“You greedy people! Today’s the day you die!” Jared bellowed, voice ringing like a temple bell. His hands blurred through a rapid seal.
Golden lances of light erupted, streaking toward every armed villager with unerring aim. Where each beam struck, bodies ruptured into scarlet mist, blood, bone, and regret dissolving beneath the dragonfire radiance.
Bruno saw the massacre and bolted, stumbling over corpses as he sprinted for the tree line. Jared flickered across the space, reappearing before the fleeing man. One savage kick crumpled Bruno to the earth.
“Mercy, sir! We were ignorant! We were fools!” Bruno babbled, clawing at the dirt, whole body quivering.
Jared stared down, eyes as cold as forged steel. “You chose cruelty for gain. Pay the price.”
Gold-bright sword energy flashed. Bruno’s head parted from his shoulders, a fountain of red painting the air before collapsing into silence.
The remaining villagers blanched, all color draining as terror stripped them bare. One after another, they collapsed to their knees, palms slapping the dirt in frantic supplication.
Jared watched the spectacle without so much as a flicker of mercy.
He knew with brutal clarity that, had he and Sylvia lacked both skill and the intimidating echo of his Golden Dragon Bloodline, these same people would already have torn them apart.
“Greedy vermin like you deserve no sympathy.” Jared’s voice sliced through the courtyard, hard and clean as winter steel.
The Dragonslayer Sword flared in his grip, loosing a storm of razor-bright sword energy that rippled outward like a hurled net of light.
Screams erupted. Bodies crumpled where the blades of force found flesh, the dirt drinking in lives faster than breaths could be drawn.
Moments later, Greedfall Hamlet lay silent, every soul extinguished save an elderly woman and the wide-eyed boy at her side. Jared and Sylvia advanced, their shadows long across the blood-spattered ground.
“Sir, spare us!” Evelyn trembled so violently her bones seemed to rattle.
She pressed her forehead to the mud again and again. “They made us do it, we never meant you harm!”
Hugo stared up at the pair, eyes enormous, terror beating in his chest like a trapped bird.
Jared’s gaze remained an arctic sheet, no pity, no hesitation.
“Mr. Chance,” Sylvia whispered, tentative, “Perhaps we could let these two go?”
He offered no answer. Instead, he raised the sword and stepped so close that their reflections quivered in the polished blade.
“I make it a rule never to slay women or children…” His tone was almost conversational.
Relief loosened the old woman’s shoulders, even the boy’s mouth twitched toward a hopeful smile.
A wet crack split the quiet. The Dragonslayer Sword punched straight through Evelyn’s chest. Blood blossomed behind her like a poisoned rose.
“Y-You said you don’t kill women or children!” she gasped, disbelief drowning her voice.
“Correct… And you, ma’am, are no child.” Jared’s reply landed with pitiless finality.
Speech failed her, only a silent gape remained as life fled her eyes.
Another sickening thrust followed. Steel pierced Hugo’s small torso. The boy crumpled before he understood the pain. His eyes widened, glassy.
“Don’t stare at me like that. You’re not a woman either,” Jared murmured, mouth curling into a cold half-smile.
Hugo made no sound at all, the stillness answered for him.
With both bodies motionless at their feet, Sylvia found herself nonplussed at Jared’s grim humor.
“Enough. Let’s leave this place.” Jared’s words snapped the moment like dry twine. He turned, nodding for Sylvia to follow toward the edge of the ruined hamlet.
An earth-splitting roar burst overhead. Sky and soil twisted, reality folding like shattered glass.
Blackness swept in. Their bodies sagged, consciousness torn away as the world itself collapsed into chaos.
They came to slowly, as if waking from a fever dream, and at once knew they were in yet another mysterious realm. Above them spread a bruised-violet sky whose clouds churned like living fire, lighting the air with a lurid glow.
Beneath their boots sprawled a shattered land, deep, jagged fissures clawed across the earth as though some unseen colossus had tried to tear the continent apart.
Far off, mountains stabbed straight into the heavens, their peaks swathed in oily black smoke that coiled and throbbed with a quiet, poisonous life.
“Mr. Chance, where are we now?” Sylvia’s voice wavered, her face as bloodless as paper. The earlier battle and the teleport had gutted her strength, leaving her swaying on her feet.
