Book Three – Chapter Nine – Part One – Who Guards the Guards?

In the morning, after reporting to Carmelo, Servi left Deset for good. She didn’t foresee a reason to ever return since she planned on killing Deset’s inhabitants in the forest on Saturday. After activating The Shadow's Embrace, Servi raced all over Arcton. Her goal had been to scout out any potential guard locations like training halls or barracks. She carried a grudge against them because they were all weak cowards who refused to fight back against the Mafia when they rolled into town.

She found smaller towers and buildings spread all through the Arcton and two located inside New Arcton. Most of the guard bases didn't seem that big. Each one outside of New Arcton only had the bare minimum of supplies. Most didn’t have a second floor, and since it was still morning, the shift change was a few hours away. That gave her the right opportunity to strike, and she refused to let that slip by her.

As she raced back to the spot where her assault would begin, Servi mentally planned out the most efficient route in her mind.

Ten minutes later, she had arrived at the place where she would start her massacre. Servi entered the front door after snuffing the life out of the guards and immediately found herself in a room containing over fifteen beds. It functioned as a communal living space, and it was the largest room. The small training room was connected to the left wall via a broken door, so it was always visible. In other words, there wasn’t any place to hide from her rampage, and she couldn’t have asked for a better opportunity. Like a farmer weeding out any undesirables from a vegetable farm, Servi extinguished the life of everyone she saw sleeping. Male or female? It didn’t matter. Young or old? Somehow, she knew they all played a part in turning Arcton into the shit hole it became.

The shadows from The Shadow's Embrace ensured her foes died without murmuring even a tiny squeak. In the first location, Servi killed twenty-seven people. She left, leaving the bodies behind to be discovered. Then the lavender-haired assassin moved on to the next building. After slaughtering the inhabitants inside, she soared across Arcton and continued her rampage, eventually doing the same for the following two locations.

In the fourth building, Servi went about her slaughter differently. Her very grip could destroy stone and bend hardened iron, and as her luck would have it, the guards she sought to destroy took refuge in a building made out of stone. After sniping the two men standing out front with her nadrium bow, which was one of the only weapons capable of withstanding her incredible strength, Servi calmly walked towards their corpses. She aimed to pierce them to the stone wall like chunks of meat in a frozen locker, but the bricks were too fragile. They exploded into dust, and the simple steel-tipped arrows were too flimsy to be of any use after a single shot.

“Ah, I knew that wasn’t going to go undetected. The sound of a brick exploding is pretty loud, isn’t it?” Servi quipped. She peeked through the destroyed stone bricks and saw the hustle and bustle of guards rushing to discover what had happened. Turning on her heels, Servi walked parallel to the building with her left hand held out and punched every so often. The destroyed bricks sent dust up to her eye, invading her nostrils in the process. She sneezed and redoubled her effort. By the time she turned the first corner and proceeded to do the same for the second wall, she felt the building shake. Having lost nearly half of its support, the other bricks holding it up failed.

The single-story brick building with two windows collapsed, and Servi simply enjoyed the sight of 31 of her foes being crushed underneath thousand of pounds of debris. Even a Kobold or Koena couldn’t survive such a heavy load suddenly pinning them to the ground. And when the last of the 31 souls flowed to her ring, she activated The Shadow's Embrace and flew off in search of another barrack.

When she arrived at the 8th building, her mind and body became dulled when trying to invent creative ways to make her opponents suffer. I better save all of my more sadistic plans for the boss and Deset. I might as well use this time to become more acquainted with my skills.

Servi parked herself on the dirty ground forty meters away from her latest target. Like all the others, she saw two guards standing out front. But unlike the others, this one-story building with no windows was situated near a residential area. Women and men passed by her, not even stopping to give a second glance at the one-eyed woman sitting against a dilapidated building. Their state of dress was similar to hers, and that helped Servi camouflage herself.

Taking another look at the building, she was sure it held many guards inside because, appearance-wise, it looked the same as the sixth and seventh building she took down minutes before. She absorbed 21 souls from the former and 28 from the latter.

Servi’s one remaining eye scouted up and down her list of learned skills, and it stopped on one used by the greatest warrior she had known. “Earth Puppet, eh? I could send them out. I don’t know how strong they are if I use mud and not armor like Albert, so I better wait on that. I need something large and destructive. Ah, here we go.” She scrolled up and down and eventually settled on one.

Venti Aqua: a combination skill that used the incredible power of wind with the dense element of water to produce a water tornado capable of slicing even the most hardened substance. Servi looked up from her ID and focused on the guardhouse. The two outside carried bows, and they must’ve not liked the way Servi stared at them. Simultaneously, they nocked an arrow and fired at her. Instead of taking it head-on, she used Telekinesis to kidnap a man walking by and used him as a shield.

Even from such a distance away, the two archers were impeccable in their aim. The two arrows pierced her hostage’s head, becoming lodged in his brain. Servi stood up, gripped the man’s spine, and threw him at the building with her superhuman strength. His corpse exploded against the dirty bricks, raining blood and organs down upon the two guards.  Pandemonium broke out when the guards screamed in terror. The man’s family cried out at what happened, and Servi decided it had been long enough.

She had slaughtering to do.

Servi held her left arm to the sky while thinking of Venti Aqua. A beautiful green gust swirled alive from the invisible air, curling up and down Servi’s body in an attempt to pick up even more speed. From the skies, a dark cloud willed itself into existence, and it cast an ominous shadow. After that, a torrential amount of water pelted down upon an area of 64,000 square meters. At first, it was nothing but a light drizzle that was oh-so-common in the summer.

But then the weather picked up in intensity. The rain kept increasing until it started to dent wood. Glass windows were no match for it. The wind continued until small rocks were carried airborne, and it all happened with Servi’s raised hand acting as the epicenter. The bright sun above, hidden by the black clouds surging with water, was helpless. It couldn’t shine its beautiful rays down upon the people that needed it the most. It was almost as if night arrived far earlier than it should've.

As the wind grew in intensity and screams grew numerous, the brutal gusts nearly snatched Servi’s wig from her head. Her clothes threatened to rip off from her body, but then suddenly, there were peace and calm in the area immediately surrounding her. It was as if she stood in the eye of a hurricane. The serene tranquility she experienced didn’t match up at all with the apocalypse happening around her.

The men and women within 64,000 square meters did their best to stay grounded by grabbing onto walls or each other. But with the wind capable of tearing houses from their very foundation, it didn’t take long for them to let go out of pain. Even if they had the strength to endure the wind, the objects they clung onto for dear life surrendered to the wind.  But the wind wasn’t the only obstacle. The rain had become so powerful that it was more than capable of piercing directly through skin.

Servi still had her hand raised, and she looked to the left. There was a group of three women huddled underneath a wooden table. Four men stood on top of it in a pathetic attempt to use their weight to keep it grounded. The rag-wearing Singi, with her trembling ears and shaky tail, kept her head low to the ground. Even with the chaos exploding around her, she instantly knew what the warm liquid dripping down through the table’s cracks meant. As if to reinforce her answer, a corpse fell down. It faced towards the Singi and her two other friends. Holes, thicker than a grown man’s thumb, littered the back of his head and body.

But the elements didn’t differentiate between the living and non-living. Servi poured more energy into Venti Aqua, and the water raining down tripled in size and doubled in destructive power. Right before the Singi’s trembling eyes, the corpse was pelted with water, turning it into a fleshy red mist as the rain demolished his body. The three other men soon died as well. Their corpses, what was left of them, were stolen by the wind. And with nothing to hold down the table, it and the three trembling underneath became Venti Aqua’s latest victims.

The wind picked up even more strength, and that was when it happened.

The storm couldn’t be called a storm any longer as the rushing wind finally took on a cylindrical shape. Everything that wasn’t part of the earth was ripped out of the ground and joined the deadly hurricane. Men, women, children, houses and homes, faithful animal companions, and beloved dolls soon became part of the raging storm.

Venti Aqua snatched and destroyed everything and anything. It spared nothing. A person’s age didn’t matter at all to a cyclone of death.

The water flowing in it took on the shape of sharps blade, and there were thousands of them. They rotated the opposite way the wind did, and nothing went unpunished. The clear blue water soon turned red from the incredible amount of blood. Bodies were chopped up into pieces so small they couldn’t be seen with the naked eye. Even the metal and stone buildings acted as butter to a hot knife when faced with the tyrannical blades of water.

Servi smiled as the screams drowned out the incredible roar of the wind rushing faster than 300 km/h. Once the screams died out, Servi formed a fist with the hand she had in the air. Just like that, the wind stopped, the dark clouds disappeared, the rain ceased, and everything was calm. Other than the wasteland surrounding Servi and the immobilized crimson ball of death and destruction above her, things were back to normal.

The sun shone its brilliance upon the area once more, but it only highlighted the destruction and chaos brought about by Servi.

She brought her hand down to the ground, and the large, compressed ball of water came down with her. It landed right where the guard building used to be, exploding with such incredible force that it sent the red, bloody water soaring for thousand of meters. As for where the water might land and what the pieces of debris might destroy? Servi didn’t care. The blades of water left nothing bigger than a Kobold’s fist. The chances of them causing any damage while soaring through the air were slim to none.

She took one final look at the utter wasteland coated in a layer of crimson and left. Other than the coat of red splashed on everything, it was almost identical when compared to the wasteland left behind by a certain skill that needed to be charged.

“In some way, that skill rivals Fulgur Spike. It might be fun to combine the two together, but that has to wait until Saturday,” Servi said to herself. She stopped right at the dividing edge of chaos and order. Servi turned her head behind her and saw the wasteland created by her. Hundreds of red souls rushed towards her, giving her even more strength that would only empower the next skill she used.

Then she turned her head forward to an area that was spared from most of her destruction. It was almost something out of a painting. The area behind her had no life left in it, the section in front of her still had people who could breathe, yet both were smothered in crimson. She didn’t know that Venti Aqua had a very detailed and defined area of operation, and she definitely didn’t realize that the rain produced by it could break the boundary created by the skill. If she had allowed the watery ball of death to gently land, then the area in front of her would have been clean.

But I can change that if I want to. I could make a Venti Aqua big enough to swallow this entire town if I want to. Maybe I’ll do it later. Until then, I have more guards to kill.

Servi stared at the people who gazed lifelessly into the wasteland behind her. Their rotten rags, stained red by the bloody water, did very little to cover their bodies. Black welts ran rampant up and down their skin. Servi surmised a disease ran through the area but put a stop to that line of thinking as quickly as it appeared.  A second later, she disappeared into the realm between existence and non-existence.  The two men in front of her and two girls to her left didn’t acknowledge it. Perhaps they were in pain? Maybe they wished they were part of the monstrous Venti Aqua? What if the crimson rain destroyed what little they had left when it soaked everything around them? The questions were infinite, and the answers were not countable.

She didn’t know their thoughts because she couldn’t read minds. However, she could almost feel their feelings through their eyes.

I don’t see any spark of life in them. Can I really blame them? I suppose killing them would be a blessing in disguise...

Servi might have believed they wanted to die because she wanted to kill them. It was something she didn’t know the answer to, and it was something she wouldn’t even spend the energy and time to discover an answer to.

Three seconds later, the crowd of survivors, which totaled 29, perished and passed into the afterlife.

Without looking back, Servi rushed away in search of more guards to kill.

It didn’t take long at all. Servi's slaughter continued unopposed and unchallenged. Even if she gave them a chance to act, the guards she fought all chose to run out of fear. Their yearning for personal safety eclipsed their need to protect Arcton and its residents.

For the 11th building, she grabbed a Kobold guard and bashed out the stone bricks supporting it with her body. For the 12th building, Servi lifted the entire thing with Telekinesis and slammed it down. The very ground below her feet shook with the force of an earthquake. If there were houses and structures nearby, they definitely would’ve collapsed from the shock.

When Servi arrived at the 13th building, located inside the elite walls of New Arcton, she grinned. Not because she finally found it after an hour of searching, but because it was situated right next to the 14th building. Like the spot where she used Venti Aqua, the targets were near a residential area. Lavish manors and decorated carriages surrounded her. And in a way, it all reminded her of the little cul-de-sac where she burned the mayor’s mansion to the ground. Only everything looked more expensive. There were a total of 8 buildings, and two of them, situated at the northern end of the cul-de-sac, were going to be the sight of her latest attack.

Servi approached the left-most building in front of her. The four guards standing out in front drew their weapons and approached her. She looked at the building to the right of that and saw more guards walking towards her. They cut across the front yard.

The noble couple walking behind her ran away. The husband's suit was made of fine velvet, and it probably cost more than three months' worth of food. His wife had a fluttery dress made from crimson silk. Their lavish screams grew quiet, then they stopped. Servi surmised they were running to one of the houses behind her. The chances were high that one of them belonged to them, but they wouldn’t reach it.

She raised her hands to the sky, prompting the growing number of guards around her to step back and take a stance. They didn’t know what awaited them from the mysterious one-eyed girl. Suddenly, two corpses fell from the sky and landed in her outstretched hands. It was the noble couple. She gripped them both and slammed them down. The ensuing explosion of gore distracted everyone but Servi, and she acted in that brief moment.

Her left hand impaled the steel helmet of the guard in front of her. A nadrium sword materialized from nowhere, slicing the guard behind her in half. She fell to the ground with the first guard’s disembodied helmet and head in tow and slammed it into the Koena to her left. Servi heard a ghastly crack and summoned a large, two-handed nadrium axe from her ring. Staying her ground, she spun in place with the axe at the ready. It sliced through metal, scale, and skin with the utmost ease. The force of her spin sent crimson mist spraying in a wide arc that nearly reached the third and fourth floors of the houses furthest away from her.

Servi looked down at the corpses cut in half and stared at the two bases. She continued walking towards the one on the left. Each step she took signified that the lives of the building’s inhabitants would soon come to an abrupt end.

She heard a scream moments before her boot-covered feet touched the first step. She turned towards it and saw a growing number of people emerge from their homes. A few edged closer to the sight of a one-sided battle, and once their eyes discovered the corpses, they screamed in unison.

Servi heard a second noise and turned her attention to the door in front of her. It blew open with a powerful skill. The door smashed into her, sending her back a few meters. Forty-seven men rushed out in an organized fashion and surrounded Servi. She heard a second explosion and realized the door from the other guard building must’ve blown off. The rhythmical footsteps she heard pounding the grassy ground in unison reinforced her hypothesis.

Suddenly, she laughed. She laughed, and laughed, and laughed as she laid against the hot ground. A guard with a feather on his helmet raised his sword to the sky. His mouth moved a kilometer a second, arguing with his fellow men about what to do, but his voice was drowned out by Servi’s shriek. Suddenly, he dropped his raised weapon. It fell on Servi’s leg and bounced away. That was when the guard put both hands to his throat and mouth and shouted for others to do the same.

Kaasuvuoto was a skill that emitted deadly poison gas. While it wasn’t invisible, it was somewhat thin and hard to see when emotions and adrenaline ran high. But there was another reason none of the guards noticed it.

The amount of time it took to become lethal depended on the volume of the area that needed to be filled. Filling a bedroom took a second or two. A luxurious ballroom took around twenty to twenty-five seconds. But Servi wasn’t filling a simple room. The area she needed to enclose was slightly more than 10,000 square meters. In many ways, it didn’t compare at all to the destruction brought about by Venti Aqua. After all, she turned an area of 64,000 square meters into a desolate wasteland. It was impressive and something to be feared, and there wasn’t any doubt about it.

But Venti Aqua was meant for wide-scale destruction. Kaasuvuoto wasn’t. Kaasuvuoto was meant for enclosing an area in gas at the expense of the user. In most cases, the user died in the process, but their heroic sacrifice assured their party members could escape whatever grave threat they faced. Therefore, it didn’t matter to most that it drained Skill Energy at such a rapid pace. But considering the lethality of the poison, the user would die seconds after losing consciousness.

No skill researcher in the world would ever fathom even the tiniest thought of someone having enough Skill Energy to fill in an area of space that was over 10,000 square meters. And none, not even the brightest scientists, would ever expect someone to have the Skill Energy to fill an open area to the point where it overpowered the very air people needed to breathe. And if that wasn’t taken into account, then the wind would be the ultimate enemy. Even if someone had the massive amount of Skill Energy at the ready, a stiff breeze could blow it all away. It was possible to set a boundary. Servi had done that very thing with Kaasuvuoto’s sleeping gas and with Smokescreen. Having an area limit strong enough to prevent gas from leaving via the wind was out of the question.

Combining all of the elements together, and it was a fool's errand to even try. It was impossible to find a valued member of society to argue that it was possible to fill an outside area with Kaasuvuoto.

Of course, it was only impossible because there hasn’t been anyone to accomplish the un-accomplishable.

But Servi was that person.

She laughed even as the guard with the feather on his helmet faced his imminent death. Blood poured from his ears and dripped down his nose as a guttural scream of sheer pain escaped from his throat. His bodily functions failed him. Shit and piss leaked out from the proper holes, soiling his armor as the strength left him.

And he wasn’t alone.

Servi stood up, dusting off her legs as a roar of laughter emerged from her pretty pink lips.

“This… It’s even more deadly than Venti Aqua!” Servi screamed. She doubled over as if she was in pain, but it was only laughter. Every enemy surrounding her-- the guards and those nobles who just wanted to live their lives-- perished in one of the most painful ways imaginable. And for the first time, Servi nearly felt drained and exhausted. It was the very first time, after almost dying the night she woke up, she had ever felt so tired. But like a surge of energy giving a wounded warrior a second wind of strength, Servi felt the odd feeling fade away. Within a couple of seconds, she surmised that the Skill Energy spent to accomplish something impossible had already regenerated.