I had made it an unconscious habit to create clothes and dye my hair black with Lightning Edict, else I would always be walking around naked. However, Lightning Edict did not just give me these disguises; it also reduced my presence to that of an Acolyte.
The truth was that I was growing so quickly that a part of me still held on to the Acolyte it had been all those loops ago when I woke up inside a tent. So I was not surprised that when the Conclave mages saw me, their initial reaction was not fear, but more of surprise.
I had spent less time as an Adept than I did as an Acolyte, and I did not fully stay at this level for long to observe a lot of Adepts, and I wondered how mages that were so weak were so capable of causing so much destruction.
I counted them as I walked out of the shadow, and they were twenty-three Conclave mages. Nineteen Acolytes, three Adepts, and my eyes remained only on the so-called Captain; the rest were all going to die, but I would need information from this scum.
∞
The first of them to see me was a young man near the edge of the circle, and... he laughed. Was this what happened when you have become drunk on your power after slaughtering a city?
"Look at this," he gestured towards the rest, drawing their attention to my presence. "Something crawled out from the flesh pit."
I barely glanced at him, just kept walking towards my target, while a part of me kept debating if I should kill them slowly or just erase them.
Somebody else said something about Aldenmere grey and a stray; they had seen my Acolyte robes, which I should have changed to either silver or blue to represent that I was no longer an Acolyte, but why bother with such trivialities?
Another said something much worse, and they laughed, something about pigs going to the slaughter, and by the time I was thirty feet out, the laughing had thinned, because I was still coming and I had not said anything, but even a fool would look into my eyes and know there was no fear there.
The Captain turned and looked at me properly, and I watched the calculation move behind his cold eyes, and I will not lie, I was a bit fascinated to see this, and the rage only grew colder inside me.
I saw him look at my Acolyte robes, seeing no visible staff, no academy insignia, walking alone into a square with twenty-three of his men in it. I saw him conclude that there were two possibilities here: either I was a madman, or something he had not accounted for.
Seeing this intelligence in his eyes, I knew that every action happening here did not come from a deluded mind that had been slowly twisted to become something monstrous; this was a well-thinking man who made the decision to inflict horror on an entire city and feed the souls of their fellow men to demons.
The Captain should have told his people to run; instead, he chose the wrong option.
"Kill the brat," he said.
A cold smile touched my face... slowly then.
∞
Eleven of them cast at once, Force, mostly, but mixed with a tinge of Veilcraft to unmake whatever defenses I may put up. This showed me they were used to fighting as a unit and using their spells in the right manner... not that this would help them, since I simply walked into their spells, not even bothering to dodge.
Force Resonance, Adept tier, made the eleven strikes vanish as if they had fallen into an abyss; my hair did not even move, and the square went quiet.
"Is that it?" I whispered, "You’re all so weak, and instead of finding ways to gain more truth, you are inflicting pain on those weaker than you... Now, pay attention. You don’t want to miss the final moments of your lives"
∞
I will not pretend it was a battle, because no version of this was a battle. Stormstep put me inside their circle before the nearest Adept had finished blinking. I did not use Heaven’s Verdict, or Lightning Edict, or anything that would have lit up this square like a beacon for the Arcanist fighting overhead to detect my presence; I used threads.
Threads are quiet, and I laid one across the throat of the man who had laughed first, and his expression was frozen with a smirk on his face as his head fell from his shoulder, but he was an Acolyte, and he would not die for at least a few seconds, long enough for him to fully understand how he died... I want to keep my promises after all.
I did not enjoy what happened next. After all this time, I knew I could never truly enjoy slaughter; maybe if there was a battle, then I would be smiling, but not this. However, it did not mean that I hesitated to do what was necessary.
There was no pleasure in it and no fury in it either, only the cold and a series of very small, precise decisions made very fast... this one is casting, cut the hand; this one is running, cut the leg then the throat; this one is behind you, step, cut.
I used only a single thread, barely using any Anima, and I moved through them like they were stumbling mannequins. It took me fifteen seconds to kill all the Acolytes, and that was because I wanted their deaths to come one at a time, so they could fully perceive themselves dying, even if their deaths were still clean... too clean, but I did not luxuriate in pain; the knowledge of their ending was enough for me.
Two of the Adepts got spells off. One was force, and it went through me, and the other was a lance of black light I did not recognise and did not have time to study, but my domain that was hovering above my skin held onto that power and chewed it to pieces.
I flicked my finger twice and sent two threads into their hearts, and with a gesture, the threads rotated through their bodies, and they fell to the ground in pieces.
At nineteen seconds, two people were standing in that square: the Captain and I.