Chapter 201: Meeting a Churchill
What followed was a massacre.
The Realm of Darkness swallowed the Silent Fang compound completely — 40 meters of absolute blackness that eliminated sight for everyone trapped within. The fighters stumbled blindly, weapons raised, voices calling out to comrades who couldn’t respond.
Kael moved through the void like a predator in deep water.
His Spirit Eyes mapped every warm body, every racing heartbeat, every panicked breath. The darkness didn’t hinder him — it was his element, his domain, his hunting ground.
Slash.
The first fighter died without seeing his killer. Kael’s blade opened his throat from behind, and the man crumpled with a wet gurgle.
Slash. Slash.
Two more fell. One tried to run and made it three steps before a blade punctured his spine. The other swung wildly at shadows and caught steel in his chest instead.
"S-stay together!" someone screamed. "Form a circle! Back to back!"
They tried. Six fighters managed to cluster together, weapons pointing outward, creating a defensive perimeter that might have worked against a visible enemy.
It didn’t work against Kael.
He shadow-stepped inside their formation and opened his attack.
Schlick. Schlick. Schlick.
Three throats opened in rapid succession. The remaining three fighters broke formation and fled in different directions — instinct overruling strategy. Kael let them run for five seconds, savoring their fear, before picking them off one by one.
Thunk. A blade through the back.
Slash. An arm severed at the elbow.
Crack. A skull caved in by a pommel strike.
The Rank 3 captains were smarter. They stayed close together, back to back, auras flared defensively. Their senses couldn’t penetrate the darkness, but they could feel the killings happening around them — the subtle disturbances in air pressure, the faint sounds of bodies falling.
"Show yourself!" one of them roared. "Fight us face to face!"
Kael didn’t respond.
He circled them slowly, analyzing their guard. The captain on the left favored his right side — a tell that suggested an old injury. The captain in the center held twin daggers with a grip that indicated throwing expertise. The captain on the right had the densest aura — the primary threat.
Kael struck.
Shadow Step.
He materialized directly behind the primary captain and drove his blade toward the man’s kidney. The captain reacted on pure instinct — spinning with a backhand strike that caught Kael’s weapon and deflected it wide.
Clang!
Metal rang against metal. The captain’s eyes widened in the darkness — he couldn’t see Kael, but he knew exactly where he was now.
"There!"
Both remaining captains attacked the position. Kael shadow-stepped again, reappearing at the edge of their perception, and watched them strike empty air.
This repeated four times. Each time Kael engaged, the captains adapted slightly — adjusting their formations, covering more angles, predicting his patterns.
They were good and experienced. They seemed to have fought together for years. But they were fighting blind against someone who could see perfectly.
Kael ended it with Devouring Darkness.
The corrosive substance pooled around the primary captain’s feet without his notice — soundless, and invisible even to senses in the darkness. By the time he felt the burning, it had already consumed through his boots and begun eating into his flesh.
"Argh— what is—"
He screamed as the darkness ate into his legs, dropping him to his knees. His companions turned toward the sound, and Kael used the opening.
Slash. Schlick.
Two captains died in the space between heartbeats. The primary captain, legs ruined and screaming, lasted three seconds longer before a blade ended his suffering.
The remaining fighters — the ones who had scattered into the darkness — died over the next eight minutes. Some tried to escape the compound and ran into the barrier runes Kael had placed at the perimeter. Others huddled in corners and waited for death that came without warning.
When the Realm of Darkness finally dissolved, more than fifty bodies lay scattered across the Silent Fang compound.
Kael wiped his blades clean and vanished into the night sky.
One hour later.
Kael approached Vasek’s main base from the air.
The Cloak of Flight carried him silently above the city’s rooftops, his form invisible against the night sky. Below, Zenthoria’s criminal underbelly sprawled in all directions — warehouses, taverns, black markets, fighting pits. The kind of place where the strong preyed on the weak and no one asked questions.
Vasek’s headquarters was impossible to miss. A fortress compound in the city’s northern district — larger than any of the satellite bases, with multiple buildings, reinforced walls, and enough guards to staff a small army. This was where the syndicate boss conducted his real business.
Kael began drawing runes in the air as he circled the perimeter.
Barrier runes — Rank 4, designed to contain energy and prevent external observation. They formed an invisible shell around the compound, sealing it from prying eyes. Silencing runes followed, layered beneath the barriers, ensuring that no sound would escape the enclosed space. Whatever happened inside would remain inside.
He completed the final rune and descended through a gap in the defensive perimeter, landing silently on an upper balcony.
And stopped.
Someone was already here.
A girl stood in the compound’s central courtyard, surrounded by dozens of unconscious or dead gang members. Her hair was pure white like snow. It fell past her shoulders in a straight curtain, catching the light of burning buildings and making her look almost ethereal.
She moved like water.
Crack. Slash. Splash.
A water serpent — three meters long, composed of compressed liquid — shot toward a cluster of fighters. It struck the first man in the chest and exploded, sending him flying into two of his companions. Before the others could react, the girl was among them, chakrams flashing in pale arcs.
Shing. Shing. Shing.
Three fighters dropped in seconds. The chakrams returned to her hands like loyal pets, dripping red.
Kael recognized her.
Ruby Churchill.
The name surfaced from briefings he’d read back in the estate 3 years ago.
The Churchill family — an old aristocratic house from World One, the capital world, with deep political connections but declining military power. Sebastian’s mother, Lady Cordelia Churchill, had come from this family.
During the Vorn conquest of the Thirteen Worlds, World One had proven challenging for one reason: the Churchills. They weren’t the strongest militarily, but their political influence and social connections had made them the linchpin of resistance on the capital world. The Vorns could conquer through force, but they couldn’t govern without legitimacy.
The solution had been marriage.
Cordelia Churchill had been offered to the Family Head as the Eighth Wife — beautiful, charming, politically skilled. She navigated high society with effortless grace and made the Vorns seem almost civilized. For six years, she was the family’s public face, the woman who smoothed over the rough edges of military conquest with aristocratic polish.
Then it all fell apart.
Two things destroyed her. First: Sebastian’s failed awakening. A Discard son from the "prestigious" Churchill bloodline was an embarrassment. The political elites of World One whispered that the Vorns had married damaged goods.
Second: Cordelia was caught sharing family secrets with a Churchill family intermediary. Whether she was spying for her family or simply maintaining innocent contact with her relatives had never been definitively proven. The Family Head didn’t bother to investigate. He simply acted.
Cordelia was exiled to World Twelve — a frozen frontier world with minimal Vorn presence. She was given a small estate, a modest stipend. The once-beautiful socialite was now a gaunt, trembling woman who watched frozen skies and waited for a visit from her uncaring son that would never come.
The Churchill family itself had been punished. Their influence declined, their territories shrank, their once-proud name became a cautionary tale about crossing the Vorns.
But they still produced talented children.
Ruby Churchill was their prodigy. Water manipulation and Misdirection — both abilities awakened simultaneously, a rarity in the family’s history. Blue grade talent. Mana Heart Rank 5 at the age of twenty-three. Even Garrett De Vorn, with the same blue grade talent, was only Rank 7 at 30.
What she was doing on World Thirteen, so far from her home planet, Kael had no idea.
Ruby’s head snapped up. Her pale eyes — the color of winter ice — locked onto the cloaked figure floating above the compound.
Another one of them.
She raised her hand. Mana gathered.
SWOOSH.
A water serpent erupted from the ground beneath Kael’s position, rising at terrifying speed — thirty meters of compressed liquid shaped into a serpentine form with jaws wide enough to swallow a man whole.
Kael activated Lightning Body.
White arcs exploded across his body as his physical form converted to living lightning. He dropped from the sky like a falling star, the water serpent passing through the space he’d occupied a fraction of a second earlier. The serpent crashed into the building behind him, detonating in a spray of water and shattered stone.
Crash! Splash!
Kael touched down on a rooftop and turned to track Ruby’s position.
She was gone.
The space where she’d been standing was empty. No water trails, no mana signatures, no indication of which direction she’d moved. His Spirit Eyes scanned the courtyard — nothing. His gravity sense searched for mass displacement — nothing.
"She’s fast," he murmured. Then, after a moment’s analysis: "No. She used misdirection to deceive my senses. That’s one dangerous ability."
A smirk crossed his face beneath the hood.
Let’s see what else you can do.
Above him.
Kael’s Spirit Eyes caught the movement a fraction of a second before his conscious mind processed it. Ruby descended from the sky — chakrams in both hands, eyes fixed on him with cold killing intent.
Shing. Shing.
The chakrams slashed toward his neck and waist in a cross pattern, wind screaming around the spinning blades. The weapons were at least Tier 1 weapons based on the runic engravings along the edges, the mana conductivity channels and it’s lethal sharpness.
Kael activated Shadow Step and Lightning Body simultaneously.
His form flickered as he dodged the first chakram by centimeters and let the second pass through an afterimage. Ruby’s eyes widened slightly. Her misdirection had failed to register his evasion until after it happened.
She recovered instantly. Both chakrams returned to her hands through some mechanism Kael couldn’t identify — magnetic attraction, perhaps, or a specialized retrieval technique.
"You’re not one of them," she said. "Who are you?"