From Outcast to Overlord The Unyielding Heir (Leander Ashcroft) novel Chapter 549

"That's... a homing missile?"

Leander felt it the instant his spiritual strength dipped.

A spike of danger stabbed through his senses.

He barely managed to pivot and slip a half-step aside before a black blur ripped past his flank, missing him by inches.

The thing was moving at an insane pace—three, maybe four times the speed of sound—pure supersonic terror.

As it screamed by, its shape burned into his vision.

A missile.

One meant to turn everything within dozens of yards into scrap.

Even his spiritual strength couldn't lock onto it in time. If he hadn't trusted that first warning and forced his body into a burst far beyond its limits, he would already be dead.

Devourer Form or not, Leander knew better than to think he could take a weapon like that head-on.

The rocket he had blocked earlier was a toy by comparison—maybe a tiny fraction of this thing's punch, if that.

Not even close.

A clean hit... and I'm finished.

The thought settled cold in his chest as the roars of its passage still shook the air.

"A homing missile? How can that be?"

Far below, Torre and the rest saw only a faint slit in the air, a blur streaking past Leander too fast for the eye to follow.

They were special operations soldiers. They knew weapons.

That was no gunship rocket.

It was a cruise homing missile, and something like that would never be mounted on an AH-1 Cobra attack helicopter. Only fighter jets—assets controlled by major military powers—could deploy a weapon of that class.

"They've brought in fighters, too?" someone whispered. "What kind of superpower is this desperate to take out our chief instructor?"

Skyler and the others stood numb, shock washing over their faces as the weight of it finally sank in.

They had started with armored columns and heavy vehicles. When that failed, AH-1 Cobra attack helicopters followed. Now, even fighter jets had been thrown into the hunt.

It was beyond extreme.

Leander was no longer regarded as a person. In their view, he had transformed into a hostile entity, a tangible danger requiring a complete military crackdown. What they employed now wasn't traditional combat but rather intense suppression—a barrage of fire designed to block all routes and eliminate him without mercy.

Whoooosh!

The missile shot forward for several hundred yards—then snapped around in a brutal arc, engines flaring as it locked back onto Leander.

This was the nightmare of it.

A homing missile earned its name because once computers and radar locked onto a target, it would hunt without mercy. The weapon carved across the sky, dragging a long plume of smoke behind it, like a steel spike being driven straight through the clouds—its tip aimed at Leander's chest, and that spike carried a warhead. One warhead was powerful enough to tear a 300-foot building clean in half.

The moment the missile swung back toward him, Leander reacted.

No pause.

He dropped.

His body plunged nearly 300 feet from the sky in a heartbeat.

The missile shot past his head, missing by just inches. It then sharply turned again, engines blazing as it continued its pursuit.

Leander slammed into the ground.

Boom!

His foot slammed down, causing the earth to cave inward and create a nearly 100-foot-wide pit. Before dust could rise, he moved on once more.

The ground burst.

His body surged forward like a cannonball, tearing through the desert while the missile roared behind him, relentless and fixed on its target.

Leander could drive his body to two, even three times the speed of sound—but only in bursts. It was intense, explosive surges that his flesh could trigger momentarily, rather than a sustained pace he could hold.

The missile had no such limit.

Boom!

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