Chapter 609: Death and Carnage

Within the space of a few seconds a clear path of ruined men marked the lady-man’s passage.

I turned my head away and still felt my stomach twist at the glimpse of innards and spilled bowels left in the wake.

The figure moved with the unstoppable momentum of a giant rhino, each step possessing more weight and more destruction than the last.

Elsewhere on the field the methods changed.

Ice formed in mid-air without warning—long, jagged shards that launched themselves into the denser knots of bandits.

Men screamed as the cold points punched through leather and flesh and bone, pinning some to the ground and dropping others where they stood.

Almost in the same breath sheets of flame roared up from nowhere, white-hot at the center, and consumed everything they touched.

Clothing, armor, skin, and hair vanished into the fire; what remained afterward was less than ash, only dark smears on the scorched earth.

Some of the bandits simply yelled—one short, rising cry—and then exploded from the inside, as if something had ignited within their chests.

Others were caught by an invisible force that hooked into their skin and pulled. I watched one man try to run while the flesh of his back and shoulders peeled away in long, wet strips. He made it three steps before he fell and did not rise again.

Through all of it the small and quiet girl remained seated on top of the wagon, hands resting lightly on her knees, expression unchanged.

She had not moved since the fighting began.

I told myself she must be the weakest of the group. The thought settled somewhere in my chest and made the whole scene slightly more bearable.

At least one of them was still within the range of ordinary human limits. She was not casually rewriting the rules of what a body could survive.

But then she raised one hand.

A piece of ordinary-looking rock—fist-sized, rough-edged—lifted from the ground and flew cleanly into her open palm. She closed her fingers around it, still wearing the same emotionless face, and flicked her wrist.

The rock left her hand with a force that had nothing to do with ordinary strength.

It crossed the distance to the remaining cluster of bandits in a blur and struck the center of them like a large magical blast rather than a simple stone.

The air itself seemed to compress and then expand. Bodies were thrown outward in a perfect ring.

The ground where the rock had passed burned an angry, glowing red, heat shimmering above the scorched earth long after the projectile itself had vanished into the distance.

When the dust and smoke cleared, that section of the field was simply empty of living men.

"It seems this is it for my group." A hardened man with long hair stepped forward through the chaos, leaving the last pockets of fighting behind him as if they no longer concerned him.

His face was calm and somewhat resigned, but his eyes stayed sharp. "Nevertheless, before I fall, shall I challenge the leader of your group?"

Zanya paid him a brief glance, measuring, then nodded once. "So you are the one that hurt Sekhmet just now? I don’t mind. If I do it or my pals do it, it doesn’t change anything. Come and die."

"Hahaha. One cannot know if they have not yet tried!"

He smiled brightly, the expression startling against the blood and smoke around him, and pulled a long sword from the sheath on his back.

The steel cleared the scabbard with a clean sound. "My name is Raven... May I know your name?"

"What? You want to tell tales about me and how I killed you in hell?" Zanya asked, one hand resting casually on her waist, the other still holding her slim curved sword loosely at her side. "That won’t do, since you will die not knowing how I did it. Anyway, my name is Zanya, Sword Girl of the Apex Girls."

Without further preamble the leader of the bandits bolted toward her.

His sword came around in a very fast, tight arc aimed at her midsection—the kind of cut that would have ended most opponents before they could react.

Zanya did not step back, shift her feet, or even appear to tense.

She only swung her free hand in a lazy, dismissive loop. The edge of her hand—or perhaps simply the force behind the motion—caught Raven’s wrist.

His hand, still gripping the sword, separated cleanly from the arm and spun away in a short, bloody arc.

Before the man could fully reconcile the sudden absence of his hand or the white-hot bloom of pain, Zanya twisted her hips and drove a kick upward.

The impact landed with a sound like a small explosion. Raven’s body left the ground entirely and climbed into the air in a high, broken trajectory.

"Do better in your next life, chum."

She lifted her sword and used the tip to draw a quick, precise symbol in the empty sky above the falling man.

The lines hung for a fraction of a second, glowing a faint, cold color. Then Raven’s entire form came apart into a fine, drifting mist of blood that the wind began to thin almost at once.

I looked back across the battlefield.

Every other bandit was gone. The field that had held fifty armed men now held only scattered weapons, dark stains, and the residual heat shimmer from the quiet girl’s thrown rock.

"Please! Please, don’t kill m—!!" One last man had somehow remained upright near the edge of the carnage.

His voice cracked on the second plea, but the lady-man was already there.

A single powerful stomp brought a heavy boot down onto the bandit’s head and drove it into the packed earth with wet, final force.

When the foot lifted again, the stump of the neck bone jutted upward from the ruined remains in a way that turned my stomach over again. I had to look away and swallow hard against the taste of bile.