That cold dagger was raised to its absolute peak.
The tip pointed downward. The edge reflected a small, trembling patch of pale light in the torchfire—like a tiny fragment torn from the moon, clutched tight in that withered hand.
The girl closed her eyes.
The movement was agonizingly slow. Slow as if dragging her eyelids shut required the very last shred of strength in her frail body. Mud still clung to her eyelashes, glinting with a murky, turbid light in the flames.
The trembling wracking her body peaked. Not from the cold. It was the suffocating stillness before detonation, after all the fear, despair, and agony had been compressed to their absolute limit. Her entire body was strung tight as a snapping bowstring, every muscle in spasm, every bone creaking under the strain.
Only the hand holding the knife—that hand hung suspended in mid-air, terrifyingly steady.
She only needed to flick her wrist.
One inch. No, half an inch would suffice. That razor edge would sever her windpipe. It would let all that bright, scalding blood—more blood than she had ever shed in her miserable life—gush from the wound, washing away the hunger, the terror, the soul-crushing despair of watching her loved ones warp into monsters.
To finally escape this man-eating muck.
Yet—
Just a hair's breadth before the steel kissed her skin—
Plop.
That withered hand—the same hand that had gripped the hilt with such lethal resolve a second ago—suddenly went slack.
The dagger slipped from her grasp.
It tumbled through the air, tracing a short, pathetic arc, before plunging back into the reeking black mud. The impact was a dull, sickening squelch.
Thud.
The girl's body collapsed with it. As if her spine had been surgically extracted.
She slumped completely into the filthy water, reduced to nothing but the wheezing, broken gasps of a dying animal.
"Hah… hah… hah…"
The broken breaths leaked from her parted lips, rhythmic and hollow, like a shattered bellows bleeding air. Like something slowly rotting away.
"She rejects your false god!"
A shrill, fanatical roar detonated from the Red Hand ranks.
It was the match tossed into the powder keg. The instant the words landed, the entire dead-end alley erupted.
"Only the Blood Palm can scour away sin!" another zealot shrieked. "You inner-city dogs have no right to deny a sacred sacrifice!"
A third, a fourth, a fifth—the voices caught like wildfire, tearing from the chests of every fanatic, ricocheting off the narrow brick walls, overlapping and amplifying until they formed a tidal wave of noise threatening to tear the sky in half! The raised torches danced in a frenzy, the dark red brands on their faces contorting like living parasites. The hands that had trembled in fear mere moments ago were now locked into murderous fists.
"Commencing disposal of refuse."
The Night Patrol leader's voice cut through the clamor from the opposite side, still utterly devoid of emotion.
It was too flat. Not the tone of a man facing a horde of charging madmen, but the monotonous drone of an executioner reading a pre-written, immutable statute.
"We do not need the slums dictating our protocols."
The instant the decree fell—
Hss.
The standard-issue longsword at his waist was drawn halfway from its sheath, accompanied by a teeth-grinding screech of metal. The motion was agonizingly slow, deliberately meant for every soul to hear. The hiss of steel on scabbard sounded like a viper flicking its tongue, like a venomous centipede crawling over their eardrums, burrowing straight into their skulls.
The Night Patrolmen behind him mirrored the motion with terrifying synchronicity.
Hss—hss—hss—
Countless blades sliding against metal harmonized into an overwhelming, scalp-prickling wave of death!
The dark uniforms didn't break formation. Their mechanical strides didn't shift a fraction. But the half-drawn blades at their waists already formed a blinding, icy wall of lethal intent in the torchlight.
The suffocating silence of the alley was instantly obliterated by two clashing totalitarian wills.
On one side, the zealots. Hoisting their torches, pressing forward like rabid hounds. On the other, the cold machinery of the Night Patrol. Advancing with synchronized iron treads like a moving execution block.
Screaming curses. The shriek of unsheathed steel. The popping of burning pine resin.
It all blended into a boiling cauldron of killing intent trapped between the narrow brick walls, heavy enough to crush a man's lungs!
"Aaaahhhhhhhhh—!"
Right at the breaking point, another inhuman shriek tore through the night! It exploded from deep within the slum, closer and infinitely more piercing than the last, carrying the horrific, eardrum-shattering frequency of a Crawler mid-shedding.
The hyper-compressed air in the alley suffered a fatal hiccup. Both the rabid Red Hand zealots and the relentless Night Patrolmen instinctively flinched at the ungodly wail. It was the biological terror of monsters, hardwired into the very marrow of Darenz's dregs.
In that singular fraction of a second, when every eye was violently yanked toward the dark—
Erika, cloaked in the shadows, struck.
No battle cry. No roar of exertion. Like a venomous viper that had lain dormant in the freezing muck, he launched himself!
His good left leg pistoned against the slick, mossy brick, shattering the plaster. Riding the violent recoil, his body shot forward like a loosed arrow, skimming inches above the mud!
Mid-flight, his lone left hand plunged downward. Not for the blade—but to violently scoop up a massive handful of the foul, rocky sludge. Using his forward momentum, he hurled the stinking slurry in a wide, devastating arc straight into the faces of the front-line zealots and Night Patrolmen!
"Argh! My eyes—!" "What the fuck?!"
In the murky torchlight, the sudden "mud rain" triggered instant chaos. Filth splattered across faces, blinded eyes, and hissed violently as it struck the burning pitch of the torches, erupting into thick, choking plumes of black smoke that obliterated the front line's vision.
Exploiting this half-second blind spot, Erika hit the ground like a phantom.
He didn't try to stick a hero's landing. He allowed his momentum to carry him into an ugly, feral roll, dissipating the crushing kinetic energy into the filthy water.
When he came to a halt, he was crouched right beside the trembling girl. His mud-caked left hand was already locked in a death grip around the hilt of the Night Patrol's fallen dagger.
Edge up. Murderous intent laid bare.
The very next heartbeat, he exploded from the muck like a maddened beast! No hesitation.
Shlk!
Driven by the terrifying inertia of his desperate lunge, the icy dagger punched brutally through the throat of the zealot directly in front of him. Boiling blood ruptured from the artery like a high-pressure geyser, instantly drenching Erika's head and face, completely washing away the cloying, aristocratic perfume of the inner city and replacing it with the heavy, sickening copper of slaughter.
But Erika didn't stop. He knew that if he bogged down in the ground-level meat grinder, a one-armed cripple like him would be minced into chum in seconds.
"Gah—!" "Enemy! He's—!"
The instant the dying zealot began to crumple, Erika executed a maneuver of pure, suicidal madness.
He ripped the bloody dagger free, slammed his foot onto the spurting fanatic's shoulder to use him as a springboard, and drove his good left leg down with explosive force, launching his body impossibly into the air!
RIIIIIP!
The hem of the confining, dark blue silk robe detonated mid-air, tearing completely up to the thigh. The canary's cage was shattered.
The next second, his right foot—the foot Cole had nearly crushed into powder—came down like a hammer onto the skull of a second Red Hand zealot!
CRACK.
It was impossible to tell if the sickening sound was the zealot's skull fracturing, or Erika's ankle bones splintering in protest.
The phantom rusted saw blade buried in his arch was violently shoved directly into his central nervous system! Agony, raw and electric, spiked straight into his brain, flooding his vision with static. But a lethal dose of adrenaline forcibly locked down the pain that should have rendered him unconscious.
Riding the brutal recoil of the skull-stomp, he twisted his torso mid-air.
One step. Two steps. Three steps!
He bounded across the heads and shoulders of the frenzied zealots, high above the swinging torches and hacking longswords. Like a blood-drenched bird with a broken wing, he leaped continuously along the razor's edge of survival!
Below him, filthy hands clawed desperately at his ankles, accompanied by the wet, meaty thuds of Night Patrol steel cleaving into Red Hand bone.
And with one final, muscle-tearing leap from the edge of the mob, he launched himself clear of the encirclement. Like a kite with a severed string, he plummeted heavily into the pitch-black shadows at the far end of the alley.
The instant he hit the ground, the pain in his foot detonated like a landmine. He rolled pathetically, violently through the mud, tumbling end over end before he finally bled off the momentum.
His lungs heaved like a punctured bellows, every frantic gasp tasting of copper and rot.
Propped up on his mud-caked left hand, he knelt in the filth. He didn't look back.
From the depths of the alley behind him came only hair-raising shrieks, the sparks of clashing steel, and the completely unhinged, blood-soaked butchery of two factions tearing each other to pieces.