Chapter 286 Scene of the western wall

‘Sorry, Mom.’

The apology looped in his head with every stride Lys was making now. He knew how it looked. He knew how it felt from her side. Leaving the fight like this, recklessly, when the monsters were already slipping past into the village. Leaving Selene without support now. Leaving Mira and the village women to hold a collapsing stretch of street, knowing how exhausted they were. 

It was reckless. It was selfish of him to do that. 

But at the same time, it was also the only option that made any sense in the handful of seconds he had to decide.

If he waited for others to free themselves, the delay might cost them everything. The explosion did not look small. Something capable of lighting the night itself like that wouldn’t just happen by accident, and the three women who had gone ahead were not the kind of people who carried explosives with them, either. 

Whatever had detonated near the gate, it had either been aimed at them or used against them. Standing around debating the risk while more monsters poured into the residential streets was not a plan he was willing to take. To him, it just looked like a slower way to lose.

So he ran alone.

CorpseSlayer was on his hand for sure, but even with that he wasn’t feeling very secure right now. With things suddenly taking this strange turn, the victory feeling he had a couple of minutes ago was already drained with stress and fear. 

A chicken-monster darted out from under a toppled cart; he took its head without breaking his own stride. With every monster he was killing as he advanced to the gate, the system notifications flickered at the edge of his vision and showed results for it. He did not have attention to spare for numbers. Whether he was close to another level up or not, he didn’t have time to check.

The two crooked houses that had blocked their view of the gate slid past on either side. The scorched smell in the air grew sharper as Lys turned the final corner at full speed.

The scene of the western gate opened up in front of him.

The breach on the gate was still there. The jagged hole in the heavy doors looked almost the same as when he had first seen it, only filthier now. Monster blood and darker fluids streaked the broken timber. Smaller creatures continued to push through in ones and twos, immediately angling toward the deeper streets as if following a scent trail of easier prey.

None of that held his attention for long, as twenty feet to the side of the gate, a section of the wooden wall had been blown outward. 

The destruction there could only be described as massive in scale. Reinforced planks and iron bands which were supposed to hold the wooden beams together lay scattered across the packed dirt like the discarded bones of some enormous animal. Smoke still rose in thin, acrid threads from the edges of the hole.

And on the ground in front of that new wound in the wall lay the three women he recognized very well.

The first one had been cut cleanly in half at the waist. Her upper body rested several feet from her legs, eyes still open, face locked in a surprised expression. 

The second, a blonde woman’s head lay a short distance from her shoulders. Blood had already begun to soak into the dirt in wide, dark patches around both corpses.

And just beside them, there was the third woman, who was still moving.

She was on her stomach, dragging herself forward with her arms. Both of her legs ended in ragged, wet stumps just above the knees. Every pull of her hands left a smeared trail behind her. Her breathing came in short, wet gasps. When her head lifted and her eyes found Lys standing at the corner, something like relief and horror collided across her face at the same time.

Her mouth moved.

The words she spoke then were thin, almost lost under the distant noise of the ongoing fight behind Lys, but he still heard them.

“Run… Lys… Run away from here…”

Before he could figure out what she meant by that, from behind her, a figure stepped through the new hole in the wall.

The man wore a full plate of armor that caught the scattered dim moonlight and threw it back in clean, cold flashes. The armor was not the battered, practical gear of a village guard or any common adventurer Lys had seen until now. It was made with a polished, well-fitted steel. A long sword rested in the man’s gauntleted hand, the edge already dark with blood.

It was clear he was the person responsible for the death of the two women who lay on the ground in front of the broken wall.

The man walked toward the crawling woman with an unhurried purpose.

Realising what was going on here, Lys’s body moved before the rest of him finished processing the scene. He did not turn back toward the village as the woman asked him to. He did not scream. He simply lowered CorpseSlayer and charged straight at the knight.

The distance was not large. But it was still too far compared to the knight and the woman.

The armored man reached the woman first. He set one boot lightly on her back to pin her in place, raised the sword, and drove the point down between her shoulder blades without delay.

The wet, final sound of the blade seating itself in the flesh and bone of the broad-shouldered woman reached Lys a fraction of a second before he reached her.