Chapter 194: Planned Massacre

The six Angels came at Malik together, and he met them with a body that no longer felt like his own.

Spine Splitter sang, black fire and golden fire braided along the blade, and the first Angel’s halo burst before his blade had finished its thrust.

Just like that, a planet ender was dead.

Crushed under Malik’s strength.

That showed just how insane it was for him to use multiple of the same Soul Glyph, especially in the condition he was in.

Utter and complete insanity.

But he didn’t care for what would happen to him.

He didn’t even take a moment to think of the consequences.

His mind only thought of his people and how he could save them.

...how he had to kill these damned Angels.

The second tried to flee upward.

She tried.

Malik caught her by the ankle, dragged her out of the sky, and put his sword through her and the ground beneath them.

’When I step forth, my eyes shall not close,’

With the same grip, he pulled her through the sword.

Her body was split into a bloodied two.

She could not resist him for a moment.

His strength was too absolute.

Four remained.

A blade took Malik across the chest.

He did not feel it.

A spear grazed his skull, and warm blood ran into his left eye.

That did not faze him as he continued on, fighting with one eye shut and the world gone red on one side.

It didn’t seem to affect him one bit.

Even though they were fighting at near-instant speed.

And yes, while their encounter might have seemed long, it barely took a few seconds.

This was the fight of Angels, where mere moments stretched to hours, and seconds stretched to days.

And on the fourth day of their fight, Malik cut the third Angel in half at the waist.

That had the fourth hesitate a moment, which lost him an arm.

The fifth tried to speak, and Malik did not let him finish.

’If my thirsty sword drinks, I shall relive the Gate,’

The last of the ring fell with her halo still burning.

Devil’s Maw was under the protection of its Sultan.

No one would stop him from being that.

Not even the Order.

Killing the Angels broke the army.

It did not scatter all at once; rather, it frayed.

A formation at the front turned first, then another, and the ranks that had marched so perfectly towards him began to ripple.

Malik walked through the gap where the Angels had stood.

Soldiers dropped their weapons as he passed. Some knelt while others stood and stared at the man coming towards them with cracks of gold light running up his arms and neck.

’And trample upon the necks of the pitiful.’

He ended them all.

And not before long, his Soul Glyphs ended one by one.

His footsteps were no longer of the Devil, and the fire along his blade guttered to a single dull ember.

At the end, his last Peak Goliath’s Fall gave out, and his frame shrank back to its ordinary size.

The system, still flickering at the edge of his vision, wrote one last line before it went dark.

—

[Fear Points: ███████████]

[Divine Kingdom: Archive of Fate — ████ ██ ██████]

—

Malik did not read it.

He turned his back on the broken army and walked towards his people.

They were what mattered most, not the end of this endless army.

His left hand dragged the Old Cane through the dirt behind him.

Every step sent a thin line of gold light leaking out of the cracks along his body, and it drifted upward in the air like smoke.

’A sight that will please you, O brother.’

Upon his return, he had expected to hear something.

The line of the Guard, anything that told him people were still alive back there.

He heard only wind.

Malik crested the last ridge and looked down.

Far ahead, the land was full of the dead.

He stood very still.

For a moment his mind refused to put the shapes in front of him into words.

A long brown scar wound across the farmland where the convoy had walked, and the scar was covered in bodies. Carts lay on their sides with their wheels still turning. Bedding and cooking pots and children’s shoes were scattered along the verge for miles.

A woman lay face down in the road with a toddler still tied to her back, and neither of them was moving.

Even further, where the last circles had stood, black smoke rose from a ring of melted stone.

The silver lines had burned through.

Whatever had been meant to carry people away from here had stopped working, and the people had stopped there, in front of it, with nowhere left to go.

’...the final retreat corridors had failed.’

He knew that, now.

The Order’s soldiers had somehow managed to sneak around the flank while he was cutting through the front of their army, and the circles had been the first thing they struck.

Malik walked down the slope and began to move through the road.

’Tens of thousands.’

He did not run.

His legs would not allow it.

He walked slowly, and he saw all of it.

He saw the Guard’s line, what remained of it, a crescent of dark cloaks lying across the road, every one of them facing the enemy.

He saw a Faraja officer with his wrapped face torn open, one hand still gripping the rope that had marked the corridor.

He saw an old man in a faded blue shawl, and next to him, her basket still in her lap, a white-haired woman who had refused to leave her husband’s grave.

He had told her to walk.

She did.

Yet, even that was not enough.

Malik knelt beside her.

He looked at her face, and the look on it was a surprised one.

Yes, it was surprise rather than horror.

All of this was done with speed.

They had planned this.