[Chapter 167. The Price of Salvation]

The world was screaming, though the sound was not one of voices, but of reality itself being torn asunder. Golden light, thick and viscous like liquid sun, devoured the buildings from the roofs down. It didn't just knock them over; it dissolved them, unmaking the concrete, the rusted rebar, and the decades of grime into shimmering threads of pure System energy. A group of survivors stood in a stunned, suffocating silence as the gray expanse of the ruined city vanished in the blink of an eye. One moment, they were standing in a monochrome world then everything was back to normal once again.

The eerie, guttural laughter that had filled the plaza for just moments came to a jarring, sickening halt. The silence that followed was worse than the laughter.

Searanox collapsed.

He didn't fall gracefully. He hit the ground like a sack of dead weight, his body bouncing once off the cracked pavement. Everyone stared toward the center of the plaza, their minds unable to bridge the gap between the butcher they had just witnessed and the broken man lying in the dirt.

It was the voice of Iris that finally shattered the paralysis.

"Searanox!"

The cry was raw, stripped of her usual composed elegance. Her Zweihänder fell to the ground with a sharp, metallic clang that echoed across the emptiness. In a blur of motion that left afterimages in the air, she was across the plaza, skidding to her knees beside his bleeding form.

It was impossible to tell which blood belonged to him and which belonged to the Nightmare Wolves he had just slaughtered. His black coat was shredded, soaked through with a warm, coppery soup of gore. Her paws pressed down on his chest. He was still alive, but barely. His body was a map of trauma; in several places, through the jagged tears in his flesh, the stark, polished white of bone was visible.

"Carmen... Heal him. Now!" Iris ordered, her head snapping back to the group.

Carmen, whose face was the color of parchment, took a slow, trembling step forward. Her medical instincts were fighting a losing battle against the sheer horror of what she had seen him do. Before she could take a second step, a hand clamped onto her shoulder, yanking her back.

"Are you insane, Carmen?" Vanessa spat, her voice pitched high with hysteria. "You can't possibly be thinking of healing that... that thing. He is a monster! Look at him! How long until he turns that violence against us? How long until he decides we aren't useful enough, or 'pretty' enough to keep around?"

Vanessa’s monologue was cut short by a grunt of sudden, explosive pain.

She didn't see the strike. None of them did. Vanessa was simply there one second, and the next, she was airborne. She flew several meters backward, her body skipping across the ground like a stone on a pond before slamming into the base of a building that was already halfway dissolved into golden light.

Iris stood where Vanessa had been, slowly lowering her leg. She had kicked the woman with enough force to shatter ribs, her silver eyes—usually cool and analytical—now burning with a chilling, primal fire.

"Insane?" Iris’s voice was a low, vibrating growl, a sound that bypassed the ears and settled directly in the marrow of their bones. It was the sound of a cornered predator. "You speak of monsters while you hide behind him like a child clinging to a mothers skirt. He is my master. He is the only reason your lungs are still pulling air. You will heal him, or I will peel the flesh from your bones with my bare claws and see if the System can knit that back together."

Carmen didn't hesitate a second longer. The sight of Iris's raw, animalistic fury was far more terrifying than the unconscious man on the ground. She scrambled forward, her white tunic instantly staining a deep, dark crimson as she knelt in the pool of blood surrounding Searanox. Her hands, which had been shaking uncontrollably, found a strange, desperate stability. They began to glow with a soft, pure white light as she pressed them against the most terminal of his wounds—a jagged gash on his chest that had carved a path through muscle and bone, narrowly missing his heart.

Vanessa pushed herself up from the dirt, gasping for breath, her hands clutching her side. She glared at Iris, but the defiance in her eyes was flickering out, replaced by the realization of her own powerlessness.

Across the plaza, Rayan and Samantha watched the exchange, their breaths coming in shallow hitches. They hadn't seen Iris move; to their human eyes, she had simply teleported. They realized then that the hierarchy had shifted. They weren't just dealing with a ruthless, powerful man anymore; they were facing his fiercely loyal, inhumanly fast second-in-command—a woman who had just proven she would commit murder for her master without a single heartbeat of hesitation.

The golden light continued its inexorable crawl, erasing the city around them. The world was being deleted, and in the center of the void, a small, desperate battle for a single life was playing out. Carmen worked frantically, her mana flowing in a visible stream from her palms into Searanox's broken body.

But as the minutes ticked by, a cold dread began to settle in Carmen’s stomach.

`How much health does this man actually have?` She wondered, her brow beaded with sweat.

She was a high-level healer by the current standards of the first stage, yet her magic seemed to be disappearing into him like water into a desert. Wounds that would have closed in seconds on Lana or Sarah were merely sluggishly knitting together on Searanox. Every time she closed a laceration, the sheer density of his Vitality seemed to demand more energy than she possessed. Injuries that should have been fatal were being held at bay by his own monstrous constitution, but her healing light felt like a candle trying to warm a glacier.

`I’m not even sure if we could even kill him right now if we tried.` She thought, a dark, intrusive realization crossing her mind. `Even in this state, before he died, his drones would probably reduce us to ash.` Her gaze drifted towards one of his drones, that seamed to be an al observing eye.

"Samantha! Go back... find another healer! Anyone with a restoration skill!" Carmen yelled, her voice straining under the effort. "The amount of life force he has... I can't do it myself!"

"What? Do I look like a scout?" Samantha started to protest, but the look Iris gave her—a cold, silver-eyed promise of death—shut her up instantly.

"Wait, I think I saw someone..." Rayan said, finding his voice. He didn't wait for a command. He turned and sprinted into the half-dissolved ruins, his boots kicking up golden dust as the System threads licked at his heels. He vaulted over a collapsing fence that turned into light the moment his weight left it, a desperate silhouette racing against the literal erasure of his world.

Vanessa, nursing her bruised ribs, watched him go. "How can you all pretend you didn't see it?" she asked, her voice a strained, trembling thing. "How can you defend that? He wasn't just killing those wolves; he was reveling in it. Did you see the grin? The laughter? He’s a monster, and you’re building him a throne."

"He is our monster," Iris stated, her voice flat and devoid of the need to argue. She didn't even turn to look at Vanessa. "And he is the only reason any of you will live long enough to have an opinion about his soul. Your morality is a luxury provided by his violence. It is irrelevant."

The final vestiges of the ruined world dissolved with a sound like a collective breath being released. The noise of crumbling stone was replaced by a terrifying, absolute silence. Where there had once been a ruin city, there was now only an unnervingly flat, barren plain of packed earth and stone under a pale sky. The ruins were gone, transformed into a massive sphere of golden light that hovered a hundred meters above the central node, pulsing like a titan's heart.

Moments later, Rayan reappeared, leading a small crowd of people who had been displaced by the cleansing. Among them was a gaunt man clutching a wooden staff. Rayan was panting heavily, doubled over with his hands on his knees.

"I... I found one. Elias. He's a priest-class," Rayan gasped.

Suddenly, the drones hovering aimlessly above the group erupted in a frantic flash of blue. Half of them vanished in a spray of sparks, recalled to the System as Searanox’s mana pool finally bottomed out. Only one defensive drone and two assault drones remained, their crimson lights flickering weakly.

Iris’s eyes narrowed. "His mana is gone."

Carmen looked at the new healer, Elias. The man looked terrified, his eyes darting between the wolf-woman and the blood-soaked man on the ground. "Get over here!" Carmen commanded. "His vitals are fluctuating. I’ve been stabilizing him, but his vitality is to vast, its as if trying to fill a bucket with a hole the size of a fist. Pour everything you have into him!"

Elias knelt, his stuff trembling as he hovered it over Searanox's thigh, where a massive chunk of flesh had been torn away. A steady, if weaker, stream of green light joined Carmen’s white radiance.

Lana and Sarah stood nearby, their roles as combatants useless in this moment. They could only watch as the two healers strained themselves to the point of exhaustion. The image of the battle—the way Searanox had moved, the way he had laughed—was burned into their retinas.

"Iris..." Sarah whispered, her voice barely audible. "How can mere beasts injure him like that? I saw him kill a Boss-class entity with a single shot before."

Iris turned her silver gaze toward the young woman. "Those 'mere beasts' you speak of are not the scavengers of the first stage, Sarah. You are looking at the world through the lens of a tutorial that has just ended. Those wolves were infused with the mana of a Stage 2 world. What you witnessed in that plaza is the new baseline. In four days time, creatures like that will roam the entire planet."

She paused, letting the weight of the statement sink in.

"You lack the capacity to comprehend the horrors the System is bringing. It didn't just save your world; it's changing it. What Searanox did wasn't a choice—it was an adaptation. If he hadn't surrendered to that instinct, he would have died, and you with it a few days later."

Vanessa scoffed, a sharp, bitter sound. "Necessary? Don't you dare dress that up as necessity. That wasn't combat; it was a slaughter for sport. He wasn't fighting for his life; he was getting off on the violence. There's a difference, Iris. A vast one."

"He was lost in the Frenzy," Iris stated, her voice dropping into a cold, clinical register. "It is a Dhampir's curse. When the body is pushed beyond the limits of mortal endurance, and the scent of blood becomes overwhelming, the rational mind shatters. The 'Beast' takes over to ensure the host survives. There is no pleasure in it, Vanessa—only the singular, brutal purpose to kill, to feed, and to live. You saw a monster because you do not understand the biology of survival."

Rayan looked out across the empty, desolate plain. The thirty thousand survivors who had called the ruins home were now standing in small, frightened clusters across the dirt, looking at the golden sphere in the sky. They were exposed, homeless, and terrified.

"Without him..." Rayan said, looking at the healers, "everyone would have starved days ago. Or we would have been hunted down by the beasts that roamed the outside of the city."

"Or the beasts inside," Samantha muttered, gripping Rayan's hand tightly. She remembered the way the they had been treated before Searanox arrived—the cruelty of the strong.

"You're all insane!" Vanessa shrieked, her voice echoing across the empty plain. "You're rationalizing his madness! You're making excuses for a killer!"

"What would you do, Vanessa?"

Lana’s voice was quiet, but it carried a surprising, heavy weight that cut through Vanessa's hysteria. Everyone turned to look at the quietest member of their group.

"If you had his power... if the lives of thirty thousand people were resting on your shoulders and your blood was screaming for release... what would you do? Would you be the one to stand in that plaza? Would you sacrifice your sanity so we can sit here and judge you? Or would you have let us all die?"

Vanessa opened her mouth to argue, but the words died in her throat. She looked at the blood on the ground, then at the empty horizon, and finally at the unconscious man who had built their sanctuary out of corpses. She began to sputter, her face reddening, but she found no answer.

Iris watched the exchange with an impassive silver gaze. She didn't care about their debates. Her focus was entirely on the rhythmic, shallow rise and fall of Searanox's chest.

The healing continued for hours. The sun—or the System's approximation of it—didn't move. The golden sphere above them pulsed. And on the barren earth, thirty thousand people waited.