Pshk!
A sword punched through the man's body until its hilt caught against him. Unable to pass all the way through, the force of the throw spread through his entire frame and carried him backward, pinning him to the wall.
"Go—"
The ground suddenly rippled like liquid, but an assassin's shrill cry was cut short.
Kain's attack reached him first, tearing through his vocal cords and throat before sending his head flying.
Thud!
Before the severed head could hit the ground, Kain kicked it like a soccer ball, smashing it directly into another assassin's skull.
They burst apart like two overripe watermelons slammed together, scattering their contents everywhere.
At the same time, Kain snatched the dagger from the decapitated assassin's hand and drove it into the temple of another attacker emerging from his shadow.
A piercing whistle suddenly split the air, nearly rupturing his eardrums.
It came from a magically enhanced crossbow bolt.
The projectile skimmed past Kain's cheek by the narrowest of margins. He had already predicted its trajectory and tilted his head aside, and now calmly straightened it again.
He had to admit that this world felt even more realistic than SAO.
If he couldn't still sense his physical body in reality—his current condition was similar to being half-awake and half-asleep—or summon a simplified status display, he might truly have suspected that he had entered another real world.
Within this world, the body formed from his consciousness could express physical power even more dramatically than his real body.
Kain pushed off the ground.
The floor cracked radially beneath his foot as though struck by a massive hammer, blasting dust into the air as he shot forward like a cannonball.
His target had been more than thirty feet away, yet Kain crossed the distance almost instantly.
The man was already sinking into the shadows.
Or rather, he was merging back into the stone.
The result was inevitable.
Boom!
"Guh!"
A torrent of blood erupted from the mouth of Fu Za, leader of the Assassins' Guild.
Chunks of shattered stone battered his body, but that pain was insignificant compared to the agony of his ruptured organs.
He was certain that almost everything inside him had been pulverized.
The tremendous impact crushed his body and forced blood and fragments of his organs into his windpipe, leaving him suffocating.
Fu Za could still exhale, spraying blood with every breath, but he could no longer draw any air into his lungs.
His opponent was a monster.
Kain had punched straight through solid rock and struck him in the chest. His rib cage had crumpled like a metal box smashed hard enough to cave in from one side to the other.
Fu Za bitterly regretted his decision.
He should have surrendered immediately instead of listening to the Dark Arts Users' Guild.
At the very least, he could have remained neutral. As long as he hadn't attempted to assassinate Kain, the man wouldn't have attacked him.
But once Kain seized control of three factions represented among the Ten Lords, the balance of power collapsed. Remaining neutral became nearly impossible.
Fu Za glanced around from the corner of his eye.
Corpses lay everywhere.
A bitter smile touched his bloodstained lips.
They were nothing but a flock of sheep, yet they had arrogantly believed they could kill a lion.
Anyone who faced Kain was torn apart in a single exchange. Almost no one survived.
Practically every strike from his weapons inflicted a fatal wound.
The light suddenly dimmed as Kain walked past him.
He didn't even spare Fu Za a glance before continuing onward to eliminate the remaining assassins.
That was the last thing Fu Za ever saw.
His vision faded into eternal darkness.
"...What a shame."
The sigh came from Shasta, commander of the Dark Knight Order.
He reached down and closed Fu Za's blood-soaked eyes.
Shasta had expected the leader of the Assassins' Guild to be an extraordinarily troublesome opponent. Instead, Kain had killed him through the simplest and most brutal method imaginable.
Only a few days earlier, Fu Za had clashed bitterly with Shasta during a meeting of the Ten Lords.
Now, the leader of the Assassins' Guild was gone forever.
The guild itself would soon become history. It had been almost completely annihilated.
Those who remained had either fled or surrendered.
"With this, only five Lords remain," said Rirupirin, chieftain of the Orcs, with equal regret.
He was deeply grateful that he had listened to the commander of the Dark Knight Order instead of foolishly allowing the leader of the Dark Arts Users' Guild to manipulate him.
Otherwise, he would have suffered the same fate.
Most of his people were stubborn and straightforward. If he had been killed, they might have abandoned all reason and attacked Kain to avenge him.
The consequences would have been catastrophic.
Kain might have exterminated them all.
Yes—all of them.
In the past, the notion that one man could slaughter his way through an entire race would have sounded utterly absurd. After witnessing Kain's abilities, however, Rirupirin no longer doubted that he could do it.
Several thousand members of the Dark Arts Users' Guild had already been slaughtered to the last.
The guild had performed some kind of spell that drove every member into a frenzy, causing thousands of dark arts users to launch suicidal attacks against Kain.
Their leader suffered the most gruesome death of all.
She had attempted to unleash an explosive spell, but Kain reacted too quickly. His interference destabilized the technique and caused it to spiral out of control.
The spell detonated and blew her body to pieces.
One day later, inside Obsidia Palace in the imperial capital.
Someone once again sat upon the throne of the first emperor and claimed it as his own.
The throne room below was saturated with the stench of blood. A crimson mist still hung in the air.
Chunks of flesh lay scattered across the floor. Someone could have pieced them together into more than a dozen bodies with different skin colors and textures.
In the end, there were still those who couldn't accept that someone who appeared unmistakably human had taken the throne.
They had poisoned it.
The instant Kain sat down, poison engulfed his entire body.
At the same moment, more than a dozen people charged him.
What happened next horrified everyone present.
The man on the throne merely raised a hand and swept it toward them.
An invisible force instantly sliced their bodies into chunks.
The attackers had leaped through the air together, intending to kill him. By the time they struck the floor, they had already become a scattered mound of flesh.
The ability to annihilate people with a casual wave of his hand far surpassed anything Kain had displayed before.
Those who hadn't participated stared at him in terror.
"...Iskahn."
"I am here, Your Imperial Majesty."
The man before them—no, the emperor—had never revealed his name.
From the very beginning, he had said that if they needed to address him, they should simply call him Emperor.
He had clearly set his sights on this throne from the start.
Perhaps he had been born to occupy it—a predestined emperor secretly chosen by fate itself.
The man who answered him was Iskahn, the tenth-generation champion of the Pugilists' Guild and one of the Ten Lords.
"You will assume control of the former leader of the Assassins' Guild's territory."
"Thank you, Your Majesty."
With that, the rewards had been distributed.
The territories of the five eliminated Lords were annexed by the factions controlled by the five who remained.
"Shasta, I will soon depart for the Human Empire. You will govern the Dark Territory in my place."
"Understood, Your Majesty!"
Shasta dropped to one knee and accepted the emperor's command.
Kain intended to cross into the Human Empire and eliminate the Highest Minister. Once that was done, a portion of its fertile land would be granted to the people of the Dark Territory.
"As for the rest of you, I hope I won't discover that any of you caused trouble while I was away."
The man on the throne spoke calmly.
Yet his gaze seemed to possess physical weight as it pressed down on everyone in the hall, sending prickling chills across their backs.
After his eyes swept over every person present, the air—and even space itself—distorted around the emperor.
His figure shimmered once, then vanished.
(End of Chapter)
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