All Chapters of Husband Returns home has a Supreme God: Chapter 201
- Chapter 210
290 chapters
CHAPTER 201
Timboti crossed the distance between them in several quick strides, and when he reached her, his voice had dropped to a register that was private and urgent. "Your phone should not be ringing," he said. "A gate—even a low-class gate—jams all communication signals in its radius. Completely. No calls in, no calls out, no data. Every device in the affected area goes dark." His eyes were very focused on hers. "That is one of the first things that happens when a gate opens. It is one of the ways we confirm a gate has opened." He paused, and the pause carried the weight of what he was not yet saying. "If your phone is ringing, it means the gate is not jamming signals. And if the gate is not jamming signals—"He stopped. Looked at the phone in her hand. Looked back at her face."Answer it," he said.She pressed accept and raised the phone to her ear. "Hello—"Her husband's voice came through immediately, without preamble, carrying the brisk efficiency of a man who had called with a specific
CHAPTER 202
The red had barely finished saturating the gate before Rose's mother felt the ground shift beneath her feet—not physically, not the trembling of earth or the instability of mountain terrain, but the internal shift of a woman whose body had decided, independently of her conscious mind, that what she was looking at was something she was not equipped to be near.Her legs held. Barely.She pressed her back against the estate wall and stared at the gate with the wide, fixed attention of someone who cannot look away from something that every instinct is screaming at them to run from. The red was not like any red she had seen before. It was not the red of fire, which had warmth in it, which carried the familiar, almost domestic associations of heat and light and the ordinary dangers of combustion. This red was cold. It was the red of something that had never been warm, that existed in a register entirely outside the spectrum of things that belonged in the world she had woken up in this morni
CHAPTER 203
He said it again, louder, turning to face his senior officers with an expression that had shed the last of its professional ease and replaced it with the focused, stripped-down intensity of genuine alarm. "This is bad."One of the level-eight Kings of War—a woman in her forties whose bearing suggested she had seen more gates than most people in the formation—was already moving, already repositioning, her eyes fixed on the black gate with the calculating attention of someone running numbers that were not coming out in their favor. "A black gate," she said, her voice flat and precise. "With black smoke bubbles." She paused. "That is not a standard classification.""No," Timboti confirmed. He was staring at the gate, and the stare had the quality of a man looking at something he had studied in theory and hoped never to encounter in practice. "It is not." He turned to the formation, and his voice carried now with the full force of command, stripped of everything except the essential. "How
CHAPTER 204
Timboti stood in the middle of the formation, and for one moment—just one, brief and quickly suppressed—the expression on his face was the expression of a man who was genuinely, deeply concerned. Not the professional concern of a commander managing a difficult situation. The human concern of someone who understood that the situation had moved outside the boundaries of what the people present could reliably handle.Then the commander reasserted itself, and his voice came out clean and hard and absolute."All civilians—into the house. Now. Everyone who is not military personnel, get inside the building and take cover. Move quickly, move calmly, and do not stop moving until you are inside." He turned to the formation. "Military personnel hold position. Full alert. Maximum readiness. Whatever comes through that gate, we meet it here."Rose's mother did not need to be told twice. She was already moving, her heels finding the stone of the terrace with the rapid, uneven rhythm of a woman who
CHAPTER 205
The tears came without warning and without dignity.Rose's mother had spent the better part of the morning constructing and maintaining a version of herself that was composed, purposeful, socially fluent—a woman in control of her circumstances and her presentation, moving through a difficult world with the practiced grace of someone who had learned that composure was its own kind of power. She had held that version of herself together through the conversation with Timboti, through the arrangement, through the gate turning red and then black, through the sprint into the building.But there was a limit. There was always a limit. And she had reached hers.She pressed herself against the interior wall of the main hall, her hands coming up to cover her face, and the tears came out of her with the force of something that had been held under pressure for too long and had finally found its release point. Not the quiet, dignified tears of a woman moved by ceremony or sentiment. These were the
CHAPTER 206
And then the roof went.The sound of it was enormous and immediate—not the gradual, warning creak of a structure under stress but the sudden, total violence of something being removed by force. Stone and timber and the accumulated weight of a roof that had stood for generations simply ceased to be above them, replaced by the open mountain sky, grey and churning, the black gate visible in the distance above the burial ground, its smoke bubbles still drifting with their obscene, patient deliberateness.The debris came down with the roof.Not all of it—most of the structural material went outward, thrown by whatever force had removed the roof rather than simply dropped. But enough came down. Fragments of stone, splinters of timber, the shattered remnants of the decorative elements that had lined the ceiling—they rained down on the people pressed against the floor with the indiscriminate, impersonal violence of a world that had stopped caring about the distinction between the living and t
CHAPTER 207
Beside her, still pressed against the floor, Elizabeth said nothing. Elizabeth, who had been the composed one, the reassuring one, the woman who had grown up in a military family and understood these things and had told her not to worry—Elizabeth was silent in the way that people are silent when they have looked at something and found that they have no words for it.The shock had moved through the hall like a second wave, following the physical impact of the roof's removal and the debris and the spiritual pressure. It moved through the assembled civilians and settled into them, and what it left behind was the particular stillness of people who have been frightened past the point where fear produces action and have arrived at the place where it simply produces paralysis.Rose's mother lay on the cold stone floor of a roofless hall on a mountain, her cheek bleeding from the cut the debris had opened, her forearm stinging, the mountain sky above her churning with the impossible black of
CHAPTER 208
The mountain had become a battlefield.There was no other word for it, no softer framing that could contain what was happening on the terrace and the burial ground and the open stone spaces of the estate. The careful, solemn geography of a funeral gathering—the arranged chairs, the ceremonial drapery, the dignified spacing of a space designed for grief and remembrance—had been consumed entirely by the chaos of an engagement that no one had planned for and no one was fully equipped to handle.Timboti stood at the center of it and made the only decision that remained available to him."All of you," he said, his voice cutting through the noise of the confrontation with the sharp, carrying force of a man who has moved past strategy and arrived at the place where only truth remains. "There is no more holding formation. There is no more coordinated defense. If you want to survive this—if you want to walk off this mountain—you go all out. Every one of you. Maximum output, full potential, eve
CHAPTER 209
The lower-ranked soldiers were falling.The level-one and level-two Kings of War had been the first to go—overwhelmed not by single opponents but by the cumulative pressure of multiple engagements, their cultivated spiritual energy depleted faster than they could recover it, their defenses eventually failing under the sustained assault of creatures that did not tire and did not hesitate and did not feel the things that made human soldiers occasionally pull back from the absolute edge of what they were capable of.Rose's mother watched a young soldier—he could not have been more than twenty-five, his face carrying the particular combination of determination and terror that belonged to someone who was doing the bravest thing they had ever done and knew it might not be enough—go down under the combined assault of three of the human-like monsters. He went down fighting, his spiritual energy flaring in a final, desperate burst that took one of the three with him, but he went down.She look
CHAPTER 210
The news coverage was fragmented and incomplete, as news coverage of gate events always was in the early stages—the reporters positioned at the base of the mountain, their cameras pointed upward at the atmospheric disturbance visible above the peak, their voices carrying the particular combination of professional composure and barely suppressed alarm that journalists deployed when they were covering something that exceeded their prepared categories. The gate was visible from the base. The black of it was visible even from that distance, a darkness above the mountain that was wrong in the way that all gate phenomena were wrong—too concentrated, too deliberate, too clearly not a natural weather event.The crawl at the bottom of the screen said: *S-CLASS GATE EVENT CONFIRMED — MOUNTAIN DISTRICT — MILITARY RESPONSE MOBILIZING — CIVILIANS ADVISED TO EVACUATE SURROUNDING AREAS.*S-class.Rose's father had been in proximity to the military world long enough to know what S-class meant. He had