Chapter 608: The New Testament

It looked like the work of a high-level mage, the kind of instantaneous and overwhelming force that turned living flesh to liquid without leaving time for even a proper scream.

I twisted my neck in every direction, scanning the roof of the wagon, the surrounding grass, the nearest stands of trees, searching for the caster who must have been responsible.

I found no one who looked capable of such a thing. There was no raised staff or glowing hands.

I heard no chant, nor did I see any visible circle of power.

Only the girls standing in a loose line and the growing confusion among the bandits.

"Listen, Old fart..."

The ponytail woman called Zanya spoke as she dropped lightly from the wagon roof and began walking forward toward the startled bandits.

The rest of her group moved with her, spreading into a loose but purposeful line across the road.

"Never underestimate a lady again, or you’ll join that perverted bandit, understand?"

Don’t tell me... Are these girls truly powerful?

Doubt crawled through my bones even as I watched them advance without any visible sign of fear.

Then my eyes caught something I had completely missed until that moment: a tattoo on the left side of Zanya’s neck, just beneath the ear and partially hidden by the fall of her ponytail.

A dark-red image of a bird with outspread wings, simple in its lines yet unmistakable in its meaning to anyone who paid attention to the quieter currents of power that moved beneath the surface of the continent.

"You lot..." My voice shook with the weight of the recognition. The sword in my hand suddenly felt much heavier and much less relevant. "You are part of the New Testament?!"

"Oh? Did we get found out already?"

The multicolored-haired girl glanced at me once, her expression still nearly flat, then turned her attention back to the crowd of bandits that had begun to gather their courage again after the first shock.

She seemed mildly interested rather than concerned.

"Listen, pigeons!" Zanya raised her slim, curved sword and pointed it toward the largest remaining knot of men. The steel caught the sunlight in a clean, cold flash that made several of the nearer bandits flinch. "Leave now and we will settle for only three deaths as compensation for disrupting our journey. But if you must obstruct us any further, point your leader out so I’ll cut his head off and we can be done with this."

"Shut up, woman!" one of the bandits shouted from somewhere near the center of the group.

His voice had the forced bravado of a man trying to steady both himself and the others around him. "As if seven people can win against fifty armed men! You’re bluffing with fancy tricks!"

"Huh...? Fifty?" The cat girl perked up at the number, her ears angling sharply forward.

She looked over the crowd again, her green eyes narrowing as she performed a rapid, visible recount. Her tail lashed once behind her. "Yikes, I thought they were around thirty! Now I feel embarrassed. My first estimate was way off."

Before my very eyes she seemed to disappear.

One moment she stood a few clear paces ahead of the others, weight balanced lightly on the balls of her feet; the next she was simply gone, reduced to a blur too fast for an old man’s sight to follow across the short distance.

She reappeared in almost the same place she had left, but both of her hands were now stained dark and wet with fresh blood.

All across the front ranks of the bandits, men clutched at their necks, bright red spilling between their fingers in thick streams.

Several dropped to their knees with wet, choking sounds. Others staggered backward, eyes wide with the sudden understanding that the distance between them and death had become much shorter than they had believed.

"Ahem!" she nodded once, clearly satisfied with the new arithmetic she had created. She lifted her chin and spoke with open pride. "Now they’re thirty! I was righ—Huh?"

The cat beastkin had noticed it: the slashed and bleeding spot on the bare side of her torso.

The cut was clean and deep enough that blood had already run in a thin, bright line down the curve of her waist.

She looked at it with the mild interest of someone inspecting a torn sleeve.

"Zanya, there is someone a little dangerous there." She reported the fact casually.

Even as the words left her mouth the edges of the cut began to draw together.

The flesh knitted and the bleeding stopped. Within moments the skin was whole again, leaving only a faint, fading mark that disappeared entirely a breath later.

Zanya, the ponytail, watched the healing with half-lidded eyes and then gave a short, open-mouthed yawn.

"I should take that as they want war instead." Her voice was flat and bored. "Kill everyone."

The order landed like a stone dropped into still water.

And the lady-man beside me moved at once.

There was no shout, or dramatic stance—only a sudden forward surge that had the solid bulk of that body across the intervening ground like a boulder rolling down a steep hill.

The first bandit in the path simply... ceased to be... upright.

The second and third followed in wet, rapid succession. Bodies tore apart under the raw force of the impacts; limbs bent in directions they were never meant to bend.

I saw ribs separate. I saw a torso fold in on itself. The sound was a series of heavy, sickening thuds mixed with shorter, sharper cracks.

Within the space of a few seconds a clear path of ruined men marked the lady-man’s passage.

I turned my head away and still felt my stomach twist at the glimpse of innards and spilled bowels left in the wake.

The figure moved with the unstoppable momentum of a giant rhino, each step possessing more weight and more destruction than the last.

Elsewhere on the field the methods changed.