Kale stood amidst the cooling glass and scorched earth of the Inferno Hollow... his chest heaving in a rhythmic... pained cadence as the adrenaline of the slaughter began to recede. The silence of the deep trench was oppressive... broken only by the crackling of charred roots and the distant... rhythmic hiss of escaping steam.
He moved through the carnage with surgical efficiency... checking the pulse of each fallen Master rank agent to ensure their deletion from the world was absolute. One final flick of his mana-enhanced dagger ensured that the female Artificer and the noble recruit would never breathe again... removing the final variables of the ambush.
The golden radiance that had previously wreathed the ambushers was fading... leaving behind only the pale... empty shells of zealots who had traded their souls for borrowed divinity. Kale stared at them with cold... analytical eyes... his mind already calculating the next set of variables in this equation of betrayal.
Paula lay at the edge of the crater... her Prism Hornet nothing more than a heap of cracked crystalline wings and leaking mana. Kale looked down at her... his green eyes shimmering with a trace of cruelty that he no longer bothered to hide from the world.
Neo landed on the ground beside him... its three heads arching in a display of unbridled predatory greed that seemed to vibrate through the soul bond. The Nemesis Hydra's six golden eyes were fixed on the corpses... its maws unhinging with wet... rhythmic clicks as it prepared to feast.
Kale felt the creature's hunger through their shared link... a dark... reaching need to integrate the high-density biological material of the Peak Masters it had just slain. But Kale held up a hand... stopping the beast before it could touch the remains of the church agents.
He looked at the yellow residue of the Dragon Authority still clinging to the skin of the fallen... a sickly light that refused to vanish completely. The discordant heat from the earlier clash still burned in his own mana pathways... making him wary of any lingering genetic contamination.
The memory of the World Dragon's curse made him inherently suspicious of anything carrying the scent of the Divine Race. He wasn't sure if devouring such unnatural... borrowed energy would mess with his own stability or Neo's internal source code.
"System... activate analytical subroutines," Kale whispered... his voice sounding thin and raspy in the hot quiet of the hollow. "Will devouring these corpses contaminate Neo's internal source code with fragments of the Church's authority?"
The blue window flickered into existence at the corner of his retina... the crystalline text providing the data he needed to soothe his paranoid instincts.
[biological data evaluated... fragments identified as borrowed divinity]
[borrowed energy is non-genetic and lacks a permanent anchor within the specimen's DNA]
[the all-devour trait will discard these volatile fragments upon digestion... no risk detected]
Kale exhaled a breath he hadn't realised he was holding... the tension leaving his broad shoulders slightly as the mathematical assurance settled in. Suspicion still flickered in his light green eyes... but the clinical certainty of the program was enough to allow the harvest.
He signalled Neo to begin... and the Hydra dived into the work with savage efficiency. The sound of cracking bone and tearing flesh filled the hollow... a gruesome melody of progress that mirrored the cold darkness in Kale's own heart.
As Neo consumed the remains... Kale looked at his own hands... which were still trembling with a mix of leftover battle-fury and a semblance of fear. The repercussions of what had just happened began to weigh heavily on his analytical mind... forcing him to re-evaluate his safety.
How had they found him so easily? The Inferno Hollow was a death trap... a place few scouts even dared to mention in their daily reports. Due to his inherently paranoid mind... he began to suspect everyone in his immediate ecosystem.
He viewed the entire world through a lens of hostility... questioning the loyalty of every face he had seen since his arrival at the Greenroot Guild. Betrayal was a familiar scent to him... and today it tasted like copper and ash in the back of his throat.
He ran through the list of candidates in his mind... but he crossed out one person in particular: his Master... Lazek Oberon. Lazek had invested too much of his own pride... resources... and Accredit into Kale to sell him to the fanatics so cheaply.
But everyone else was a suspect. Even the higher-ups of the Greenroot Guild were not beyond the reach of his suspicion. This event felt too structured... too convenient to be a simple fluke of scouting or bad luck.
The attack had happened right after he had advanced to the Greater Master rank and Neo had grown stronger. Otherwise... with his previous strengths... he would have definitely died in that initial golden surge of divine power.
It was way too fucking convenient. It felt as if something beyond his comprehension... or some unseen hand pulling strings behind a curtain... was directing his path. It was the same suspicion he had felt when first coming out of the Beast Tomb.
Kale's gaze drifted toward the eclipsing heights of the Tigerwood canopy far above... where the green starlight was obscured by drifting mana clouds. He was positively sure of one thing... someone as powerful as Overlord Rivaldo definitely knew exactly what he had been through.
Rivaldo likely had a complete data set of Neo's powers and the range of its draconic arrogance. The Overlord could literally be in the skies at this moment... hiding himself behind a layer of high-altitude clouds... watching the slaughter with detached interest.
The man could be recording a specimen's reaction to a lethal stimulus... viewing Kale's struggle as nothing more than a biological variable to be managed. The thought made Kale's blood boil with a cold... dark fury that he struggled to keep beneath his stoic mask.
For a moment... he felt a reckless urge to call out... to shout toward the heavens and demand an answer from the man who watched over the forest. His lips actually parted... the words building in his throat like a suppressed roar of defiance against the world.
But in the end... he only ended up closing his lips... the silence of the hollow remaining heavy and stagnant around him. It was perhaps not a good idea to confront an Overlord on a whim of paranoid intuition... especially not when he was still so weak.
If he spoke up... he would have to be the one forced to reveal his hand first. He would have to confirm secrets and reveal methodologies which he wasn't comfortable sharing with anyone serving the Empire's politics or the Church's gaze.
It was most likely that the Greenroot Guild had spies embedded in the Church... and seeing a promising fleshcrafter appear on the radar... they were gathering info. The Church had launched a hasty... desperate attack to prune a threat before it could grow.
The longer he stayed here... the more exposed he would be to the next wave of danger. The Church wouldn't stop at seven agents... and he needed to return to the relative safety of room 555 and the specialised Association laboratories.
There... under the protection of his master's reputation... he could continue the Elemental Resonance Project and manufacture the Ignis Core. He needed power... and he needed it before the unseen hands decided to close the cage for good.
Just as he decided to move... a sharp... rhythmic rustle echoed through the dense foliage to the north. Kale froze... his heart racing against his ribs as his senses flared with an ominous feeling of imminent threat once more.
"What the fuck... don't tell me they sent more fucking teams of awakened to kill me," he muttered under his breath. He immediately melted into the deep shadow of a giant ironwood root... his daggers ready for another systematic slaughter.
Neo sensed the shift in the bond and vanished from the clearing... merging into the darkness behind Kale. Master and beast became twin phantoms in the gloom... their presence suppressed to the absolute minimum that their Hexarion physiology allowed.
But Kale did not move to strike immediately. As he focused his perception... he realised that this group of humans was even weaker than the peak masters he had just deleted. Their mana signatures were erratic... unrefined... and lacked the golden pulse of borrowed divinity.
He waited... his daggers humming with a high-frequency mana edge that was nearly invisible in the dim light. His breathing was non-existent... his heart rate lowered to a near-hibernating state through pure biological control.
The figures finally emerged from the dense Tigerwood thickets into the edge of the bloody clearing. They moved with a desperate... stumbling gait that spoke of exhaustion rather than tactical caution.
From the distance... even through the lingering smoke and thermal distortion... Kale recognised the gear... the posture... and the familiar beasts trailing behind them. His grip on his daggers loosened slightly... though the suspicion in his heart did not vanish.
It was the rest of the Wolfberg mercenary team... Fabio... Shane... Leda... and the others... stumbling toward the graveyard he had just created. They looked battered and weary... their faces pale with a terror that Kale could sense from fifty meters away.
Fabio froze at the edge of the crater... his Pyro Cobra recoiling into his shadow as it sensed the lingering stench of draconic blood and systematic death. The mercenaries stared at the boy they once knew, now a monarch of the slaughter, and the silence of the hollow screamed with the weight of the unknown.
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