By two in the morning, the holy crusade of the Oykot Vanguard had devolved into a frantic, disorganized ghost hunt.
Commander Kaelen, a scarred veteran of the New World’s border skirmishes, stood in the center of Oakhaven’s blazing tavern.
He had ordered the wooden structures torched to eliminate the shadows, but the fires only made the darkness in the alleyways deeper.
“Report!” Kaelen barked, his hand resting on the hilt of his cutlass.
A breathless scout stumbled into the firelight, his armor covered in soot and someone else’s blood.
“Sir… the third patrol is gone. We found them near the docks. The fifth and sixth patrols aren’t responding either. We’ve lost forty men in under an hour.”
“To what?!” Kaelen roared, grabbing the scout by the collar.
“Is there a Roshwan garrison hidden here? How many of them are there?!”
“It… it isn’t an army, sir,” the scout whimpered, his eyes wide with a terror that bordered on madness.
“The men are saying it’s a demon. A ghost. It doesn’t make a sound. It just takes them into the dark.”
From the roof of the burning tavern, perfectly concealed within the billowing black smoke, Elian watched them.
The heat of the flames was blistering his bare feet, and his small muscles were screaming from lactic acid buildup.
He was ten years old.
Biologically, his body should have collapsed an hour ago.
But the heavy, blood-red mist bleeding from his pores acted like a synthetic adrenaline, bypassing his fatigue and completely severing his pain receptors.
‘Commander identified.
Plume on the helmet.
Intact vocal cords projecting orders.
If the command structure holds, they will eventually form a phalanx.
A phalanx reduces exposed surface area by eighty percent.
The commander must expire.’
Elian didn’t jump down into the center of the tavern.
That would expose him to crossfire. Visit novelping.com for the full chapter.
Instead, he looked at the heavy oak chandelier hanging directly above Kaelen, suspended by a thick iron chain.
‘Chain tensile strength: high.
But the mounting bracket is bolted into burning timber.
Structural integrity is compromised.
A single precise kinetic strike will trigger catastrophic failure.’
Elian reached into his pocket and pulled out a heavy steel belt buckle he had stripped off a corpse.
He didn’t throw it at the men below.
He threw it upward, directly at the charred wooden beam holding the chandelier.
With a sickening *crack*, the burnt wood splintered.
The chandelier, weighing several hundred pounds, plummeted.
It crashed directly into Commander Kaelen and his lieutenants, crushing armor and shattering bone with a deafening crunch.
Sparks and burning oil rained down over the remaining soldiers, sending them screaming into the street.
Elian dropped from the smoke, landing lightly on the edge of the shattered chandelier.
The commander wasn’t dead.
Kaelen lay pinned beneath the heavy oak, coughing up blood, his cutlass still gripped weakly in his hand.
He looked up, his vision blurring, expecting to see a towering Roshwan assassin.
Instead, he saw a barefoot, ten-year-old boy.
The child’s face was completely blank, his eyes dead and unblinking, surrounded by a suffocating, blood-red aura that smelled overwhelmingly of copper and ozone.
“You…” Kaelen gasped, absolute horror dawning on him.
“Just a boy…”
‘Ribs four through eight are shattered.
He is drowning in his own blood.
Time to death: four minutes.
Unacceptable.
He needs to scream now to maximize psychological damage to the surviving troops.’
Elian stepped onto Kaelen’s shattered chest plate.
He raised Vane’s chipped, blood-stained boning knife.
The red aura crawled down Elian’s arm, coating the cheap steel in a dark, hyper-compressed sheen.
*Absolute Penetration.*
‘Insert the blade between the clavicle and the pauldron.
Sever the brachial plexus.
Pain receptors will overload without causing immediate expiration.’
Elian drove the knife down.
It slid through the commander’s heavy steel armor as if it were wet paper.
Kaelen unleashed a blood-curdling, agonizing scream that echoed across the entire island.
It was a sound of such profound, hopeless agony that every Oykot soldier in a one-mile radius froze in their tracks.
Elian twisted the blade, pulled it out, and vanished back into the smoke before the first soldiers rushed into the tavern.
When they found their commander bleeding out from a wound that cleanly bypassed two inches of solid steel, the last remnants of Oykot’s morale shattered.
The hunt was over.
The slaughter was about to begin.
Half Goal reached so, here it is.