Chapter 478. His Fury Was a Precision Instrument, Not a Blunt Axe

Chapter 478: 478. His Fury Was a Precision Instrument, Not a Blunt Axe

The order shattered the fragile silence like a hammer through glass. "Attack!"

The first wave descended from every direction at once—a coordinated, crushing avalanche of steel and muscle designed to collapse the circle so rapidly that William would be smothered before he could even draw his sword.

The sound was deafening: the synchronized thud thud thud of armored boots, the metallic shriek of blades leaving scabbards, and the collective roar of men who believed they were hunting prey.

But William was no prey. He was the storm itself.

He moved before the first blade could even bite the air.

With a burst of speed that defied human physiology propelled by decades of hard-won instinct and the supernatural current coiling tight around his ankles, William became a blur.

For one dizzying, impossible instant, he seemed to flicker out of existence. A Delmore soldier lunged from behind, his sword whistling through the space where William’s spine should have been, only to find empty air.

A heartbeat later, William reappeared in the man’s peripheral vision, his elbow connecting with the soldier’s ribcage with a wet, sickening crunch.

The sound of bone grinding against bone echoed through the courtyard as the soldier’s air was violently expelled in a strangled gasp, sending him crashing to the wet marble in a convulsing heap.

’Too slow,’ William’s mind whispered, cold and analytical. ’Your momentum is your enemy.’

Two more soldiers pressed in from opposite flanks simultaneously, their blades angled in a deadly pincer maneuver. They moved with the lethal grace of trained executioners, expecting William to flinch or retreat. Instead, he leaned into the danger.

The wind rose in a sudden, violent updraft, carrying him upward in a spinning arc that vaulted him clean over the gap between them. For the soldiers, it was as if he had taken flight.

Before their swords had even completed their killing arcs, William landed behind them. With two precise, lightning-fast strikes, he slammed their skulls together, making a CRACK sound like two stones striking each other.

Both men collapsed instantly, their consciousness snuffed out by the sheer force of the impact, though their skulls remained intact.

"Impossible!" one of the soldiers screamed, but his voice was cut short.

A third soldier, a veteran spearman, thrust his weapon forward with practiced precision, aiming for William’s center mass. The spearhead hissed through the rain, but William was already gone.

He left behind nothing but a faint trail of displaced air. He closed the distance from a blind angle, his movement so fluid he seemed to flow around the spear like water around a rock.

His hand shot out, gripping the ash wood shaft just behind the spearhead. With a vicious wrench of leverage using the spearman’s own forward momentum against him, William snapped the weapon clean in two with a splintering snap.

Before the soldier could even register the loss of his weapon, William’s palm struck a precise nerve cluster at the side of his neck. The man’s knees buckled instantly, his body folding like a marionette with severed strings.

"Form up! Don’t let him breathe!" Bracken’s voice tore through the chaos, raw with growing panic. "Close the gaps!"

Two soldiers from the same flank charged in unison, one aiming a high, decapitating slash, the other a low, gut-ripping thrust.

This was a drilled combination meant to force a defender into a fatal choice: block the head and die from the gut, or block the gut and lose the head.

William refused the choice. He dropped into a low, spinning pivot that allowed the high blade to whistle past his shoulder by less than an inch.

Simultaneously, he brought the flat of Aetherion’s sheath up to catch the low thrust with a ringing CLANG of steel that vibrated through the courtyard. Using the momentum of the parry, he drove his elbow upward into the first soldier’s jaw.

The impact was brutal; the man’s head snapped back with enough force to lift his entire body off his feet before he crumpled into the rain. The second attacker, thrown off balance by the sudden absence of resistance, stumbled forward straight into a rising knee that caught him beneath the sternum, leaving him retching blood and bile onto the pale stone.

A sixth soldier, clearly more cunning than his dying comrades, refused to rush. He hovered at the edge of the killing circle, his short curved blade held low, waiting for the moment William’s momentum died.

He saw an opening. William turned his shoulder slightly, appearing momentarily exposed as he pivoted away from another attacker.

The soldier committed, lunging forward with a killing strike.

But it was a trap.

As the blade descended, William exploded into motion. The wind didn’t just lift him; it propelled him along the ground in a low, terrifyingly fast slide.

He came up inside the soldier’s guard before the curved blade could complete its arc. With two staccato strikes to the inside of the man’s elbows, Thwack Thwackthwack thwack William severed the nerve pathways.

The soldier’s arms went limp, his blade clattering uselessly to the marble with a lonely metallic ring.

William didn’t pause to watch him fall. He was already moving again, a phantom in the rain, already hunting the next throat.

By the time a dozen men lay scattered across the courtyard, some unconscious, some retching blood onto the marble, others simply frozen in primal terror, the once impenetrable circle had begun to fracture.

The disciplined, ironclad formation Bracken had spent years drilling into his men, which was dissolving like salt in the rain. Soldiers who had entered the courtyard shoulder to shoulder now edged backward, their boots scraping nervously against the stone.

They glanced sideways at their comrades, eyes wide and darting, the unspoken question of who would be the next to feel the bone-deep shock of William’s strike hanging heavier over them than any order their commander could bark.

’They’re breaking,’ William thought, his breathing still eerily controlled despite the chaos. ’The fear is more effective than any blade.’

He fought with a terrifying, mechanical economy. This was the way he had always fought, the way he had taught countless recruits to fight in a life that felt, some days, impossibly far away.

His philosophy was simple: technique over raw power. Read the pattern before it finished forming.

Find the half-second gap between an opponent’s intention and their action, and live entirely inside that gap.

But tonight, he wasn’t just living in the gap; he was expanding it. The wind curling around him wasn’t just a tool; it was an extension of his nervous system.

Every gust that buffeted his opponents, every unnatural swirl that deflected their blades, was a calculated move in a game they didn’t even know they were playing. The Delmore soldiers were trained to fight men; they were not trained to fight a weather system.

"Don’t let him break formation!" Bracken roared, his voice cracking with a desperation he couldn’t hide. "Close up! For Delmore! Strike together!"

Three soldiers, desperate to prove their courage, charged in a desperate triangle, their swords raised for a simultaneous thrust. They moved with a synchronized fury, three blades aimed at William’s heart.

William didn’t retreat. He stepped into the storm.

The wind exploded outward from him in a concussive burst, WHOOMPH, the sheer pressure forcing the soldiers to stagger backward. In that split second of disorientation, William spun.

His fist connected with the first soldier’s solar plexus with a sound like a mallet hitting a side of beef—THUD—knocking the wind from the man so violently his eyes rolled back in his head.

Before the second could recover, William swept his leg in a low arc, the wind amplifying the force. The blade of his boot caught the man’s ankle with a sickening CRACK of cartilage, sending him crashing face-first into the wet stone.

The third soldier tried to abort his thrust, but William was already there, his palm striking the man’s chin in an upward motion that snapped his head back with enough force to send him sprawling backward into his own comrades.

’Pathetic,’ William thought, though there was no venom in it, only a cold, detached assessment. ’They fight like they’re trying to prove something.’

’They should be fighting to survive.’

Yet, despite the brutality of the encounters, the sounds of snapping tendons, the wet slap of bodies hitting marble, and the labored gasping of broken men, William had not drawn blood. He had not killed a single one of them.

It would have been easy. He understood that with the same cold clarity that had settled over him back in the Hall of Accord.

His current speed, his control over the air, and his mastery of momentum—he could have opened throats, shattered windpipes, and stopped hearts as easily as he dropped men unconscious. A single twist of Aetherion could have turned this courtyard into a charnel house.

But William’s fury was a precision instrument, not a blunt axe. He knew these men.

They were not the architects of this betrayal; they were not the ones who had orchestrated the famine, the manipulation, and the cold-blooded betrayal of a kingdom.

They were merely pieces on someone else’s board, expendable assets following the orders of a prince who viewed an entire nation’s suffering as nothing more than an efficient business transaction.

His fury was not aimed at the pawns.

His eyes, sharp as shards of ice beneath the falling rain, cut through the chaos of the fighting. They bypassed the groaning soldiers and the panicked commander.

His gaze locked onto one person alone: Alden.

The prince stood at the edge of the courtyard, untouched by the rain’s spray, his arms crossed over his chest. He watched the carnage not with horror, but with the detached amusement of a man watching a particularly entertaining play.

And through it all, that cold, satisfied smile remained firmly in place, a smile that promised that this was only the beginning of the end.