As a precaution, the palace maids had already gone to the residential districts as a group before the city defenses were breached. Posing as evacuees, they directed the civilians in an orderly retreat.

A population numbering over a million couldn’t all reach safety so easily.

By nearly two in the afternoon, the unarmed civilians inside the city had only managed to evacuate eight or nine out of every ten people;

Those still left in the city were the final group waiting to leave.

Although the defenders inside the city had risked their lives to buy time,

by this point, the defensive line leading to the residential district had still been completely torn apart by the crusaders.

More than a thousand crusaders stepped over countless corpses and entered the presence of the innocents. They had come to carry out the order to massacre the city.

The order of evacuation had been decided by drawing lots. In that respect, the more than one hundred thousand civilians who hadn’t yet reached safety were extremely unfortunate.

The crusaders raised their bloodstained swords. The maids who tried to stand in front of the civilians had virtually no combat ability of their own;

even if these palace personnel stepped forward, all they could do was die in front of the civilians. In the end, they still wouldn’t be able to save a single person.

There wasn’t the slightest trace of mercy. All the devils possessed was the ruthlessness to carry out their orders.

One sharp sword after another swept down in perfect formation, and more than one figure immediately collapsed.

The color drained from the maids’ faces, while the civilians behind them covered their mouths and couldn’t make a sound.

Just then, the crusaders in the front row suddenly twitched on the ground.

The scene had happened too suddenly, but what came next was even more unexpected.

The crusaders in the rear saw it clearly. They knew that the little catkin girl who had landed in front of them was the culprit who had injured their comrades.

It wasn’t that they cared about their comrades, but the crusaders in the rear still prepared to kill the obstacle before them, offering their fallen companions a small measure of tribute.

Their assumptions contained two mistakes that needed to be pointed out.

That little catkin girl was Bai Meow.

Not taking another person’s life was Bai Meow’s personal principle;

but since she showed no mercy to “bad guys,” she had just thrown her little fists with complete seriousness.

The forbidden spell had enhanced Bai Meow’s strength and destructive power. When her fist struck a crusader’s armor, it punched straight through the armor on the spot;

then, without losing any of its remaining force, the impact surged into the target’s body and shattered every bone inside.

All of their internal organs took the impact, yet none of them were completely destroyed.

Bai Meow’s incredible speed allowed her to move sideways and strike each swordsman before any of the enemy’s blades could finish coming down.

Those crusaders, reduced to crippled wrecks, then collapsed miserably onto the ground.

On a battlefield like this, a warrior who couldn’t protect themself had only one possible fate: death.

Perhaps Bai Meow herself hadn’t realized it:

what she had just done differed from murder only in whether the distinction was direct or indirect.

Mistake number one:

Their comrades weren’t dead yet—at least, not for the moment. It was too early to talk about offering them tribute.

“Before killing the civilians, cut her down first!”

Under their leader’s command, the remaining crusaders formed an attack formation and charged forward.

At the same time, Bai Meow still hadn’t lowered her tightly clenched, bulging little fists.

If the princess of the beastkin kingdom could have her life threatened by a mere thousand opponents, how could White Bear, the ultimate daughter-obsessed father, possibly have allowed anyone to take Bai Meow away from the palace?

Smack-crack, smack-crack, smack-crack, smack-crack, smack-crack, smack-crack.

That continuous string of bone-cracking sounds represented the little loli’s overwhelming might, which was far above that of the Empire’s elite troops;

she didn’t usually raise her tiny fists simply because she didn’t want to—not because she lacked the ability.

Mistake number two:

The crusaders who fell one after another moments later proved through their actions that they hadn’t come for revenge;

interpreting what they had done a moment ago as volunteering to be buried alongside their comrades was much closer to reality.

“We’re done for! It’s not the cruel soldiers—we’re going to be killed by a cat demon!”

After knocking down this batch of enemies, Bai Meow heard a frightened voice come from one of the children in the crowd behind her.

It couldn’t be helped that people were afraid. Bai Meow’s fame was, after all, nowhere near that of the Demon King who had destroyed a certain wedding, and many people in the city didn’t know her at all;

in a time when the land was broken and the nation lay in ruins, it was certainly much easier for children to believe that monsters had appeared than to believe that a savior had arrived.

That overwhelming might made the adults among the residents realize that the girl before them was no ordinary beastkin.

Unlike the children, they couldn’t yet determine whether Bai Meow was friend or foe.

They were more willing to regard Bai Meow as one of their own, because she had saved the maids earlier;

if this savior later turned into an aggressor from another faction, the people would surely fall into despair.

While everyone remained uneasy, the tail behind Bai Meow rose upright, curved around to her front, and pointed toward the direction in which the civilians were evacuating;

Following the movement of her tail, the people watched as she clenched her little fleshy fist and patted herself on the chest.

Interpreted in the boldest possible way, Bai Meow was silently telling them:

“Go on ahead. I’ll cover you!”

With Big Brother absent, she had decided to become everyone’s protector.

“The one who saved us wasn’t a god or an angel, but a beastkin… Thank you!”

At the end of her words, the leader of the civilians—the palace’s head maid—expressed her gratitude to Bai Meow;

but when faced with someone else’s thanks, Bai Meow suddenly furrowed her brows and waved her thumb toward the child beside the woman.

“I’m not a cat demon! Hah!”

After frightening the child with a sound like that of a canine creature, Bai Meow turned around and once again faced away from the countless weak and helpless people.

The first time she had spoken that day was solely to argue with a child.

“Cat Angel, please watch your own safety as well.”

After saying those final words, the head maid led the people away.

Along the unavoidable route to their escape destination, the petite figure knocked down three waves of invaders in succession, defeating more than two thousand enemies in total.

When the people in the third wave stopped twitching on the ground, the civilians had more or less gone a long way away;

Bai Meow was thinking about taking a breather, but before she could lower her hands, her petite body suddenly shuddered violently.

The instincts of a cat beastkin told her that a powerful presence was nearby. Compared to it, the crusaders were no different from babies facing a grown adult!

Her momentary relaxation vanished without a trace. Bai Meow immediately swept her fierce gaze across the surroundings, leaving no angle unchecked.

“The city walls have collapsed, and the soldiers are either dead or wounded. I never expected that even under these circumstances, the holy army would still be obstructed—and by someone who isn’t even human.”

Before Bai Meow could discover him, the person radiating that pressure spoke. Her gaze immediately locked onto the source of the voice.

On top of a burning ruin, she saw an old human man with completely white hair and beard, dressed in magnificent clothing.

He had come to assist the crusaders in massacring the city. Even though he hadn’t revealed his identity to Bai Meow, she could still understand that he was her enemy.

If Cai had been here, she would have recognized him:

the old man who ignored the scorching heat of the flames was one of the Papal State’s “Three Protectors of the Faith.”

There were seven powerful and influential people in the Empire, including the Holy Maiden. The remaining six were the five archbishops and the Pope himself.

However, only a very small number of the Church’s upper ranks knew that

those seven did not represent all of the nation’s supreme combat power.

The so-called “Three Protectors of the Faith” were a hidden force that almost never entered the public eye and obeyed the current Pope absolutely;

the words “Protectors of the Faith” were somewhat misleading. It would be much closer to reality to understand the three of them as the Pope’s “personal guards.”

The members of the “Three Protectors of the Faith” were all candidates qualified to become archbishops who had ultimately failed to take that final step;

after being eliminated, people like them would receive a personal audience with the Pope.

From among the many failures, the Pope would conduct a strict selection and choose the three most outstanding candidates, turning them into loyal hounds who obeyed only him.

Under normal circumstances, the Protectors of the Faith were somewhat weaker than archbishops. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have been eliminated.

But their insufficient foundations didn’t prevent the Pope from giving them special attention.

Just as the cardinal had once wielded inhuman holy power,

the Pope also had ways to strengthen his guards through special methods.

After granting them a portion of a god’s power, the Pope had even given each of them a forbidden spell.

As a result, the individual strength of the “Three Protectors of the Faith” surpassed that of ordinary archbishops. Their leader was even no weaker than Zi Yi.

This time, the Pope had made extremely thorough preparations to destroy Dibiles;

besides a massive army and a large number of “Redeemers,” he had even sent one of his personal guards.

Before setting out, this old man, remembered as the “Human Protector,” had believed that His Holiness was making a mountain out of a molehill, deploying such an enormous force to conquer a weak country.

However, after giving Bai Meow a distant glance, he realized that those seemingly troublesome arrangements were actually the key to preventing anything unexpected from happening.

For nothing else, he felt that this powerful cat beastkin alone was an opponent who required his full attention.

Of course, if possible, the Human Protector still hoped to keep Bai Meow calm. At the very least, he wanted to avoid clashing with her before Dibiles was destroyed.

To achieve that goal, he even tried to “persuade her with kind words”:

“His Holiness the Pope has already decided to destroy this country. He is the ‘spokesperson of the gods,’ and everything he does is correct;

by contrast, the people of the Empire who oppose him are committing a grave error simply by continuing to exist in this world.”

The Human Protector genuinely believed from the bottom of his heart that

the beastkin before him had no need to fight to the death for those “damned people.”

He wanted to use persuasion to make Bai Meow give up the fight.

“Right and wrong” were sometimes far more difficult to understand than “good and evil.”

Bai Meow was still a child and couldn’t understand such complicated matters. She didn’t know what “right” meant.

But she could be certain of one thing:

“You’re a bad guy!”