The moment these words left her mouth, Hestia, Onigawara Rin, Kikakujou Mary, and the others all froze mid-motion.
Even Rei and Rania turned their gazes over at once.
"There's more!" Anakity added urgently.
"According to the informant's report—besides Miss Tsukuyo, Lord Haimer had a new swordswoman with him, one no one had ever seen before."
"A small girl, golden short hair, carrying a black blade, with those very rare ring-patterned eyes."
"The one who did the killing was that never-before-seen newcomer swordswoman."
"Right outside the gate of Lord Apollo's residence!"
"That newcomer swordswoman, in front of everyone."
"She simply began a slaughter right outside the gate."
"Cutting down five Apollo Familia guards, one after another."
Finn froze where he stood.
"Just one person?"
"Yes." Anakity nodded firmly. "Not only that."
"The god Apollo even came out personally to surrender."
"And then, when the Apollo Familia's captain Hyacinthus, wanting to smooth things over, cut off his own arm and knelt to beg forgiveness…"
Anakity's voice trembled harder still.
"That newcomer, right on Lord Haimer's command, hacked off one of the Apollo Familia captain Hyacinthus's legs, right there in front of everyone!"
"Now all the Apollo Familia's assets out there have been completely sealed off by the Ganesha Familia."
Finn's brow furrowed tightly. Riveria and Gareth exchanged a glance, each seeing the heaviness in the other's eyes.
This left no room even for surrender. A scorched-earth approach—killing to the very last.
Loki, meanwhile, set down her wine cup, laced her fingers together behind her head, tilted it back, narrowed her eyes, and began to laugh.
"This guy really can't hold his temper, huh."
"Still, Apollo's luck is rotten to the core. His own Familia went and provoked that kind of jinx at this exact moment—who's left to blame?"
Loki smacked her lips, without a shred of sympathy.
Meanwhile, at the other end of that same moment.
The Southwest Main Street of Orario.
The handover of the Apollo Familia's remaining affairs was proceeding with unusual speed.
Hyacinthus, now missing an arm and a leg, had already been taken away by several military police.
Apollo and his several dozen Familia members were escorted off together, to face the Guild's interrogation; anyone with a criminal record wouldn't escape a stint in the cells.
Once the place was cleared, pools of blood still spread across the flagstone road.
Haimer stood where he was and turned his head slightly to look at Shakti beside him.
"By the way, Miss Shakti."
"Besides the Apollo Familia, which other Familias in Orario are the incorrigible sort—the ones who've done evil for a long time?"
The moment he said it, it was clearly a signal that a great purge was about to begin.
But Shakti had evidently long been prepared for this.
As the military police captain who'd upheld public order for years, she knew all too well that a major crackdown demanded some hidden tumors be sacrificed to raise the banner.
So when she learned Haimer might truly move against the Apollo Familia, this was the very sentence she'd been waiting for.
And so Shakti drew a rolled parchment list from an inner pocket of her light armor and held it out before him.
On this list were densely packed the names of large, medium, and small Familias.
Behind each name, their detailed misdeeds were clearly noted in black ink.
"A few Familias have long entrenched themselves in the commercial district, using force to strong-arm trades and extort protection money," Shakti reported gravely.
"Others specialize in ambushing lone adventurers at the boundary between the Dungeon's upper and middle levels, seizing their spoils and even destroying the bodies to erase all trace."
"Worse still, some run gambling dens deep in Daedalus Street and lend at usury; once a debt can't be repaid, they break the debtor's limbs and force them to sell themselves."
"Normally these Familias operate so covertly that victims rarely dare speak up."
"On top of that, they know how to wriggle through the loopholes."
"Our Ganesha Familia has caught them several times, but in the end it always comes to nothing—either from insufficient evidence, or because the patron god behind them steps in to grease the Guild and plead for mercy."
After all, Ryu's own story arc had been full of plots about gambling, trafficking, and oppression. So to Haimer, a god's Familia pulling this sort of thing was already nothing rare in Orario.
Even the Ganesha Familia had been kept in the dark at times.
But the Shakti before him clearly didn't yet know that.
After she finished speaking, her brow knit deeply, and a strand of long-suppressed anger flashed in her eyes.
Haimer took the parchment and swept his gaze across it.
Then he passed the list straight to his left.
"Koharu."
Narukami Koharu, standing on his left, took the parchment at once.
"Miss Shakti." Haimer turned to look at her. "Could I trouble you to send someone to the Loki Familia's base, Twilight Manor, and call Lili over for me?"
And so, a little over an hour later. Deep in Daedalus Street.
The Geryon Familia's underground gambling den.
Daedalus Street—the roads of this district were as tangled and intricate as blood vessels, a vast labyrinth built upon the surface itself.
And this, the largest of the underground dens, was cunningly tucked into the cellar of a dead-end alley that sunlight never reached.
Its patron deity, Geryon, was an extremely peculiar male god.
Like the other gods, he too was especially fond of the residents of the Lower World.
But what he loved was something else—a near-pathological obsession with the utterly twisted hearts of Lower World mortals when they lusted after money.
So, under his indulgence—even his deliberate hands-off encouragement—his Familia let the greed in their bones run completely wild, perfectly inheriting their patron god's warped character.
They not only ran the largest underground den on Daedalus Street but also held three affiliated usury shops in their grip.
This formed a horrifying chain of industry.
After the gamblers here squandered their fortunes and lost everything,
the shops next door would immediately, all honeyed words, lend them money—and clamp the shackles on.
Until the day came at last, interest compounding upon interest, when the debt could never be repaid.
Before the ink on the IOU had even dried, the debt-collecting thugs would come knocking and shatter the debtor's kneecaps outright.
Then they'd throw them into the reeking sewers, or pawn off the better-looking ones to unlicensed brothels in exchange for Magic Stones.
Bang! A violent explosive crash burst out.
The heavy wooden door, together with its rust-caked frame, didn't even get the chance to groan. It flew straight inward, slamming hard onto the cellar floor and kicking up a cloud of dust.
Under the Magic Stone lamps, in the hall,
the dozens of gamblers crowded around the tables, shouting out their bets, and the thick-jowled enforcers scattered about—all froze.
Stunned, they turned toward that dust-filled breach.
Daedalus Street hadn't seen a break-in like this staged in a very long time.
Narukami Koharu, gripping her pitch-black long blade in a reverse hold, bare feet treading over the splintered planks scattered across the floor, a savage grin at the corner of her mouth, walked straight in.
In the passage behind her, Shakti led twelve fully armed elite military police, already sealing the cellar's only escape route tight.
Their halberds gleamed with a cold, forbidding light.
"Move! Out of the way!"
Seeing the military police storm in—clearly no easy marks—a bald brute guarding the right side of the entrance reacted fastest; face twisted with menace, he roared to cover his panic.
His hand had already reached for the poison-tempered long blade hanging at the small of his back.
But there was no time even for his fingers to tighten. The instant his hand touched the hilt—
Shhk—! Narukami Koharu's figure blurred for a fleeting instant.
So much so that it gave the illusion she hadn't moved at all.
The pitch-black blade traced a half-circle.
Clang! The bald enforcer's head lost the support beneath it in almost the same instant.
Under the immense pressure of the blood erupting from his neck, it spun into the air, tracing a parabola.
It crashed down hard onto a round table piled with heaps of silver coins and colorful chips.
Chips and cups of every kind spilled clattering across the floor.
As for the huge headless body—the severed stump of its neck was like a burst water spout, jetting a column of blood a good two meters high, painting half the ceiling red.
It swayed twice, then toppled to the floor with a thud.
Time seemed to freeze for a second.
"Aaaaaah!"
The moment they grasped what had happened, screams blew the roof off the entire den.
The gamblers, whose reason had been burned hollow by greed, were now stricken with sheer terror.
Like headless flies they overturned the tables and chairs before them, scrambling desperately to both sides, wanting only to get farther away.
But the curious thing was, even in the panicked flight for their lives, many still clutched their money pouches tight to their chests, some even trying to snatch the gold coins off others. Utterly pathological.
"Don't panic! Kill her!"
But soon the true desperadoes mixed into the crowd came to their senses.
The den's dozens of full-time enforcers had watched her cut a man down in a single stroke before everyone,
and knew full well that with the military police blocking the door, escaping this wretched hole in one piece was a pipe dream.
A dozen or more fiendish figures drew short axes and broad-bladed swords in unison, trampling over the gamblers' bodies, faces mad with murderous light, and rushed to surround Koharu ahead of them.
"Courting death." Facing the blades closing in from every side,
Narukami Koharu's eyes lit up.
Thwuck! Thwuck! Thwuck! Thwuck! And then—severed arms. Mangled limbs. Even half-bodies sliced clean in two along the waist.
Like a scroll painting of hell.
Any living thing that dared step within a meter of Narukami Koharu met a meaningless death in an instant.
The floor grew slick underfoot.
These enforcers' bodies could do nothing to stop the first-class equipment forged by Tsubaki's own hands.
At the same time, the bloodthirsty trait of Bloodcry was fully awakened.
After cutting down more than a dozen in succession, the temperature of the entire blade climbed wildly, until even the air around its edge warped from the heat.
The blade, having drunk its fill of human blood, swelled and contracted.
Meanwhile, in the den's most concealed rear corridor,
the Geryon Familia's patron deity, Geryon, who had been lurking in hiding all along,
watched through the thin crack of a hidden wooden door, face deathly pale, as the enterprise he'd built with such painstaking care was carved into pieces within minutes.
"A pack of useless trash!"
He made his decision on the spot, turning to shove open the concealed door behind the bookshelf.
It was the secret alley escape route leading to Daedalus Street's foul-sewer district.
As long as he could get out of here, he could go on living carefree in some other city of the Lower World.
But just as he was about to plunge headlong into the back alley—the moment one foot stepped out—
Clang! Clang! He heard two crisp clangs of weapons striking the ground.
At the mouth of the narrow alley that should have been empty, two tall Ganesha Familia military police, halberds in hand, had long since sealed off both ends.
"Lord Geryon."
"In the name of Constable Lord Haimer, in accordance with Captain Shakti's orders,"
"you are suspected of orchestrating grave violations of discipline and law from behind the scenes."
"You are now formally under arrest."
"And we ask that you not struggle, Lord Geryon—it would make it very hard for us to answer to Lord Haimer."
At the mere mention of Haimer's name, Geryon's throat instantly seized up, and the two military police laid hands on him at once.
Soon, only half an hour later, the purge list moved on to the eastern district.
A large cargo warehouse district, abandoned for at least several decades.
The Guild had long marked this place off as a gloomy corner unfit for any development.
On any given day, the eye met nothing but haphazardly stacked wooden crates and giant hooks caked with tons of rust.
A stench of dead rats mixed with fermenting rotten wood hung perpetually over the place.
Flies even darted about overhead.
A ghostly spot like this, where hardly any decent soul ever passed, was naturally the favorite haunt of fences and black-market dealers running their underground criminal trades.
The Nemea Familia's underground black-market headquarters was likewise hidden dead center in this ruin.
The patron deity, Nemea, was a goddess with a tall, slender figure, though the lines of her face carried a snakelike, cold-blooded heartlessness.
According to the records, her Familia's registered identity at the Guild was nominally an unremarkable little exploration squad.
But in truth, what they did in private was all the zero-cost, conscienceless trade of murder and robbery.
Especially the most vicious villain of a captain under Nemea,
who never did honest dungeon runs, preferring to bring along a few utterly devoted, like-minded cronies,
lurking year-round like a viper in the shadows, prowling the relatively deserted floors 11 to 13, where the Dungeon's upper level joins the middle.
They deliberately staked out lone, exhausted adventurers—those locked in a death struggle with monsters, or gravely wounded and desperate to head back and retreat.
Once someone was alone, they ambushed them off guard, lopped off the head in a single stroke to snuff them out, and skillfully stripped away every priceless dropped item along the way.
As for this plundered, blood-tainted Valis, once brought up to the surface it took only a few short hours—through their connections among the eastern district's black-market dealers—to fence it and split the money, turning it, without a soul the wiser, back into a clean deposit within the Guild's System.
Now, inside the tightly locked warehouse, under the ghostly green glow of a Magic Stone desk lamp,
twelve killers, their gear ragged and worn, dressed almost like barbarians, were gathered around an enormous black chest.
Strewn carelessly across the floor were a pile of mid-grade breastplates and vambraces still stained with dried blood, over a dozen bottles of rare antidote, and even a costly staff-shortsword.
At the center sat a man with a great blade scar running raw from his left eye down to his chin. He was the captain of the Nemea Familia.
But the next moment—Boom! A shattering roar that could drown out a thunderclap burst out abruptly.
The oversized rusted iron lock sealing the warehouse's escape route, along with the two heavy, solid hardwood doors a full three meters tall,
were kicked in from outside with brute force, and like rotten paper in the wind they blasted straight inward, collapsing wide open on the spot.
A cold wind swept in with them.
The circle of blade-licking cutthroats in the warehouse jolted alert and snapped their heads toward the entrance in unison.
Their eyes changed. And then, through the haze of dust,
a young figure of strikingly small stature—a pitch-black long blade shimmering with strange light slung in a reverse grip over one shoulder—kicked aside the wood splinters and stepped through the doorway.
"Hmm? You came alone to wreck the place?"
The scar-faced captain had already drawn his blade.
But once the firelight shifted a little and the view cleared, he found the one striding in out of the rubble was merely a short-haired girl who looked almost like a child.
And when not a single sound of anyone else backing her came from beyond the door, the panic on that ferocious face quickly drained away.
Gripping his broadsword, he led his dozen or so battle-hardened elite killers slowly closing in around her in an arc.
They thought they'd netted a fat, foolish fish who didn't know how high the sky was.
But soon, Shakti and the others, keeping watch dozens of meters outside the warehouse door, listened as the screams within gradually died down.
Then they saw Narukami Koharu walk out—aside from the flecks of blood spattered across her face and clothes, she carried a dripping, bloody head in her hand.
It was none other than the Nemea Familia's captain, eyeballs bulging out in terror.
At the sight, Shakti and the others swallowed hard.
In that instant, a petite figure came hurrying over.
"Koharu-sama, wipe off the blood."
It was Liliruca Arde.
Clutching a clean white linen handkerchief tightly in her hands, she came up to Narukami Koharu with slightly hurried steps and held the cloth out with both hands.
Narukami Koharu glanced at Lili, reached out to take the handkerchief, and wiped her cheeks a couple of times.
"Nice work." Narukami Koharu tossed the blood-stained cloth back to Lili, her tone utterly casual.
"This wretched place winds around like a maze. If it weren't for you knowing the way and leading me, little lass, I'd probably be spinning around like a headless fly."
At these words, Lili hugged the handkerchief, her shoulders flinching on instinct, an uneasy flutter in her chest.
After all, she knew this Daedalus Street area all too well. It wasn't a skill worth boasting about.
Then, seeing that Koharu was done, Shakti ordered several military police to move swiftly into the abandoned warehouse, checking for any accomplices who might have fled and confirming the carnage strewn within.
Narukami Koharu naturally had no time to bother with the cleanup behind her; she hoisted her long blade back over her shoulder and strode straight past Lili.
"Let's go. There's still the next one."
The sun slowly slanted westward. The orange-red light peculiar to dusk spilled across Daedalus Street.
Because the streets were laid out in such utter chaos, long shadows overlapped one another.
The already cramped bluestone path was shrouded in a broad swath of gloom.
The residents along the way, sensing the approach of heavy-armored footsteps in great numbers, had wisely locked all their doors and windows tight.
Guided by Lili, Narukami Koharu's group descended a steep stone stairway and finally stopped before a black iron riveted door.
The Ikelos Familia's base.
Though called a god's Familia base, the place looked like nothing more than a small hut.
And unexpectedly, this door stood wide open.
A burly man in dark brown leather armor stood in the very center of the entrance, arms folded across his chest—none other than the Ikelos Familia's senior member, the bald Lv. 4 Gran.
And behind him, five men lay bound head to toe with thick hemp rope, writhing frantically on the ground like five fish out of water.
As for the lower halves of these five faces, they were almost entirely smeared with blood.
At the sight, Shakti frowned and stepped half a pace forward.
She stared for a second at those mouths ceaselessly spurting blood, and her face darkened at once.
The reason was plain: these men's tongues had all been forcibly severed at the root.
The cut wounds hadn't even received any proper attempt to staunch the bleeding—just enough to ensure they wouldn't die in the short term.
"What is the meaning of this?"
Face grim, Shakti raised the halberd in her hand and coldly demanded an answer from the bald Gran blocking the doorway.
"No particular meaning, Captain Shakti."
"Just a small, humble token of cooperation."
With that, Gran kicked one of the still-struggling men in the ribs; a crisp crack of bone sounded, the man convulsed violently, and a great mouthful of bloody foam spewed from his lips.
"These fellows have spent every day going around flying the banner of our Lord Ikelos, pulling petty thefts and stirring up trouble," Gran said, his expression unchanged.
"We'd meant to give them a way out."
"But since the Constable is in such a fury today—going out in person to patrol and purge, clearing away these dregs of the city,"
"we ought to show our attitude too."
Gran spread his hands, putting on an air of utter openness and compliance.
"The men—I've already bound them up and delivered them out to you all."
"Our Ikelos Familia has always kept to honest business down below; we'd never want a few rotten apples to stir up some colossal misunderstanding."
"Please, let the Constable's people do the deed."
With that, Gran lowered his head and looked away.
Hearing this, Shakti's brow only knit deeper.
After all, as a military police captain who'd dealt with the undercurrents for years, she'd seen this so-called "righteously severing kin" trick far too many times.
But the method was so vicious—severing the tongues to strip away their ability to speak outright—that it reeked of conspiracy.
To clear itself of any connection, it had wiped out in advance even the chance for interrogation at the Guild.
It was nothing but fear that these men, under extreme torture, might carelessly bite out the unspeakable dealings hidden deeper down.
Such as the Ikelos Familia's rumored, ever-unexplained, nouveau-riche wealth.
But the other side had already gone this far—even voluntarily binding the offenders and handing them over to the Constable.
On any legal basis, the military police truly had no grounds to break in and thoroughly investigate the Ikelos Familia.
And that was exactly what made this lizard-shedding-its-tail move so sickening.
And most crucial of all, given the current situation, she really couldn't act rashly.
After all, when Shakti swept a cold glance over the bald Gran, she noticed that the Ikelos Familia's true captain—the Lv. 4 "Brute," Dix Perdix—was nowhere to be seen.
This too was a problem. Every avenue had been blocked off.
At the thought, Shakti turned her gaze to Narukami Koharu, ready to hear the opinion of this executor Haimer had authorized.
After all, since this was Haimer's authorization, whether or not to accept these discarded pawns was Narukami Koharu's decision to make.
But even Narukami Koharu—she, like Shakti, had noticed the very same thing.
Yet clearly, whether or not these divine Familias had committed some sordid trade in private meant nothing at all to Narukami Koharu.
She had come here, besides following Haimer's orders to thin out the troublemakers, for one incidental pleasure alone: the feedback she reaped through killing.
Just like the name of her skill—Slay Because of Slaying.
Since she could extract from the fallen and gain direct, permanent Ability growth as compensation,
and the prey was already laid out on the chopping block, the struggle already spared—what reason was there not to kill?
At the thought, Narukami Koharu grinned savagely, tilted her head slightly, and fixed her gaze straight on those five men already scared out of their wits.
And then—Shing! With a single wet Squelch—!
An arc of blood! In an instant it drew up five neat lines of red light!
And with that, amid five thuds rolling together into one,
five heads, each fixed with a final expression of agony, tumbled together to rest beside five headless corpses.
____
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