Chapter 174: You Will Know What They Feel

Elias did not know much about Alchemistry devices; they were usually created by a Master Alchemist and contained profound mysteries that few would understand, but one of the few things he knew about these devices was that they were ridiculously expensive.

So expensive that the Alchemistry Crystal that he used to work underneath the tunnel was regulated and linked to the Royal Palace, and had been used for almost three hundred years.

An Alchemistry Device was extremely valuable because of the complex function it could perform that could end up being heaven-defying, and of everything he expected to find inside this place, then an Alchemistry Device was certainly not one of them.

These devices were priceless and could not be bought with money that an average person would be able to make in ten lifetimes. These four guards would never make the money to afford an Alchemistry Device, even the entire guard unit may have only one or two of these devices, and this was the final confirmation Elias needed, that these four were in an organization.

Beneath the Alchemistry Device lay a folded piece of paper, smooth and etched with words penned in golden ink. The words were in code, and Elias could not read them.

“Leave that alone, please, we have money, a lot of money… there.” Aris, who had recovered from the blow to the throat, wheezed and pointed to a hidden section of the floor.

Elias shrugged, “I told you I don’t want your money, but if you tell me who is behind you, then I may listen to your request.”

Aris’ eyes widened, a weird look passed through his eyes, and his body became slack. Elias paused as he noted a strange surge of Lumina flowing through the body of the man that erupted inside his head.

Elias Will and Perception made it possible to see the Lumina flowing in the bodies of weak Siphons like these guards, and he could have fought them with his eyes closed, just using the flow of Lumina in their veins, and so he was able to quickly detect this foreign flow of Lumina inside the body of Aris.

Aris suddenly looked around in surprise, and then in shock, before pain washed across his features at his broken arm and his sore throat. He looked up and saw Elias, and in his eyes, Elias did not see any recognition.

“Who are you?” he gasped, as he looked around in shock and fear, especially when he saw the bodies of his fellow guards, “Do you know who we are? The entirety of Stormf–”

Elias sighed as he went down and seized Aris by the throat, lifting him off the ground. Aris’s eyes bulged. His hands clawed at Elias’s arm, but Strength at a 149 made his struggles meaningless. When the man could have maybe 30-40 at most in this attribute, the gap between him and Elias was so great it would only be bridged if he became a Mist Phantom, and not just any normal Mist Phantom. Elias held him there for three full seconds, seeing the fear and confusion in Aris’s eyes, and confirming that it truly was not being faked, and then he squeezed.

The sound that emerged underneath his grip was wet and final, as cartilage was crushed, the windpipe collapsed, and the vertebrae ground together before turning to paste under a force that could compress a steel plate as if it were made from dough.

Aris’s body went limp, his bladder releasing in death. Elias dropped him and turned to the others. A part of his mind was telling him that two seconds had elapsed from the moment he squeezed and then dropped the dead man to the ground.

To confirm if this change was not just unique to Aris, Elias turned to Corin who he had incapacitated when he had slammed his palm against Corin’s face with enough force to shatter teeth, but when he picked the man up, Elias blinked in annoyance when he noticed that when he did that to the man, the teeth had been driven backward into the soft tissue of his throat, and in the time that Elias had spent reading through the evidences lying around, the man had choked on his own blood and broken bones in silence.

Elias held him upright for a moment, seeing if there was any light in his eyes, then let him fall.

“Men plan while the gods laugh,” Elias muttered to himself as he turned towards Mikel, who was the largest of the four, broad-shouldered, thick-necked, the kind of man who relied on size to intimidate.

He had used that size, Elias knew, to hold children down while the others did their work; there were enough memories of him doing this that Elias was getting increasingly irritated as he looked at the man who was slowly coming to after his head had been slammed into the ground.

Elias impatiently flipped the massive body over, planted one knee on Mikel’s chest, and saw recognition in the man’s eye. He nodded and asked, “Who is your backer, who owns the Alchemistry Device?”

Mikel’s eyes widened in shock as he turned to the side and saw the Alchemistry Device that was lying on the table, “You… what the hell did you do? I cannot…” Again, that strange surge of Lumina erupted from the chest of Mikel and entered his head, and he went slack.

The big man regained his consciousness and grimaced in pain, and then he looked up in confusion at Elias, glanced at the leg on his chest, then growled, “Who the fuck are you? Get your leg off my chest before I break it and feed it to…”

Elias bent and drove his claws through the man’s throat. It was a firm thrust, straight down, severing everything from windpipe to spine, and he retracted his hand so fast that it was not stained with any blood. Mikel’s body jerked once, twice, then lay still.

Turning to Derrick, the smart one who tried to run while throwing a chest at Elias, but was crushed to the ground when Elias returned the chest with so much force that his spine was crushed.

Elias walked up to the man, and he was barely alive. His legs were useless, his spine probably severed, his breath coming in wet, rattling gasps.

Derrick’s lips moved, trying to form words, to beg, or to bargain, but no sound came out of his mouth. As a Siphon, it was possible for him to recover, given enough time, and if he ascended to Mist Phantom, but why would Elias want to give thrash like this a chance to live?

Elias knelt beside him. “You liked watching, didn’t you?” he asked quietly. “You liked seeing them suffer. You liked hearing them cry. So many of them died, and the last face they saw was your own. I have to see your face so many times in my mind that I am sick of it.”

Derrick’s eyes were wide, pleading. He may not totally understand what Elias was saying, but he could hear the tone of his voice, and there was no pity in them.

Elias placed one hand on the man’s chest and noted that his ribs were also shattered, and he adjusted his hand so his palm rested right over the heart.

“Now you’ll know what they felt.”

He pushed, and his hand sank through flesh and bone like they were wet paper. Derrick’s body arched, his mouth opening in a silent scream, as Elias’s fingers closed around his still-beating heart.

One squeeze and then there was silence.

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