Chapter 17: Blood on the Gold
The clandestine auction at the ostentatious Golden Arena had come to an end, but blood still vibrated, dense and electric, in the air of South Wind City.
The crowd of nobles, mercenaries, and minor sect leaders dispersed quickly into the main streets. They spoke in hurried whispers and exchanged nervous glances, as if a primal instinct warned them that the real show hadn't happened on the illuminated stage, but was about to break loose in the deep shadows of the urban night. No one wanted to be nearby when the wounded arrogance of the Black Falcon Family clashed against the monstrous and unknown outsider from box seven.
Samael Morningstar exited through the back door of the building, his massive black cloak billowing slightly behind him. The heavy Medicine King's Cauldron, the rusted relic that would make Elowen a legend, already rested safely in the vault of his spatial ring.
Beside him walked Kael, Violeta, and Eris, wrapped in thick dark cloaks woven with aura-dampening threads. Each of their steps seemed to echo with an unnatural weight on the wet cobblestones of the alley. The auction house manager, who had escorted them to the back exit, had sent them off with a nauseating mix of servile respect and absolute terror; he didn't utter a single word of courtesy, his pale face only reflecting the desperate desire for those specters to leave his property as soon as possible.
The night air was cool in contrast to the daytime heat of the border desert, but it was heavy with dark omens. The oiled paper lanterns hanging from the city's eaves flickered erratically, and the shadows cast on the high roofs of the mansions seemed to elongate, watching them with malicious eyes of their own.
Kael, newly turned seventeen and with the instinct of the Wind Essence circulating through his hyper-densified veins, walked with the posture of a war veteran. His right hand rested with lethal familiarity on the hilt of the Whisper of the North. He leaned closer to Samael, dropping his voice to a whisper that barely caressed the air.
"Patriarch, we are being followed. The stench of hostility is suffocating... I sense at least four Qi Sea level presences behind us, measuring our speed. And there are more sliding across the roof tiles of the adjacent buildings."
Samael didn't turn his head. His expression beneath the hood was a mask of carved ice.
"I have the exact count, Kael," Samael replied, his voice deep and monotone, devoid of any hint of concern. "My spiritual sentinels have detected five elite archers positioning themselves on the upper right elevation. Ten heavily armed men are marching to block our front at the next intersection. And there is a greater aura, repulsive and stagnant, closing off the rear to secure the trap."
In the darkness of his mind, the System confirmed every word, highlighting in his peripheral vision a three-dimensional "inner map" where the thermal and enemy Qi signatures glowed a lethal red. He knew every breath, every heartbeat of the men coming to kill them. But only Samael could see that hidden dance of death.
Beside him, the sixteen-year-old twins showed no panic like defenseless little girls. They had crossed a desert plagued with calamities, endured the torture of extreme gravity, and watched their own brother tear apart a king of the sands.
Violeta watched every adjacent alley, every elongated shadow, her heterochromic eyes scanning for optimal freezing points. Her attitude was cold, calculating, and deeply murderous. Eris, on the other hand, gripped the shaft of her Phoenix Spear hidden beneath her cloak. Her knuckles were white, but not from terror—she was trembling with almost volcanic anticipation. Her chest rose and fell rhythmically. She wanted blood.
The city seemed to hold its breath the precise instant the small Morningstar group turned down a narrow dead-end alley in the textile warehouse district. Here, the light from the lanterns didn't reach, and the nocturnal bustle of the brothels and taverns died away completely, leaving room only for the sound of boots on stone and the freezing whistle of the wind.
Upon reaching the geometric center of the black stone alley, the trap snapped shut with the brutal precision of a steel jaw.
From the shadows ahead emerged ten imposing figures, blocking the only viable escape route. They were elite soldiers, all at the peak of the Qi Sea or skirting the beginning of the Transcendent realm. Their dark armor and heavy sabers gleamed menacingly in the pale moonlight. On their dark metal breastplates, the symbol of the falcon diving onto a skull proclaimed their absolute loyalty.
And from the rearguard, cutting off their path back, appeared Jareth Black Falcon, flanked by four more bodyguards.
The young master, drunk on greed, humiliation, and homicidal rage, walked toward them with an arrogance that masked his own weakness. High above, on the cornices of the massive warehouses flanking the alley, the silhouettes of five elite crossbowmen were outlined against the full moon, their siege weapons aimed directly at the group's chests.
"Finally, the rats stop running!" Jareth raised his voice. His tone was shrill and unpleasant, reverberating off the brick walls. "The mysterious 'benefactor' of the auction, the outsider who thinks a few spiritual stones give him the right to insult his betters. Hand over the cauldron, the box with the crown, and hand over the two girls hiding under those cloaks... Do it right now and maybe, just maybe, I'll take pity on your miserable life and let you go... if you agree to serve as a slave beneath my boot for the rest of your days."
As Jareth spoke, his gaze drifted to Violeta and Eris.
The air around the twins was always peculiar. Unlike Kael's Golden Destiny, which acted as a magnet for opportunities, luck, and the synchronicity of the world, the sisters' Taboo Red Destiny was a gravitational curse. It emitted an undetectable spiritual pheromone that severely affected weak and corrupt minds. To Jareth's eyes, the two hooded figures weren't just potential captives; they awakened in him an unnatural greed, a repulsive lust, and a fanatical obsession to possess them and drain their Yin energy, completely clouding any rational judgment that might warn him of the danger he was in.
The elite guards around him laughed harshly, confident in their overwhelming numerical and positional superiority. It was fifteen against four, with aerial superiority and the backing of the ruling family. To them, it was a summary execution.
Kael did not step back. With a fluid, feline movement that made not a single sound, he placed himself in front of his Patriarch, standing between Samael and the enemy vanguard. His hand was already firmly gripping the hilt of his sword.
Violeta and Eris slid to Samael's flanks in perfect tactical synchrony. Violeta unsheathed ten centimeters of her Lunar Frost Waltz, letting a thin thread of freezing vapor fall onto the cobblestones. Eris uncovered the tip of her black spear, and a faint red glow began to heat the cold air. The two sixteen-year-old girls exchanged a look of silent resolve. None of the three teenagers responded to the heir's insult; to their hardened eyes, Jareth was already a corpse that simply hadn't stopped talking.
Samael lowered the heavy hood of his cloak with a deliberate, insulting slowness, revealing his long white hair and his violet eyes that shone like cursed stars in the gloom.
His voice sounded cold, monotone, and sharp as broken glass.
"Kael. Violeta. Eris," Samael called out, crossing his arms. "The ten pieces of scum in front of us... are your graduation exam for this week. Allow no mistakes. I do not want the combat to last more than ten seconds."
Kael nodded with a military gravity that belied his age.
"As you command, Patriarch."
Violeta and Eris swallowed hard—not from panic, but to settle the adrenaline flooding their blood, tightening their grip on their Heaven and Earth Grade weapons. They were ready.
Jareth scoffed, his face contorting into a grimace of disbelief and homicidal fury.
"Do you think this is some damn provincial academy's training yard?" the Young Master spat. "Men! Kill the two of them! Archers, aim for the girls' leg tendons! I want them alive and on their knees!"
On the high rooftops, the five crossbowmen drew back the heavy dragon-gut strings of their weapons, ready to unleash a rain of armor-piercing steel bolts.
An expectant, deadly silence fell over the narrow alley, interrupted only by the racing heartbeats of the assassins.
Samael slowly raised his right hand. His pale fingers pointed toward the wet stone cobblestones.
"You think the darkness covering this alley is your ally..." Samael murmured. His polyphonic voice seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere all at once. "But the darkness... has a master."
Samael's violet eyes flashed with the relentless light of death.
"Malak. Reap."
In that exact instant, the temperature in the alley didn't just drop; it plummeted drastically below freezing in a fraction of a second. A dense white mist began to pour from the open mouths of the Black Falcon guards.
But the truly terrifying thing wasn't the cold. It was the sound. Or, rather, the absolute absence of it.
The natural echo of the city, the noise of distant taverns, the clashing of the guards' steel... everything was swallowed by an unnatural acoustic void. The ground beneath the assassins' feet vibrated violently, and a massive dark fissure, pitch-black with smoking edges, opened along the cobblestones.
From that fissure, hell emerged.
[System: Mythic Grade Summoning: 'Malak, the Reaper of Silence' completed.]
[Activating Shadow Domain: Veil of the Eclipse.]
Malak's massive tattered cloak expanded like bat wings, and a dense, liquid darkness rose toward the alley's sky, devouring the light of the lanterns and the moon itself. The physical space within the alley suddenly solidified. It was the Veil of the Eclipse, an Area of Effect skill that broke lower spatial laws. The instant the Veil fell, every escape talisman, teleportation seal, or wind artifact the elite guards possessed cracked and turned to dust on their belts. They were hermetically trapped in a slaughterhouse with no way out.
Inside the Veil, the mercenaries felt their meridians suffocate, losing all connection to the natural energy of the world. There was only the suffocating, crushing darkness of the Reaper.
From the deepest pools of shadow cast on the rooftops, near where the snipers were positioned, it wasn't men that emerged, but living nightmares. Hooded, deformed figures, devoid of faces and formed of dense, solidified smoke, sprouted behind the marksmen.
The five crossbowmen, feeling the glacial chill of the grave at their backs, tried to turn and scream. They opened their mouths in blind terror, but Malak's domain stole their voices. No sound came out.
The black smoke claws of the specters closed around the marksmen's throats. With a synchronized movement, the shadows pulled the men into the dark pools. The archers were literally absorbed by the stone of the rooftops, disappearing from the plane of existence without leaving a single trace of blood, a dropped weapon, or a scream. They were simply erased.
The ten elite guards on the ground stumbled backward, their eyes bulging with irrational, primal panic.
"Demonic magic!!" one of the mercenaries managed to shriek, his voice barely breaking the imposed silence.
"What the hell is going on?! My talismans are dead!"
In the middle of the alley, floating above the fissure, Malak stood at his full height of two meters. His tattered tunic floated without wind, thick chains of black smoke and torture hooks spun slowly around him, and in his bony hands, he wielded a gigantic rusted scythe, from which a deadly, purplish mist emanated. The Reaper didn't need to speak, didn't need to threaten; his mere existence, the materialization of the concept of Death, caused the enemies' sphincters to fail and their minds to break.
[System: Legion of Silent Shadows deployed. Psychological Terror Aura multiplied by 500% in the area of effect.]
Samael made a slight, sharp gesture with his right hand.
"They are paralyzed by terror," Samael told his young proteges. "Now is your moment. Baptize yourselves in blood."
Kael was the first to move. The seventeen-year-old took a deep breath, exhaled a fine mist, and simply vanished from sight in a blur of absurd speed.
He activated his lethal new evolutionary technique: Phantom Gale Slash. Kael gripped the hilt of the Whisper of the North, creating an acoustic void bubble around the scabbard. The classic, tell-tale "click" of the draw never existed. The enemy only saw a silver flash cutting through the air.
Two of the massive vanguard guards, with their sabers raised, didn't even know what hit them. By the time the sound of the blade cutting the wind should have reached their ears, Kael was already behind them, slowly sheathing his sword. The two guards' heads slid off their necks and fell to the cobblestones, with columns of arterial blood staining the brick walls.
A third guard, terrified, tried to launch a downward slash at the youth, but Kael merged with the air currents generated by the man's panic. He evaded the blade by a millimeter, slid his sword behind the soldier's knees, severing his tendons, and then slit his throat cleanly as he fell, without altering the rhythm of his breathing. Three dead in less than two seconds.
To Kael's right, Violeta Morningstar began her own macabre dance.
The young Tsundere moved with the lethal grace of an imperial ballerina, executing the Lunar Frost Waltz. As she advanced, she left three "Frost Images" behind her. Two guards, roaring in fury to chase away their terror, charged at her and stabbed the image closest to them.
The illusion didn't dissipate like smoke; it exploded violently into shards of hyperbaric ice. The ice slammed into the attackers' arms and chests, instantly freezing the blood in their veins and rooting them to the ground like statues of cracked glass.
Violeta appeared on their blind flank.
"Frigid Midnight Slash," she whispered.
A horizontal slash of cold, bluish energy struck both men in the throat. There was no spilled blood; the cut froze their arteries and vocal cords on contact. The men fell to their knees, alive and fully conscious, but completely paralyzed and unable to breathe, drowning in their own internal ice.
And on the left side, hell broke loose.
Eris Morningstar advanced with uncontrollable ferocity, her red and violet eyes injected with pure adrenaline.
"Get away from my sister, you damn dogs!" Eris roared.
She channeled her explosive temper into the Heaven-Piercing Phoenix Spear. The shaft of the spear ignited in crimson flames. A guard tried to block her with a heavy Mortal Grade steel shield, but Eris executed the Setting Sun Thrust technique.
She launched three spear strikes so fast they seemed like one. The thrusts didn't pierce the steel, but they left three super-compressed "heat spots" marked in the center of the shield and on the man's armor. An instant later, the three spots detonated simultaneously with the force of a siege charge.
BOOM!
The explosion blew the shield into pieces of shrapnel, destroying the primary target and incinerating the meridians and flesh of the two soldiers behind him. The charred bodies collapsed, smoking under the cold light of the Veil of the Eclipse.
The massive combat didn't even last ten seconds, exactly as Samael had demanded.
To deal with the last two elite bodyguards attempting to flee in terror toward Jareth's rearguard, Malak intervened without needing orders. The Mythic Reaper literally materialized from the very shadows the men cast on the ground. His skeletal hands reached out and executed the Touch of the Grave's Cold.
The moment the smoke fingers brushed the mercenaries' chests, an injection of pure death energy flooded their systems. The men fell face-first, feeling their blood turn to frozen tar, their hearts stopping from instant necrosis.
The alley was plunged back into a silence denser and more oppressive than before. Fifteen elites of the Black Falcon and Valois families had been massacred without a single cry of alarm reaching the main streets of South Wind City.
In the center of the sea of blood, ice, ashes, and darkness, only Jareth remained standing.
The Young Master stumbled backward, trembling uncontrollably until his back hit the wet wall of the alley. He was surrounded by the corpses of his best men, faceless specters, and the gigantic, terrifying figure of Malak floating above him. Cold sweat ran down his forehead, and his noble arrogance had been humiliatingly shattered.
"S-Stay away from me!" Jareth shrieked, hysteria breaking his voice. "You don't know who you're messing with! My family wields Forbidden Arts! I have the power of true demons in my blood! You can kill me here, but my ancestors and the Valois will hunt you to the last corner of this miserable world!"
In an act of absolute desperation and madness, Jareth brutally bit his tongue. He spat a large amount of black, corrupted blood onto the blade of his jeweled dagger. The veins in his face and neck bulged until they looked ready to burst, turning a blackish-purple color, and his eyes grew bloodshot from the overload.
"Forbidden Demonic Art: Corrupted Blood Slash!" he roared, channeling a profane art he had bought on the black market, fueled by the sacrifice of mortals.
A massive blast of foul, red energy, smelling of rusted iron and rotting corpses, tore through the air in the shape of a crescent, heading straight toward Samael like a tide of muffled screams.
Samael didn't even blink. He took a slow, calm step forward.
His royal purple aura, heavy and immense, burned in the gloom of the alley. Jareth's disgusting demonic energy struck Samael's body... and simply dissipated into nothingness. It evaporated like a drop of water falling on the surface of the sun. The Qi of Jareth's demonic blood, upon touching the passive shield of Samael's Primordial Blood, was literally burned away by its crushing hierarchical and conceptual superiority.
Samael stopped in front of Jareth, looking down at him from his height with genuine, frigid disgust.
"You are pathetic," Samael decreed, his contempt palpable. "You play at being a dark villain. You steal fragments of power, you sacrifice innocents to feed your corrupt arts... and you don't even manage to understand the fundamental laws of the very blood you try to control."
Samael stopped suppressing the pressure of his bloodline.
He released just a fraction of his Primordial Blood Domain. The air in the alley vibrated with absolute, unquestionable biological authority. The deity of all blood races was demanding submission.
"Your impure blood offends me," Samael whispered, his eyes oozing tyranny. "Kneel."
The effect wasn't magical; it was purely biological. Jareth wasn't thrown to the ground by a gust of wind; it was his own blood that betrayed him.
The blood inside Jareth's body, empowered and altered by the stupid demonic corruption he had assimilated, sensed the presence of an Apex Predator before it and rebelled instinctively in an act of forced submission. The young master's legs gave out as if they were made of jelly, and he fell to his knees on the cobblestones with a violence that fractured his kneecaps.
Dozens of small capillaries and veins burst beneath Jareth's pale skin, unable to withstand the pressure of cellular terror. His mouth filled with clumps of black, coagulated blood that he began to spit up uncontrollably.
"W-Why... why isn't my sacred art working?!" Jareth screamed between agonizing coughs, his voice broken by the deepest, most existential fear a living being could experience. "Why does my own blood obey you?!"
Samael leaned slightly forward, enveloping him in his massive shadow. The coldness of his next words sealed the noble's fate.
"Because you are just a child dressed up as a fake demon. I... I am the real monster here."
With a fluid, effortless motion, Samael reached out, violently ripped the jewel-encrusted spatial ring from Jareth's finger—breaking the finger in the process—and retrieved the heavy, sealed glass box containing the mythical Blue Phoenix Ice Crown.
Samael weighed the box in his hand and smiled with cruelty and irony.
"And thank you for spending a hundred thousand spiritual stones to guard and deliver this wedding gift for my future wife. You have saved me a lot of time."
Jareth wept tears mixed with blood, absolutely unable to move a single muscle, his face and mind permanently deformed by absolute panic. He had understood, too late, that he had provoked the wrath of something that did not belong to the mortal world.
"What... what kind of demon... are you...?" the youth babbled, choking on his own blood.
Samael straightened up and turned his back to him, losing all interest in the broken trash at his feet. He looked up at the imposing figure of Death floating nearby.
"Malak. Clean up this filth for me. Do not leave a trace, not even a thread for his soul to return."
Malak, obedient to his Sovereign's will, raised his massive rusted scythe. But he didn't execute a simple physical cut.
The Reaper executed the Silver Thread Cut.
The scythe traced an invisible arc in the air, passing through Jareth's neck without breaking his skin. The attack struck directly at the "silver thread" connecting his soul to his physical body. Jareth suffered complete spiritual paralysis; his eyes rolled back as his cultivation instantly collapsed, turning him into a spiritual cripple in a second.
But the sentence wasn't over yet.
Because Jareth was in a state of critical weakening and absolute agony, Malak activated his ultimate skill: The Purgatory Harvest.
The Reaper extended his skeletal hand, and the space directly behind Jareth tore unnaturally, materializing a terrifying, ancient Gate of the Underworld, carved with faces screaming in agony.
Malak's scythe suddenly glowed with a green and violet will-o'-the-wisp fire. With a final, sentencing motion, Malak severed the enemy's very destiny.
It wasn't a decapitation. Chains of black smoke and burning hooks shot out from the Gate of the Underworld, coiling like starving snakes around Jareth's arms, neck, and legs, binding him completely.
"NO! BY THE HEAVENS, NO! I DON'T WANT TO GO IN THERE!" the condemned man bellowed, experiencing the true death of the soul, tears, snot, and blood mixing on his disgusting face. "FORGIVE ME! I'LL GIVE YOU MY ENTIRE CLAN, FORGIVE ME!"
Malak was relentless. The chains yanked violently, dragging the noble into the unfathomable darkness on the other side of the dimensional rift. Jareth's shrill voice was quickly lost, drowned in the endless echo of the infernal gate's abyss, which slammed shut after swallowing him whole, vanishing into nothingness.
It was an absolute death. Jareth Black Falcon had been erased from reincarnation, and no celestial artifact or life-substitution treasure from his family could bring him back.
The alley fell back into a sepulchral, oppressive silence.
Malak's Veil of the Eclipse slowly dissipated, allowing the pale light of South Wind City's moon to illuminate the black stone once again. There was no longer any physical trace of Jareth, nor the bodies of the archers, nor a single drop of the disgusting demonic blood. All that remained was the biting cold, the thick smell of iron and frost, and the lifeless bodies of the fourteen guards, frozen or charred, left there as a brutal physical warning for the local family.
Samael gave his black cloak a slight shake to dust it off and turned to Kael and the twins. The three teenagers still had their weapons drawn, breathing heavily, but their eyes shone with the pride of victory and the adrenaline of their real baptism in the civilized world.
"Cleanup finished," Samael decreed, storing the glass box in his spatial ring. "Good job, you three. You showed no mercy, as it should be. Now, it's time to return to the Rock. The clan needs to see our strength, and a wedding awaits us."
As the group sheathed their weapons and began walking back toward the safety of the desert dunes, the twins walked a step behind.
Violeta was still trembling slightly from the torrent of Yin energy she had discharged, but also from an undeniable residual fear. She had seen the ease with which her brother had stripped a man of his will to live.
"Did you see his eyes, Eris?" Violeta whispered to her sister, hugging herself. "When he looked at that miserable noble... it wasn't just a display of power... it was pure emptiness. As if the lives of thousands wouldn't matter to him in the slightest if they crossed his path."
Eris nodded slowly. Even though she was immensely satisfied to have incinerated her enemies and proven her worth after so much inactivity, she felt the crushing weight of real death floating in the night air.
"That's the real world of the strong, Vio," Eris replied, though her usual boastful tone lacked triumph in that moment. "If he didn't look at them with that emptiness... those monsters would have tried to do worse things to us. He is our wall."
In the vanguard, Kael approached Samael as they quickly crossed a completely deserted commercial plaza, making sure no one was following them.
"Patriarch... we massacred the heir's personal elite, and we erased him from existence right under the city's nose. Do you think the ruling family and their Valois allies will leave this insult without a tactical response?"
Samael did not answer immediately. In the stillness of his mind, the System vibrated with triumphant intensity, unfurling a barrage of notifications in scarlet and gold letters.
[Special Event Completed: Perfect Ambush and Total Eradication!]
[Rewards Acquired:]
Purified Demonic Blood Core (x1) Crystal of Loyalty and Devotion: +10% increase in the faith bond of Kael, Violeta, and Eris. Generation of "Regional Legend Aura".
[Consequence Alert: Rumors regarding the absolute disappearance of Jareth and the dismemberment of his elites in a safe zone of the city will sweep the merchant continent before dawn.]
[Reputation Analysis: New higher-ranking enemies have forcibly fixed their attention on the reappearance of the Morningstar Clan.]
[Imminent Strategic Warning: The Valois Imperial Espionage Network has been declared in a State of Maximum Alert.]
Samael read the warnings, feeling the cold wind of imminent conflict kiss his face. He looked at Kael with a highly dangerous half-smile.
"Let them come, cousin. Let them cry and demand answers if they want," Samael replied. "Up until today, the continent thought it could use us as stepping stones. But tonight, on the streets of their own city... we have shown them that the true darkness already has a master."
Behind them, in the deepest shadows of the streets and the high rooftops near the Auction House, a handful of involuntary witnesses—terrified beggars and nocturnal thieves—fled in panic to spread the Dantean tale.
By the next morning, the legends would blossom with monstrous details: "The greedy Black Falcon had been swallowed by shadows in the night without being able to utter a single scream."
In the opulent brothels, in the dark taverns, and in the halls of the merchant guilds, the bets would radically shift course.
The Morningstar Clan had just uprooted the status of an isolated desert rumor to plant its banner as a tangible, brutal, and overwhelmingly lethal threat in the very heart of the civilized world.
In the alley of the massacre, ten minutes after Samael and his escort left, a solitary, trembling figure dropped down from a distant cornice.
It was an experienced spy, an elite tracker of the Valois. He had watched the climax of the scene with bulging eyes, paralyzed by a fear so deep that he had wet himself without realizing it upon seeing Malak's Gate of the Underworld swallow the noble.
The spy stumbled through the narrow alleys of the lower districts until he reached his underground hideout. Ignoring standard security precautions, he fiercely bit his thumb until he tore the flesh and pressed his bleeding finger against a complex scroll of red leather. It was a Blood Transmission Talisman, an exorbitantly expensive, single-use artifact that sent instantaneous tactical information thousands of kilometers away.
With a hand trembling so violently he could barely write, the Valois agent traced the characters on the scroll with his own blood:
"The Dragon has taken the auction gold. The Black Falcon heir has fallen in the night, devoured by incomprehensible demons. The shadow of the void we thought dead advances and shows no mercy. I recommend declaring maximum threat level. Send the Elders... send the Saints. —Agent C, South Wind City Outpost."
The scroll burst into red flames, consuming itself and sending its message in a heartbeat of the world.
Thousands and thousands of kilometers away, in the freezing and impenetrable lands of the Northern Empire.
In the opulent war room of the Valois family's massive main mansion, illuminated by hundreds of ice crystals, an exquisite goblet of red wine suddenly shattered into a thousand pieces of sharp crystal, crushed by the bare fist of a young man.
The wine, red as blood, dripped slowly onto the heavy continental tactical maps scattered on the obsidian table.
The young Duke Alaric Valois, the architect of the original betrayal and acting Patriarch, read the lines of blood formed by the talisman's transmission in the cold air of his hall.
The young duke wiped his wine-stained hand with a white silk cloth and looked up into the darkness of the room. His blue eyes were two frozen, deadly lakes.
"The game has finally escalated to a war of annihilation," whispered Alaric Valois, his voice devoid of humanity, echoing off the ice walls of his impenetrable fortress. "Very well, Samael Morningstar... you have caught my attention. But this time... I will personally ensure that not even your soul survives to regret it."
The massacre in South Wind City had not been the end of the siege, but the starting gun that unleashed the true war.
END OF CHAPTER 17