Chapter 653: Elven Massacre

I took a stance in the center of the floor.

The katana began to glow with a bright, pale golden light that pushed back the dimness of the lair, flooding every corner, every blood-slick table, every glass cylinder, until the entire chamber stood revealed in merciless clarity.

With a single swing, the blade carved a perfect circle around me.

The radius of three hundred and sixty degrees parted as cleanly as silk under a razor, the cut traveling outward without the slightest lag, as swift and absolute as light itself. Everything within that circle—wood, metal, flesh, bone—separated in the same instant and fell away in silence.

The chairs collapsed into neat halves. The tables split down their centers. The stone walls opened like paper. And the broken people came apart in the same breath, their bodies folding inward and outward at once, then dropping to the floor.

They no longer resembled anything human. May they rest now.

Subsequently, a small, hoarse voice drifted through the sudden quiet.

“Mother? Are you okay? Say something, mother…”

The sound reached me late, like an afterthought, as though it had been traveling a long distance to find me.

I realized in that moment that I had missed one person. The boy was still there, still strapped to the wall, and still alive.

His ribs pressed against his skin like the bars of a cage.

I crossed the blood-slick floor in long strides and raised the katana once more.

He looked up at me with eyes that seemed unable to focus properly, as though the world around him had gone soft at the edges.

His voice came out thin and careful, the polite tone of a child who had been taught to speak well even when everything was wrong.

“Good day, sir. I believe there is something wrong with mother. She is not responding to me at all. I have been calling her for a while now. She… used to answer even when she could not move very much. She would blink or make a small sound so I would know she was still listening. But now there is nothing. Could you help me, please? I think she might be just sleeping very deeply.”

Enough…

I brought the katana down in a precise arc.

The blade of holy light sheared through the iron shackles as though they were made of soft wax.

The metal fell away in two clean pieces, and the boy’s thin wrists were free.

He did not rub them or step back. He only stood there for a second, then turned at once toward the ruined body that had once been his mother and began speaking to her again in the same soft, hopeful voice.

I left him there.

But an uncertainty sat heavy in my chest as I walked away: had I freed him, or had I only pushed him out into a world that would make him suffer in newer and slower ways?

The question followed me like a second shadow, but I did not turn back.

The anger inside me had nowhere left to go except forward. I already carried the locations of the remaining lairs in my mind, clear and certain, so there was no need to ask questions or linger where I might be seen. I simply moved.

The first lair was a warehouse near the eastern docks, its windows blacked out with tar paper, its doors reinforced with iron bands.

Two guards stood outside, speaking in low voices.

They saw me coming, and one of them laughed. The other reached for his sword, but neither of them finished the motion.

I ran for the building the way a colossal bull enters a field of dry grass—head down, full of force, unstoppable.

The moment I crossed the threshold I let the rage pour out of my throat in a low growl that rose into something closer to a wail, a sound that carried every scrap of sorrow I had tried to keep locked behind my teeth.

Researchers looked up from their tables and their instruments. Some raised hands in protest. Some reached for weapons.

But none of them had time to finish either gesture, before I cut them down without pause and mercy.

Every person who had played a part in this particular flavor of wickedness fell beneath the same pale light.

And the more of them I killed, the lighter their bodies felt in the moment the blade passed through.

It was as if the weight of their crimes had already left them, leaving only empty shells that offered very little resistance. One man tried to crawl under a desk.

I split the desk and the man together. One woman held up a crystal that glowed with defensive magic.

The crystal split, and so did she. One young assistant—barely more than a teenager—stood frozen in the corner with tears running down his face. He did not beg me or speak.

But he waited. And I gave him the same answer I gave the rest.

The second lair was beneath an abandoned temple. The stairs were narrow and dark.

The researchers here had heard the commotion above. They had formed a barricade of overturned pews and broken statues. It did not matter.

I went through the barricade—over it, around it, through it, until nothing remained standing. When the last body hit the floor I turned the blade on the machinery itself.

Not every research subject died. A few still showed some spark of competence, some fragment of will that had not yet been completely extinguished.

And those I left alive. The ones who had already drifted past the edge of sanity—the ones whose eyes no longer tracked movement, whose mouths only opened to make soft, meaningless sounds—I killed.

But even as I walked away from the ones I chose to leave breathing, the same question returned, heavier than before.

Was this a good deed? Or should I have ended them as well?

Most of them carried injuries that would never fully heal. Limbs missing. Organs damaged beyond repair. Minds fractured. They would find it difficult simply to stay fed from one day to the next.