At 7:25 a.m. that same day.

Ledux clamped his clawlike hand around Qiuyan’s throat. A tear ran down her cheek.

The next instant!

A whip, striking like a python, flashed into the corner of Ledux’s eye.

In an instant, his instincts blared an unmistakable warning: dodge it, now.

Between Qiuyan’s life and his own, he chose the latter, just as expected.

Ledux’s agility saved his life, but he couldn’t avoid the attack completely.

As Ledux leaped aside, the tip of the whip curved slightly and sliced a bloody gash across his cheek before he could get away.

Demonkin healed quickly. Given some time, his face would recover.

But that didn’t stop him from turning an enraged glare on the ambusher.

All he saw was a girl in white, surrounded by bewitching charm, striding forward on her bare feet.

The girl was Charley. She didn’t approach Ledux, but instead walked toward Qiuyan.

After coughing a few times and barely regaining consciousness, the maid looked at her and asked in confusion:

“Former master, why…?”

“That’s none of your business. I came here to find someone.”

Charley had no patience to let Qiuyan finish. She immediately explained why she’d come.

That was indeed the truth. Before today, she’d heard that a girl with the title of “Imperial Consort” had been making quite a stir in the Duchy of Murin.

Among the Three Empires, the Emperor of Su'e was a bachelor, and the Empress of Inran still hadn’t married.

From this, Charley concluded that the Imperial Consort had to be Wang Xiaole, so she’d made a special trip here.

After all, he still owed her a date he’d never made good on. She’d come here to “collect.”

But she was in for a disappointment!

There was no Imperial Consort here, and no chance of anything romantic like a date.

Before Qiuyan had even noticed her, Charley already regretted coming all this way.

With her hopes dashed, she had no choice but to take out her frustration on the maid she’d sent ahead.

“Why do you think things turned out this way?”

Charley came to stand in front of Qiuyan, bent one knee, and lowered herself into a half-crouch in a pose worth admiring.

Then she curled her long fingers around Qiuyan’s dirty strands of hair, twirling them before playing with them briefly at her fingertips and pressing them against Qiuyan’s face.

In Charley’s view, there was a reason Qiuyan had been defeated and nearly killed before she arrived.

“The reason is that you’re completely useless!”

She said it without mercy.

When it came down to it, Charley wasn’t good at being kind, nor did she like being kind to others.

Say whatever came to mind. Do whatever she wanted. That was her only principle.

Qiuyan had already been in low spirits after everything she’d been through. Now her former master’s blunt words made her feel even worse.

Even so, Qiuyan never once took her eyes off what was in front of her.

Because she hadn’t given up looking, she saw it:

Behind her former master, Ledux and Katusha—two streaks of motion—were launching a sneak attack at the same time.

“Behi—”

Before Qiuyan could finish speaking—or even open her mouth to utter the first word—Charley smiled cruelly.

As she smiled, she swung the whip in her right hand behind her, meeting the attack without even turning around.

Crack! Crack!

A hand as hard as metal and a great axe forged from actual metal were both blocked with ease, even with Charley’s back turned.

Wait. She hadn’t merely blocked them.

The instant the whip spun around, the two attackers’ movements froze. A second later, they were both sent flying backward.

As Katusha retreated, she tried to make Charley drop her weapon by channeling heat through the surface of her great axe.

But as soon as the heat began to spread, layer upon layer of frost covered the tip of the whip.

In just an instant, the terrifying cold swallowed up that insignificant warmth, then froze everything around them even faster.

A layer of ice crystals formed over the whip. As the temperature plunged, the ice shattered.

More than a dozen shards shot toward their targets like a spray of arrows.

Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang!

Katusha and Ledux reacted in unison, knocking the shards threatening to hit them out of the air and onto the ground.

But neither of them was strong enough to stop every shard. One or two still slipped through.

Just before blood sprayed into the air, the seemingly insignificant fragments pierced their skin and flesh.

Only a few seconds passed between their combined attack and their retreat in defeat!

“Boring.”

Charley felt her time was being wasted. Unfortunately, she’d already come all this way, and her opponents weren’t about to let her leave easily.

That was the situation. Since there was no helping it, she’d just have to waste a little more time.

Three minutes. That was all!

Hoping for even one second more was a fantasy…

A sight that seemed like an illusion became reality. The whip in Charley’s hand grew a hundred times longer and larger the instant she raised it high.

As if controlling some enormous creature, Charley lifted her weapon and brought it crashing down straight ahead.

Katusha and Ledux reacted quickly, dodging before the attack came down.

The soldiers behind them weren’t nearly as fast.

With a single crash, the ground caved into a deep crater. At the same time, a vast cloud of blood mist drifted into the air, casting a vivid red haze over the royal city.

This wasn’t a battle at all. Charley was simply slaughtering the soldiers she’d targeted as quickly as someone clearing weeds.

With each crack of the whip, another part of the residential district—already evacuated by its innocent residents—was reduced to rubble.

The craters plunged deep underground. They didn’t even need to become mass graves, because every soldier who died was blown to pieces in an instant.

Not even a whole corpse was left behind. What was there to bury?

That was what a war without suspense looked like.

As an executioner no less ruthless than a certain someone, Charley’s mood shifted back and forth between delight and calm.

The endless life she was born to live would leave her lonely.

If she couldn’t torment the people she wanted to bully and use them to cheer herself up, then she had to find her own amusement.

Weaklings who didn’t know their place were still worth tormenting, because doing so made her happy.

That brief happiness vanished as soon as the victims died.

“At least entertain me with your lives! At least make me feel you’re worth something before you die! Arms, legs, heads, torsos—let them all fly apart in the rain of blood…”

Charley felt not the slightest guilt about taking lives.

If the dead failed to interest her, then to Charley, killing ten thousand people was hardly any different from crushing a thousand ants.

As the screams grew less frequent, the once-numerous enemy troops had dwindled to almost nothing.

The horrific scene, enough to drive anyone mad, sent the survivors fleeing for their lives.

Charley was happy to watch them run, but she couldn’t bring herself to smile. That was all the value those weaklings had, after all.

“I’m sick of this! I hate it! I’m bored!”

The few survivors desperate to live should run while she was in no mood to play.

The greatest stroke of luck in their lives was this:

Even if it cost them their lives, they couldn’t make Charley feel any better now.

Even though a small number of them ultimately escaped alive, it didn’t change the fact that a river of blood now flowed outside the palace in the royal capital.

She didn’t mind the sight of blood, but she disliked dirty blood.

The only standard for whether blood was dirty lay with her; it all depended on whether the person had managed to interest her.

Never mind her mood. The situation on the battlefield was clear:

After Qiuyan’s earlier efforts, the enemy forces had been reduced to a little over forty thousand.

After two or three minutes of Charley’s slaughter, only two or three thousand of those remaining managed to flee.

Some forty thousand soldiers had been turned into a sea of red. With her subordinates dead or scattered, only Ledux remained beside Katusha, the commander.

Before the two remaining opponents could launch an attack, Charley moved faster than a phantom and closed the distance in a flash.

“You’re this weak, and you still have the nerve to call yourself a demon?”

She said it to Ledux.

“In every age, the weak are always looking for a way to die.”

She said it to the Grand Duke of a nation.

Then Charley tucked the whip into her belt and seized her opponents with both hands at blinding speed.

Her delicate hands reached upward and clamped onto the shoulders of both targets. She applied a little force…

Two sharp cracks rang out. Two arms drenched in blood appeared right in front of Charley—she’d just ripped them off with her bare hands.

“Filthy!”

As if tossing out garbage, she casually flung the two severed arms to the side.

When they hit the ground, the soldiers of the Duchy of Murin—her allies—retreated in terror, afraid to touch the severed hands as they rolled across the ground.

Rather than fearing a piece of a human—or demonkin—body, it would be more accurate to say they were indirectly afraid of Charley.

In their eyes, a cruel enemy or a powerful enemy could sometimes be less frightening than a terrifying ally.

Qiuyan couldn’t stand the sight of blood, so she’d closed her eyes long ago.

Even without opening them, she could tell from the sounds around her what had happened:

The battle was about to end!

The winner had been decided the moment Charley and her opponents first clashed.

“Handsome, I don’t really want to say this, but we can’t stay here any longer.”

If there was even the slightest chance of winning, Katusha didn’t want to give up.

After all, she was the ruler of the duchy, and the armies being slaughtered one-sidedly had belonged to her or her neighboring allies.