Chapter 123: Six Executioners

Chapter 123: Six Executioners

WHOOSH!

Ambiel’s leather whip shot forward like an enraged viper, wrapped in shrieking Wind Qi.

"I’ll kill you for what you did!"

Her voice trembled with raw fury. The phantom terror of watching her youngest sister nearly decapitated still clawed at her throat.

Jules twisted his torso, narrowly evading the whistling strap.

"I didn’t do anything wrong!" he snarled, scrambling back as another whip-crack fractured the basalt floor an inch from his heel. "Anyone else would have done the exact same thing in my position!"

He had barely finished his sentence when a blinding sphere of condensed light hurled toward his chest.

Jules’s face twisted in panic. He threw himself sideways—only to plunge headlong into a fan of razor-sharp wind blades.

He jerked his head back at the final fraction of a second.

SHING!

One of the crescent blades grazed his collar, drawing a thin line of crimson down his neck.

Jules’s expression darkened into an ugly sneer. His glare swept over the three Argon sisters with venomous contempt.

To him, survival was the only law. Arvessa hadn’t died, had she? She was still standing, wasn’t she? Then why couldn’t these wretched women just let it go?

Sparks of silver lightning crackled across his knuckles, surging in tandem with his mounting resentment.

His unrepentant arrogance only stoked the flames of their wrath.

Arvessa stared at Jules with unnatural stillness. She did not yell. She did not weep. She had known Jules Drackar since their early days before the apocalypse—she knew his pettiness, his narcissism, and his fragile pride.

Yet she had never imagined that beneath his tailored noble robes lay a coward so fundamentally rotten.

Standing on the threshold of death had peeled away her illusions. For one frozen heartbeat, she had stared directly into the hollow sockets of the reaper.

Her gaze drifted toward the woman clad in crimson silk.

If not for her... I would be an unrecognizable pile of minced flesh.

Searing Fire Qi ignited along the length of Arvessa’s blade. Without a word, she swept her weapon horizontally in a wide, sweeping crescent of flame.

FWOOSH!

Jules crossed his forearms in panic. A lattice of silver lightning formed a protective barrier in front of his chest.

BOOM!

The flaming edge collided with the electrical lattice, showering the air with blazing sparks. But before Jules could push the weight back—

SHING!

A far denser, heavier wind blade sliced straight through the lightning mesh from his blind spot.

Jules barely brought his palm up in time.

CLANG!

The gale-force strike hit his palm-guard like a battering ram, launching him backward through the air.

BOOM!

His spine slammed hard into a massive stone pillar. Before his boots could touch the flagstones, Ambiel’s whip struck through the dust like an executioner’s chain.

SNAP!

The leather coiled tightly around his waist. With a vicious flick of Ambiel’s wrist, Jules was hoisted off the ground and hurled toward a second pillar across the aisle!

BOOOOOM!

Stone fractured behind his skull.

"Kh..." Jules hissed through clenched teeth as he slumped to the floor, a thin trickle of dark blood leaking from the corner of his lips.

He dragged himself upright, wiping his chin with a trembling sleeve. His eyes narrowed with cold, calculating caution.

He knew his limits. He could not defeat all three Argon sisters together. Individually, their cultivation realms were on par with his; even in a isolated duel, besting any one of them would require dirty tricks and heavy risks.

Worse still was the masked woman in crimson.

Jules had no idea where her allegiance lay. He wasn’t foolish enough to gamble his life against someone who could parry an executioner’s array with one hand.

"Hmph." Jules spat a mouthful of blood and brushed the dust from his silk robes. "Aren’t we supposed to deal with the palace’s guardians before you take your petty vengeance out on me?"

Ambiel’s expression hardened. Every fiber of her being wanted to snap his neck, but she knew he was right. The ancient constructs were already resetting their stances.

"I will remember this, Jules Drackar," Annelle said, her voice dropping into a chilling promise.

She turned her back on him, raising her wind-sheathed daggers toward the six black-robed executioners. The trial was far from over.

Asher had watched the entire confrontation in silence. His sharp eyes lingered on Jules for several seconds—unreadable, cold, and heavy with unspoken contempt.

Then his gaze shifted toward the true immediate threat: the executioners.

Finally, he looked toward the mysterious woman in the red flower mask. He parted his lips to speak, but someone stepped ahead of him.

"Thank you for saving my life earlier," Arvessa said softly, offering a formal bow from the waist. "I owe you my life."

Ambiel followed, her hand pressed over her fist in a solemn salute. "If there is anything you ever require in the future, the Argon Family will exhaust every resource to provide it."

The masked woman said nothing. She merely inclined her head in silent acknowledgment.

Behind the porcelain flower mask, Seana’s thoughts were far away from noble politics.

She had been sealed in a subterranean blood-refining corridor when an unexpected spatial tremor forced the locking mechanism open, providing her a narrow path of escape.

Since the moment she was seperated from Lothe in the first sector, her sole priority had been locating him.

She was worried sick about him.

She knew that cunning fox was frighteningly capable. But this Ancient Palace had demonstrated time and again that raw strength was insufficient. Every step, every archway, every stone tile was a calculated trap.

Most alarming of all was the palace’s adaptive nature—it evolved in real-time, tailoring its lethality to counter whatever techniques the intruders revealed.

But yet...

Knowing that man, Seana couldn’t help but suppress a wry, exasperated smile beneath her mask.

That cunning fox has never suffered a loss in his life. If anyone is going to end up hollowed out and bleeding... it’s this damned palace.

Suddenly, her dark eyes sharpened behind the eye-slits.

She looked toward the far end of the chamber.

There were no longer five executioners.

There were six.

From a patch of distorted shadow along the perimeter, a fresh black-robed silhouette had materialized.

Seana let out a soft, imperceptible sigh. She possessed little interest in complex arrays or mechanical engineering, but even she could grasp the basic logic at work.

The trial’s formation had cataloged her entrance. It had simply scaled up the meat grinder to account for her presence.

Asher shifted his stance, his golden sword humming at his side. "It seems the host has laid an extra place at the table."

"And it would be remarkably rude not to accept the hospitality," Seana murmured, her voice carrying a dry, lethal calm through the porcelain mask.

FWOOSH...

Thick, viscous crimson Qi coiled along the pitch-black steel of the Blood Moon Sword, bathing the flagstones in an eerie, bloody luminescence.

The six executioners moved at the exact same instant.

BOOM!

They surged forward, their coordinated speed and weight doubling from before. Each executioner selected its prey with machine-like precision.

CLANG!

Seana’s Blood Moon Sword collided with twin black scimitars in a shower of sparks!

The newly arrived double-blade executioner lunged with fluid ferocity. Its right scimitar cleaved diagonally toward her collarbone, while its left blade swept low to sever her waist.

Seana’s boots glided backward across the stone.

The upper scimitar hissed past her chin, missing the porcelain mask by a hair’s breadth. She pivoted her hips with ethereal grace, letting the lower blade slice harmlessly through empty silk.

Without retreating another inch, she stepped directly into the construct’s guard.

SHING!​