would number in the thousands, a low-ranking logistics officer like Joseph—who had been standing at ground zero—would naturally just be recorded as another casualty missing in action. There would be no body left to identify, and absolutely no evidence to trace the sabotage back to the Reunion Movement.
, the intelligence Flandre brought back regarding the Originium dust cloud changed everything. The fact that a massive portion of the surviving Ursus soldiers had instantly been turned into the Infected left the Fourth Army Group’s surviving command structure facing a brutal, impossible dilemma.
What exactly was the Ursus Empire going to do with an army of freshly Infected soldiers?