Their bodies convulsed. Blood erupted from their noses, mouths, eyes—not drops, but streams, as if every vessel in their bodies had burst simultaneously.
The blood flew through the air toward Don's position, drawn by invisible force. Ribbons of crimson that traced geometric patterns through space, beautiful and terrible.
One hundred fifty liters in five seconds.
The humans collapsed—not quite dead, but close. Drained to the point where their hearts couldn't pump, their brains couldn't function, their bodies simply shut down waiting for the end.
They twitched on the ground, making small whimpering sounds, eyes glazed and unfocused. One woman tried to crawl away, her skeletal arms trembling with the effort. She made it three feet before collapsing face-first into the blood-slick cobblestones.
Another—a young man, maybe twenty—reached out toward the nearest goblin as if pleading for help. His hand shook violently. His lips moved but no sound emerged. Then his eyes rolled back and he went still, hand still extended in that final desperate gesture.
[+1,200 XP]
Their blood joined Don's arsenal.
Thirty spears materialized and immediately launched at the goblin flanking force.
The goblins tried to dodge—their enhanced speed should have made them fast enough.
The spears were faster.
Each weapon moved like a bullet, leaving contrails of red mist. They struck before targets could react.
One spear took a goblin through the chest. Punched completely through his torso, the point emerging from his back trailing spine fragments and lung tissue.
[+40 XP]
The goblin looked down at the shaft protruding from his chest, touched it with shaking fingers as if unable to believe it was real. Then he coughed once—blood sprayed from his mouth in a fine mist—and collapsed.
Another spear hit a goblin in the side of the head. It entered through his left temple and exited through his right eye socket, carrying the eyeball with it. The eye dangled from the spear point for a moment before the whole weapon dissolved back into liquid.
[+40 XP]
The goblin's body stood upright for three full seconds, brain-dead but not yet aware of it, before falling like a puppet with cut strings.
A third spear caught a goblin in the groin. It punched upward through his pelvis, shattering bone, tearing through intestines and stomach, finally erupting from his mouth.
[+40 XP]
The goblin stood impaled, the spear running completely through him from groin to mouth, and his eyes were still moving, still aware, for five agonizing seconds before death took him.
Fifteen goblins died in the initial volley.
[+600 XP]
Fifteen more were wounded, infected, going mad.
More than half the elite force was compromised now.
Don reached the third row of humans.
He raised his hand.
Ten humans in the center of the formation exploded simultaneously.
Not from the outside in—from the inside out.
Their blood turned to pressurized liquid that burst outward with enough force to shred everything within five meters. Skin split like overripe fruit. Bones fragmented into shrapnel that punched through nearby bodies. Organs became wet projectiles painting everything crimson.
The first human to detonate was an older man, gray-haired and branded. His body swelled for a fraction of a second—abdomen distending, skin stretching tight—then burst.
The explosion sent his ribcage flying in eight different directions. His skull launched upward like a cannonball, trailing blood and brain matter, and struck a nearby goblin in the face hard enough to shatter both skulls.
[+40 XP]
His pelvis became a spinning disc of bone that decapitated another human three meters away.
The second detonation was a young woman. When she exploded, her spine shot out like a spear, vertebrae still connected by stretched tissue. It impaled a goblin through the stomach, pinning him to the ground.
[+40 XP]
He screamed and tried to pull it out, but the bone had punched completely through him and embedded in the cobblestones beneath.
The third was a child—maybe twelve years old, skeletal from starvation. When his small body detonated, the force was concentrated. His fragmented bones became a shotgun blast that shredded four nearby humans. One man took a femur fragment through the eye—it punched through his brain and out the back of his skull. Another woman caught a cluster of rib fragments in the throat—they tore her windpipe open, and she collapsed gurgling, drowning in her own blood.
[YES! YES! KILL THEM ALL, little seed! Can you FEEL it? The way their essence SCREAMS as you tear it away? The way their power becomes YOURS?]
The explosion radius overlapped, creating a chain reaction of gore.
Twenty-three humans died in the overlapping blasts.
Seven goblins caught in the shrapnel went down—some killed instantly, others injured and infected.
[+1,200 XP]
The blood from the detonations didn't fall to the ground.
It hung in the air like a crimson cloud, then condensed into a single massive construct.
A blood golem formed in seconds.
Ten feet tall. Humanoid shape but wrong proportions—arms too long, reaching nearly to the ground. Hands ending in blade-fingers, each one a foot long and razor-sharp. Torso too broad, muscles made from compressed blood that looked almost solid. No face except for a gaping mouth full of blood-crystal teeth, each one jagged and serrated.
The golem charged into the goblin formation.
Its blade-fingers swept through three elites like they were wheat before a scythe. Bodies separated at the waist, top halves sliding off bottom halves in sprays of blood and exposed organs.
[+120 XP]
One goblin's upper body landed face-down three meters away, arms still moving, trying to crawl, dragging his intestines behind him like grotesque ropes.
The golem's crystalline teeth closed around another goblin's head. They bit down with hydraulic force, and the skull crunched like an eggshell. Brain matter squirted between the teeth.
[+40 XP]
The golem shook its head like a dog worrying prey, and the goblin's head came off entirely, neck vertebrae still attached, trailing shredded meat.
It grabbed another elite with one massive hand—fingers wrapping completely around the goblin's torso—and squeezed. Armor crumpled. Ribs shattered. The goblin's eyes bulged, and blood erupted from his mouth as his lungs were crushed flat.
[+40 XP]
The golem kept squeezing until the body simply burst, exploding between its fingers like a blood-filled balloon.
Grimscar finally broke formation.
The commander charged directly at Don, war axe raised, one good eye blazing with desperate fury.
"ENOUGH!"
His enhanced speed carried him across fifty meters in two seconds.
His axe came down with tremendous force, enhanced by cultivation and two centuries of combat experience.
It should have split Don in half.
The axe struck an invisible barrier three inches from Don's head.
CLANG.
The sound was like a bell being struck. The axe stopped dead. The barrier didn't flex, didn't crack, didn't give even a millimeter.
For three seconds, Don was completely invincible.
Grimscar's eye widened in horror as he realized what he'd just encountered.
Don's eight Executioner's Edge blades moved.
They converged on Grimscar from eight different angles simultaneously. The commander tried to dodge—too slow, too close, already committed to his failed attack.
The first blade took his right arm at the shoulder. The limb separated cleanly, still gripping the war axe, and spun through the air trailing arterial spray.
The second blade took his left leg at the hip. The leg flew backward, foot still twitching.
The third and fourth blades crossed through his torso in an X pattern, carving him into quarters.
The fifth blade took his head.
The sixth, seventh, and eighth blades struck his falling body pieces, reducing them to smaller chunks.
Grimscar died in pieces, body separating into dozens of distinct parts that hit the ground in a wet circle around Don.
[ELITE COMMANDER GRIMSCAR: DEFEATED]
[+500 XP]
His head landed face-up, one good eye still moving, still aware, watching his own body parts rain down around him. His mouth opened and closed like a fish drowning in air. Then the light faded from his eye and he was gone.
Don walked through the spreading pool of the commander's blood without breaking stride.
His domain had moved the entire battle, following him as he advanced. Now it encompassed nearly half the courtyard.
Four hundred humans within range. One hundred goblins.
The goblins were broken now. No commander. No coordination. Half their forces dead or insane. They fled in every direction, abandoning the captives, abandoning their posts, thinking only of survival.
Don raised his hand toward ten fleeing goblins.
Their blood obeyed him.
The ten goblins stopped fleeing.
Turned around.
Raised their weapons.
And charged their own allies.
They were screaming the entire time—conscious, aware, watching themselves betray their comrades but unable to stop their bodies from obeying Don's commands.
One tackled another goblin and started stabbing repeatedly. The knife punched into his comrade's chest over and over—once, twice, five times, ten times. The victim was long dead but the possessed goblin kept stabbing, each thrust accompanied by wet tearing sounds. And he was crying the entire time, tears streaming down his face, sobbing while he murdered.
[+40 XP]
Another turned his blade on himself. His hands moved independently of his will, forcing the steel toward his own stomach. He fought it—muscles straining, veins bulging in his neck—but the sword kept coming. It touched his abdomen. Pressed inward. The point broke skin. He screamed and tried to pull back but his arms kept pushing. The blade slid into his stomach inch by agonizing inch. He felt every bit of it—the steel parting flesh, puncturing intestines, scraping against his spine. Then his hands twisted the blade sideways, opening the wound, and his guts spilled out in wet loops.
[+40 XP]
A third grabbed a human captive—a middle-aged woman, starved and branded—and snapped her neck with mechanical efficiency. The crack echoed across the courtyard. The woman's head lolled at an impossible angle, eyes still open, still aware for a few seconds before death took her. The possessed goblin moved to the next victim, hands reaching for another throat, sobbing the entire time.
[+40 XP]
Don maintained control for thirty seconds. Long enough for the puppets to kill fifteen more goblins and twenty humans.
[+800 XP]
Then he released them.
They collapsed, shaking, traumatized, mentally shattered from the violation of being forced to murder while conscious.
One was curled in a ball, making small whimpering sounds, hands pressed against his head as if trying to hold his fractured mind together.
Another was laughing—high-pitched, broken, the sound of sanity shattering.
A third was simply staring at his blood-covered hands, watching them shake, unable to process what they'd done.
Don's blood weapons finished them.
Twenty blood swords descended simultaneously. Each one punched through a skull, ending trauma with execution.
[+200 XP]
One hundred eighty goblins infected with Madness now.
The courtyard was a vision of Hell.
Bodies everywhere—human and goblin mixed together in piles that stood waist-high in places. Blood pooling so deep it covered the ancient cobblestones entirely, turning the courtyard into a crimson lake. The air was thick with copper and iron, so heavy it was difficult to breathe.
The survivors—maybe two hundred humans, thirty goblins—huddled in clusters, too broken to flee, too terrified to move.
Some humans were laughing hysterically, the sound shrill and wrong.
Some were catatonic, staring at nothing, minds retreated somewhere internal where reality couldn't reach.
Some were praying to gods who clearly weren't listening, voices hoarse from screaming.
Some had gone mad themselves—not from infection, but from witnessing horrors the human mind wasn't designed to process. One man was trying to dig through the cobblestones with his bare hands, nails torn off, fingers bleeding, muttering about needing to get underground where it was safe. Another woman was cradling a severed arm like it was a baby, singing a lullaby, rocking back and forth.
Don walked through it all.
His footsteps didn't splash—the blood moved away from his boots, parting like water before a ship, leaving dry stone in his wake.
His domain was feeding now. Eight hundred liters of blood under his control. Fifty blood weapons orbiting him. The massive golem crushing the last organized goblin resistance.
He reached the center of the courtyard.
Stopped.
Looked at the remaining humans—those close enough to see him clearly, to meet his eyes, to understand what was coming.