"Is he... is he even one of us?" a veteran Veynar warrior whispered, his hand shaking slightly as he gripped his bone axe, his eyes fixed on the black-armored silhouette. "Even the most savage Marauder doesn’t cut a man apart like this while he begs..."
"Shut your mouth," Zeyra hissed from the front rank, though her own hands were clenched so tight her nails were drawing blood. "He is doing what needs to be done. The Zharun earned every single cut."
Beside her, Kira remained on her knees, her face buried in the dirt.
She wasn’t watching the bloodbath, but every time Malphas’s curdling shrieks echoed off the slate walls, her shoulders shook with a wild, convulsive sob.
The guilt in her chest was a burning fire, but hearing the monster who wore her friend’s face being turned into meat provided a dark, hollow pit of relief.
On the other side of the clearing, the remaining high layer Marauders and Zerith stalkers were completely paralyzed, not just by the invisible gravity of the Golden Dominion, but by pure, psychological shock.
They were races raised on raw power, muscle, and fearless rushing.
They viewed death as a glorious reunion with their ancestors.
But what Sol was doing right now wasn’t delivering death.
He was withholding it, turning a Layer 4 powerhouse into a squirming, limbless sack of meat right in front of their eyes.
The primitive fear of being kept alive just to be deliberately broken began to crack their fearless masks, their knuckles turning white against their clubs.
They realized that they had come across an even bigger monster than them.
Even the twenty-foot Grand Chieftain of the Gray Marauders felt a cold weight drop into his stomach.
He had killed hundreds if not thousands of men with his own hands, but seeing Sol calmly peeling the limbs off a living person without a single change in his expression filled his primitive brain with an instinctual dread.
Sol dragged Malphas back up by his neck, his fingers digging deep into the muscles.
His face was completely unrecognizable, a bloody mess of shattered bone, black bile, and torn skin.
His left eye was entirely swollen shut, and his right pupil was clouding over as his life core began its final, sputtering rhythm.
Yet, despite the absolute ruin of his body, the pale, stretched leather flap of Lumi’s face remained pinned tightly to the top of his head, held together by the crude bone pins, as Sol had deliberately avoided hurting it.
Sol looked at the trophy, the intense fire inside his chest burning with a quiet, final concentration.
He didn’t say a word. He raised his left hand, his thick fingers moving with extreme care... almost gentle compared to the brutality of his previous strikes... and began pulling the crude bone pins out of the giant’s hair one by one.
Malphas couldn’t even weep anymore.
He just hung from Sol’s grip, his breath coming in short, wet whistles through his broken throat, his one open eye staring at Sol with a total, hollow compliance.
He had used all his latent potential, he had burned his core to ash, and he had done his best just to survive... and it hadn’t mattered for a single second.
...
Sol held the soft, pale sheet of human skin in his left palm. The texture was incredibly fine, the weight of it almost non-existent.
Yet, as he looked down, a frown cut across his forehead.
His silver-crimson eyes remained focused entirely on the delicate material as he slowly, carefully tried to smooth out the creases. He wanted to align the features, to find the familiar, carefree face of the girl who had always met the tribe’s coldness with a bright, comforting smile.
But as his fingers adjusted the shape, a deep frown carved its way onto his forehead.
He shuffled the edges again, adjusting it thinking maybe it was due to incorrect aligning.
But, the result was the same. The skin felt incredibly strange in his hand. No matter how he held it together, no matter how he tried to align the stretched contours and the stitched borders, the face that formed in his palm was not the one he knew.
The jawline was too wide. The bridge of the nose, though flattened, carried a completely different bone-print. The brow structure, even when flattened and stretched by the crude bone pins, was far too wide.
The lips, though dried into a grotesque grin, belonged to a completely different face, lacking the small, soft curve that had defined Lumi’s constant, quiet laughter... someone older, with harsher, sharp lines.
It was a human girl’s skin, yes. But it definitely wasn’t Lumi’s face.
Sol’s chest pool of Golden Silver energy gave a sudden, cold jerk.
The white-hot fury that had been threatening to burn his body to ash instantly froze into an icy, hollow shock and confusion.
He turned his gaze back down to the ruined, limbless pile of flesh that had been Malphas, which was still hanging loosely from his left hand like a broken gourd.
"Who is this?" Sol asked. His voice was incredibly quiet, but it carried a sharp, chilling edge that made the nearby Zharun warriors flinch.
But no word came out from Malpahs, no it was more like even if he wanted to, he couldn’t.
Because his mouth was torn,his shattered lower jaw merely twitched in the red mud, completely unable to form words, his eyes entirely glazed over as his life core flickered its last, pathetic beats.
He was too far gone, his mind already drifting into the silent pastures of the dead.
He couldn’t even register the question, let alone form words through a severed throat.
Sol didn’t waste another breath on the dying man.
He dropped the body into the red mud with a wet, heavy thud, leaving it to twitch in the gravel.
He stood up slowly, his silver-crimson eyes sweeping across the frozen Zharun lines like a pair of glowing embers through the limestone dust, his black Rockhorn armor dripping with dark crimson as he let out an earth-shattering shout that echoed off the whole battlfield.
"WHOSE SKIN IS THIS?!"
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