Chapter 584: Chapter-584
They did not expect to look up and see the Vanguard General staring down at them with eyes completely devoid of human warmth.
Before the leader could even process the impossible reality, Heena moved.
She didn’t have her midnight-black daggers.
She didn’t have her swords. But a Vanguard didn’t need steel to kill.
Heena lunged, her right hand shooting forward with blinding, terrifying speed. She bypassed the leader’s raised sword entirely, her long, pale fingers wrapping like an iron vice around his armored throat.
With a brutal, effortless twist of her wrist and a violent shift of her hips, she completely crushed his windpipe.
CRACK.
The sickening sound of cartilage and bone snapping echoed loudly in the small bathroom. The leader’s dead eyes bulged as his weapon dropped from his hand. Heena didn’t even watch him fall; she used his collapsing body as a stepping stone, launching herself directly at the second assassin.
"Oh, she is MAD!" the System cheered, doing a mid-air digital backflip. "Get them, Host! Rip them to pieces!"
The second assassin panicked, wildly swinging his serrated blade in a desperate horizontal arc aimed at her stomach.
Heena dropped low, the poisoned blade whistling mere millimeters above her wet hair. As she ducked, she grabbed the heavy, wooden bathing stool sitting by the tub. Without breaking her momentum, she swung the solid oak stool upward with bone-shattering force, smashing it directly into the underside of the assassin’s jaw.
The impact lifted the man completely off his feet. His jaw instantly dislocated with a wet crunch, his head violently snapping backward as he crashed against the stone wall, out cold before he even hit the wet floorboards.
Only one assassin remained.
He took a terrified step backward, his back hitting the splintered doorframe. The absolute slaughter of his two elite comrades had taken less than four seconds. His hands shook violently as he gripped his sword with both hands, staring at the dripping, nightmarish figure rising from the shadows.
Heena stood up to her full height. The adrenaline was roaring through her veins, masking the agonizing pain in her spine, turning her into a machine of pure, unadulterated violence.
She reached behind her neck. With a swift, sharp pull, she ripped the silver needle out of her flesh and tossed it casually onto the floor.
The remaining assassin let out a desperate, guttural scream, charging forward and thrusting his blade directly at her heart.
Heena didn’t dodge. She stepped into his guard.
She violently slapped the flat of his blade away with her bare palm, completely ignoring the sharp edge slicing a shallow cut across her skin. In the same fluid motion, she stepped deep into his personal space, grabbing the front of his black armor with her left hand to anchor him in place.
She drew her right fist back and drove it forward with the combined, terrifying momentum of her entire body weight.
Her knuckles slammed directly into the center of his chest plate. The sheer kinetic force of the Vanguard strike caved the armor inward, violently shattering the assassin’s sternum and stopping his heart on impact.
The man’s eyes rolled back into his head, and he collapsed into a lifeless heap at her feet.
Silence instantly reclaimed the ruined pavilion. The only sounds in the room were the heavy, ragged breaths of the Vanguard General, and the steady drip... drip... drip... of freezing water falling from her robes onto the blood-soaked floor.
Heena slowly turned her head.
In the corner, the Third Wife was still pressed against the wall, her hands hovering over her mouth, completely paralyzed by the sheer, brutal violence she had just witnessed. She stared up at Heena, trembling like a leaf in a hurricane.
Heena wiped a splash of the assassins’ blood from her cheek. She looked down at the frail, terrified woman who had just dragged her through hell, stabbed her in the spine, and saved her life.
The freezing, demonic fury in Heena’s eyes slowly melted away, replaced by a dark, unyielding promise.
"You did well," Heena rasped, her voice thick and commanding. "Now... get up. We have a work."
Heena slowly turned her gaze away from the trembling woman and looked down at the absolute bloodbath covering the bathroom floor.
Three elite, armored assassins lay dead. The stagnant, freezing water from the tub had mixed with the rapidly spreading pools of dark blood, turning the wooden floorboards into a grotesque, slippery nightmare.
The adrenaline roaring through Heena’s veins was beginning to stabilize, leaving behind a dull, throbbing ache at the base of her skull where the silver needle had pierced her. But a Vanguard General did not have the luxury of resting after a kill.
Her razor-sharp mind instantly shifted from combat to strategy.
If she simply walked out into the night and left these bodies here, the Prime Minister would find them. It wouldn’t take a genius to realize that the assassins had tracked the Vanguard Madam to his own Third Wife’s assigned pavilion. The Prime Minister wouldn’t care how it happened; he would immediately deduce that his wife was involved. He would torture and execute her before the sun even rose.
Normally, Heena didn’t care about the collateral damage of the capital’s political games. The weak died, and the strong survived. But looking at the small, bruised woman cowering against the wall—the woman who had risked everything, dragged her dead weight across a ruined palace, and stabbed her in the spine to save her—Heena felt a rare, undeniable surge of protectiveness.
She absolutely refused to let this woman take the fall.
But hiding three full-grown, heavily armored men in a guest pavilion in the middle of enemy territory?
’This is going to be incredibly troublesome,’ Heena sighed internally.
Heena stepped over the crushed sternum of the third assassin, casually tossing the stolen, blood-stained sword onto the floor. She looked at the Third Wife, her voice completely devoid of the demonic rage from moments ago, returning to a calm, flat, military cadence.
"Go and close the outer door," Heena ordered.
The Third Wife jumped as if she had been physically struck. She blinked, her wide, tear-filled eyes staring up at the Vanguard Madam.
"W-What?" the Third Wife stammered, her voice barely a squeak.
Heena watched her closely. The fierce, terrifying spark of rebellion that had driven the frail woman to stab her had completely evaporated. Now that the immediate threat was dead, the massive dump of adrenaline was leaving the Third Wife’s system, causing her body to undergo a violent, uncontrollable crash. She was trembling so hard her teeth were audibly chattering.
It was almost comical. Heena genuinely could not believe that this fragile, weeping woman was the exact same person who had boldly hauled a paralyzed general out of a death trap just twenty minutes ago.
"Do a watch out," Heena instructed, speaking slowly and clearly to cut through the woman’s panic. "Stand by the front entrance. Make sure no one else comes here. If you hear footsteps approaching the courtyard, tap the wall twice."
The Third Wife slowly pushed herself up off the wet floorboards, her legs wobbling dangerously. She looked at the three mangled corpses, then looked back at Heena, her face completely pale.
"A-And what are you going to do?" she whispered, terrified that Heena was going to leave her alone.
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