The ceiling finally gave way.
With the deafening crack of splintering timber, a massive section of the roof caved in, and with it, an avalanche of what looked like thick, black gore poured into the hall.
But it wasn’t liquid.
It was hair; thick, unnaturally glossy, and sticky as a spider’s web.
It surged into the room like a living, sentient waterfall, deliberately bypassing the armed warriors and striking with lethal precision at the weakest links.
The black coils snapped tight around the throats of two servant girls before they even had time to drop their porcelain sake pitchers.
There was no screaming.
There was only the wet, sickening crunch of actively crushed windpipes.
The first woman was yanked upward with such terrifying force that her feet left the ground, her entire body going instantly slack like a ragdoll whose head had been brutally twisted off.
The second desperately tried to fight back, clawing wildly at the strangling coils, but the thick black strands forced their way into her open mouth, choking her from the inside out before dragging her bodily into the pitch-black maw of the shattered ceiling.
A rain of warm, scarlet gore splattered across both the immaculately clean straw mats and the polished wooden floorboards.
Absolute panic erupted in the hall.
The dignified merchants and stoic monks, who just moments before had been enjoying the music, frantically scrambled for the exits, trampling one another and tearing through the delicate paper walls.
A portly silk merchant, who had been seated closest to the entrance, was a mere foot away from salvation when a thick braid of hair shot toward him like a harpoon, wrapping tightly around his ankle.
The man shrieked as he was yanked off his feet and dragged face-first across the floorboards, straight back toward the center of the hall.
His manicured fingernails tore desperately at the wood, leaving long, bloody streaks, until he was finally swallowed whole by the writhing mass of black.
From within the coils came only the sickening sound of snapping bones and a wet slurping.
Someone else; a young bodyguard belonging to one of the guests; drew his katana and slashed wildly, desperately trying to free his master.
The sharp steel cleanly severed the hair, but as the strands fell, they sprayed a blinding stream of caustic, black liquid directly into the attacker’s face.
The man collapsed, howling in agony, frantically clawing at his own eyes as the acid rapidly melted the flesh from his skull.
Yerga took a slow, deliberate step back, flicking a single, stray black hair that had dared to touch her silk sleeve away with disgust.
Void hissed furiously, digging its bony claws deep into the straw mats.
The necromancer looked up at the ceiling with sheer disdain, casually sipping her own, entirely safe tea, which she had elegantly produced from the pocket of her coat.
“Bregg, darling, this is your cue,” she whispered, her voice saturated with a cold imperative that brooked no refusal.
She snapped her fingers.
The air in front of her rippled, as if the very fabric of reality had fractured beneath the crushing weight of a summoned presence.
The ambient temperature plummeted instantly.
From the long shadow she cast emerged a walking nightmare encased in solid steel.
The Death Knight.
A colossal, mute behemoth clad in armor forged of matte-black segments that looked exactly like obsidian tombstones, specifically designed to instill pure terror.
He wielded no weapon; his massive, spiked gauntlets were instruments of total annihilation in their own right.
From the waist down, the knight simply did not exist; his legs were nothing more than a shivering, semi-transparent mirage of green mist.
Two pinpricks of necrotic, sickly green light flared to life deep within the pitch-black visor of his helm.
Figlin, recognizing the familiar spectral giant, merely snorted into his tankard.
“Oh, look, the Big Guy decided to crash the party,” he evaluated, entirely unfazed by the sudden appearance of the immensely powerful undead.”Well, it’s about to get real crowded in here.” He downed the last dregs of his sake and brutally kicked a low table over to serve as a makeshift barricade.”Right then, since everyone’s finally here, let’s get this bloody circus started!”
The Matron, sitting entirely unmoved dead center in the chaotic slaughter, calmly took a slow drag from her pipe, completely ignoring the shattered roof tiles raining down around her.
“Jorōgumo,” she stated coldly, exhaling a thick plume of smoke that perfectly formed the shape of a colossal spider.”The Spider Courtesan.
Tread carefully.
Her threads cut significantly deeper than a barber’s razor, and her venom dissolves solid bone.”
Zedora, still standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Duria near the porcelain servant, didn’t waste a single heartbeat on shock.
On the contrary; at the sight of the descending black tide, her scarred face twisted into a mask of feral, nearly ecstatic joy.
“Finally!” she roared, her voice ringing with pure, unadulterated euphoria completely devoid of fear.”Enough of this pretentious artistic bullshit!
It’s time to butcher something!”
When a thick clump of hair, dripping with corrosive slime, shot toward her like a hurled spear, she didn’t bother to dodge.
She stepped directly into the strike.
With a feral snarl, she swung her axe with such devastating force that the sheer kinetic impact vibrated through the floorboards.
The steel didn’t merely cut; it brutally tore through the black coils, which immediately began to hiss , aggressively spraying caustic, black gore in every direction.
Zedora sprang back, unleashing a string of curses so incredibly foul they would have made a seasoned dockworker blush .”By the festering teats of a troll!” she shrieked as the searing sludge splashed across her chest.
Her scale armor hissed loudly, releasing plumes of acrid, biting smoke.
The acid rapidly began eating through the metal scales, dripping steadily downward, straight onto her bare skin.
She instantly felt the exact same excruciating, fiery agony as she had in Silent Bliss when she was hacking apart the explosive, acid-filled beasts.
It was happening all over again.
That exact same horrific stench of burning meat and smoking steel.
“This vile shite again?!” she roared, but the excruciating pain, rather than slowing her down, acted exactly like throwing high-proof oil onto an open bonfire.
Her eyes darkened with blinding fury.”You think a little acid is going to stop me?!
I’ve bloody well bathed in it!”
Perval, the colossal monk who moved with the eerie grace of a hunting cat, had been sitting completely still in a full lotus position.
He literally blurred out of existence.
A thick spear of hair, sharp as a needle, pierced the straw mat in the exact spot where his heart had been beating a mere fraction of a second before.
“You’ve got a terrible draft in here!” he called out cheerfully, already clinging to an intact rafter high up near the ceiling.
He swung his massive bulk and delivered a devastating, mid-air kick directly to a massive, falling crossbeam.
Rather than allowing the timber to crash down onto his companions, he launched it straight back up into the pitch-black maw in the roof.
The beam spun end-over-end and smashed into the breach with a deafening crack, crushing the writhing coils and effectively corking the flow of the murderous hair for one precious heartbeat.
He landed softly on the wooden railing of the mezzanine and bellowed down:
“Figi, watch your head!
It’s thicker than these beams, but if they hammer you into the floorboards, we’re never getting our deposit back!”
“What?!
What deposit?!” the dwarf shrieked, frantically drawing his flintlock pistol.”Are we already paying?!
I am not in the bloody mood!” He fired blindly up into the dark hole in the ceiling.
The deafening roar of the gunshot in the enclosed space was staggering.
The lead ball hit something soft and yielding in the darkness.
An inhuman, multi-tonal shriek immediately echoed from above.
In the midst of the utter chaos, the porcelain servant; the living sculpture; seized its agonizing opportunity.
With an inhuman, metallic roar, he yanked against his iron shackles.
The chains pulled taut, and with the sickening crack of splintering timber, the iron hooks were torn clean out of the massive load-bearing pillar, showering the immediate area in huge, jagged splinters and thick clouds of clay dust.
The silver scars crisscrossing his ruined body flared with blinding light, and he hurled himself directly toward the Matron, blades raised for a lethal strike, desperate to annihilate the only person left who actually cared for him.
He never reached his target.
Bregg was not fast, but he was entirely relentless.
He shifted his massive bulk, phasing effortlessly through the shattered remains of a table, and extended an armored arm.
The rusted blades slammed against his spiked bracer.
A shower of bright sparks erupted as the rusted metal ground against the obsidian armor, but the Death Knight didn’t even flinch.
He calmly clamped his massive gauntlet around the creature’s porcelain head and began to slowly, methodically squeeze.
“Neira!” Duria shouted, drawing her katana, the polished steel gleaming lethally in the gloom.
Her entire face had transformed; the theatrical, childish smile was completely gone, replaced by bared fangs and the cold promise of murder in her crimson eyes.”Do something about that bitch on the roof!
I’ll handle the broken doll!”
The succubus unfurled her spectral, luminescent wings, completely knocking over an expensive silk folding screen in the process.
“I always have to clean up everyone else’s mess!” she groaned, instantly firing a massive wave of raw psychic energy straight up toward the ceiling, desperate to stun whatever was actively controlling the murderous hair.
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