Book Three – Chapter Ten – Part Four – The Banquet of Death

Itarr wasn’t a stranger to cigars or cigarettes. She’d seen many people smoke them in her time at Canary. But not once did anyone offer any to Servi or Momo. Her beloved friend never once talked about her experience with them or tried to smoke them. Even when Itarr said she wanted to know more about them, Servi responded with a shrug and said they did nothing but damage the lungs. She felt something off about that response and decided to end her questioning a bit early.

Servi, I don’t think there’s any of the old you inside. What happened—

Her short monologue was cut short by Servi leaping into the air. She cleared the buildings and almost touched the clouds above. But with such a jump came an equal reaction. A hole the width and size of a Kobold had been left in her place. Instead of succumbing to gravity, the girl with strength on par with legends remained airborne via a skill called Air Step.

When the skill was invoked, a small, invisible platform appeared underneath the user’s feet. The skill level dictated how many platforms could be created before the user was forced to reset the counter by touching the ground. When used wrong, the created footholds had the tendency to be formed at an angle. The list of people who had perished by improperly using Air Step wasn’t short. It was a skill that relied more on the user’s dexterity and agility than strength and power. It had a time limit. One couldn’t remain motionless in the air for more than fifteen seconds before the transparent platform crumbled and dissolved.

Servi counteracted that intentional flaw by alternating between her left and right feet like a boxer. The internal platform counter increased far faster than it needed, but Servi had more than fifty thousand steps available before she needed to touch the ground.

The base called Jade was the second to last target. With Air Step, Servi hopped across the sky towards it. Her eyes weren’t on the Deset lookalike, however. They were focused on the sorry excuse for a Warden office.

Servi was a girl capable of many things, but subtly wasn’t one of them. The noise created by the chaos she wrought wasn’t something a person could sleep through. On the off chance someone from Warden left the building and investigated the disturbances, Servi had thought of a plan that wouldn’t end in their death. But thankfully, no one emerged. With as clear of a conscious as Servi could have in her current state, she was free to focus her attention on the extermination of the Mafia. Coincidentally, Jade’s roof stood tens of meters below her.

From her initial reconnaissance from up high, she saw the same washbasins Deset had. Even the broad glass windows and the door leading in were the same. The chances were extremely high that the underground portion either mirrored Deset’s or matched it corner for corner. In either case, there should be a devilish pit filled with enemies and prisoners called the hole. Deset had one, so why wouldn’t Jade?

But why was it those two were the only ones who had such a terrible room installed? The other bases Servi destroyed never had anything resembling the hole. Again, the inaccuracies and lack of a uniformed policy when it came to a base’s specifications gave off an amateurish vibe. The Mafia's grip on Arcton must’ve been the result of a series of extraordinary events that happened in the correct order. Before her mind kicked into overdrive at imagining the way their conquest played out, she leapt from her Air Step platforms and took out her nadrium greatsword. She gripped the handle and fell together with it. Like a meteorite, her body collided with the roof, shattering it and 90% of her bones.

When it came to combat, anything was a weapon. Nothing was off-limits, and that included Servi's very body. She fell to the dirty tiled floor below, partially landing on a wooden basin filled with cold, soapy water. As she grabbed the edges of the washbasin in an attempt to get up, her strength betrayed her, shattering the oak wood. Somehow, that action snapped the three Koena in the room out of the shocked trace they'd been in. They charged towards her, stabbing their spears downward and grunting in excitement when they pierced her stomach.

Servi’s soaking wet face remained stoic. Her eyes red only stared at the left-most Koena as she raised a single hand. In a flash, four of his green scales were ripped away, exposing the pulsing flesh beneath. However, Servi wasn’t done. Like a maestro, she manipulated the four scales into killing the three in front of her. By the time she stood up and pulled the three spears out of her midsection, the four bloody scales fell, joining their master in his journey to the afterlife.

Her wounds healed as quickly as she expected as her eyes turned to the only door that didn’t lead outside. She proceeded to walk through it, coming to a spiral staircase in desperate need of regular maintenance. Every fourth or fifth step was missing, and instead of making the tiresome journey down it, Servi grabbed the railing and hopped it. Air Step was the skill she chose to slow her rapid descent. Compared to Feather Fall, Air Step provided more precise control at the cost of actively thinking about it. With Feather Fall, one only needed to activate it, and they were left to enjoy a pleasant fall.

Once her feet touched the ground, Servi punched open the door in front of her. Walking in, Servi killed the single Dwarf standing between her and her target. He did the best he could, but Servi was his better in both strength and technique. She stepped back and kicked up, breaking his hands as the Dwarf attempted a pathetic horizontal swipe. He couldn’t keep a grip on his weapon. Catching it with Telekinesis before it hit the ceiling, Servi slammed it down, cutting him from head to crotch. The two halves of his body slammed into the floor, and Servi continued on her way.

If the similarities between Jade and Deset continued beyond the entrance-way, the room behind the door Servi stood in front should be big and wide. There should be tables galore, partially covered with trash. The walls and floors should need repair to fix the various holes and cracks.

With a hand, Servi reached out and tore the door off its hinges.

Then she grinned, showing off a set of teeth stained with her blood. The room she saw matched precisely with the community room in Deset. That was really all the proof she needed to know they shared a layout.

She stepped over the threshold and proceeded to do what she did best.

Kill.

Slipping into The Shadow's Embrace, Servi exploited every advantage it gave her. First, she kicked off the ground and charged headfirst into the closest enemy. Her shadowy, hidden blades severed his head, and she kicked off his body with nearly enough force to break the sound barrier, yet his body didn’t explode. By manipulating the exact moments her actions affected the living, Servi accomplished the impossible and defied physics. With the addition of Air Step, Servi could stop on a dime, twist her body, and kick-off to fly in a different direction.

Servi bounced like a ball thrown between two walls, becoming tangible the moments before slamming into an enemy. When they exploded into a shower of gore, Servi severed her link to existence and continued on to the next enemy in her sight. It took a bit of experimentation, but Air Step wasn’t limited to her feet. By creating Air Step platforms in just the right way, Servi could use her fingertips to adjust her direction.  And if she went further beyond, it was within the realm of possibilities to use her hands in conjunction with her feet.

And that was what she did. Like a monkey, she grabbed and grasped onto invisible platforms, halting her momentum, changing directions, and kicking off, thereby regaining—surpassing— her initial speed all in a fraction of a second. The force exerted on her body should’ve sent her brain down her neck and into her stomach. Her innards, bone, muscle, ligaments, and tendons, should've liquified.

And that happened to Servi hundreds of times over and over. Each defying moment she made killed her. Every slight, minute adjustment to change her angle by even half a degree required her to pay with her life.

If she stayed within the depths of non-existence via The Shadow's Embrace, such mortal concerns were only a spare thought to be tossed aside. Yet, for some odd reason, she chose to cast aside the protective cloak of shadow. Such odd choices were becoming natural. The only one who could know the method to her madness, the reasoning behind her hypocritical actions that flipped flopped every second, was the girl herself. Yet even she didn’t understand why she did the things she did.

She claimed to know the reasons and believed them to the point where it was the truth, but that was her truth, not anyone else's.  The madness, anger, hatred, the lucidity she displayed in a few rare moments, they couldn’t be counted on to show up again. Each instance of rage came from a different type of displeasure, and the same could be said for every other emotion coursing through her body.

Before she knew it, the community room had a fresh coat of crimson with giant cracks from where she slammed into the wall. Bits of brain and bone stubbornly attached to her hair, giving her faint pink and white highlights with a dash of red. Her head hastily turned towards a passageway while holding out both hands. Two uses of Air Step later, Servi gripped the invisible platforms, then slung herself forward like a Human slingshot. Her incredible strength meant she had no use of rubber.

As soon as her body passed the threshold of the passageway, Servi’s mind and thought process accelerated. The incredible feats of athleticism she performed in the community room paled in comparison to the awe inspiring motions of her dashing in a room, slaughtering all inside, and dashing out in less than a second.

Much of it had to be attributed to the thousands of Singi and Elven souls inside her ring. They were natural athletes, after all. Elves hopped from tree to tree to train their powerful legs, and Singi raced up and down trees, crossing any terrain with the agileness of a cat. By themselves, they were attributes to be envied. Together? They combined to form the ultimate warrior that couldn’t be matched in regards to speed or agility.

Thousands of them coming together? Her feats, considering the use of The Shadow's Embrace or Air Step alone, put her so far past the heroes of legends and into the categories of Divine Beings.

That was with her Absorption at level 15. She had enough Potential to double her Absorption to level 30, thereby receiving 30% of each soul’s physical power. She could even double it again to 60%.

She essentially had no limits, and any she might have had were easily broken. In some ways, her sheer potential was only limited by the number of people inhabiting the planet.

It was a scary thought, for sure, but none of that ran through her mind. When Servi entered the fifth room, all of Jade collapsed on top of her.

When she slammed into the wall without The Shadow's Embrace to protect her, the impact had to go somewhere. It traveled up, spreading and scattering like the sharp lines in a broken panel of glass. With enough lines—cracks— in the foundations and walls that dispersed tens of meters, weakening them, the support beams keeping the room above them had no choice but to fail. Support beams could only support when the weight was distributed equally. When more than one beam had to withstand more weight than it was designed to do, they failed, falling like dominos in a chain reaction.

But it wasn’t a repeat of the events that happened at Turner. Servi faced the falling debris head-on, sending blow after blow, punch after punch, breaking heavy concrete debris that threatened to squish her. Her voice—screaming and shouting—empowered her strikes. They contained enough power to pulverize rubble on the smaller size into something less than dust. The whole affair lasted a bit over twenty seconds. With tens of punches every second to protect herself, she threw at least 200 punches. By the time her arms had broken for the 174th time, her mind was numb to everything except destruction.

When it was all said and done, and Servi's arms had paid the ultimate price hundreds of times over, a single glimpse of the moon shone down upon Servi. However, she wasn’t the focus. Tightly packed smoke and dust met the fresh summer breeze for the first time, covering Jade’s only survivor in a layer of soot thick enough to suffocate an elephant. Her eyes fell victim to a never-ending loop of regeneration in an attempt to free them of any particles that irritated them. Like a swarm of mad bees, a torrential amount of little red orbs flowed towards Servi, but she jumped high in the air.

As she soared upward, she looked at the Warden office.  Other than a thick layer of soot dirtying its wooden surface, none of the destruction she caused affected it in any way that would prevent it from functioning as it should. When the wind stopped rushing against her face, drying her eyes and fluttering her black hair down, she slowly created two Air Step platforms under her.

Balancing on them, Servi danced across the skies until she came to the last base. Only once she stood above it, 120 meters in the air, did she allow the souls belonging to the Jade branch a chance to be absorbed by her. The invisible platforms under her disappeared, and Servi made her arrival at the homeless camp-like area known. Twenty Ice Balls proceeded her, giving a chance for twenty members to die before they had the pleasure of falling to her hands.

Against their vagrant appearance, which suggested they would be the easiest, Sabre put up the biggest fight. How could they not have? They were right next to three bases, which meant everyone there had a front-row seat to the chaos Servi brought. Instead of rushing to help, the upper leadership thought it better to reinforce their position. The open area, in theory, should’ve been the optimal place to defend against a single adversary.

Perhaps that was what Sabre specialized in. Either way, calling it a ‘specialization’ was giving it far more credit than it deserved. Trained they may have been, their fighting only consisted of having three lines of ten archers firing in waves, a team of Kobold throwing barrels lit with fire, and a small squad of Skill Users firing off support skills like Protection.

From the moment Servi landed, their defensive battle began. The three lines of archers spread about horizontally, forming three staggered rows. The metal drums surrounding both them and Sabre’s general layout were lit. Dancing flames reflected across the metallic arrowheads as the first line pulled back their nocked arrows. The commander, a stout Dwarf with half a beard, shouted.

From then on, it was like clockwork. The moment the first line of archers had released their arrow, they kneeled down and allowed the ones behind them to shoot. And after that, the same thing repeated for the third line, and it popped back around with the first wave firing off their re-nocked projectiles. The total downtime between the first wave shooting twice couldn’t have been more than two seconds.

Even as Servi took the arrows head-on without Protection, allowing them to shred her body like pins in a pincushion, she advanced forward with no signs of stopping. However, Sabre’s warriors didn’t show any signs of fear or fright. In that way, they were far more well-trained than those guards she fought at Turner.

Two armored Kobolds broke rank from behind the archers and approached her in formation. Her nadrium blade appeared in her hand. She waved it around in front of her like a magic wand, daring them to make the first move. Suddenly, the pair of Kobolds ducked down, becoming flat as a pancake as two flaming barrels made a beeline for her. She leaned back, kicking the two potential bombs high in the air and swinging them down. Simultaneously, they landed on the group of archers. Two were crushed to death, dying in a somewhat painless way. The rest suffered unimaginable burns if the explosion didn’t incinerate them first.

Servi wasn’t focused on the little group anymore since she incorporated her own Fire Wall to ensure their death. Their cries of pain slowly died down like the whimpers of a dying animal.

Her eyes turned to the barrel throwers: a team of Kobolds in a line six members long that stood on a waist-high wall. A strange device sat next to them. It had three metal wires situated in the right spot that allowed the wooden barrels to slide down on it. A bit further past them sat a team of Skill Users who had two jobs. First, they were responsible for filling the barrels with flammable liquids and setting them on the device. An automated trigger handled the rest, including running the top part of the barrel under a lot match, which lit a small, separate container of gas.

Such a machine had ingenuity behind every step of its construction, from designing the shape of the barrel to determining the proper amount of oil to fill it with. The Skill Users' second task was support. Even now, as the six Kobolds picked up their flaming barrels and illuminated their armor-less bodies, Protection was in the process of being used on all available men.

But that wasn’t all. A tremendous flash of white light, courtesy of Lucem, illuminated the area every few seconds, blinding everyone who stared at it. Servi’s eyes adjusted within a quarter of a second. The flaming drums, probably used for warmth, lighting, and cooking were really the only things she saw that had any worth to them. The wall the barrel-throwers stood on was a wall in name only, and with no sleeping bags or any kind of camping equipment, it was impossible to know where Sabre’s inhabitants slept.

But when it came to her situation, caring about where her foes slept and how they were meant she didn’t see them as enemies. And she didn’t want that. Showing any kind of mercy meant her genocide of all who claimed to be a part of the Mafia would turn out to be for nothing. Her strikes had to be fast like a speeding train, yet carry enough force to send out a wave of terror to all who would strike back against her in the name of the Mafia.

Genocide was really the only cure for those bastards. If she sincerely wanted to wipe them out, then the only way to be sure was to wipe out the planet’s population. After all, if she—Servi— was the last living thing, then claiming that there were no Mafia members would be a genuine truth.

Or maybe it wouldn't. Though it was in name only, Servi, temporarily, belonged to that awful organization. She'd ending up being the last spec of remembrance and would continue to be that until the day she took her final breath.

Was killing hundreds of millions—maybe even billions— just for the chance to say that she was responsible for wiping out the organization behind causing her so much heartache—the group that pushed her to evolve beyond that of Servi and into the Mad Dog—worth it?

No one but Servi could answer that, and until Momo was free of their diabolical clutches, she probably wouldn’t answer it. Her words and actions may have hinted at one way or another in the past, but words were nothing but fickle objects to her current self. They couldn’t be trusted as her true feelings, and they couldn’t be taken as lies.

A mystical glow enveloped the two armored Kobold, who had returned to a fighting position after spending a bit of time on the ground. They both held a sword and shield, stained silver, which reflected off the intense blasts of Lucem, yet Servi’s weapon dwarfed them both in. The left-most one charged forward as a barrel came flying in from behind her. Servi jumped up, avoiding the area where it smashed into the ground and exploded into flames. She felt a tinge in her knee and looked down. The remaining armored Kobold held a bow in his large hands. It was something he didn’t have before. More importantly, there was an arrow attached to it.

The smell of kerosene, mixed with oil, filled her nostrils as Servi contemplated her future actions. A second passed, and she realized gravity never took its toll on her. How was it possible Servi remained airborne? Once again, she looked down at the arrow piercing her right kneecap and touched the rope with her hand. It was rigid and stiff like it wasn’t a rope at all. She took her nadrium sword and scrapped the blade against it. Sparks erupted, catching the ‘rope’ on fire.

“READY!!!!!” She turned towards the voice and saw all six Kobolds on the throwing team had their arms raised up.

None of them held empty air.

“THROW!!!!” The left-middle Kobold, with her ruby-red scales covering half of her chest, shouted the order. Then Servi was faced with six exploding barrels coming her way. Before they smashed and doused her with a large amount of oil, she looked down at the fool who shot the bow. Both of his hands gripped what she now realized was a metal pole painted to look like wood and covered in gas. With how he leaned back with a little bit of strain on his face and sweat dripping down his arms, holding her up while gravity tried to bring her down was putting the work on his arms.

The strain on his eyes and cheeks disappeared when six large explosions rang out almost simultaneously.  He dropped the pole, and Servi fell to the ground doused with fire. She looked like a shooting star. But just as quickly as it happened, the flames covering her disappeared. All that remained was her bare body, free of any wounds caused by arrows or fire. Smoke billowing from her hair continued to timidly dance for a few extra seconds.

“Eh?!” The ruby-scaled Kobold felt something pick her up, but she wasn’t alone. The fire reflected and danced off the red scales attached to her chest. The space under her eyes became doused with tears, yet the waterworks didn’t truly begin until the rest of her team slammed into her.

Like atoms smashing together, the other five members slammed into her, sending blood everywhere. She begged her God for help and forgiveness from her foe, but neither wanted to hear her out. One after another, Servi battered their bodies together like a ball bouncing around a pinball machine. They slammed into the ground, sending up a mist of brown. She only stopped her bloody game when six souls soared to her ring, but that only meant the contestants had to change.