Whoosh—
The longsword snapped through the air, flinging wet blood like rain off a roof. Wang Xiaoming exhaled hard, breath rough as winter wind.
Corpses ringed him like toppled scarecrows. None were his kills. They had been torn down by a single beast—a headless brute now lying where he had severed its life.
This was the place he’d promised barbecue. The mess hall under open sky. These fallen bodies were the very people he’d invited to eat roasted meat, warm as hearth-fire.
His face didn’t fold into grief. The blade kissed the ground and scratched lines like a plow. Pits opened one by one, shallow mouths in the earth. He lifted each body in turn, laid them down, and covered them with soil as if tucking in sleepers.
It wasn’t that Wang Xiaoming saw his men as tools to toss. It was that a general needs iron—coldness pressed like ice against the ribs.
In crisis, feeling is a broken bridge. To keep his mind from shattering, he let the gates of emotion slam shut. Joy, sorrow—both cut off like a stream dammed by stone.
He came to the last corpse. Bury this one, and then the Daemons would be judged.
He pried free the revolver clutched in the dead hand. Even now, the pistol gleamed, a hard star; the safety light winked, warning the weapon was live. He flipped the cylinder with practiced fingers. One round waited like a last word.
The finger on the trigger told its story. He’d died a heartbeat before the shot. He couldn’t even drag one down with him.
He let that thought waste a second or two, then gathered the body and laid it into the final pit. Soil whispered over skin. He set a stone, and carved two characters into it—A-Wei.
Wang Xiaoming stood where he was and reached into his coat. His fingers pinched the air, remembering a cigarette box. He searched, and found nothing. Memory caught up. His hand fell.
Forget it. Time to work.
His fingers hooked the sword’s hilt. The blade stayed sleeping, yet the air around him dropped into storm-pressure, heavy with the taste of iron.
His eyes held no expression. Cold as a corpse-mask, and somehow burning with anger like coals under ash.
All right… let’s tally your sins.
He flickered, white light strobing like a lightning moth. In the next beat he was atop the wall. Below, a pack of Daemons clawed at the city gate, black tide on stone.
He watched their siege without a ripple in his gaze. Then he tipped forward. He let gravity carry him down into the swarm like a falling bell.
Grand Funeral!
His body stayed head-first, but the sword woke. It traced a circle in midair, slicing clean. A golden half ring rippled outward from him, like sunrise breaking a horizon.
Any Daemon touched by the sword-qi bled. The weak split like bamboo under an axe. The strong were shoved back, faces snarled by wind.
None reached him before he hit ground. After he landed, even fewer dared.
He flipped once and set his boots. The earth thudded. A war-stomp slammed out, savage and stony, and the shockwave knocked Daemons flat like wheat in gale.
Star of Flashstep!
He streaked through them like a meteor. Each sweep of his blade harvested a dozen heads, sparks of life snuffed out like candlewicks.
Against foes who didn’t ward their flesh with mana, this was brutal efficiency, a sickle in ripe field.
General Wang…
A white-haired elder leaned over the wall, voice thin with wind. He was the one who’d raised flag after flag—omens spoken out loud.
Regret had set lines in his face, like frost. He knew his words had been wrong, wrong enough to crush, not something merit could mend.
I repent.
I beseech.
I atone.
Light, strip my sins from me.
Scouring Light of Remnants!
As the name promised, the spell existed to scour away sin. For Daemons, born steeped in it like dye in cloth, it was a blade of pure pain.
It wasn’t that Daemons were fated evil. Their race leaned toward it, as breath leans toward air. They made sin the way lungs make wind.
If a Daemon resisted that pull and refused to sin, the spell would spare them. And if such a one stood there, who would waste this high-tier magic anyway? No one casts a sun just to warm a stone.
He released Scouring Light of Remnants, and the change trampled past mere radiance. Unlike the Light That Shines Upon the Living World, this was an attack, a verdict swung down.
No magic circle burned on the ground. Instead, the sky tore open a blank—an empty window. Nothing there… no, only light, white as bone.
It felt like a miracle and refused to be one. White radiance spilled from that emptiness and washed the land, pushing back darkness like tide receding. It was as beautiful as a god descending, and just as dangerous.
