Chapter 41: A Woman's Honor

The young girl was dressed in a tattered long gown, her bare feet stained with blood. Fresh wounds marred her arms and legs, still unhealed. Her face was delicate and elegant, her large eyes both ethereal and dazed like those of a helpless creature caught unprepared.

Yet the demonkin's instinct screamed danger—even though this girl had not even reached the rank of Warlord.

In her hand was an enormous battle cleaver, disproportionately large for her small frame. A bulging backpack, nearly half her size, trailed behind her packed with an assortment of weapons sticking part way out: handguns, blades, and even heavy weapons like axes—all a sight chilling and unnerving on sight.

This assembly of armaments exuded terror even from afar.

The demonkin clenched his nerves and questioned coldly, voice remarkably tempered for someone of the Highborn of Darkness—for he had barely survived a critical beatdown at Qian Ye's hands and his usual abilities were still functioning only because he had activated his racial battle arts forcefully.

The girl's voice was light and soft, almost airy as if carried by distant music, like from afar: "I'm named Bai Kongzhao. I can bet, truly, you don't want to hear this name."

The demonkin shuddered visibly as expected, because that was undeniably his most loathed name now. During the brutal iron curtain battles, she was among the most memorable and dangerous human prodigies to leave bloody marks upon the forces of Evernight. She followed closely after the Empire's Twin Stars—Qian Ye and Zhao Jundu—and then Song Zining—so ran the legends.

What rendered Bai particularly horrifying was how efficiently brutal and ruthless she was, achieving carnage and destruction despite being of low rank—without question a devil in the eyes of the dark races.

Terror surged as he forced a surge of his remaining power through his body and lunged desperately.

Facing a foe reduced to merely less than a third strength at best and still reeling, Bai Kongzhao evaded effortlessly and brought her monstrous cleaver slicing downward, neatly lopping off his lower leg.

Screaming in utter anguish from his sudden dismemberment, he rolled and fell, freshly reopening his still-mending chest wound and spilling forth blood anew.

Bai Kongzhao approached calmly, the cleaver dripping dark blood, her voice echoing her ghostly tone. "I forgot to mention: no matter whether or not either you wish for death, either way it grants me delight all the same."

“Y—you, what are you seeking?!” the demonkin stammered through horror. Already betrayed in the face of Qian Ye once—the humiliation would be easier endured if repeated.

Yet without a hint of remorse or hesitation, Bai Kongzhao took one further deliberate step forward and planted her foot upon the severed stump of her adversary’s leg. Screams nearly drove him unconscious in agony again.

Not until the tortured screams had dragged on for a sufficient while did Bai remove her bare foot. Only then did she add, "It's your clan's cultivation secrets I seek."

"My clan techniques?" the demonkin echoed in bewilderment, truly unable to suspect such a wish.

For their secret cultivation arts were essentially ineffective if used by any race aside from their own. They had been passed through their family lineages, tied irrevocably for countless millennia to blood powers mystically connected to Totems, shared among certain high families alone. Even for fellow demonkin of different lineages trying to copy them, their effectiveness would be halved.

Secrets distinguished powerful highblooded lineages from nobodies of lesser rank. Yet they were never considered highly classified due simply to how specialized and inefficient the secrets were for other bloodlines—should leakage occur, uselessness would result anyway, for only specific inherited blood powers truly enabled these techniques to shine in full terrifying force.

The mere consideration that the secret could become a weapon against the demonkin was laughable—their Totemic forces were birth-given by the primordial Rules governing reality itself. Rules of reality—how could rules themselves be destroyed? It was as impossible as imagining the world itself cracked and sundered entirely.

So then why would a human like Bai need them?

But it proved irrelevant; in the situation at that moment, he sought only a reprieve from further agony. He relinquished all he knew regarding the techniques hastily.

Bai Kongzhao pressed with over a dozen pointed questions and then made him repeat the knowledge fully. Many iterations later, when sure of its unvarnished truth, a flick of her deadly cleaver passed—off his head spun cleanly.

"Y—you, deceive me!" came his last shriek from the severed head.

Bai Kongzhao gave a guileless, childish smile in reply. “Could you expect otherwise from a girl's words?”

Thud.

The beheaded demonkin's skull met the substance-rich floor. Though his mind burned with something yet unsaid, his mouth uttered nothing past ragged wind escaping torn muscles. His pouring lifeblood touched the ground, as if waking the latent monstrous forces buried there. It animated the floor, creeping forth, embracing that still-conscious severed head.

As Bai leaned down to rummage through the headless torso, suddenly her silhouette froze—her body briefly tense. Almost imperceptibly, she relaxed—but it was merely deceptive pliancy. Rather than stooping, she crouched low upon the ground, every muscle coiled predatorily like an ambush beast ready to explode.

From beyond the fog appeared Dusk's silhouette, emerging as if she had risen from its core, so fluidly did the ambient swirling tendrils blend with her—perhaps they were her own.

Meeting Bai head-on, Dusk allowed only a seductive smile onto her face. “Such a perspective… how well I share in its sentiment. Even our enemies mirror one another closely. Truly unfortunate, it seems, to kill something with such potential. However…”

Before Dusk might finish, suddenly Bai's head turned sharply behind her, her usually composed countenance flashing with raw terror at something unseen there.

Smirking, Dusk paid absolutely no attention to turning around and simply said, "A cheap ploy suitable for childish displays. Shall we cast aside such lesser trickery? We ought to treat one another with the respect due superior talents.”

Even so, Bai still showed the horror of prey in the presence of a predator. She seemed wholly unaware of Dusk’s words, and despite the imminent vulnerability such a movement might create, Bai instead exploded sideways in a swift burst, darting backward, fleeing at a dizzying speed deep through the forest shadow.

For every additional hundred meters put between them would bring her closer to slipping away from Dusk completely.

Not about to let her prey escape, Dusk recalled well her long surveillance of this hunter Bai over the years along the iron curtain battlefront. By all measures of dangerous human killers—though Zhao might surpass her somewhat—Bai's deadly potential was not far behind at her most lethal.

The mist flowed violently apart. In the blink of an eye, Dusk crossed tens of meters in pursuit, racing after Bai like a hunting feline.

Yet as she passed through Bai's previous position, an instinctive warning suddenly flared. She twisted aside with instantaneous reaction.

The ground rumbled, then a blazing infernal pillar shot upward from the ruptured earth. The shockwave slammed directly into Dusk, tearing her sideways through the air before hurling her into the trunks of ancient trees behind her. Her body rebounded after the impact.

Stumbling into an ungraceful landing, Dusk's head reeled in shock mixed with intense ire. Turning toward the source of the explosion with narrowed eyes, she found scorched terrain and no remains. Even the ever-present substrate of the terrain itself seemed burned away. A crater now filled the space—evidence of an enormous explosion, with at least seven or eight vampire-force explosive cores detonated in unison beneath where Bai had been standing.

Even Dusk's exceptional perception had no idea exactly when the sly girl had hidden traps within the ground. Reviewing every action she could recall, the timing most certainly aligned with the moment after Bai decapitated the demonkin. As she approached the corpse, just as Dusk herself appeared, Bai had concealed her movements from a blind spot using the angle of her body—that single critical instant had been enough.

By the time Dusk recovered, Bai had long since vanished into the haze.

A single furious stomp rang out with her exasperation—she admitted she had underestimated this girl's venomous and agile nature. Gnashing her teeth, she snorted coldly. "We'll have another reckoning eventually. Wherever you flee, I can track you!"

Yet another howl reverberated, fierce and powerful. Recognition sparked: William, famed as a fierce duelist and Dusk’s equal over long years along the iron curtain battlefront. Yet Dusk had no wish to meet such an adversary without the restraints of that battlefield here and now.

She analyzed distances and positions—and reluctantly stopped. Faced with unavoidable reality, she swore, "Fine. This once I'll graciously let your neck slip free. But that wolf ahead—test him at your peril.”

In terms of pure combat strength, even several dozen Bai Kongzhaos would struggle to match that brutish Wolf Lord head-on. Bai’s combat techniques and sly exterior, masking lethal instincts, might still prove a thorn more irritating than manageable—perhaps, under some strange misfortune, it would be the wolf who tasted humiliation today.

An image involuntarily painted itself in her mind: the wolf spinning in circles, chasing his own tail after being thoroughly duped.

Part of her wavered toward resuming the chase anyway.

Then she hesitated, recalling why stopping was necessary.

William was, in certain lights, an honorable warrior, and his rigid moral code was often mistaken for clumsiness. Yet within that stubbornness lay a terrifying habit—if Dusk was present, then regardless of what was said, if he happened to be in the mood, a fight would happen. Whether in anger or in delight, he would beat first and speak later.

Dusk had spent years attempting sincere discussion, seeking change, seeking a truce. The Monroe family's diplomatic approaches had always leaned toward moderation, especially under the present internal and external pressures, where they had neither reason nor desire to prolong conflict against such pinnacle elites.

Yet Dusk herself had never understood how the talks broke down, time and again, into unavoidable confrontation, and every conflict ended with her in a worse state.

Experience dictated that, after being beaten repeatedly, a better alternative was to play games of trickery and illusion against his blunt force. Yet even one such deception had nearly cost Dusk her life; had it not been for a fortunate recovery, she would have died—and that incident had shattered even her previous assumptions about William's limits.

From then on, he regarded Dusk with more suspicion than ever. In the last iron curtain clash, he had ambushed and nearly destroyed Dusk entirely, forcing her to expend one precious life-saving treasure.

Even some elder vampires had said of William that perhaps he was thoughtless, yes—but “slow” was the wrong word. Once he made up his mind, he became a truly formidable opponent.

Though Dusk herself had heard such words whispered countless times, instinct refused to accept that the wolf's mind could truly be as sharp as her own.

At that moment, meeting William was not appealing in the least.

William represented a force that caused headaches: singular-minded determination combined with terrifying might—the perfect formula for trouble.

After casting one lingering glance in the direction of the howl, Dusk turned and left. Not a hundred strides later, her eyes caught a flicker—a blue flash at the edge of her vision. Alarmed, she turned quickly. Over a kilometer away, a blue streak flew through the air!

Not an ordinary blue. The brilliance of a blade was unmistakably sharp and violent despite the fog-choked terrain. A luminous arc visible across such a distance spoke of terrifyingly honed power—the kind impossible to match.

Color drained from Dusk's face, her instincts screaming with certainty that she would have been reduced to dust had it struck her head-on.

The sharp energy bore the unmistakable signature of dawn-force. It could only belong to a certain powerful figure of the Empire who had recently arrived.

She shifted course at once and departed, her pace now far more hurried than before.

A thousand meters away, where brilliant sword-light surged again, an injured spider demon count staggered backward, clutching his grievously torn left shoulder. Blood streamed down. His arm was gone, and even the shoulder had been partly sheared clean through. He had never even had the time to activate Spider Form, which might perhaps have lessened his injury somewhat.

Before him, Li Kuanglan stepped forth from the shadows of the trees. With every graceful step she took toward her trembling adversary, a predatory aura radiated from her. Her devilishly beautiful eyes were locked upon the spider noble like a hunter upon prey—and in those eyes there was now an edge even sharper than the sword she leveled before her.

A crystalline, water-blue blade sang with both music and silence. Clear and transparent as crystal, it seemed forged from the deepest heart of winter itself.