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The moraine beach offered no cover. The Sek had scattered into the stone forest and the cold-weather shrubs, each one hunched in the dark.
Luo Wei drifted seven or eight meters above the ground, wrapped in thick black mist, dagger in her right hand and magic wand in her left.
The night was her cloak. The dark mass of mist blended into the sky above, and no matter how the Sek scanned the dark, none of them spotted her.
If they hadn't extinguished their torches, they might have caught the outline of her "storm cloud."
But they had handed her the advantage themselves.
Everything was moving exactly as she'd planned.
She descended without a sound behind one of them. In the half-second before he could sense her, she drove the dagger into his heart from behind, twisted the hilt a full circle, and ripped it free.
She was too fast. The man barely managed a muffled grunt before he was gone.
Throat-cutting and heart-stabbing from behind , these were the killing techniques she'd drilled hundreds of times in Central America.
Both worked best from behind. Move fast enough, and your target never screams.
The neck is the body's most vulnerable point. Whether you crush it or snap it, the enemy goes down fastest. Her grip wasn't strong enough to do it bare-handed, so she used a blade to open the carotid and trachea instead. Nearly the same result.
As for the heart , a stab alone might not be enough. A stab and a twist guaranteed it.
Attacking from behind made it cleaner. Judge the position, push through the latissimus dorsi, reach the heart. Less effort than hitting from the front.
These two techniques were how she'd escaped the underground lab. From the first time she'd used them until tonight, she hadn't missed once.
PFFT , Another one.
The dagger punched through soft, yielding flesh and severed the tough trachea. Arterial blood sprayed across the ground. The body crumpled.
Luo Wei moved through the dark, the blade finding heart after heart, the tip opening throat after throat.
Her diet had been carefully balanced. Her night vision was sharper than theirs by a significant margin. What they saw as absolute blackness still held faint shapes for her.
Locating the hidden Sek was simple. She used her nose.
They reeked , a thick, rancid, animal stench, and underneath it something else, something difficult to name. The smell of human flesh.
She didn't always manage a clean approach. When prey struggled too hard, the noise reached his neighbors. But the moment those neighbors saw a pair of scarlet eyes, every one of them froze for a second or two. That pause was all she needed.
Only one gave her real trouble: the leader.
He was the only one who sensed her before she got close. A beast worthy of his position , his instincts were sharper than the rest of the pack.
"Who's there!"
The leader's eyes met hers , scarlet, burning in the dark , and his pupils snapped tight. "Demon?"
Beneath the black hood, the red light in those eyes pulsed with something that reached into the chest and stopped the heart.
"Those who eat men are condemned by heaven."
"You shall all enter hell."
The demon raised pale, bloodless fingers. The voice that spilled from those blood-red lips was low and wrong in a way that had nothing to do with volume. Where the sound reached, the cold deepened.
"Hell?" The leader's face twisted. His cleaver came up. "Grandpa'll send you there first!"
"Damn demon — die!"
BOOM ,
A fireball materialized and slammed into him. The scarlet flames caught his animal-fur clothing immediately, raced upward, and shot toward the sky.
AHHH ,
The fire took him whole , skin, flesh, bone. Inside the blaze, the man screamed himself raw.
His iron blade clattered to the ground. He beat at the flames with his hands, rolled across the dirt, clawed at his burning clothes. It was useless. The animal fat layered across his body had already melted, fusing to his skin like a second layer of fuel.
He would burn down to nothing.
Just like the children they had skewered over their fires.
Luo Wei kicked the fallen blade aside and flew toward the main campfire a hundred meters out.
Five or six more. Still unpunished.
The Sek guarding the fire heard the screaming echoing from the stone forest. Their faces went slack with dread.
"Who is that? Is that one of ours?"
"I , I don't know. Did the leader catch someone from another tribe?"
"Should we , should we go look?"
"The leader told us to watch the two-legged sheep..."
The six of them hovered, indecisive, with no idea that it was already too late.
Above the fire, a churning mass of black mist had gathered. Inside it, a pair of scarlet eyes watched them. Cold. Still. Patient.
One of the Sek glanced at the fire by chance.
The blood in his body stopped.
"W-what — what is — that..." His teeth were knocking together, upper against lower, a rapid clatter he couldn't stop.
"What is what?"
The second man looked over, distracted. Then his eyes went wide. "D-demon?"
The moment they spoke, the other four turned to look. In a single breath, all six of them stood frozen where they were, limbs locked.
"Those who eat men, heaven shall condemn."
"You shall enter hell. The fire will burn you. Forever."
Luo Wei swept the white bone sickle , what her magic wand had become , down through the air. Six fireballs launched at once, almost simultaneous, and struck.
The heat hit their skin before they could run. Magical fire swallowed them. Their corneas burned out in an instant, and in their blind, screaming panic, every one of them stumbled and fell into the very fire they had built themselves.
The wailing tore through the sky.
From within the roaring blaze, the demon descended , black robes, bone wings beating slowly , and landed in the withered, broken grass below. Black mist rolled outward from her footsteps, curling around her legs.
To the captives watching from the ground, her silhouette drifted in and out of the fog like something that existed between worlds. She passed over them without sound, her bone wings and sickle whispering faintly against each other.
And where she passed, the ropes binding them snapped open, one after another, as though the knots had simply given up.
"D-demon lord!"
A woman had shaken free of her broken ropes. From somewhere she pulled enough courage to call out.
The demon paused.
"What is it?"
The response shocked everyone into silence.
The woman dropped to her knees and pressed her palms together. Her expression was hollow, hollowed out by grief, but her eyes were fierce with something close to worship. "My lord. Please. Take my soul. I will serve you. Eternity , I don't care. Just take me."
She had watched her two children be eaten. She had watched it happen and done nothing, because she had nothing to fight back with. She hated the Sek for it. She hated herself more.
If the demon hadn't come, she would have died as a captive, unavenged. She didn't want to go back to what she'd been. She wanted darkness. She wanted to be something that made others afraid. She wanted power like what she'd just witnessed.
She worshipped it.
"I do not guide the souls of the living."
The demon's voice was frigid. Everyone who heard it felt it move down their spine.
But the woman pressed her forehead toward the ground. "Then tell me. Please. I'll offer you my soul as sacrifice. Just tell me , how do I become like you? How do I get strong enough?"
The demon looked down at her the way someone looks at something very small.
"Foolish human."
The blood-red lips parted, and four long, sharp fangs caught the firelight.
"Pray to my Lord. My Lord will grant your wish."
"So long as your faith holds true."
➤ Next: Was That Her Noble Person?
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