Chapter 577: 577. Bloods Are Everywhere! Just What I Wanted!
The earth itself folded the soldier in half, causing his lungs to collapse and a spray of frothy, red blood to erupt from his mouth. But the patrol units were a machine of perfect, brutal efficiency.
As the contact swung a massive slab of debris at the second line, the Voidkin reappeared. They didn’t just step back into reality; they materialized behind him with the silent, predatory grace of ghosts.
The contact had anticipated a frontal response from the patrol units. He had not planned for units that could step through the spatial plane.
The transition was instantaneous and devastating. One moment, the contact was pouring every ounce of his life force into a final, crushing blow; the next, the world had shifted.
The Voidkin emerged from the void behind his back, their hands glowing with the pale, cold light of spatial severance.
He was caught in a pincer of reality.
The patrol units in front of him leveled their weapons, their muzzles glowing with kinetic energy, while the Voidkin behind him reached for his spine. He tried to pivot, to throw a desperate burst of earth behind him, but the stone mass he had sent ahead was already distributing against the corridor wall with no target to reach, leaving him exposed, his momentum wasted on the unyielding stone.
The engagement lasted ninety seconds from the moment the contact committed to the direct approach; at the end of this period, the patrol units reformed around the debris field, leaving only arithmetic options remaining.
The corridor was a graveyard of shattered stone and mangled flesh. The contact lay in the center of a crater of his own making, his breathing a wet, bubbling rattle.
A Voidkin stood over him, a blade of folded space poised at his throat, while the patrol units stood in a perfect, blood-splattered semicircle, their weapons lowered but ready. The "cleaning" was complete.
Rex watched without expression.
"He was good," Lilith said.
"Yeah, he have my respect for that," Rex said.
"Better than Raizen," she said.
"Different toolkit," Rex said. "Raizen was a direct combatant."
"The earth-manipulation contact was a situational one, and he needed the right environment and the right variables." Rex crossed his arms. "In different circumstances he would have been considerably more difficult to contain."
"But these weren’t different circumstances," Lilith said.
"No," Rex said. "I chose the circumstances."
Lilith looked at him with the expression she had when she found something simultaneously admirable and uncomfortable, and had decided to file it rather than address it.
...
Cassandra, who had been moving through the western district since the speech ended, emerged briefly into a plaza below with two militia units and a Voidkin combat squad at her flanks. Rex could see her from the spire height with the specific clarity of elevated perspective—the way she moved through a combat zone with the contained, precise efficiency of someone who had been trained to fight at a level that most opponents were not equipped to match.
"She’s been running for forty minutes straight," Lilith said.
"She doesn’t look like it," Rex said.
"No," Lilith agreed. "She doesn’t."
The cluster of marked combatants in the plaza had taken a defensive formation around a central structural pillar, four of them using the pillar’s bulk to limit the approach angles and a fifth positioned at height on a broken section of raised floor that gave her a clear sightline over the formation’s top.
It was a competent defensive setup for a group that had not planned to be in this situation and had assembled the best position available from what the environment offered.
But competence was a fragile shield against a predator of Cassandra’s caliber. As she closed the distance, the air in the plaza seemed to thicken with the sudden, violent shift in pressure.
"Don’t let her breathe!" the man with the mace roared, his voice cracking with a mixture of command and pure, unadulterated terror. "Crush her!"
The first two combatants, realizing the sheer velocity of her approach, didn’t wait for her to reach them; they unleashed a synchronized kinetic burst meant to shatter her momentum before she could even enter their reach. The ground beneath Cassandra’s feet groaned as a wave of compressed air and jagged stone shrapnel tore toward her.
She didn’t flinch. Instead, the violence of her movement became even more terrifying.
"Too loud," Cassandra muttered, her voice a low, dangerous hum beneath the roar of the wind.
She leaned into the incoming assault, her body a blur of calculated motion. The first combatant, a man wielding a heavy mace infused with gravitational mana, lunged forward to meet her, his weapon trailing a wake of distorted space.
Cassandra didn’t parry; she flowed. She pivoted on a dime, the mace whistling past her ear with enough force to create a vacuum that tugged at her hair, and in the same breath, her blade sang.
A single, brutal arc of steel caught the man just below the jawline. There was no elegant duel here, only the sickening, wet thwack of metal meeting soft tissue and bone.
The blade sheared through his mandible, sending a spray of hot, bright blood erupting into the air like a macabre fountain.
"Guh—!" The man’s voice died in a gargle of red foam.
He didn’t even have an opportunity to scream before the sheer momentum of her pass sent him reeling, his jaw hanging by a single, ragged thread of muscle, his eyes wide and weeping tears of shock.
The second combatant, a woman with elemental wind affinities, attempted to sweep Cassandra’s legs with a razor-sharp gale. Cassandra anticipated the low sweep, stepping into the wind’s eye.
As the gale roared beneath her, she brought her sword down in a punishing vertical strike. The blade didn’t just hit; it cleaved. It bit through the woman’s shoulder, the sound of the clavicle snapping echoing like a gunshot in the plaza, and continued its descent until it buried itself deep in the stone floor beneath her.
"AAAGH! GOD—!" The woman’s scream was a jagged thing, torn from a throat constricted by agony. She collapsed, her left arm a useless, mangled ruin of shredded fabric and splintered bone, her blood pooling instantly in the cracks of the pavement as she clawed at the dirt, sobbing in rhythmic, broken gasps.
The formation was breaking, the "geometry" of their defense turning into a chaotic mess of panicked lunges and desperate, uncoordinated strikes. The third man, a brute with reinforced skin, tried to tackle her, his massive frame a living battering ram.
"Get back! Get away from her!" he bellowed, his muscles bulging as he threw his entire weight into the charge.
Cassandra met his charge not with strength but with a terrifyingly precise redirection. She caught the momentum of his lunge, spun, and used the edge of her blade to rake across his exposed midsection.
The steel tore through his hardened skin like parchment, opening a long, jagged canyon of viscera.
"Hrrrk—!" The brute let out a wet, choked sound, his hands instinctively flying to his stomach to try and hold his intestines inside.
As he doubled over, gasping for air that wouldn’t come through his ruined abdomen, she delivered a brutal, short-range pommel strike to his temple.
CRACK!
He went down, sprawling into the dirt, unconscious and bleeding from the ears. And then the fourth member, seeing his comrades falling in a gruesome, rapid-fire succession, panicked.
"Stay back! Stay the hell back!" he shrieked, his voice jumping an octave as he threw a desperate, wide arced slash of energy.
Cassandra simply stepped through the arc, the energy singeing the hem of her cloak.
"Too slow," she whispered. Her blade found the gap in his guard.
It was a surgical strike, a quick, vicious thrust into the soft space beneath his ribs. The blade exited his back in a sickening burst of red, the tip of the sword glistening with the lifeblood of a man who had thought a pillar would save him.
He slumped forward, a hollow, rattling breath escaping his lips as the light left his eyes.
The plaza was now a slaughterhouse of failed intentions. The air was heavy with the metallic tang of blood and the desperate, dying gasps of the marked.
The defensive formation had been reduced to a collection of broken bodies and shattered spirits, leaving only the fifth member, perched precariously above, watching the nightmare unfold with eyes wide in primal terror. She let out a small, whimpering sound, a tiny sob of a person who knew they were next.
Cassandra assessed the formation from approximately thirty meters away and moved.
’What am I doing...?’
’Is this really... necessary...?’
