Chapter 878: The Hotel Massacre [Monthly Bonus 3]
"Really? That’s it?"
His voice carried a different edge, his entire demeanour changing as he looked back up at the elf with a completely blank expression.
Before the elf could react to the sudden change in tone, the young man raised his left hand and turned his wrist clockwise by 90 degrees.
Simultaneously, the elf’s neck snapped in the same direction with a crack, and he collapsed instantly, his glass shattering on the tiled lobby floor.
The sound drew attention, and people turned, eyes widening as they saw the corpse on the ground with red wine spilling across the tiles.
Their gazes moved to the person standing closest to it, who reached for his own neck, gripped the skin beneath his jaw, and peeled away a thin layer, revealing that he’d been wearing a skin mask.
He removed the mask in one go, revealing a messy head of silver hair beneath it, and as he tossed the mask aside, he glanced at the gathered crowd with glowing eyes.
"Sorry for the disturbance," he said calmly. "I was getting rid of a yapping pest."
Cracking his knuckles, he stepped forward and added, "You all would be joining him soon enough."
Those words seemed to finally pull them out of their dazes, but no one could move as the world around them abruptly turned monochrome.
"You know, I can almost commend you all for your audacity. At least try to host your meetings off the planet..." Speaking with a sigh, Arthur walked through the lobby, raising his left hand and clenching his fist.
’Anti-Divine Gravity Authority: Gravitational Compression.’
Squishing sounds echoed as the heads of everyone except the lobby receptionists were crushed under their own body’s personal gravity, and when the flow of the world’s time resumed, the headless bodies dropped to the floor.
Arthur stepped past them without slowing, moving toward the private access hall that led to the highest-level suites in the building.
He calmly made his way down the long hallway, hearing alarmed voices shouting from the far end before he even reached the midpoint. When he turned the corner, several armed guards emerged from deeper within the area, their eyes widening the moment they saw him.
Arthur didn’t give them a chance to speak as he soundlessly clapped his hands, and a crushing force collapsed inward from both sides of the hallway, crushing the guards’ bodies into messy masses of flesh and bone.
He continued forward with the same speed, the power of gravity pushing aside the messes on the floor as he walked.
Behind him, another guard burst out from a side passage and immediately hurled a spear of glowing law energy toward him. But before it reached Arthur, time slowed to a crawl, and without turning his head, Arthur used gravity to rotate the projectile so its tip pointed back toward the path it had come from.
The flow of time resumed, and the spear, keeping all its original momentum, continued moving at the same speed, piercing straight through the head of the guard who had thrown it, killing him instantly while Arthur continued walking without even glancing back.
"Celestia. Lostvayne. Clear the path. Ignore Stelan’s spy."
The two swords manifested at his command, shooting forward down the hallway and dashing in opposing directions.
By the time Arthur walked toward the intersection where they split, screams had already begun echoing through the halls.
’There were three of them, weren’t there? Why can I only sense tw—!’
Arthur’s thoughts were cut off as he sensed magic power condensing underground, and a split second later, the entire building exploded as something burst out from below, shooting into the sky at supersonic speed.
Immediately, several battleship turrets locked onto Arthur and fired their blasters at him as they ascended high into the air, but Arthur’s gravity shield completely protected him from everything they unleashed.
Still, to prevent the redirected beams from crashing onto the ground and devastating the planet, Arthur used AGSD, absorbing all their energy along with the energy of the explosion into one glowing orb of condensed light which he then released as a single beam that seared through the air and split through five of the six ships that had burst out of the ground with the explosion in an instant.
The destructive energy consumed the five ships entirely, torching them and blowing apart everything inside.
As the broken fragments of their wreckage crashed toward the ground, Arthur reached out and clenched his right fist, increasing the gravity on the sixth ship that was accelerating upward and pulling his hand down to drag it back toward the earth with overwhelming force.
The ship crashed against the surface in another massive explosion, shockwaves rippling across the land as a gigantic crater appeared before Arthur.
Unclenching his fist, Arthur spoke.
"I was trying not to blow up the place since my subordinate had a spy inside here, but you bastards started it."
With those words Arthur dashed into the smoking debris, his right hand stretching out to catch the face of one of the existences whose body remained completely intact despite the blast.
He slammed them down into the ground with overwhelming force, and even though they tried to struggle and break free, Arthur’s grip was unyielding. Destruction energy coursed down his arm faster than his captive could activate an Authority, and with a single pulse, all the skin on their face was burned away.
Letting go of their face, he stomped down on their chest and caved their ribcage in, forcing them to vomit blood as their consciousness descended into darkness.
|You damned....!|
The loud voice echoed from behind him, and as Arthur turned, he saw an elf charging at him in rage.
|You strut around like you own this place! What gives you the right?!|
The elf swung a great sword at Arthur, but before he could even complete the swing, the sky split apart and a streak of purple lightning shot downward, striking his body and smacking him face down into the ground with a violent blast.
When the dust dispersed, the figure of a familiar dragon with long crimson-purple hair was revealed, her naginata piercing into the back of the fallen elf.
Upon seeing her, Arthur raised an eyebrow in surprise.
"Rishia? The heck are you doing here?"
The Dragoness lifted her naginata and spun it once as the weapon construct dissolved into a wisp of cosmic energy, and she looked up at Arthur as she spoke.
"Lady Wyndella demands your presence."
At this Arthur frowned and replied, "Didn’t I tell her that I had affairs to sort out before I began the trials? I have traitors to root out on my planet."
"I neither know nor care about that. What I do know is that she demands your presence immediately."
Rishia’s response made Arthur click his tongue with irritation, sighing as he looked toward the sky and spoke.
"Stelan, did you get the last one?"
[Yes,] came the voice in his ear, confirming that the third traitorous councilman had been captured.
[Don’t worry about my operative. I had them evacuate while you were talking with the elf.]
"That’s good to hear," Arthur replied, snapping his fingers to summon several spears of destruction energy that pierced the body of the one beneath his feet.
As they screamed in pain, Arthur turned to Rishia and pointed at the elf she was standing on.
"Get off him."
Rishia stepped aside without a word, and Arthur, using gravity to raise the man’s hands, seized them and, pressing one foot between the man’s shoulders, tore his limbs off using nothing but brute strength.
The man screamed awake, but Arthur used the back of his heel to hit the back of his head, knocking him out before using time manipulation to slow the bleeding so the man wouldn’t die.
Tossing the ripped-off limbs onto the ground, he spoke to Stelan.
"Execute all of them publicly for treason and delete the rest of their subordinates from the surface of this planet. You can ask my friends for help. Let this serve as the first bags of EXP that they get in this universe."
Raising his right hand, he began operating the Cosmic Teleporter as he continued.
"I’ll be heading to the Abyss Labyrinth for a bit. I’d be gone for up to 31 days, so schedule the meeting with the Demon Kings for after that."
With those words, Arthur generated a Cosmic Gate and stepped through, leaving behind Rishia, who glanced around the scene silently.
Then, with a shrug, she snapped open a Cosmic Gate that looked like a pool of shadows and vanished through it.
