By three in the morning, Oakhaven was no longer a village; it was a sprawling, chaotic inferno.
The heat of the burning taverns and collapsed wooden homes radiated into the narrow alleyways, baking the salt out of the sea breeze and replacing it with the thick, choking scent of charred wood, melting pitch, and burning flesh.
Ash fell from the pitch-black sky like a morbid, gray snowfall, sticking to cobblestones that were already slick with a coagulating layer of blood.
The deafening roar of the flames consumed the silence, punctuated only by the occasional crack of a collapsing roof or the distant, agonizing moans of the dying.
Elian stood silently in the suffocating shadows of the harbor master’s ruined office.
He held a cheap, chipped boning knife in his small, trembling hand, methodically wiping the gore from its blade using the heavy wool fabric of a fallen Oykot soldier’s coat.
His ten-year-old chest heaved with shallow, rapid breaths, but his eyes were entirely dead—twin voids reflecting the dancing, violent flames outside without a shred of humanity or childhood innocence.
Then, a new sound cut through the crackling of the dying village.
It was a deep, rhythmic thrumming.
War drums.
They echoed across the dark, churning water of the bay, their steady, terrifying cadence vibrating through the wooden planks of the docks and into the soles of Elian’s bare feet.
A second fleet had arrived.
Through the haze of smoke drifting across the harbor, the colossal silhouettes of three dreadnought-class vessels emerged.
These ships were entirely different from the bulky, heavily armored vessels of the Oykot Vanguard.
They were sleeker, built for predatory speed and devastating broadside attacks, painted pitch black from hull to mast to blend seamlessly with the night sea.
Snapping violently in the gale above their masts were massive flags bearing the golden sunburst of the Roshwan Empire.
The holy war, a brutal conflict spanning across oceans and consuming islands whole, had finally followed the retreating Vanguard to the quiet shores of Oakhaven.
Elian’s mind, fractured by the bleeding memories of a past life and overridden by an unnatural, cold logic, immediately partitioned this new sensory information.
A synthetic, analytical voice drowned out the underlying terror of the ten-year-old boy.
New variables introduced to the battlefield.
Three dreadnought-class vessels.
Approximately two thousand fresh hostiles.
Heavily armed with flintlock rifles, steel sabers, and boarding halberds.
They are deploying landing craft.
**Current Battlefield State:**
The Oykot remnants are clustered near the docks in a panicked, disorganized defensive perimeter.
Two heavily armed opposing forces are about to occupy a geographical bottleneck.
This is a zero-sum game.
The entity that controlled Elian—the Absolute Murderer—did not feel fear at the overwhelming numbers.
It did not recognize the tragic futility of a lone, battered child standing against two professional armies.
It simply recalibrated its parameters for maximum efficiency.
**Directive:**
Do not engage both forces simultaneously.
Frontal assault will result in immediate catastrophic biological failure.
Let them fight each other.
Act as the unseen catalyst.
Exploit their inherent chaos.
Maximize lethality while keeping caloric expenditure to absolute zero.
On the shoreline, the landing crafts hit the sand with a heavy crunch.
Roshwan soldiers stormed the beaches with bayonets fixed, moving with the disciplined synchronization of a fanatical military force.
They screamed war cries for “True Freedom,” expecting a grueling, entrenched battle against Oykot’s elite Vanguard.
They had prepared to fight tight, disciplined ranks of riflemen and hardened spearmen.
Instead, they found a broken, terrified mob. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
The remaining Oykot men, their nerves entirely shattered by the massacre they had just survived, were not looking at the ocean.
They were shooting wildly into the shadows of the burning village, screaming hysterically about a blood-soaked demon that was hunting them in the dark.
“They’re completely disorganized! Their lines are broken!” a Roshwan captain bellowed, his voice booming over the sound of the drums.
He raised a polished silver saber as his heavy boots hit the bloody sand.
“No quarter for the Oykot heretics! For the True Freedom! Fire at will!”
Volleys of musket fire tore through the panicked Oykot ranks.
The deafening cracks of black powder rifles shattered the night, and the beach instantly erupted into a chaotic, bloody melee.
Armor clashed against armor, sparks flying into the night air as steel met steel.
Men screamed as bayonets pierced their guts, and the humid ocean air filled with thick, blinding, sulfurous smoke.
It was the absolute perfect environment for a ghost.
Elian stepped out of the shadows of the harbor master’s office.
The red aura surrounding him had grown so dense and saturated that it looked like literal blood boiling off his skin, defying gravity as it drifted upward.
The air around him visually distorted, heavy with the terrifying conceptual weight of a million simulated deaths.
He didn’t charge in with a heroic battle cry.
He simply slipped into the chaotic tide of screaming men like a single drop of deadly poison spreading through a dark well.
He moved directly into the heart of the frantic melee, completely ignored by the soldiers who were too busy slaughtering one another to notice the child at their knees.
A Roshwan soldier, heavy infantry was winding up a heavy lateral swing with a two-handed boarding axe.
‘Step inside his guard.
Overextension creates an unavoidable vulnerability.
Redirect his wrists upward at a twenty-degree angle.
Force the momentum of his own blade into the Oykot soldier’s exposed neck.
Pivot on the left heel to avoid blood spatter.’
Elian didn’t even need to use his own knife for most of the slaughter.
He became a fluid, frictionless gear in a massive, grinding machine of death.
He ducked beneath a swinging halberd, his small stature allowing him to move completely unnoticed in the blind spots of fighting giants.
As the blade whirled past his head, he tapped the wooden shaft of the weapon just enough to alter its trajectory by three inches.
It was a minuscule adjustment, but it was enough to send the heavy axe head cleaving straight through the iron helmet and skull of a Roshwan officer instead of its intended target.
**Target Acquired:**
Oykot rifleman taking aim at the Roshwan vanguard.
‘Blind spot located at his six o’clock.
Sever the Achilles tendon.
As his body weight collapses, his autonomic nervous system will contract his muscles in an attempt to stabilize.
His finger will jerk the trigger.
Friendly fire achieved.’
Elian slashed low.
The rifleman screamed, falling backward, his rifle discharging directly into the chest of an Oykot lieutenant.
Elian was a dancer in a ballroom of corpses.
A ten-year-old boy weaving through a hellish, claustrophobic warzone, completely untouched.
He left a trail of mathematically perfect, instantly fatal wounds in his wake.
To the soldiers, blinded by black powder smoke, deafened by cannon fire, and fueled by raw adrenaline, he was barely a blur.
He was just a flash of red—a phantom that appeared in the corner of their eyes for a fraction of a second before a comrade’s throat was inexplicably opened or a heart was suddenly pierced.
Thick wooden shields, reinforced steel breastplates, and heavy iron helmets offered absolutely zero resistance.
The red edge didn’t cut through the metal; it simply bypassed the concept of durability entirely, sliding through solid iron as smoothly as it would slice through empty air.
‘Target the commanding officers first.
Sever the chain of command to eliminate organized retaliation.
Let the grunts panic.
A panicked man swings wide.
A panicked man exhausts his stamina and kills his friends in the confusion.
Keep the rhythm steady.
Cut.
Pivot.
Redirect.
Cut.’
He became a force of nature, a localized natural disaster tearing through the ranks from the ground up.
Bodies piled up around him, soldiers slipping and falling in the mud and gore of their own making.
The Roshwan soldiers, initially confident in their overwhelming numbers and religious zealotry, began to realize that they were not fighting a disorganized enemy.
They were trapped in an invisible meat grinder.
The Oykot soldiers, already mentally broken by Elian’s earlier assault, fully succumbed to total paranoia.
They began to turn their bayonets on anyone who approached them, ally or enemy, convinced that the red demon was hiding in the face of every man on the beach.
The slaughter continued relentlessly under the choking canopy of black smoke.
Every swing of a sword that missed its mark found a different victim, guided by a small, bloody hand that manipulated the battlefield with horrifying, flawless mathematical perfection.
The harbor of Oakhaven steadily filled with an ocean of red.
Sorry I had to edit this chapter again because I later found some critical errors(I uploaded the wrong chapter”_”) in it.
As a compensation I will upload an extra chapter now.
I am new to this so I might make errors so, I am really sorry for it.
Thank you.
Yawn…
Wait, you guys actually did it?
I set that bonus chapter challenge fully expecting you all to fail so I could hit the snooze button for another week.
But no, you just had to go and smash the goal.
So, thank you!
I’m genuinely amazed by your support.
Now I have to wipe the drool off my keyboard and actually write.
I hope you enjoy your well-deserved bonus chapter!
The “Schedule” (If You Can Call It That) Since you’ve forced my eyes open, let’s talk about future updates.
Irregular Uploads: My sleep cycle is a complete mess, and my upload schedule is going to reflect that.
Please don’t expect clockwork precision from someone who regularly dreams about formatting text.
The Goal: I will try my absolute best to drag myself to the screen and post 1 chapter every 2-3 days.
If a chapter doesn’t drop exactly on time, just assume I fell asleep on the backspace key and deleted my entire draft.
It happens more often than I’d like to admit.
Thanks again for the love, the challenge completion, and for reading my half-conscious ramblings.
I’m going back to bed now.
Zzz…