"Form up! Kill the—urgh... ghhk..."
Before the squad leader could finish the order, his face contorted in horror as he clutched his throat and crumpled to the ground.
Even in death, he couldn't comprehend how an intruder pinned to the floor by countless blade-tips had blinked into existence right before his face in the span of a heartbeat.
Nor could he fathom what that fleeting silver flash in the man's hand had been—what divine weapon could slit a throat with such surgical precision that its victim retained a few seconds of consciousness before the end.
Thud.
The body hit the ground. Blood sprayed everywhere.
As the sound of the fall echoed, Cheng Shi moved. He materialized behind each knight in succession like the spray of blood-foam from the corpse—epheral, sequential—drawing a single streak of light with his scalpel, gone before anyone could react.
In the blink of an eye, a crimson line had appeared across every knight's throat. Those vivid red marks intertwined with the blood-mist hanging in the air and the yet-unfaded silver reflections, as though soone had sketched staves of sheet music into thin air. For one fleeting instant, accompanied by Cheng Shi's quiet hum, they played a soaring movent of fate overturned.
And the final chord of that movent was a cascade of thuds—bodies hitting the floor one after another.
In that mont, the elegant Clown staged a dazzling performance that glorified Fate and paid tribute to Death alike.
But the show wasn't over yet, because reinforcents from below had arrived.
Cheng Shi watched as squad after squad of knights poured from the stairwell, charging at him with cries of "Order above!" He let out a weary sigh and readied his stance, preparing to take the stage for an encore.
But just then, his own reinforcents showed up.
Whoosh-whoosh-whoosh—
A rapid volley of bowstring snaps rang out, and a curtain of arrows like a sudden downpour ca streaking in from behind Cheng Shi.
Each arrow carried the terrible power of Decay. The instant they pierced the garrison knights' bodies, they consud every shred of vitality—transforming each victim into a desiccated corpse of pallid, sagging skin, wasted flesh clinging to protruding bone, features withered beyond recognition.
And the most terrifying part was that these husks numbered not one, but a heap.
Every knight who had charged at Cheng Shi had been struck by the Sudden Dusk and reduced to decay. They weren't dead yet, though—each one clutched their wounds and collapsed helplessly, their brittle bones too fragile to withstand even the impact of the fall, producing a chorus of dry, crunching snaps.
"..."
Cheng Shi froze. He turned in astonishnt to find Yu Mu—the tree-servant Hong Lin had refined—standing at the entrance in a drawn-bow stance, slowly advancing toward him.
Honestly, if he hadn't already seen the knights' wretched state, the sight of Yu Mu approaching like that might have made Cheng Shi think the man was coming for him.
Thank goodness he was an ally!
His expression flickered from delight to annoyance. He stopped worrying about the old knights who lay groaning around him, their swords scattered, too feeble to even rise, and instead bent down to start picking up dice from the floor.
"If you'd shown up a few seconds earlier, would I have had to scatter dice everywhere? These things are hard to co by—every one I use is one I can't replace..."
Yu Mu was rely a tree-servant now and wouldn't play the fawning lapdog the way Qu Yan once had by helping Cheng Shi gather his dice. His orders were to protect Cheng Shi—so he focused solely on monitoring the surroundings for threats.
Seeing the lack of reaction, Cheng Shi pursed his lips, swiftly collected his dice, cleared a path through the immobilized old knights, and continued downward.
As for the knights who'd survived—they might as well have been dead.
"Keep up."
Cheng Shi moved quickly. Now that he had muscle with him in the dungeon, there was no need to waste ti playing dress-up as a knight.
Though the Howling Iron Prison's inmates were all death-row convicts, there were differences even among the condemned. When he'd run into that squad of knights earlier, Cheng Shi had noticed the prisoners on that level staring with vacant, lifeless eyes, utterly indifferent to everything happening around them—clearly tortured into soulless husks during their interrogation.
He didn't know if every prisoner in this place was the sa. If so, this entire trip was a waste—and he'd look like a fool.
He and the tree-servant descended rapidly through several more levels, dispatching a few more waves of knights heading upstairs to reinforce. It wasn't until approximately the seventh underground floor that Cheng Shi suddenly spotted several familiar faces among the vast rows of cells.
Well, "familiar" was a stretch. They were the four teammates he'd been assigned when the trial began—every last one of them present, neatly strung up on iron fras.
Of course, this floor held many other prisoners besides these four, but none of the others were nearly as "lively." These four appeared to be actively working on freeing themselves, attempting a jailbreak.
They looked thoroughly exhausted, though—as if they'd already failed many tis over.
Seeing this, Cheng Shi grinned. He ducked back into the corridor, stripped a set of knight armor off one of the fallen guards, pulled it on, then sared so fresh blood across his face to refresh the dried, caked layer that was already there. He shifted his bearing entirely, feigning injury, and staggered toward the four.
The four—who had been in the middle of attempting to gnaw through their own wrist bindings—saw the knight who'd just gone upstairs to reinforce now stumbling back with a blood-drenched face. Every one of them felt their hearts sink, their expressions filling with gravity.
They had no idea what was happening outside. They'd hoped to use the chaos as cover for an escape, but now it seed the chaos had co—while their opportunity had not.
Eight eyes tracked Cheng Shi's approach, wary and alert. Cheng Shi played his part, lurching and stumbling closer, his head slightly bowed to conceal his gaze—but his eyes never left his teammates for an instant.
After studying them briefly, he concluded that none of these four were amateurs. Even if their scores fell short of peak status, they were at minimum experts in the two-thousand range.
The problem was that right now, all of them appeared to be shackled by Order's restraints, stripped of every talent and ability.
'Perfect opportunity. If I don't shake them down right now, I'd be insulting this gift from the heavens.'
He ducked his head to hide the smile tugging at the corners of his eyes, then violently coughed up a mouthful of blood and rasped hoarsely:
"Soone actually dared challenge the Grand Executioner's authority—absolutely suicidal! Order above, they will not succeed.
Nothing like this has ever happened in the Howling Iron Prison. And today, you four are the only ones brought in. Talk—are the intruders above connected to you?"
"No, absolutely not!" All four of them were terrified. One tall, thin man shook his head frantically: "Sir Knight, I'm a follower of Order too! I have no idea what happened in the Tribunal today. I've been wrongly accused!"
"Wrongly accused? Heh. The Howling Iron Prison has never wrongly accused a single death-row prisoner. You don't know what cri you committed?"
"I really am innocent!" This Order-following player was on the verge of tears. "I was just too devout toward Order—I couldn't stop thinking about witnessing the glory of the Inquisitors. So I borrowed an identity to attend a Tribunal hearing, letting my Benefactor's radiance cleanse my soul. Yes, I'm not a citizen of Katouting, but... I didn't do anything wrong! I don't even know what the Lin Renyu Cri is, sir!"
"?"
'What the hell?'
'The Lin Renyu Cri?'
'Is that the Lin Renyu I'm thinking of?'
'Holy crap—they actually codified it into law?'
'No wonder Lin Renyu hated the Prisoner so much—causing havoc everywhere under his na. So this is how he got himself "immortalized."'
'That's actually kind of impressive... though I wonder what exactly the Lin Renyu Cri entails?'
The other three players chid in too, each insisting they'd been wrongly accused, that they weren't Lin Renyu, didn't know anyone by that na, and couldn't even begin to explain how they'd ended up arrested.
Cheng Shi nearly broke character laughing. He put on a pensive expression, as if genuinely reconsidering their defense. The four players saw the opening and imdiately turned enthusiastic.
One of them—a stocky, sowhat short man—said eagerly:
"Sir, the intruders have absolutely nothing to do with us. Think about it—if we were connected, why would we have surrendered so ekly at the Tribunal? With that kind of power, we obviously would've fought back! We're truly innocent. We want to file an appeal with the Tribunal.
But in here, there's no way for us to appeal. We can only beg you to help us—put in a word with the higher-ups. And of course we wouldn't ask you to help for free. I've still got a few things in my pockets..."
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