Chapter 41: Fall of the Doom Blades
Inside the teaching building, Klein slid his twin blades back into their scabbards. He glanced down at the two Gold-tier adventurers groaning at his feet.
One man, one woman. The guy was face-down on the stone, his shield splintered into three useless pieces. The woman had slumped against the corridor wall, her short sword snapped cleanly in half.
Holding him off for a full five minutes with pure martial arts and combat experience inside a mana-suppression barrier was genuinely impressive.
Too bad it was completely pointless.
They had still caught Crown Princess Angelica.
At the far end of the hall, four men in black were marching her over. Her arms were bound tightly behind her back, and her long hair was a tangled mess over her shoulders. Her lips were pressed into a pale, bloodless line, but her spine was rigid.
She glanced at her two defeated guards and silently closed her eyes.
Klein didn't care about her. His mission was capture, not murder. The primary target was Countess Seraphina, but intel said she had taken the day off. Angelica was the backup plan. Her royal bloodline carried more than enough weight to force the kingdom into a stalemate.
"You two," Klein said, pointing at a pair of cultists. "Escort her to the auditorium. Hand her over to the contact."
The two men nodded and dragged Angelica toward the stairwell. Klein watched them disappear around the corner, then leaned his back against the cold stone wall.
Half an hour ago, he had been standing in the shadows of the auditorium's second-floor balcony. Arms crossed, dead silent, basically a piece of furniture.
The long-haired man in the cloak and mask had been throwing an absolute meltdown at the front of the stage.
"Seraphina took a leave of absence?!" The masked man's voice had squeezed through gritted teeth, practically vibrating with rage. "Why today of all days?"
The cultists below the stage had been dead silent.
The leader had paced back and forth, running the tactical picture through his head, and arrived at a deeply unsettling conclusion. The operation had likely been leaked.
Regardless, they had already sunk the budget. The barrier was up, the counter-measure gear was distributed, and the manpower was fully deployed. Going back empty-handed wasn't something they could afford.
He had swept his gaze across the crowd.
"Fine. Pivot. Isn't the Crown Princess also at the academy? Angelica."
He had demanded an update. The answer only spiked his blood pressure further.
"She's not in the auditorium either?"
The princess was MIA. Seraphina was MIA. Several other high-value targets were unaccounted for. On top of that, two strike teams had gone completely dark, meaning there were probably still uncontained students roaming the campus.
The cloaked leader had stopped pacing. His eyes locked onto Klein, who was leaning against the wall in the shadows. This was the executive known as the "Doom Blades," a killer who had just barely crossed the threshold into Mithril-tier.
Klein wore his signature brown high-collared coat. His hands rested loosely on the hilts of his blades. He hadn't spoken a single word the entire time.
"Klein. Hunt down everyone still hiding in this building. The princess, the other high-value students. Leave no one behind."
Klein hadn't replied. He just pushed off the wall, turned, and walked toward the side door. His seven highly trained subordinates followed him like ghosts.
Finding Angelica had taken some time. Her two guards had bought her a few minutes, but the math never changed.
Now, only Klein and five cultists remained in the corridor. The two escorts were long gone, and the rest were waiting for his next order.
"Boss, aren't we heading back to the auditorium?" one of the men whispered.
Klein shook his head. "The old man wants us to sweep the upper floors. We've lost contact with a few squads."
Klein didn't particularly like the old man. Watching a balding, middle-aged bureaucrat try to reclaim his youth using cult elixirs was deeply annoying. But he was still the boss.
"Let's move. Check the upper levels."
He started up the stairs.
Flanked by his vanguard and rear guard, Klein ascended to the top floor. The corridor stretched out before them, a suffocatingly dim tunnel lined with tightly shut classroom doors.
Klein stopped dead.
It was too quiet. The kind of quiet that sets off alarm bells in your hindbrain.
The cultists who were supposed to be holding this floor were completely gone.
His fingers loosened over his hilts.
"Stay sharp."
The men behind him instantly stiffened.
They hadn't taken ten steps.
Three dull thuds echoed from behind him. The intervals were so short they practically overlapped.
Klein spun around.
His three rear guards were already on the floor.
Then came two more thuds.
Klein whipped back around. The two vanguard guards had also collapsed.
His twin blades cleared their scabbards in a fraction of a second.
The steel hissed in the dim light, vibrating with a low hum in his palms. He flared his domain. A two-meter radius, centered on his body. This was his ultimate technique. Within this sphere, he tracked everything. Even the air displacement from a fly's wings couldn't escape his perception.
Nothing.
The corridor was empty.
His eyes darted across the ceiling, the walls, the windows. He mapped every single corner. There was absolutely nothing there.
Poison? Invisibility?
Just in case, he yanked his collar up over his nose and mouth, taking shallow breaths.
"Are you with them?"
The whisper brushed right against the back of his skull. It sounded like a casual, passing question.
Klein pivoted and unleashed a devastating cross-slash. The blades shredded the air, carving two deep silver arcs into the stone walls. His domain registered zero feedback. It was as if the voice had spawned directly out of the masonry.
He sucked in a sharp breath, his palms slick with sweat.
He had hit nothing.
He refused to believe it. His domain was active. It didn't make mistakes.
"You're with them, aren't you?"
The voice came again.
Panic flared. Klein didn't turn this time. He compressed his domain and unleashed a torrential storm of slashes. He wove an impenetrable net of steel across the two-meter radius, filling every cubic inch of space with lethal intent.
The walls, the floor, the ceiling. Hundreds of dense blade marks scarred the corridor in seconds.
Silence returned to the hallway.
Klein stared straight ahead, his mind racing to rationalize the data.
It had to be some kind of over-the-shoulder ghost trick. The caster was definitely hiding in a safe location, projecting this creepy audio illusion to mess with his head. Force the caster out, and the threat vanishes.
He threw his weight backward.
Back against the wall. The ultimate defensive posture. If the caster wanted to strike, they had to come from the front. Solid stone behind him meant nothing could spawn behind his back. He just needed to inch toward the stairwell, get downstairs, and regroup.
A grin slowly spread across Klein's face. The adrenaline rush of surviving a lethal encounter nearly made him laugh out loud.
Ha. Hmph. Is that it? You think you can kill me? Not a chance.
He shuffled backward along the wall, one tiny step at a time.
Then the voice drifted down from the ceiling.
"What are you doing?"
Klein didn't even have time to look up. He just registered a silhouette flipping down from the ceiling, executing a casual one-eighty rotation right in front of his face.
Before his eyes could even focus on the landing figure, his blades swung up on pure instinct.
But something slammed into his temple first. His vision instantly snapped to black.
He didn't even hear the impact. The strike had likely broken the sound barrier.
Before his fading consciousness could even register the concept of pain, a bizarre vision flashed before his eyes: the gates of the underworld, swinging wide open with horrifying efficiency. He didn't even have the luxury to scream.
He tried to say, Hey Grandma, I'm here, but his jaw didn't move. His face just hit the floor.
---
In the Headmaster's office, Uriel was flipping through page thirteen of a stack of documents.
Most of it was mundane administrative garbage. Procurement approvals, class schedules, student transcripts. He had just uncovered a few encrypted letters that looked highly suspicious when the lighting in the room suddenly shifted.
Something was blocking the sun.
Uriel looked up and stared out the window. There was something hanging outside. Actually, several somethings.
Cultists.
Bundles of cultists.
They were tied together in neat clusters. Legs to legs, shoulders to shoulders, strung up on thick ropes like sausages, or fish left out to dry on a bamboo pole. They were dangling from the window eaves, swaying gently in the breeze. One, two, three, four, five.
A perfect row of human piñatas waiting for a birthday party.
Uriel's hand froze in mid-air, the file completely forgotten.
He leaned halfway out to inspect them. Left, right, up, down. Yep, every single cultist was bundled up tightly with the kind of meticulous, terrifying care only a mother packing a bento box could achieve.
He really, really didn't need to guess who was responsible.
"...Mom. What are you doing."
The Witch materialized in the doorway. Her golden eyes were devoid of all human warmth, completely ignoring his slip of the tongue.
"The harvest of the abyssal threads has concluded, Scribe," she declared, her voice a flat, freezing monotone that sounded entirely too majestic for the context. "The sinners now hang as offerings to the blood moon. Observe the symmetry of their despair. Shall I baptize them in white shrouds to complete the ritual?"
Uriel massaged his temples. She was talking about tying them up like sausages.
He pulled his head back inside, entirely speechless.
He glanced back out at the swaying bundles. White shrouds. Why not just draw little smiley faces on them and hang them up as giant, creepy Teru Teru Bozu while we're at it.
He decided to table the exterior decorating project for now and put the files back on the desk.