Chapter 207: The Red Night
Kael and Garrett stood at the transfer gate departure point.
Garrett extended his hand. "I hope we stay in contact."
Kael shook it his hand firmly. "You’ll hear from me."
The Old Wolf nodded, turned, and walked toward the administrative wing.
Kael watched him go, then turned to Aria, Lira, and Gerard.
"Ashfall City. Transfer gate seven."
The transfer gate deposited them in a building.
Ashfall City was exactly what the dossier described: a dumping ground. The buildings were gray stone and rotting wood, cramped together along narrow streets that smelled of sewage. The sky overhead was perpetually overcast, choked by the smog from the mine’s processing facilities. Even the mana density felt thin and polluted, like breathing through a dirty cloth.
Lira surveyed the street with barely concealed disgust. "This is... your fief, my lord?"
A/N: A fief is a piece of land given to a person by a lord.
"One of them."
Gerard’s expression remained neutral, though the corner of his eye twitched.
"Why here?" Aria couldn’t help asking.
Kael started walking toward the city center. "My sister advised me to choose Ashfall. It has resources that don’t appear on any official documentation. And I chose it for other personal reasons."
The city’s central square was dominated by a gallows-style execution platform that hadn’t been used in years. Beside it stood the administrative building. A fat man in expensive clothes stood on the platform’s steps, flanked by four armed guards who looked more like thugs than soldiers.
The Acting Lord.
He was exactly what Kael expected.
"Ah! The new Vorn appointee!" The Acting Lord spread his arms wide, gold rings glinting. "Welcome to Ashfall, young master. I am Maldon Trask, the Acting Lord appointed by the previous—"
Kael’s blade left its sheath.
Shing.
The head hit the platform steps with a wet, heavy sound — thump — and rolled to a stop at the base. Maldon’s body stood for a full three seconds before toppling sideways, blood fountaining from the neck stump, silk robes soaking through with red.
The four guards stared.
Lira’s aura erupted — early Spirit Soul realm pressure washing over them like a tidal wave. The guards dropped their weapons and knelt so fast their knees cracked against stone.
Kael cleaned his blade on Maldon’s expensive robes and walked past the kneeling guards without acknowledgment. He picked up the severed head by the hair and carried it to the city gates.
He drove a spike through the forehead and mounted it on the gate’s iron framework, facing outward so every person entering Ashfall would see it leaving a clear message.
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The tavern was called The Rusty Pick.
It was the largest building in the entertainment district — three stories, packed every night with miners, gangsters, debt collectors, and the desperate souls who gambled away their meager earnings. The air inside was thick with smoke, cheap alcohol, and the particular tension of a place where violence could erupt at any moment.
Kael walked through the front door alone.
Every eye in the tavern turned toward him. A stranger in clean black clothes, walking like he owned the place. The silence spread outward from the entrance like a ripple.
A man stood up from the back corner. Large, scarred, with a scar that bisected his left eye. He wore a vest made from beast leather, and two curved daggers hung at his hips.
"You lost, friend? Or just stupid?" The scarred man laughed. "This is Rusty Pick territory. You pay the toll or you leave in pieces."
Around him, forty-three gangsters rose from their tables. Weapons appeared from beneath cloaks, from behind chairs, from behind the bar. The bartender reached under the counter for a sawed-off shotgun.
Kael looked around at the gathered criminals with an expression of profound boredom.
"I am the new lord of Ashfall." His voice carried to every corner of the tavern without raising his volume. "The old rules are dead. This is my city now."
The scarred man laughed. A heartbeat of genuine amusement.
"Your city? Boy, this city belongs to whoever has the balls to take it. And you—"
Kael moved.
Schlick.
The scarred man’s head separated from his shoulders before his laugh could finish. The body stood for two seconds, blood spraying from the neck in a high arc that painted the ceiling.
"Anyone else have questions?"
The bartender fired.
BOOM.
The shotgun blast caught Kael in the chest. The buckshot scattered across Shadow Armor. Kael didn’t flinch.
The tavern erupted.
Forty-two gangsters attacked simultaneously. Chairs flew. Tables shattered. Bottles exploded against walls. The bartender was already reaching for a second shell when Kael’s blade opened his throat.
Schlick.
Then the real slaughter began.
Kael moved through the tavern like a death sentence with legs. His Void Edge blades worked in complementary arcs. Shadow Step carried him between targets in flickers of darkness. Lightning Body made him fast enough to dodge the crossbow bolt that would have taken his eye.
Schlick. Schlick. Crack. Slash. Schlick.
A gangster tried to run. Kael’s blade caught him between the shoulders from across the room, thrown with enough force to pin him to the wall. He didn’t die instantly. He hung there, choking on his own blood, watching Kael move on to the next target.
Thud. Slash. Crack. Schlick. Schlick.
The tavern floor became a river of blood. Bodies fell in piles. The survivors tried to flee through windows, doors, any exit they could find. Lira was waiting outside.
Thump. Thump. Thud. Thud.
The ones who made it past Lira found Gerard standing at the far end of the alley. The Spirit Soul butler’s expression was utterly blank as he eliminated the escapees with clinical precision.
Inside the tavern, Kael stopped moving.
Forty-three gangsters had entered the Rusty Pick that night. Zero left standing.
The floor was so saturated with blood that it pooled in the gaps between tiles, seeping into the floorboards, dripping through the ceiling to the floor below. The walls were painted in arterial spray. Bodies were piled against the bar, against the walls, in the corner where the scarred man’s head sat on a table like a centerpiece.
Kael wiped his blades on a dead man’s shirt and sheathed them.
The news spread through Ashfall’s underworld like a virus. Within hours, every gang boss, every loan shark, every slaver, every power broker in the city knew that someone new had arrived. Someone who didn’t negotiate. Someone who didn’t offer deals.
Someone who killed without warning.
Kael walked out of the Rusty Pick with blood on his boots and didn’t look back.
Three days later, the underworld was in chaos.
The scarred man’s gang had dissolved without its leader. Two other mid-level gangs had voluntarily surrendered after hearing about the Red Night, offering their territories and fighters in exchange for their lives. The remaining gangs were either fortifying their positions or preparing to fight.
Kael let them prepare.
On the fourth day, he made his move against the biggest target remaining.
Bruski.
The one-armed brute was the closest thing Ashfall had to a kingpin. A massive mountain of muscle with a giant iron sword, Berserker ability that increased his power as he took damage, and Mana Heart Rank 7 cultivation that made him one of the strongest fighter in the city’s criminal hierarchy.
He was holding court in his fortress — a converted warehouse near the mine’s eastern entrance — when Kael walked through the front door alone.
Bruski looked up from his throne — a modified mining drill repurposed as a seat of power — and laughed.
"The Red Night hero! Come to surrender?"
Kael formed a hand sign.
"Realm of Darkness: Darker Than Black."
Bruski’s shadow expanded in a three-meter radius, swallowing him in absolute darkness. The fortress went silent as his gang members exchanged uncertain glances.
One of them moved toward the darkness. Lira appeared beside him like a ghost, her aura pressing down with cold warning.
"Touch him and die," she said quietly. "His fight."
Inside the realm, Bruski roared.
His Berserker ability activated — muscle mass expanding, veins bulging, single arm radiating enough power to shatter stone. His iron sword appeared in his remaining hand, the weapon glowing with accumulated battle-lust.
He attacked the barrier directly.
BOOM. BOOM. CRACK.
Fist after fist slammed into the darkness surrounding him. The realm rippled but held. Bruski’s knuckles split against the barrier’s surface. His roars echoed through the darkness like trapped thunder.