Elisha, Ocelot, and Malla fought in a fragile, lethal ballet of power, their movements blurring the air as they exchanged blow after calculated blow. Yet, as the seconds bled into a long, brutal minute, the perfect balance of the opening shattered. Elisha, the “legendary genius” of the Orphanage, was the first to fall out of step, his single blade a desperate flicker against the synchronized assault of two close to Centurion-level foes.
Elisha flickered in and out of existence,
Yet every wound closed almost as soon as it opened.
Ocelot watched from the shadows, rat-eyes gleaming, tonfas spinning lazily.
Elisha’s breath came in ragged gasps. Alone, he might have danced around Malla forever, bleeding her slowly.
But Ocelot was the scalpel that turned every opening into a death sentence.
As Elisha committed to a deep lunge—a grand technique intended to breach Malla’s guard—Ocelot seized the fraction of a second.
The twin tonfas in his grip whirled into cyclones, generating a violent, churning roar of contained Qi. In a flash that bypassed the natural limits of mortal speed, Ocelot vanished, his body folding space to reappear beside the entangled combatants. Elisha was forced to abort his killing blow, his sword-arm whipping around to meet the new threat.
“
BOOOM!
Ocelot thrust both tonfas forward, their polished ends pointing at Malla and Elisha. Two colossal seals of ochre-yellow Qi manifested in the air, spinning like millstones before slamming into the warriors. The force was concussive.
Elisha was thrown backwards like a pebble, his footing barely returning to him after a clumsy slide. Malla fared little better; though she had retreated and braced herself for the impact, the sheer power of the blast sent a deep, shuddering ache through her already injured arms.
Blood from Elisha’s previous strikes mingled with new trickles on her forearms, a testament to her costly defence. Yet, in her feral, blood-mad eyes, the last embers of reason were being consumed by a terrifying, fanatic light.
Ocelot licked blood from his whiskers.
“Still clinging to reason, goat? Let’s fix that.”
A guttural roar tore from Malla’s throat, a sound more animal than human, echoing the primal clamour of her Rhodar Beastman heritage. Her transformation was agonising and swift: her fingernails hardened into black claws, her skin tightened and deepened into a protective leather-like hide, and the nascent horns on her forehead swelled violently, curving into foot-long, ivory scythes. This was the call of Ancestral Power, the latent bestial majesty of her bloodline, an immense force that pushed her to the precipice of losing her mind. Power surged through her frame, expanding her height by twenty centimetres, granting her a monstrous strength that dwarfed her former self.
Malla became a juggernaut of instinct, leaping at Ocelot with a speed that nearly matched Elisha’s renowned velocity. Ocelot was forced onto the defensive, his tonfas barely able to absorb the impact of her berserk strikes.
Now, Elisha’s situation was dire: two stronger enemies, one a calculating tactician and the other a maddened brute, were focused entirely on his destruction. A peculiar, desperate shine—the cold calculation of a gambler with nothing left to lose—flashed in Elisha’s eyes.
Malla’s relentless onslaught created a crucial opening; she delivered a sweeping, armoured blow that shattered Elisha’s stance and sent a gush of blood trickling from his mouth.
Ocelot, ever the opportunist, used a powerful repulse from Malla’s attack to launch himself toward a distant wall. He used his Qi to anchor himself, instantly vanishing from sight, pooling all his energy for the decisive, final strike.
He reappeared behind Elisha, who was still reeling from Malla’s near-lethal assault. Elisha whipped his sword around, barely managing to block Ocelot’s tonfas, but the impact was a deafening chime of metal on metal, a shockwave that stole all sensation from his arms. The sword slipped from his paralysed grasp.
“You are definitely the weakest link,” Ocelot sneered, his voice laced with venomous amusement. “So, I think the easiest thing to do is get rid of you first.”
Tonfas crossed, halo of ochre-yellow light flaring like a diseased sunrise.
BAM!
The halo only lasted for a blink, but the effect was catastrophic. The strike lifted Elisha off his feet and flung him like a broken doll straight into Malla’s waiting fist.
The Beastwoman, driven entirely by bloodlust, saw only a target. She slammed her armoured fist into Elisha’s exposed back, sending him skidding across the floor in a sickening series of impacts. He struggled weakly to rise, his body a ruin, before finally collapsing into the oblivion of unconsciousness.
Ocelot moved to confirm the kill, but Malla, having momentarily forgotten Elisha, intercepted him with a relentless, animalistic fury.
“How hard it is to make a Rhodarian Beastman think once the beast wakes up. But that’s fine. The fly is swatted. Now I only have you, my perfect little toy.”
He spread his arms. A sickly yellow halo blossomed around his body. Shadows—indistinct, writhing—clung to his limbs like living oil.
“You see, Sagat let me play with your precious Stones,” he crooned. “My Qi was stagnant for years. One night with those beauties and…” he flexed, and the air itself bowed “—Centurion. Unstable, yes. But the Will is still settling. But even half-formed…”
The shadows sharpened into claws.
“…it’s more than enough for a mad goat.”
Malla’s crimson eyes narrowed. For the first time since the rage took her, a flicker of animal caution surfaced.
Somewhere in the darkness, Elisha’s fingers twitched. The nightmare was beginning.
Fifteen kilometres from the edge of Radon Woods, the Prairie itself held its breath.
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A lone figure moved across the endless golden ocean faster than any horse, any spell, any storm. The hurricane winds of Rhodar parted before him like silk curtains. Grass did not bend; it simply lay flat in perfect, worshipful circles, as though the land itself recognised its sovereign.
Sylas Du Sacar.
No cloak flapped. No dust rose. Only a faint ripple in the air, the barest distortion of heat above sun-baked stone, marked his passage.
He stopped.
Absolute silence fell for a hundred meters around his presence.
From his sleeve he produced a flawless dodecahedron crystal. Inside, twelve motes of starlight drifted in slow constellation. Eleven glowed soft silver. One burned blinding white and tugged insistently toward the black wall of trees ahead.
Sylas’s eyes—pale gold, ancient, unreadable—narrowed.
“That reckless cub went in without me.”
The crystal pulsed again, faster, almost frantic.
Distant thunder rolled from the Woods: explosions, combat Qi, the taste of blood on the wind.
Sylas closed his fist. The crystal vanished.
“Ansara’s dogs are already here. Then we end this before noon.”
He took one step.
The Prairie answered with a single, deafening crack of displaced air. When the dust settled, Sylas Du Sacar was gone. Only a straight, glass-smooth scar across the grass—three kilometres long—remained, pointing like an arrow into Radon Woods.
An Emperor was coming.
And the earth itself was afraid.
The supposed "throw-away mission" had become a slaughter. Five men had breached the orphanage walls, intending a simple grab for children to curry favor with the Shadow Leader and an Ansaran Captain.
Now one Grandmaster and one Master were dead. Another Master lay screaming, one arm completely useless. The last one was close to pissing himself, fighting the urge to flee.
In the center of the backyard, radiating an aura of lethal, quiet menace, stood Myra.
Her youth, her gentle face, and the simple, homespun dress she wore only amplified the horror. She was a beautiful, deadly apparition, her eyes devoid of mercy, staring at them with the cold indifference of one who has executed countless lives, reducing them to the level of bothersome insects.
Her killing intent was a palpable, choking miasma, thick enough to cling to the air and the snow-dusted ground.
The children, her adopted siblings, watched, transfixed, paralyzed by a terror far greater than any war horn. Their kind, disciplined, and loving elder sister had dissolved, replaced by a monster from the deepest pits of the world.
Varro, the leader of the surviving men, squinted, his survival instincts screaming. The hairs on his body stood on end, and his Qi pulsed instinctively, desperately. “Who are you?” he managed to rasp, his voice hoarse. “This Orphanage is certainly not normal. Why is such a young Centurion living here?”
Myra did not deign to answer.
Miriam had fallen again, kneeling beside Leo, tears streaming. She opened her mouth to call “Sister Myra…” but the words died in her throat.
Myra’s head tilted, her gaze settling on the only unscathed Master standing near the cluster of children, who had been hastily tied. She saw Brandon and Landa, two of her youngest, their grievous wounds shining, and then—she simply vanished.
She reappeared in the blink of an eye next to the last Master, her leg already whipping out in a bone-shattering kick aimed for his head, a vibrant halo of deep red Qi surrounding her beautiful limb.
BAM!
Varro appeared in front of his man, a crossed guard of his arms imbued with a desperate, glimmering silver-colored halo of Qi, barely managing to deflect the strike. The kinetic shockwave alone sent the Master tumbling away, crashing hard into the dirt. Varro himself was forced back two steps, his feet gouging trenches into the ground. Myra used the recoil, however, to instantly pivot and vanish again, reappearing next to the already injured Master.
Varro roared, scrambling to intercept, but he was a step too late.
CRACK!
Myra’s heel snapped down. The man's head jerked, his neck twisting 180 degrees, his last conscious thoughts a panicked, internal scream: What did we find? Why is there such a demon in a rotten corner of Ansara?
“SHIT!” Varro snarled. “You want to play dirty? Two can play that game!”
He made a devastating, instinctual decision. He launched himself toward the cluster of innocent children, intending to massacre them in a crude, brutal gambit to shatter Myra's concentration, disturb her Will, and make her desperate enough to make a fatal mistake. It was a fleeting, cowardly thought.
Myra was faster. She was instantly there, a shield of righteous fury, her speed unsurpassed.
The true clash began, a torrent of violence too swift for the human eye. The children and the last remaining Master could barely register the moves, their pupils unable to keep pace.
Myra’s style was unlike the grounded, powerful blows of her brothers, like Elisha or her father Mikael. She was a whirlwind of kicks—spinning, feinting, lashing out low, mid, and high in a tempest of motion that created winds capable of snapping bone. Varro’s style was a desperate, well-drilled defense, a frantic focus to understand the terrifying rhythm of her assault.
Myra vaulted into the air, seemingly floating for an eternal moment, three Acupoints flaring violently on each leg.
She spun in a deadly aerial gyroscope, her kicks descending in a barrage designed to overwhelm and drown Varro, each blow carrying the crushing weight of over seven thousand kilograms of force.
Varro realized he could not defend any longer; another minute and he would be pulverized.
With a final, desperate burst, his Qi flared, manifesting an indistinct apparition beside him: the shadowy outline of an animal's hoof, like a spectral horse. It was enough. The apparition barely deflected Myra’s final, violent kick, sending her backward with a powerful counter-recoil.
“You don’t know who you’re messing with, witch!” Varro yelled, his voice cracking. He knew the mission was a failure. Myra was at least his equal, if not stronger. Punishment was inevitable, but his survival was paramount to deliver this terrifying intelligence to his superiors.
He unleashed his Will, and his speed nearly doubled, becoming a blur as he fled in the direction of the Radon Woods.
But Myra was having none of it.
The unstable Qi around her back coalesced, forming an apparition of impossible beauty and dread: a two meters long singular wing, swan-like and magnificent, yet cast in the deepest obsidian black. It seemed to attach itself to her spine, not as physical limbs, but as a Will-forged hologram of power. Her eyes began to blacken, the sclera turning to midnight.
She did not vanish. The earth simply ceased to anchor her, and space became meaningless.
Varro had managed nearly thirty meters in a millisecond, but Myra was faster, instantly closing the distance. Seeing the black-winged apparition and her shadowed eyes, a memory from the deepest, bloodiest annals of the Frontier’s history surfaced.
Six years ago. A red-haired teenage girl who looked like an angel and killed like the apocalypse.
Hundreds of mercenaries, thieves, Beastmen — all dead on the Frontier.
“The Red Demoness of the Frontier…” Varro whispered, his heart turning to ice.
It was all or nothing. He spun, grabbing the knives from his belt and vaulting forward. In a clash of true Warriors, he who hesitated or had their Will overwhelmed was defeated. This was a war of Paths.
His Will manifested fully: the spectral head of a Mare and one of its powerful legs, its form now much clearer. His Qi flared with all his desperate might, fusing his two knives into one, mixing with the Mare's head to form what appeared to be the horn of a Unicorn.
“Face my Will, Demoness.
He melded with the image, charging straight at Myra.
She barely squinted, but she responded in kind. Since arriving at the Orphanage, this was the first time she opened her mouth to speak, her voice soft, cold and final.
“My Will… blackens existence.”
She seemed to multiply into a multitude of phantom figures surrounding the Mare, confusing the spiritual construct for a fleeting second before all the figures merged back into one, right on top of the Unicorn's head. Supported by her single, massive, obsidian wing, Myra raised one leg high above her target, the posture of a guillotine claiming its next victim.
A massive energy slash, a black void of cutting force, descended upon the spectral Unicorn.
SLASH!
The head of the Mare was sectioned clean off, and Varro’s Will-manifestation instantly shattered and vanished. Varro himself reappeared, his face slamming into the ground as Myra’s foot, still haloed in red Qi, landed squarely on the back of his head. He tried to look up at her, his eyes begging for the mercy she would never grant.
The children of the Orphanage stood still, their eyes firm on their Elder Sister’s dark, terrible image. Myra looked down at the cowering Varro, then to her children, and then… she stomped.
SQUASH!
Varro’s head exploded like a watermelon, scattering gore onto the dirt of the backyard where the children played and trained daily, the lone witness to their silent efforts, something sacred that was meant to be untouched.
The silence that followed was absolute. No children were killed that morning. But they lost much more.