The Warlord's Carnal System

From the shadows, a dozen assassins emerged.

Their dark attire and head wraps, styled in the traditional fukumen fashion around their faces, made them one with the darkness itself.

Unless one possessed heightened perception, it was nearly impossible to spot attacks from these extremely trained covert operatives.

Unfortunately for them, both Ilya and Rune were awakened intermediate tier.

They could heighten their perception with the help of their auras.

Ilya could see that among the dozen assassins who materialized from the night's thick blanket, there were a few awakened. And she could sense that even the ones who weren't awakened were not to be taken lightly.

Their teamwork. Their formations. The swiftness with which they adjusted tactics according to their target's fighting style.

Ilya had found it extremely dreadful earlier when she'd escaped from their clutches barely alive and made it out of the enclave, only to be tailed by them relentlessly.

Ilya was not a fool. She understood they'd left her alive deliberately so she would lead them to her companions, if any existed.

That was why she'd tried to lead them away from the rendezvous point. To at least let Rune and his friends live.

But now...

Now she found something else dreadful.

More so than even the sight from the enclave that had shaken her to her core.

It was Rune.

He blurred into motion, a streak of crimson leaving crackling aura in his wake like dying embers.

He clashed head-on with the foremost shadow.

The shadows were quick. Though Rune didn't give them enough time to formulate a proper formation around him, the one he'd engaged held his ground admirably.

The other shadows didn't rush to engage, they positioned themselves carefully in Rune's peripheral vision.

It was a good technique to corner prey.

By always staying in the periphery, they gave the target false hope, making him think he had their movements in check while actually forcing him to lose focus on his immediate threat by concerning himself with the ones hovering just outside his direct line of sight.

With even the slightest movement from an assassin in the peripheral vision, the target was bound to momentarily shift focus onto that movement.

And even a moment of distraction was deadly when facing the royal covert unit.

But Ilya didn't see any of the difficulty she'd experienced facing their tricks reflected in Rune.

He was calm.

More importantly, he was certain.

And subtly arrogant. An arrogance backed entirely by the skills on display.

Rune side-stepped from the direct clash with the foremost shadow. The sky-blue sword in his hand screeched against the shadow's blade as he voluntarily positioned himself among the shadows.

Ilya's heartbeat rose sharply.

'What is he doing? That's suicide.'

Ilya had escaped their claws... or rather, thought she'd escaped, by making sure only one shadow at a time could clash with her, steering clear of her peripherals entirely.

But Rune was flowing... no, dancing among their swords.

A shadow drove himself forward from Rune's side, taking advantage of the fact that his focus was supposedly on the shadow he'd just exchanged a blow with.

But the sky-blue sword in Rune's hand had already moved to meet the charging shadow's blade. His body twisted sideways fluidly, giving his right hand ease of motion.

The shadow's sword made contact with Rune's and Rune guided the enemy's blade along its intended path without disturbing its trajectory.

Only now, he was no longer in that path.

The parry made the shadow stumble forward.

Rune effortlessly twirled his sword, making it vertical in his grip, and drove it into the stumbling assassin's back of the neck.

The blade revealed itself from the throat.

He twisted the sword buried in the assassin's neck and guided the body forward with a push.

The lifeless corpse was hurled toward one of the shadows in his periphery.

And without even taking advantage of the disorientation that caused, Rune quickly moved to the nearest charging shadow.

Blocking the blow from his sword, he twisted the sky-blue blade and side-stepped the assassin's trajectory.

The sword slid along his with an irritating screech.

Just as the assassin stumbled forward off-balance, Rune kicked him hard with his boot, sending him flying toward the shadow's nearest charging comrade.

Rune didn't waste time.

He immediately twisted himself and met the assassin who'd sneaked up from behind with his sword.

Flames erupted from their erratic clash.

But before the shadow could recover, Rune twirled the sword in his hand and drove it into the assassin's gut.

The shadow, unfazed, bearing pain stoically and not even faltering from the fact that steel had just torn through his insides, drove his own sword at Rune's face.

Rune moved his head aside. A crimson glint emanated from his eyes along the path of motion.

He twisted the sword embedded in the shadow's stomach.

The next moment, he swung it sideways in a wide horizontal arc.

The sword came tearing through the assassin's gut.

The shadow's legs shook violently. Blood dripped from the cloth wrapped around his face. Then his intestines fell out of his stomach in a grotesque cascade and with them, the shadow stumbled and collapsed.

Ilya simply stood there.

Watching Rune paint ruthless gore before her eyes.

But Ilya's brain was well-trained to work even under such tolling conditions. After all, she'd maintained sanity even after witnessing the events that had taken place in the enclave.

Her mind began following Rune's graceful yet destructive footwork as he danced between a dozen trained swords.

She noticed how he moved. How he maintained distance. How he used the numerical advantage of enemies against themselves by making one block the path of another, or disorienting them just enough to deal with the immediate threat.

She observed his uncanny parry techniques. His short-span encounters.

She noticed how he didn't spend more than a moment with a single enemy.

Above all, she was in awe of his aura control.

It flowed seamlessly around his body quickly traversing to the parts where he needed enhancement and immediately withdrawing from places where the task was done.

His strikes were precise. There was no wasted strength in his movements except when he struck.

He was as fluid as liquid, tearing through the shadows like he was in the middle of preparing a work of art.

The surgical precision he had in his strikes made it seem exactly like that.

It was the first time Ilya had seen someone make killing look like art.

Ilya, though possessing higher aura output, could never dream of traversing her aura that quickly and precisely throughout her circuits.

She found the whole scene as beautiful as it was deadly.

But even in the dread and gore, she found... peace.

'Is it because he's not my enemy?'

She understood the logic behind the emotion she was feeling. After all, finding peace in gore was called being insane.

Rune moved like death incarnate through the remaining shadows.

One assassin lunged from his left. Rune caught the blade mid-swing with his own, twisted, and drove his fist into the assassin's throat, collapsing the windpipe instantly. As the shadow choked and fell, Rune ripped his sword upward through the man's jaw and into his skull.

Brain matter splattered onto the gravel.

Another shadow attacked from behind. Rune spun, his blade cutting through the air in a perfect arc. It severed the assassin's arm at the elbow. Before the man could scream, Rune drove the pommel of his sword into the shadow's face, shattering the mask and the nose beneath it. The assassin fell backward, and Rune finished him with a downward stab through the chest.

The blade punctured lung and heart in one smooth motion.

A third shadow tried to retreat, realizing too late what kind of monster they were facing.

Rune closed the distance in two steps. His sword flashed. The shadow's head rolled from his shoulders, hitting the ground with a dull thud.

Blood fountained from the neck stump, painting the alley walls in arterial spray.

Rune stood amidst the carnage breathing evenly, not even winded.

Then he turned to look at Ilya.

His face was covered in crimson. His eyes glinted with the color of blood.

He lifted the sky-blue sword and the next instant, he hurled it toward her.

Shick.

Ilya gasped as blood oozed from a throat.

Gkk...

It wasn't hers.

It was the shadow who'd sneaked up behind her, one she hadn't noticed because she'd been too busy absorbing the vast amount of knowledge from the simple movements of the Warlord as he'd washed the road with crimson.

Rune turned his back to her and raised his hand as if summoning something.

But nothing came to his hand.

He paused. Turned back.

"Right..." he muttered, scavenging a piece of metal from one of the fallen.

'Did he... did he forget it wasn't his sword and try to use the homing feature?'

Rune had forgotten it was Ilya's sky-blue sword he'd been using and tried summoning it like he would Blood Raven.

'Right. His sword is still in the wagon...'

Ilya couldn't retrieve their weapons when she'd escaped the enclave. She'd barely made it out alive anyway.

Ilya looked at her sword, a graceful sky-blue shard blade in her own hands, yet a deadly instrument of a death dance in the hands of the boy before her.

She walked over to the kneeling shadow who was vomiting blood and pulled the blade free from his throat.

Not minding the gore, she shook the blood off the blade with a practiced flick.

Her brain had registered so much carnage in a single night that this didn't even register anymore.

She now felt a compelling desire to imitate Rune.

But she knew she was nowhere near capable of even making the first step of his footwork.

What Ilya didn't know was that Rune's combat techniques had all been passed down from the Beast King himself, hammered into Rune's instincts by decades of near-death training in his past life.

Of course she couldn't imitate it.

But she knew that trying was the first step to advancement.

And she wasn't going to let the huge amount of information she'd acquired in these few minutes from the boy's fight go to waste by letting it rot into nothingness.

She was going to put it into practice.

On some very unlucky shadows who were not yet dead at the hands of the blood-hungry hound.