Chapter 34: Scent of Blood in the Upper City
The wooden ventilation window near the basement ceiling exploded violently. Shards of glass and jagged wood splinters rained down on the hard stone floor, accompanied by a deafening crash.
Belida moved faster than a blink. The giant knight instantly lunged, using his massive body to shield Kanos while simultaneously drawing his pitch black steel sword. Sili let out a panicked shriek, scrambling desperately to hide under the collapsed halves of the wooden table. Kanos held his breath. His right hand instinctively reached into his cargo pocket, his fingers tightly gripping the glass bottle of his newly mixed ink.
A figure tumbled through the narrow window gap. The person hit the rocky floor with a sickeningly loud thud, sliding several meters through the thick dust before finally crashing into a stack of empty grain sacks.
It was Papuyu.
The female hitman usually landed without making a single sound. She normally moved like a ghost. But right now, her breathing was terribly ragged and heavy. Her gray cloak was ripped wide open at the right shoulder. Fresh, dark red blood poured out freely, dripping and staining the dusty floor beneath her. That wound was not a normal blade slash. The flesh on her shoulder looked blistered and boiled, like it had just been scorched by high temperature magic.
Papuyu did not groan in pain at all. The girl forced her battered body to stand up slowly. She limped over to Kanos’s broken experiment table. Her left hand reached inside her rain soaked cloak and pulled something out.
She tossed a silver steel helmet onto the table. CLANG. The heavy helmet was badly dented on the side and covered in thick, sticky blood. Carved right on the front of the helm was a distinct emblem of a single eye pierced by a sword.
Sili, who had been hiding under the table, slowly peeked up. The moment his cracked glasses caught sight of the emblem on that helmet, Sili’s face turned deathly pale. It looked like every drop of blood had been instantly drained from his head.
"You are insane," Sili’s voice trembled violently. The usually chatty guy stared at Papuyu in pure horror. "You brought death straight to our base. You killed a member of the Number Caste?"
Papuyu pulled a long strip of cloth from her belt. She bit one end of the fabric and tied it tightly around her burned shoulder with a sharp, forceful yank. The girl did not care about Sili’s panic at all. Her normally dead, empty eyes now stared straight at Kanos.
"My intel leaked completely," Papuyu reported flatly. Her voice sounded incredibly exhausted but remained steady. "The Sensor Bureau did not send regular tracking dogs. They directly deployed an Executioner Unit from the Number Caste. Level sixty and above. Three of them."
Belida tightened his grip on his sword hilt. The knight’s jaw locked hard. He knew exactly what the Number Caste meant. They were not regular city gate guards who could be bribed with gold coins or threatened with violence. They were literal monsters in human skin whose only job was to burn down absolutely anything that violated the world’s system rules.
"How did they track us down this fast?" Kanos asked coldly. He slowly wiped the dried blood from under his nose, keeping his eyes on the dented helmet.
"The fake document broker who forged your death report in the upper city," Papuyu shifted her stance because her legs were starting to wobble from blood loss. "I found him pinned to an alley wall with an iron spear an hour ago. He was flayed alive for interrogation. They know you are still breathing. And that massive energy explosion from your ink experiment just now gave them our exact coordinates."
"We have to leave right now," Sili hurriedly crawled out from under the table. He frantically stuffed his stolen anatomy books into his backpack. His skinny hands were shaking terribly. "This warehouse is lined with lead to block tracking magic. But if they know the general area, they will just burn this entire district to the ground to flush us out. Executioners do not give a damn about civilian casualties. We run to the deep sewers now."
"We cannot," Belida cut in with his heavy voice. The knight walked closer to the wooden warehouse door, pressing his back against the wall. "The rain outside is pouring harder. If we run through those narrow streets, we will just become easy target practice for their magic arrows from the rooftops. You two cannot outrun level sixty Executioners."
Kanos stayed silent, staring at the bloody silver helmet on the table. His brain spun rapidly, calculating every possible exit route. Running meant dying one by one. Papuyu was severely injured. Sili was not a fighter. Belida was tough, but fighting three high level Executioners at once in the open street would be pure suicide. If they had to fight, the absolute best place was right here. Inside a cramped, enclosed room where the enemy could not carelessly spam wide area explosive magic without killing themselves in the process.
"We hold our ground right here," Kanos declared with absolute certainty.
Sili stopped packing his books. He stared at Kanos like he was looking at someone who just lost half their brain.
"Boss, listen to me very carefully," Sili spoke incredibly fast, pacing back and forth. "These are not market thugs. These are Executioners. Their armor has top tier magic resistance. Their swords can slice through solid boulders like cutting soft butter. That shadow wolf of yours will maybe hold them off for three seconds before getting slashed into dust."
"I am not going to use the wolf," Kanos looked down. His left hand reached out and picked up the pitch black steel cube from the floor. The fist sized cube he created earlier from mixing red spider blood and pure core smoke. The newly created material that was insanely heavy but carried absolutely zero traces of magic.
Kanos tossed the cube straight at Sili’s chest. Sili caught it in a panic and almost fell backward, completely shocked that something so small could feel as heavy as a ship’s anchor.
"You said you memorized every ancient weapon blueprint," Kanos stared sharply at Sili. "I need a physical trap structure. Not magic. Something that can lock down the movements of heavily armored enemies without triggering their passive magic alarms. Find it in your books right now."
Sili swallowed hard. He saw the absolute, deadly serious look in Kanos’s eyes. There was zero time to argue. The glasses wearing guy immediately dropped his bag to the floor, frantically digging through his pile of stolen books. He flipped through the worn out, thick parchment pages in a total panic, muttering to himself.
"Physical trap. Anti armor physical trap," Sili mumbled rapidly. His index finger finally stopped on a page showing a sketch of hundreds of overlapping, crisscrossing thin threads. "This one. The Bone Cutting Puppet String. A blueprint from the mechanical temple ruins on floor forty. The thread is as thin as a human hair but can hold two tons of pulling weight. The knitting structure is specifically designed to snag and lock into the tiny joints of heavy armor."
Sili shoved the book right in front of Kanos’s face. "But the original material requires the veins of extinct crystal spiders. You will never find the materials to make this."
Kanos did not answer. His eyes rapidly scanned the extremely complex knitting pattern in the book. His artist brain instantly recorded every single angle, line tension, and load bearing point from the sketch. Kanos shifted his gaze toward the wooden warehouse door.
He closed his eyes. A brutal wave of pain immediately invaded his head. The imaginary ice needles stabbed the back of his eyeballs again as Kanos forced his mental stamina to draw pure energy from the system. His left hand slowly rose into the air. Kanos opened his eyes, which were now glowing with a dim blue light.
Pitch black lines began to be drawn in the empty air. Not thick, solid lines like usual. This time Kanos pulled hundreds of impossibly thin lines, crisscrossing and floating all across the basement room. These black threads were made of pure smoke ink, compressed and solidified by Kanos’s near insane mental focus. The ends of the threads attached themselves firmly to the stone walls, the wooden pillars, and even the uneven floorboards.
Blood dripped from Kanos’s nose once again. His eyes turned completely bloodshot from enduring the massive pressure. He had to force the density of the black material to stay as thin as a human hair. The black threads absorbed all the light around them, making them truly invisible inside this dimly lit room.
Papuyu stared at the web of death hovering in the air with her eyes slightly widened. As a professional assassin, she understood perfectly how fatal this room had just become. One wrong step from someone who did not know the pattern, and their body would be diced into cubes in a matter of seconds.
"I need ten seconds to lock the final knot," Kanos muttered quietly, his teeth grinding together to fight the immense pain. Both of his hands were now moving like a mad orchestra conductor, pulling and weaving the shadow threads in the air.
The air inside the room suddenly turned incredibly hot. The sound of the heavy rain outside vanished instantly. Total silence. An extremely unnatural quietness pressed hard against their ears.
Belida raised his massive black greatsword, positioning his giant body directly in front of Kanos. The knight lowered his stance, getting ready to welcome the incoming impact.
The iron hinges on the wooden warehouse door in front of them suddenly turned glowing red. Thick smoke began billowing from the gaps in the wood, burning from the extreme heat outside. Someone had just pressed their palm against the outside of their door.
The uninvited guests had arrived.
