After sorting through the words and thoughts in his head, Fate got ready to head for the outskirts.

It was already afternoon. The church was mostly empty today. Loraine seemed to have gone out for something too, leaving Fate alone.

The moment Fate stepped out of the church, he heard a sharp, piercing blast. Right after that came terrified screams from the crowd.

Those cries of fear and despair triggered Fate's instincts. Without even thinking, he broke into a run toward the source of the sound.

An explosion that loud... it sounded like a house collapsing. This probably wasn't something simple.

Could it be another cultist raid on the city? But how had they slipped into Bati City? And why pick this edge-city that barely stood out in the entire Empire?

Fate couldn't draw a conclusion. Cultists had never followed normal logic to begin with. Some of them were methodical and highly goal-driven. Others were less cultists and more a pack of thugs. They acted with no logic at all, and their malice toward others often harmed themselves too. They were lunatics, plain and simple.

He had beaten those mentally broken, twisted madmen into submission before, but that didn't mean no remnants had survived and risen again.

Fate ran all the way to the city center and found the place in complete chaos. Several houses had collapsed, and fierce flames burned through the ruins.

People were rushing out in panic. For ordinary folk used to peaceful days, this scene was no different from hell on earth.

Those on the outer edge didn't even know what had happened. They stood there frozen, only to be shoved aside or knocked over by the fleeing crowd.

The scene had completely fallen into disorder. It seemed the Inquisition Tribunal and the public security office still hadn't arrived.

Was it really a cultist attack?

Fate frowned.

He wasn't a knight anymore. Without proof of knighthood, he couldn't exercise a knight's authority. Naturally, the crowd wouldn't listen to his evacuation orders either.

Then that sharp, ear-splitting sound exploded again, like thunder tearing through the clouds. This time Fate heard it clearly. It wasn't an explosion. It carried a kind of uncontrollable emotion, more like the hysterical roar of some indescribable creature.

Fate noticed a pitch-black humanoid standing atop a collapsed roof beam ahead.

The creature was taller than an adult, nearly half a house in height. Its wrinkled black skin was covered in sharp reverse spikes. Its jaws were like a crow's beak, with many jagged, irregular fangs hanging inside. Its huge eyes were blood-red, pupil-less, and its fingers were lined with sharp claws.

The monster was shockingly massive. Even the muscles on its limbs shifted and rippled with eerie flexibility, like flowing lake water.

"This monster..." For some reason, Fate had never seen it before, yet it somehow felt strangely familiar.

The creature stood there in a daze. It watched the endlessly surging crowd without moving. Its eyes were wide open, as if enduring something. It reached a hand forward, groping into the air, and let out a hoarse roar from its dry throat. But what came out sounded like a broken accordion.

And it seemed there was more than one.

Among the collapsed buildings in the city center, Fate spotted other black figures. They were madly tearing apart the houses there. Some citizens who hadn't escaped in time were struck by falling debris and died on the spot.

On top of that, one monster had locked onto the scattering crowd. It charged in like it had gone mad, and its sharp claws and fangs tore through the bodies of two innocent passersby with ease.

This is bad...

There were already casualties. The monster was closing in on the crowd, and Fate couldn't worry about anything else now. He plunged into the crowd and forced his way inward.

"Make way! Please, make way!"

But the crowd was far too packed. The noise was deafening. The panicked people running for their lives couldn't hear Fate at all.

Compared to the monster's speed, the crowd looked like crawling ants.

In just a few breaths, the monster reached the tail end of the crowd. Fate, meanwhile, was still stuck in the middle.

The cries of children and women suddenly rose up. Fate gritted his teeth, one hand clutching his necklace. He was already prepared to release his Heart Art.

Luckily, at the very last moment, the knights of the Inquisition Tribunal finally arrived.

One knight holding a heavy crossbow raised it and aimed at the monster's back. A sharp demon-breaking bolt pierced through the monster's heart, driving its body forward for some distance before it crashed to the ground and went still.

Seeing the Inquisition Tribunal arrive, Fate let out a breath of relief and lowered the pendant.

"Everyone, don't panic! The knights are here! We'll wipe out every last monster! Don't crowd each other! You'll all be safe!" the leading knight shouted.

Hearing that the knights had arrived, and that one monster had already been killed, the people on the scene finally steadied a little. But the crisis wasn't over yet.

The knights began fighting the monsters on site.

Each knight took the lead, with groups of three to five guards from the public security office supporting them against a single monster.

These knights had all come from proper academies, but this was still their first real battle. Some panic was unavoidable.

Fate understood that too. What the academy taught was dead knowledge. Only learning how to use that knowledge and those combat techniques flexibly in real battle made them alive—made them truly your own.

Then, by chance, Fate glanced toward a corner. His pupils instantly shrank.

The monster whose heart had been blown apart by the heavy crossbow, the one that should've been dead beyond doubt, was still twitching slightly. One hand was already braced against the ground as it slowly rose to its feet.

The local forces of the Inquisition Tribunal were equipped with enchanted demon-breaking heavy crossbows. Those things were siege weapons of the Empire's legions. They could easily punch through five layers of plate armor, even pierce a slightly thinner city wall. And even if they didn't fully penetrate and stayed lodged inside the target, the enchanted inscriptions on them would keep dealing damage. They were terrifyingly lethal weapons.

And after being hit by something like that, it still wasn't dead?

Fate couldn't even begin to describe the monster's vitality.