A cavern yawned open at the base, runes like crawling green fire circling the lip, countless hungry eyes glaring from the stone.
Two guards in black robes stood motionless. Their faces were masks of wax, their eyes empty hollows, as if their souls had been harvested away.
“Halt! Identify yourselves!” one barked, the echo slicing through the canyon. Flaxseed started forward, but Jared lifted a hand, an unspoken order heavier than iron.
Jared stepped ahead. Each footfall seemed to land directly on the guards’ hearts. “We’re the ones who’ve come to claim your worthless lives.”
The instant Jared finished speaking, his aura exploded from him, a tidal wave of invisible pressure that roared across the mountaintop corridor.
The two guards never even blinked. They were ants in a tsunami, pulverized mid-breath, bones and armor liquefying into a wet smear against the stone before a scream could form.
“Come on. We’re going in.” Jared’s tone stayed flat, as if he had merely brushed aside dust rather than lives.
He pivoted and looked to Flaxseed with a mild nod, as though inviting an evening stroll instead of a plunge into darkness.
They stepped through the jagged mouth of the cave.
A long passage stretched ahead, lit at intervals by sickly green oil lamps. Each flame shivered, ready to suffocate at any moment, throwing crooked shadows that crawled along the walls like restless spirits.
The tunnel ended at the summit’s hollow crown, an enormous hall. At its center rose a stone dais, carved top to bottom with warped runes that emitted a glow of negative energy, the kind that scraped at the spine and whispered of graves.
A score of cultivators lay motionless upon that altar. Their eyes were sealed, faces ash-pale, and breath thin as spider silk, their very souls siphoned away until life clung by a thread.
Around them stood robed figures clad in black, low incantations rolling from their throats, thick, guttural syllables dredged from some hellish scripture. The cadence felt like iron chains being dragged across a crypt floor.
“So, this is where they hide their filthy ritual,” Flaxseed snarled, anger flaring in his eyes like furnace sparks. “People’s lives mean nothing to these bastards. Tonight, they pay in blood!”
His voice trembled with fury, each word striking the damp air like flint on steel.
Jared’s gaze sharpened, killing intent glinting colder than winter steel.
“Your time has come,” he said, every syllable a blade. “Under my sword, evil has no refuge.”
He leaped, an eagle released from the cliff, cutting a ruthless arc through the gloom, momentum crackling around him. The hall seemed to tilt beneath that single motion, as though gravity itself conceded his right of way.
The black-robed cultists wheeled toward him. Red light pulsed in their pupils, beasts possessed, stripped of self and driven only by the black magic’s thirst.
“Kill them!” one of them screeched, voice thin and metallic enough to peel paint.
The order ricocheted off the vaulted ceiling.
As one, the men in black lunged, perfectly synchronized, the drill-craft of soldiers twisted to wicked purpose. Yet before Jared, they were insects. His fists and heels crashed through ribs and skulls with mountain-splitting force.
Every strike flowed into the next, water over stone, hurling bodies across the marble like broken puppets. Bones cracked, then silence; none of them managed to rise again.
