Chapter 248: SlaughterHouse

They came from different angles: one from behind, three from the sides, one straight ahead. They moved like insects that had learned to be deliberate — their segmented bodies unfolding from dormancy into full extension in the span of a heartbeat, limbs extending, hooked appendages reaching.

[Ghost Blade] painted their trajectories in his mind like lines on glass.

He stepped sideways and forward simultaneously, into the one angle that wasn’t covered, shoulder brushing broken plaster, the air moving just behind him as one Xenon’s limb scythed through where his spine had been a moment before.

His first cut was horizontal.

He swung Sorrow’s Edge in a flat arc at chest height, the blade passing through the torso of the Xenon coming from his front as if the creature’s chitinous shell had been paper.

There was no resistance or impact. The sword did not behave like a normal weapon against Xenon material. It translated contact into absence.

The Xenon’s body parted in silence.

For a fraction of a second, the two halves remained, then the purple flame consumed them… leaving nothing behind.

[You have Slain a Xenon]

[You have Received 50 Data Fragments]

’Tch… bastards. Not even worth farming.’ He opened the top button of his shirt and gritted his teeth.

“Come on… Insects!”

“One gone.”

He pivoted through the space the vanished body had left and drove the point of the blade upward into the underside of the Xenon dropping from the left.

The sword passed from lower jaw to upper spine. Purple flame licked briefly along the blade’s path. The Xenon evaporated in sections — head, then thorax, then legs — gone, gone, gone.

[You have Slain a Xenon]

[You have Received 50 Data Fragments]

“Two.”

Two more lunged from the right.

He dropped his weight and rolled under the first, the sweep of its limbs passing above him, close enough that he could smell the cold, rotted stench of Xenon flesh, a smell like old batteries and wet stone.

As he came up, he cut backward without looking, trusting [Ghost Blade]’s perception.

Sorrow’s Edge met the second Xenon mid-air and simply removed it from the equation.

[You have Slain a Xenon]

[You have Received 50 Data Fragments]

[You have Slain a Xenon]

[You have Received 50 Data Fragments]

“Four”

He turned and looked at another one who was coming towards him… the Xenon turned, reorienting mid-lunge and taking hesitant steps back.

“What are you afraid of, god damnit. Come on… you had the nerve of attacking me.”

Although he said that… there was something very unsettling about all this. The abrupt change of the weather and the mini truck… there was something very weird going on here.

He was angry and there were several targets to ventilate his anger on.

He stepped forward towards the Xenon.

The purple along the blade brightened as he put weight behind the next swing. The sword sheared through three limbs and the heart in one motion.

For an instant, he saw the pale organ at the centre of the Xenon’s body. It was not a heart… but a small, glowing sphere that had once been a human heart and was now something far less human. Then the flame took it and it vanished, leaving a brief afterimage behind his eyes.

The notification followed.

“Five.”

He hadn’t felt a single impact.

His breathing was steady.

It was, he realized with a brief, grim clarity, It was very easy.

The remaining fifteen were already in motion.

Normal Xenons moved like predators that had never needed to evolve beyond efficiency: fast and direct.

The five Superior-class ones among them were a horror on their own. They had bodies as large as fucking houses and there was no anatomy to their shapes whatsoever.

Even looking at one reminded of his very bad experience of once being swallowed up by the monster.

“Disgusting shits,” He clicked his tongue.

One of the normal ones lunged low.

He kicked off a broken wall fragment, went vertical for a moment, let his body move in a way it had been trained to move in forests and corridors and slaughterhouses in other worlds. The Xenon passed beneath him. He reached down with the sword, barely more than a tap, and removed its head.

Purple flame consumed it and it was simple gone.

“Six”

More came into fill the spot.

The world contracted to a circle of movement, purple flashes, the sharp, brief impressions of Xenon presence flaring and disappearing at the edge of [Ghost Blade]’s map.

The sound was mostly his own breathing and the crunch of debris underfoot. Also the momentary shooting sounds from somewhere within the ruins.

He soon lost count.

Ten.

Twelve.

Fourteen.

It was going too well.

The thought arrived at the exact moment something hit him from behind.

The impact slammed into his back like a low-speed vehicle collision — not enough to break him cleanly in half, but enough to pick him up and throw him forward.

Even Divine Blood was not able to form a defensive wall.

His chest hit a chunk of collapsed wall. The air punched out of his lungs. His teeth clicked together hard enough that he tasted more blood.

[Ghost Blade] flashed blank for a fraction of a second.

There was nothing behind him.

Then, in the blank, something moved.

He hit the ground on hands and knees, Sorrow’s Edge still in his grip. Dust rose around him in a grey cloud.

He pushed himself up, the place between his shoulder blades ached with a deep, dull pain.

“…Screw That,” he said, again, more quietly this time.

He narrowed his eyes at the same spot and suddenly felt something.

The air behaved weirdly… as if someone had pressed a hand into the fabric of the world and left a shallow, invisible imprint.

The edges of the ruined buildings blurred slightly around that imprint, lines bending where they should have been straight.

Then the imprint deepened.

The distortion in reality condensed, like heat shimmering, colours shifted inside it. For a moment, he saw himself reflected in it — a dark figure with a black sword — and then the reflection broke.

A shape outlined itself.

Human.

Broad-shouldered. Taller than him by almost four or five heads at least, maybe more. The outline sharpened, detail filling in where there had only been suggestion: the cut of a coat, the shape of hands, the fall of hair.

Reality adjusted around the body as if making room for something that had been there all along.

A man stepped fully out of nothing.

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