Rolling around in the wind was the massive, lifeless, dead-eyed head of Grand Chieftain Bruga.
"H-He’s... he’s dead," he stammered, his voice cracking into a high-pitched, pathetic squeak. The poison-dripping bone daggers in his hands slipped from his trembling fingers, clattering uselessly against the stone.
"Retreat!" a Zerith squad leader shrieked, panic finally piercing the collective paralysis of the Coalition lines. "Run! The demon killed the Grand Chieftain! Run for your lives!"
Like a dam bursting under the pressure of a flood, the Coalition’s morale evaporated into thin air. Soldiers dropped their weapons, turned their backs, and began scrambling wildly toward the broken valley pass, desperate to escape the valley before the black reaper turned his gaze upon them.
"Stop them! Hold the line, you cowards!" the Zharun Chief Vane screamed, his voice shaking violently as he tried to rally his remaining guards. But nobody listened. The illusion of invincibility had been shattered.
Sol calmly looked at them and...
BOOM!
He vanished from near the of Bruga’s corpse.
The air ruptured with a sonic crack so violent it knocked several nearby soldiers flat on their backs.
Enhanced by his peak Layer 3 evolution and the blistering, friction-defying speed of the Dreadwing, Sol’s movement bypassed the tracking entirely.
To others, he wasn’t running; he was blinking across space in a series of terrifying, overlapping afterimages.
His primary target was the first high-value cowards attempting to slip away in the chaos: the remaining Coalition Layer 4 powerhouses.
Target one: The fleeing Zerith Chief.
"You’re not going anywhere," a cold, raspy voice whispered directly beside the fleeing Zerith commander’s ear.
The Chief froze, his heart instantly stopping. He tried to spin around and raise his bone dagger, but he was already moving in slow motion relative to Sol’s newly evolved perception.
SLASH!
A single, razor-thin arc of sapphire light flashed in the twilight.
The chief’s head drifted smoothly off his shoulders, spinning through the air before hitting the dirt, while his headless body took three more stumbling steps forward before collapsing into a fountain of arterial blood.
Sol didn’t even pause to watch him fall. He flicked his wrist, his body blurring into a dark streak of motion as he intercepted the second target.
Target two: A surviving Marauder Layer 4 captain attempting to organize a rear-guard defense.
The massive Marauder commander, realizing he was hunted, roared in desperate defiance. He channeled every ounce of his remaining essence, throwing a massive, slate-grey shockwave punch straight at the incoming black blur.
"DIE, YOU MONSTER!"
Sol didn’t dodge. He channeled the absolute, unyielding gravity-anchor weight of the Great Badger into his left shoulder and drove straight through the center of the kinetic shockwave like a cannonball.
CRASH!
The Badger’s defensive shell shrugged off the punch with a dull thud. Sol materialized right inside the commander’s guard, brought the Dreadwing blade around in a violent, two-handed upward swing, and sheared the giant Marauder straight through from his hip to his opposite shoulder.
SPLIT!
The commander’s body separated into two bloody halves, sliding apart in opposite directions across the white slate as Sol stepped cleanly over the gore without breaking his stride.
In less than five seconds, two more high-tier pillars of the Coalition leadership had been eradicated as if they were nothing more than field grass.
...
There was only one man left on the battlefield whose crimes against Sol, Lumi, and the Veynar outweighed all the rest: the current Chief Vane of the Zharun Tribe.
This was the same gaunt, serpentine warlord who had stalked the shadows, betrayed the Veynar and... most unforgivably... personally plotted to flay, and skin Lumi.
This was the real architect of the Zharun’s sadistic cruelty, the man who had looked down upon him with sneering, untouchable superiority.
Now, that superiority was entirely gone.
The Zharun Chief Vane stood alone, his face drained of every drop of color.
He watched in paralyzed horror as the black-armored reaper carved a bloody trench through his men and materialized fifty feet away, stepping casually over a pile of severed limbs.
"S-Stay back..." the Zharun Chief Vanestammered, stumbling backward until his spine hit a stone. His hands shook so violently he could barely continue gripping his weapon. "I am the head of the Zharun! We are both humans. If you kill me, the ancestors will—"
"The ancestors won’t care about a bastard like you," Sol interrupted smoothly. His raspy voice was quiet, steady, and laden with a terrifying, bone-chilling calm.
He didn’t rush. He walked toward the Zharun Chief with slow, deliberate footsteps, the tip of the Dreadwing blade dragging along the limestone slate, leaving a long, sparking white line in the stone.
"P-Please," the Zharun Chief whimpered, his aristocratic arrogance melting away into sniveling, pathetic cowardice.
He dropped to his knees in the dirt, throwing his hands up in a desperate plea for mercy. "Take anything! Take our territory, our wealth, our lineage secrets! I can serve you! I will do whatever you want, just let me live!"
Sol stopped three feet away from the kneeling chieftain. He looked down amusely, his neon-crimson eyes burning with a cold, unforgiving abyss.
"Serve me?" Sol tilted his head, a dark, humorless chuckle rumbling in his throat. "You think I need a dog that betrays his own race? You spent months hunting the Veynar, burning our borders, and wanted to skin a child who had nothing to do with your petty politics."
The Zharun Chief’s breath hitched. "L-Lumi... you mean that girl? I—I only—"
SCHWING!
Before the chief could finish his sentence, Sol swung the sapphire blade in a short, controlled arc... not aiming for his neck, but bringing the heavy, flat edge crashing downward.
CRACK!
"AAAGHH!"
The blade l smashed directly onto the Zharun Chief’s right knee, pulverizing the kneecap and shattering the bone into a dozen broken splinters.
The chief let out an ear-splitting shriek of agony, collapsing sideways into the dirt, clutching his mangled leg as hot blood spurted across the gravel.
"That’s for every Veynar your tribes killed." Sol said coldly.
"P-Please... kill me! Just kill me!" the chief wailed, rolling in the dirt, tears and snot mixing with the dust on his pale face, as he finally knew what fate awaited him.
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