Chapter 19: Chapter NINETEEN

TW: Gore

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"Wang and the Sentinels traveled in a canvas cart dressed as simple nomads to pass unnoticed. At one point, the Sentinels must have sensed something was wrong and positioned themselves at the four corners of the cart to protect Wang. They were completely taken by surprise... Mark and Wayne died instantly, their heads severed."

New exclamations rang out as Zerkan's story was heard. Mia didn't know what precisely shocked the audience between the horror of the facts or particular detail, although she highly doubted that Adam could still be shocked by such a story when hearing him talk about the sacrifices necessary during a war an hour earlier.

"What killed them?" Adam asked, his voice shaking, already dreading the answer.

"The question isn't what killed them, but who killed them," Zerkan replied tensely. If I tell you that the weapon used to chop off their heads is a sickle-shaped blade..."

"Fuck…" cried Adam as Irina let out a cry of horror. "You must have seen him before, Ethan. He is a "friend" of Impervia. Solomon Arkane, does that mean anything to you?"

The Vila's features reflected his extreme concentration for a few seconds until a pout of understanding lit up his face. Immediately after, his features darkened.

"I only saw him a few times when I was younger, and I remember he had an incredibly creepy presence. He has a psychopathic look and a bloodthirsty aura that always made me frankly uncomfortable..."

"That does not surprise me. He was called "the Grim Reaper" back then. Massacring people is a hobby for him, he's sick. He was unstoppable," explained his older brother with a grimace.

Just hearing about it gave Mia goosebumps. She didn't know what he looked like, but the description of his aura was enough for her to form an image of a dreadful monster, a mountain of misshapen flesh and skin filled with war scars. If they wanted to give him a reason never to set foot on the battlefield, they had just given him a good one.

When dangerous creatures tell you that they fear a particular individual... Me, the little human, I just have to pray that I never meet him...

"Felicia and Georgia tried to climb into the cart to protect Wang, but Felicia got caught before she could get in. He planted his two sickles between her neck and her collarbones and pulled her back. She died bleeding to death a few minutes later."

"Are the details really necessary?" Ethan complained, seeing Mia squirm in her chair and bite her lip, becoming increasingly nervous.

"Might as well start accepting reality as it is immediately," Ellana said coldly and without empathy.

Ethan glared at her but held his tongue. Mia couldn't help but think she wasn't wrong, but maybe it wasn't necessary to do it now. Not that the blonde would ever feel ready to discover the horrors of the world, but her mind was still confused and turned upside down by the events of the past few days. She felt more and more alien hearing them talk about things she didn't understand as if she were just a passive spectator forced to witness terrifying things. The reality of these events hit her hard, to the point where she felt almost an outside observer of her own body, as if she were watching a film that particularly affected her, but of which she could not bring herself to be a part.

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"Georgia fought long enough for Wang to run away from the cart. Solomon pierced her skull and left to follow in Wang's footsteps a few meters further. He threw his sickle at her back to cut off her escape. He brought her back to the wagon, which he emptied by placing Georgia's body on the ground, then untied the horses to immobilize the convoy. The way we found them was totally intentional. What he did to Wang..."

"How can he know so many details about what happened?" Mia murmured, asking Ethan the question, taking advantage of the Commander's short pause to inquire.

"He's a werewolf," the Vila replied with the same loudness after probing the man's magical aura. "As long as he knows how to analyze the splashes of blood, coupled with his sense of smell, nothing can escape him on such a bloody massacre."

He's not the Sentinel Commander for nothing, I suppose.

Zerkan exhaled slowly before a long sigh. He spoke confidently, without a trace of fear in his voice, but his tone was extremely serious. His report was coming to an end, and he was obviously coming to the hardest part to tell. Or the most heartbreaking to listen to, judging by the tense faces of the individuals who were glued to the slightest of his words.

"We found her with her spine in a pulp. He completely paralyzed her so she couldn't run away, but he didn't kill her right away. If we had noticed something was wrong sooner, we might have been able to save her..."

Chills of horror run through Mia's spine in response to the Sentinel's story. It was a terrifying way to die and it was clear that Solomon wanted to torture Wang at this point. Zerkan was right, it sounded like a set-up to scare anyone who heard of what had happened. In any case, if that was their plan, it worked for the young human. It wasn't hard to imagine what Ethan's mother would do to them when she would land her hands on them if she condoned the actions of her "friend" Solomon.

We're gonna stay safe in Callis, huh...

"And the message?" Ethan inquired, impatient and in a hurry to leave now.

"An ingenious spell worthy of your mother," Zerkan continued, looking at the two brothers. "There's really only her to use such sordid gadgets and spells. Wang's body was lying in the cart, her jaw broken. At first, it was unclear why, until one of my Sentinels noticed that a small box had been placed in the back of her throat. He wanted to remove it by slipping his hand into Wang's mouth and... He triggered the spell and his hand was severed. 

"So how can you be so sure that this is a message for me?" Ethan questioned again, impervious to the sordidness of the scene.

"Igor, our chief sorcerer-engineer, was able to conduct a first analysis on the spell used after receiving the body and deduced that the trap thus reacted to any magic signature unknown to the object," Ellana explained, taking over. "He also noticed that there are initials embroidered on the box. E.D."

Ethan Darcy.

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