"Alright, after you register your fiend's combat designation, you bear the karmic weight of that choice. The Vanguard does not tolerate indecision. I expect you to enforce your will."
On the first night within the staging caverns, a scarred veteran from the Flaying Halls was sent to lecture the newly culled elite.
The veteran looked exhausted and heavily warded in his dark-metal armor. He stalked to the center of the cavern, a dripping burlap sack clutched in his gauntlet.
He dumped the sack onto an obsidian observation table, spilling out several petrified, gray skulls of the Grave-Ash Horrors.
"Tonight, I will demonstrate how to maximize absolute lethality," the veteran announced concisely, his voice echoing off the damp walls.
"Different fiends utilize different vectors of slaughter, but the underlying demonic principle is identical. Many rely on brute force, corrosive venom, or soul-shattering curses to break the enemy."
As he said this, the veteran suddenly channeled a dense pulse of dark Qi into his right hand, his four fingers extending into elongated, shadowy talons.
His hand violently pierced straight through one of the petrified skulls!
The gathered disciples flinched; why did this instructor unleash a dark art without warning?
The veteran calmly withdrew his dripping talons, then activated a glowing, blood-red projection array above the table.
"That is an execution. I struck when the ambient death Qi was fluctuating; that is how I shattered a Calamity-spawn's skull with a mere Elite-tier technique."
"Senior, did you shatter the skull because the entity was already deceased?" Disciple Vesper asked, her hollow eyes fixed on the display.
The disciples waited in tense silence. The veteran narrowed his scarred eyes. "Yes, I shattered it because it was an inanimate object. But the principle remains. You must command your fiends to strike when the enemy is distracted by agony; the Demonic Path offers no honorable duels."
Then the veteran continued his gruesome demonstration. He did possess a terrifying mastery: shattering petrified bone with bare, Qi-infused hands was as easy as snapping dry twigs.
The blood-red projection array displayed a massive amount of forbidden knowledge, detailing the exact anatomical weaknesses of various Orthodox Paladin mounts.
It demonstrated the optimal angles to sever spiritual tethers, how to deflect radiant-fire incantations using sacrificial flesh-shields, and how to maximize a fiend's cruelty to drain the enemy's morale.
The only problem was he conveyed too much horrifying information at once; the disciples needed time to process the sheer volume of slaughter-tactics.
Sunny sat entirely rigid upon his spine-throne during the lecture. There were a lot of terrifying things he had never encountered in his previous life as a civilian.
He also realized how incredibly out of his depth he truly was. This lecture gave him a profound, sinking feeling of impending doom.
After the lecture concluded, Vesper drifted into Sunny's pavilion, her massive Rot-Weaver Arachnid lurking in the shadows outside.
The Rot-Weaver remained perfectly still, but it was not as frantic as before. At least it could remain in the presence of Sunny's Phantom Ash Scorpion without immediately trying to initiate a death-match.
"Here. The tactical breakdown of area-denial," Vesper said, her voice like grinding stones, handing Sunny a scroll bound in cured human skin.
She exchanged it for a jade slip containing Sunny's completely fabricated 'Flesh-Mending theories.'
He opened the scroll and scanned the glowing green runes, glancing over the key points.
To Venom-Spitter fiends, unless your beast possesses an absolute, Calamity-tier toxin, precise positioning is always more vital than the volume of venom...
The notes also detailed horrific examples of how to trap Paladins within agonizing, slow-acting poison clouds, maximizing the psychological terror of the Orthodox troops.
Sunny was internally nauseous but outwardly satisfied. He gave a microscopic nod to Vesper, "..."
"The pact holds. We ensure mutual survival," Vesper muttered, retreating into the gloom.
Later that night, it was time for the practical slaughter-drills. Goggling at the massive, rune-inscribed iron transport cages being hauled into the cavern, Sunny sighed heavily in his mind. 'This is going to be a bloodbath. I don't know how I'm going to fake my way through actual combat.'
The captured entities were dragged down from the transport arrays and locked within reinforced, blood-warded execution pits. The average pit was fifty yards wide and enclosed by a dome of crackling, black lightning.
There were around fifty pits scattered across the cavern floor; each contained a starved, captured fiend or a corrupted Orthodox beast.
These monsters were entirely feral, pacing the perimeter of their pits anxiously, roaring with bloodlust and glaring at the disciples above.
"Are we to execute these beasts with our newly ascended fiends?" A tall, heavily scarred disciple from the Beast Pavilion asked, his voice trembling with eager malice.
He confidently glanced at his massive, mutated Three-Tailed Corpse-Hound.
"My hound is the apex of this cohort; it can tear these starved runts apart without a doubt."
"Your hound only possesses mass. Once it steps into the execution pit, it will bleed like the rest. My Obsidian-Carapace Centipede is a true executioner." Another disciple scoffed. He gently stroked the thick, jagged armor of his six-foot-long centipede.
"Arrogance. That is merely a mutated scavenger. You claim the title of executioner too easily," the first disciple sneered.
"I claim nothing! How can you predict the depths of my dark arts? My centipede will liquefy your hound if provoked!"
Seeing the violently thrashing, muzzle-bound monsters being forced into the pits, the surviving disciples murmured with a mixture of terror and dark anticipation. The staging cavern was suffocatingly tense.
"Cohorts of five. Your practical slaughter begins now," Captain Kael's cold voice suddenly cut through the gloom.
After being segmented into smaller kill-teams, Captain Kael took charge of Sunny's immediate vicinity, overseeing a cluster of five execution pits.
"Who volunteers to offer the first blood?" asked Captain Kael, his Blood-Marrow Hound growling softly.
When the moment of actual, lethal combat arrived, the disciples suddenly became dead silent. Nobody dared to boast about their fiend's prowess anymore.
"I expect absolute ruthlessness. The first execution provides the truest measure of your fiend's baseline malice. After a few engagements, the captured beasts will be exhausted or crippled, and the value of the drill will be greatly reduced. Seize the initiative."
It was sound demonic logic. But goggling at the massive Iron-Tusked Behemoth-Boar in the first pit - which stood eight feet tall, twelve feet long, and was slamming into the blood-wards - no one dared to send their fiends into the meat grinder first.
The Behemoth-Boar crashed against the crackling black lightning insanely, the sound of sizzling flesh echoing loudly.
Its bloodshot eyes were filled with pure, unadulterated ferocity, exhaling clouds of hot steam.
It continued to ram the wards as if it felt no pain, its thick, iron-like bristles standing on end like jagged spears.
"Captain Kael, may we... select a different target?" Disciple Zhao hesitated, his voice barely a whisper, pointing a finger at the adjacent pit.
In that pit paced a flayed, Crimson-Marrow Hyena, looking as though it had been turned inside out, its dense, acidic muscles fully exposed to the air.
It looked horrifying, its physical size was relatively small, barely reaching a man's waist. Compared to the massive Behemoth-Boar, it didn't seem to possess the same immediate, crushing threat, relying mostly on its grotesque appearance to intimidate.
[Target Identified: Iron-Tusked Behemoth-Boar]
[Monster Level]: Tier 3 (Peak)
[Monster Grade]: Normal
[Monster Condition]: Enraged (Highly Lethal)
[Target Identified: Crimson-Marrow Hyena]
[Monster Level]: Tier 4 (Commander)
[Monster Grade]: Excellent
[Monster Condition]: Starving (Calculating)
Sunny's crimson eyes narrowed as the System interface flashed in his vision. Unexpectedly, that grotesque, smaller hyena was a Commander-tier fiend of Excellent grade.
Furthermore, it was an incredibly cunning predator.
Unlike the mindless, raging Behemoth-Boar exhausting itself against the wards, the Crimson-Marrow Hyena paced silently in the center of its pit, its eyes locked onto the disciples above, analyzing their weaknesses.
Sunny remained perfectly still, his face an impenetrable mask. Internally, he was having a meltdown.
'Are you kidding me?! The small ugly one is the boss monster? If Zhao throws his beast in there, it's going to be eaten in two seconds, and then the Captain is going to force me to fight it!'
"..." Sunny slowly turned his head, fixing Zhao with a stare of such profound, freezing emptiness that the surrounding temperature seemed to drop.
Zhao choked on his own breath, instantly misinterpreting the Young Master's silent, terrifying gaze.
'Heavens... The Supreme One is furious!' Zhao thought. 'He recognizes that the Hyena is the true, hidden threat, and he is disgusted that I dared to choose the 'easy' target! He is silently threatening to throw me into the pit if I show such pathetic cowardice again!'
"I-I retract my request!" Zhao practically screamed,
"I am blind to the true depths of slaughter! I will face the Behemoth-Boar!"