The traumatized woman sat trembling in the puddles of coagulated blood, entirely crushed under the absolute, demonic weight of Rayn's glowing crimson eyes. She couldn't even formulate a coherent thought to lie.
"We... we don't know who they were!" the woman stammered, fresh tears cutting through the grime and bloody spit on her face. "They descended upon Ashburg like a plague of locusts! I saw them... they were all wearing these bright, sickly yellow robes. They completely covered their faces with pitch-black cloth masks, and every single one of them wore a wide, blood-red hat. They didn't even speak! They just started slaughtering everyone in the streets!"
Rayn's demonic eyes narrowed, the heavy crimson Qi swirling around his body. He had absolutely no fucking clue who these cultivators were. Yellow robes and red hats? It sounded like a highly organized, psychotic sect, not a random group of starving scavengers.
"The bandits," Victus suddenly spoke up, his voice tight with an underlying, instinctual fear.
Vespera immediately snapped her head toward the Victus, her golden eyes flashing with lethal intent. "What the absolute fuck are you saying, Victus? Do you actually know who these motherfuckers are?"
Victus violently swallowed his saliva, his face completely pale as he looked at the butchered corpses littering the street. "Yes. I know exactly who they are. They are the elite bandit coalition that Matthew warned us about. I had never seen them alive before, but the description—the yellow robes, the black masks, the red hats—matches perfectly."
Victus paused, a shudder violently racking his spine. "A few years ago, my older brother brought a massive pile of bodies into the Ashburg domain. My father and I went out to the courtyard, and we saw him standing over a literal mountain of corpses wearing those exact same yellow robes. They were all completely massacred. My brother had hunted them down, slaughtered them, and then he casually threw a torch on the pile, burning their bodies to ash. That horrific scene was permanently burned into my memory. If those are the same people... this wasn't a raid. This was an organized, apocalyptic revenge strike."
Hearing this, Rayn's absolute rage violently erupted. He moved faster than sound, his hand violently clamping around Victus's throat. With pure, terrifying brute strength, Rayn lifted the Victus completely off the ground, suspending him in the air.
"Victus!" Rayn roared, his killing intent suffocating the surrounding air, cracking the stone beneath his feet. "I am going to ask you this exactly one fucking time. Did you have any underhanded, treasonous deal with this massacre to weaken my domain?!"
Victus frantically kicked his legs, desperately clawing at Rayn's iron grip as his airway collapsed. "No! Sir... I swear to the Heavens! I didn't have absolutely any fucking deal with these monsters!"
Rayn stared deep into Victus's eyes, searching for the slightest fluctuation in his soul signature. Finding no deceit, Rayn violently threw him down into the bloody dirt like a piece of trash. Victus landed hard, violently coughing and gasping for air.
As the group stood in tense, suffocated silence, Dawinton—completely invisible and sealed by Vespera's magic—quietly limped up right behind Rayn.
Leaning in, Dawinton whispered directly into Rayn's ear, his phantom voice sounding like a ghost. "Rayn. Stop wasting time beating my idiot son. We need to find Matthew immediately. He is the absolute only person who was here when the attack happened. He is the only one who can give us a full, strategic description of this catastrophe."
Rayn subtly nodded, completely agreeing with the invisible Town Leader's logic.
"Okay then, listen up, you useless fuckers!" Rayn shouted, commanding the absolute attention of the group. "We need to find Matthew, right fucking now. Chandler, you pick up that grieving mother and carry her. Vespera, take the child's dead body from her arms. We are marching directly to the central Castle stronghold. Move!"
Chandler, the First Division Leader, immediately stepped forward. He respectfully took the headless, bloody corpse of the child and handed it to Vespera. He then hoisted the traumatized mother into his strong arms. With Rayn leading the vanguard, the group began their grim march toward the fortified Palace at the center of Ashburg. The invisible Dawinton trailed closely behind them, leaving no footprints.
The journey through the town was an absolute descent into hell. Ashburg had been completely, viscerally butchered. Every single shop was violently smashed open, completely looted of artifacts and spirit stones. Profound architecture was reduced to burning rubble. The streets were literal rivers of thick, dark blood. Everywhere they looked, they saw the mutilated, naked, and dismembered bodies of the citizens. The air was filled with the sickening, agonizing screams of the few survivors who were crawling through the gore, desperately weeping over the shredded remains of their families.
Suddenly, Vespera stopped dead in her tracks.
In the middle of the ruined cobblestone road, there was a one-year-old baby girl. She was covered in dirt, sitting completely frozen and silent beside the horrific remains of her mother.
The mother's corpse was an absolute nightmare. Her face had been completely caved in by a heavy blunt weapon, leaving nothing but a bloody, unrecognizable crater of shattered skull and teeth. Her clothes had been violently ripped away, leaving her naked, and her abdomen and private parts had been brutally, sadistically slit wide open from sternum to pelvis. Her intestines had spilled out, entirely painting the cobblestone red.
When Vespera's golden eyes locked onto the baby girl sitting next to that horrific, butchered corpse, a violent, traumatic illusion entirely seized her mind.
The ruined street of Ashburg vanished. In its place, Vespera saw an ancient, heaven-shattering battlefield. She saw the mutilated body of a supreme, divine woman whose face had been similarly destroyed by heavenly tribulation lightning. And sitting beside that divine corpse... was a small, terrified little girl with golden eyes.
It was her. Vespera was hallucinating her own repressed, catastrophic past from three hundred million years ago. Her breathing violently accelerated, and she completely froze like a stone statue, her mind trapped in an ancient, unadulterated nightmare.
Smack!
Rayn aggressively slapped his hand down onto Vespera's shoulder, instantly shattering the traumatic illusion with a violent surge of his Conqueror Qi.
"Vespera! What the actual fuck happened?" Rayn demanded, his crimson eyes scanning the surroundings for hidden enemies. "Why the hell did you just freeze up like a rock in the middle of an open, hostile road?"
Vespera violently blinked, the ancient battlefield fading as the gruesome reality of Ashburg returned. She looked down at her trembling hands. "Nothing, Rayn... it was nothing. Just some ancient, fractured dreams that I don't completely understand."
Rayn's eyes narrowed, but he didn't press the issue. Survival took absolute priority. "Let's fucking go, then."
Rayn turned back to the grieving mother that Chandler was carrying. "Ma'am," Rayn said, his voice entirely devoid of emotion. "I am going to take your headless child's body to a secure location. Since you have lost yours, could you please take care of that small baby over there?"
The mother, whose face was stained with absolute sorrow, looked at the orphaned one-year-old. She slowly nodded. She knew the absolute, world-ending pain of losing a child, and she knew that the baby, though entirely oblivious to the concept of death, was about to experience the terrifying void of losing a mother.
Chandler gently set the woman down. She crawled through the blood and reached out, pulling the orphaned baby into her chest. The absolute second the child felt the warm, maternal embrace, the terrifying shock broke. The baby remembered the warmth of the mother she had just lost and immediately burst into loud, heartbreaking, hysterical crying.
"Please... take extreme care of the child, ma'am," Vespera whispered softly, an uncharacteristic sliver of absolute sadness in her voice.
The group resumed their march. Vespera still held the headless, bloody corpse of the first child tightly in her arms.
Freddy, entirely confused and slightly disturbed by the interaction, finally spoke up. "Hey, Rayn. Why the fuck did you just give that mother a completely different kid? And more importantly, why did you aggressively demand that we confiscate her child's mutilated dead body and bring it to the Palace?"
Rayn didn't even look back as he marched. "The absolute truth is, I didn't want to sacrifice the child's body right in front of her grieving mother. It would have been a fucking hassle."
The entire group violently stopped walking. The air dropped to absolute zero.
"What the actual, ever-loving fuck are you saying?!" Freddy gasped, his face completely pale.
Rayn turned around, his crimson eyes glowing with pure, unapologetic demonic pragmatism. "The thing is, the parasitic creature sealed inside my soul—the Gambler's Heart—violently demanded that I bring it fresh blood and a heart. It needs resources to fuel my profound abilities. Right now, I possess a fresh, untainted child's body, a heart, and a massive amount of blood. So, I am going to feed this corpse directly to the Gambler's Heart to increase my absolute power."
Vespera stared at him in unadulterated shock. The bloody corpse in her arms suddenly felt infinitely heavier. "Are you fucking serious, Rayn?! That absolute, terrifying anger in your eyes back there... when you held this dead baby... that wasn't rage for the child who lost her life? You didn't care about the mother who lost her child?!"
Rayn let out a cold, deeply arrogant scoff. "Vespera, the fucking kid is dead. If she were still alive and breathing, I wouldn't have even laid a single finger on her, because I don't go out of my way to torture innocent children. But she is a corpse! She is completely useless to her mother, and she is entirely useless to this town! So, at the very least, her physical vessel is going to be incredibly useful to me. Is that really so fucking hard to understand?"
Vespera's golden eyes flared with absolute, heaven-shattering fury. "How the fuck did you become this twisted?! When did you change into this absolute monster, Rayn?!"
"I NEVER FUCKING CHANGED!" Rayn roared, his voice echoing like an apocalyptic thunderclap through the ruined streets. "I have always been the exact same ruthless bastard! You are the only one who is changing, Vespera! You are getting weak and soft! I explicitly told you from the very beginning that I was going to sacrifice absolutely everything and everyone to achieve my ultimate goal! And you swore on your soul that you were going to help me!"
Vespera screamed back, her spatial Qi violently warping the air around her. "I swore I was going to help you conquer this world! I didn't swear to help you descend into this absolute, cannibalistic madness!"
"Madness?!" Rayn laughed, a psychotic, chilling sound. "I am still incredibly fucking kind! If I wasn't, I would have completely slaughtered Victus and Freddy the absolute second they showed signs of treason! But I chose to keep them alive! So why the fuck are you violently shouting at me over a piece of meat that is already dead?!"
Driven by absolute disgust and ancient fury, Vespera roughly shoved the child's corpse into Victus's trembling arms. She raised her hands, her delicate fingers violently transforming into massive, terrifying, black Dragon Claws. Spatial rifts began to tear open around her body.
Rayn's lips curled into a bloodthirsty, demonic smirk. "Oh? So you want to fucking fight me now? Okay then! I already know I am likely going to die if we clash at full power, but let me make you an absolute promise, Vespera: before my soul shatters, I am going to violently drag you down to hell with me!"
Rayn thrust his hand to the side. The air completely shattered, and his terrifying, crimson Conqueror Sword materialized in his grip, violently crackling with blood-red lightning.
The two supreme monsters stared each other down, their killing intents completely locking the surrounding space. They simultaneously bent their knees, entirely prepared to lunge forward and brutally slaughter one another over their clashing ideologies.
"Rayn!... Rayn!"
A weak, pathetic, trembling voice suddenly echoed through the bloody streets, completely breaking the apocalyptic tension.
Both Rayn and Vespera instantly halted their Qi circulation. They forcefully snapped their heads toward the source of the voice.
Sitting in the middle of the debris-covered road, leaning against a shattered merchant cart, was a man who looked exactly like a starving beggar. He was covered in soot, dirt, and dried blood.
It was Matthew.
Rayn immediately dispelled his sword and sprinted forward, dropping to his knees right in front of the Vice Leader. Matthew was completely pale, his eyes wide with absolute, traumatized horror.
Rayn's eyes darted downward. There was a thick, filthy burlap cloth draped over Matthew's lower half. With a swift, aggressive motion, Rayn violently ripped the cloth away.
Rayn's breath completely caught in his throat.
Matthew had absolutely no legs. Everything below his upper thighs had been brutally, violently amputated. The stumps were a horrific mess of charred flesh, shattered bone, and dark, rotting blood. The yellow-robed bandits hadn't just defeated the Vice Leader; they had viscerally butchered him, completely crippling him for the rest of his pathetic life.