Chapter 150: Divine Punishment
The monsters gave way to perfect human silhouettes, disturbingly elegant and powerful. Men and women of superhuman beauty, almost angelic in appearance, but with eyes injected with a crimson glow and expressions cold, merciless. Their garments, ink-black, seemed to absorb the surrounding light, creating around them an aura of palpable darkness. They advanced slowly through the still-smoking rubble, their steps leaving no footprints in the ashes, as if they floated above the devastation they had sown.
These beings methodically tracked terrified survivors, sniffing the air like predators to detect the scent of fear. They effortlessly flushed out those who had hidden under debris or in basements, extracting them from their precarious refuges with inhuman strength.
A child, discovered curled up behind the ruins of a school, was seized by the throat by one of these creatures with a feminine appearance. The humanoid dragon observed with curiosity the tears streaming down the little boy’s dirty cheeks, a thin smile stretching her perfect lips. With a casual gesture, she broke his neck, the sharp sound resonating like a whip crack in the vitiated air. The lifeless body was thrown with disdain onto a heap of corpses already as high as a macabre hill.
Adrien felt as if his blood was freezing in his veins. Never had he seen such atrocity. Never had he imagined that war would take this form, a war so cold, so methodically brutal. A war of extermination where the enemy didn’t even seek to subjugate, only to annihilate.
- "Alert all our remaining hunters immediately!" he suddenly shouted, his voice breaking with emotion. Droplets of saliva mixed with blood—he had bitten his tongue without realizing it—splashed the console in front of him. "Tell them to fall back immediately, to evacuate whatever they can!"
But he already knew, deep inside, that these orders were derisory. Paris no longer existed. The City of Light had gone out, replaced by an infernal blaze. The humanoid dragons roamed the alleyways, hunting humans without mercy, using enchanted blades that glowed with a bluish sheen to coldly finish off those who dared resist them. Each blow sliced flesh with surgical precision, leaving wounds that didn’t bleed immediately, as if even the victims’ blood was momentarily frozen by the horror of what was happening to them.
Marc Lemaire, the once arrogant and self-assured inspector, now crouched in his devastated office at the Hunters Bureau headquarters. The windows had shattered, projecting glass fragments throughout the room. His impeccable suit was now torn and soiled with blood—his own and that of colleagues he had tried vainly to help.
He observed with a haggard gaze the absolute chaos reigning in the streets below, where humanoid dragons implacably tracked survivors. He saw a pregnant woman, running as fast as her condition allowed, being caught by one of these creatures. With a negligent gesture, the monster in human form plunged its tapered fingers into the distended belly, tearing out the fetus in a spray of blood before contemplating it with morbid curiosity. The mother collapsed, hands clenched over her eviscerated belly, her screams fading into a gurgle of blood.
Suddenly, a dull pain filled Marc’s heart, a profound guilt gripping him as never before. His legs gave way beneath his weight and he collapsed to his knees, short of breath, vision blurred by tears he didn’t even know he was capable of shedding.