CHAPTER 162: ANNIHILATION AND UGLINESS

It was too late. The speed of Wang Yu's alchemical firearm was a notch faster than a knight's movement. Although preemptive judgment could make dodging bullets manageable, once inertia set in, it became impossible for Morak to evade in time.

A molten streak of crimson cut through the dimly lit space, leaving behind a glaring trajectory that vanished in an instant—only to explode upon impact with Morak.

The specially crafted bullet, infused with a massive amount of magic and energy, erupted with searing heat in a blinding flash, unleashing devastating force upon Morak.

A charged shot powerful enough to twist and bend a rune-reinforced metal door struck him at point-blank range. Wang Yu had taken full advantage of his mistake. The impact released destructive energy straight onto his body, melting and warping his light armor before shattering it into fragments.

The remaining force tore through the armor, completely engulfing Morak's body. The explosion struck him directly and sent him flying. His skin blistered and cracked from the burns, while his muscles and bones were torn and broken under the terrifying force of the attack.

Morak's body skidded across the ground, leaving a trail of debris, charred clothing, and melted armor on the ground. Finally, the residual impact sent him slamming into the wall. He collapsed limply.

Even a grand knight would have suffered grievous injuries from a direct hit by Fury of the Forge—and Morak had yet to reach that level. Though his body appeared intact, his chest had been violently carved out. The resulting wound was horrifying: charred flesh, fractured ribs, and bone shards protruding outward.

The sheer shockwave from the explosion had destroyed most of his internal organs. After all, not everyone had Wang Yu's monstrous regenerative abilities. Morak was as good as finished.

But Gilbert, an experienced Nightblade, never made a habit of taking things for granted. Seizing the perfect opening that Wang Yu had created, he lunged forward, his sword wreathed in the ethereal glow of his Spectral Blade.

At the exact moment Morak crashed into the wall and slumped down, Gilbert drove his blade forward.

The phantom-like edge bypassed all defenses, shredding through Morak's ruined armor, piercing his exposed flesh and muscle, and finally slicing through his cracked ribs to impale the still-struggling heart beneath.

"N-No... help... me, I'm... from a... noble... family..." Blood gushed uncontrollably from Morak's punctured heart, spilling out through the gaping wound left by Gilbert's sword. The knight's physique allowed him to utter a few last words, even with his heart torn open.

At death's door, Morak desperately tried to reveal his noble connections, hoping this would make the Nightblades spare him. But even if there were such a chance, Wang Yu wasn't about to take it.

A standard alchemical bullet from Wang Yu's revolver punched through Morak's temple, snuffing out his consciousness instantly. His final words faded in a whisper, swallowed by the silence of his lifeless body.

"I don't know anything about your background. Just clearing out a heretic cult, that's all," Wang Yu remarked, holstering his revolver as he pursed his lips.

No matter what others might think, the Nightblades would officially classify this operation as a routine purge of heretical cultists in the capital's shadow.

As for the connection between the Abyss Cult and certain noble families, how would the Nightblades possibly know anything about that? There was no need to talk nonsense.

"Wang Yu, your strength is truly impressive. Without your help, taking down this cult leader wouldn't have been easy," Gilbert murmured, glancing at the gaping, charred wound in Morak's chest.

He couldn't help but marvel at the sheer power of Wang Yu's shot. Even if he hadn't finished him off, Morak wouldn't have survived without immediate medical attention.

"It's normal if it's two against one," Wang Yu replied casually. He walked over to the lever Morak had pulled earlier, which had spewed mental corruption into the hideout, and pushed it back into place.

As the passage to the Abyss gradually sealed, the mental corruption began to dissipate.

"The ability to disperse mental corruption is truly invaluable to us. Praise be to the Lady of the Night," Gilbert murmured, closing his eyes in gratitude.

He signaled for the other Nightblades to enter and clear the battlefield. Strangely, despite having fought in this corrupted environment, he felt no dizziness or mental disarray, symptoms that usually followed such encounters.

Taking a deep breath, he sincerely praised the Lady of the Night's divine power.

"Let's see..." Wang Yu walked over to the counter where Morak had been standing earlier. As he swept his surroundings with his ripples, he quickly discovered a hidden compartment. He shattered the counter's casing with a forceful grip, causing a ledger to fall out.

Picking it up, he flipped through the pages. This was one of the Nightblades' primary objectives—a record of transactions between the Cult of the Abyss and certain nobles.

Wang Yu clicked his tongue in displeasure as he skimmed through the ledger's contents, then tossed it to Gilbert.

Gilbert took the book and read through it more carefully. As he did, his expression darkened, his fingers tightening involuntarily around the pages.

If Wang Yu didn't nudge his hand, a reminder for him to stay calm, he might have torn the fragile pages to shreds.

"These... these monsters..." Gilbert's voice trembled. The sheer anger boiling inside him was impossible to suppress. His fist slammed onto the counter, cracking the surface, but the destruction did nothing to quell the rage raging within him.

Even someone like Gilbert—who had witnessed countless atrocities, both from ruthless criminals and unspeakable voidborn horrors—was filled with utter fury at the accounts recorded in this book.

What angered him most was one particular entry. The victims were people he knew: a family from a slum near the Nightblades' base in the capital's shadow. The father had once been a gang member, crippled by old injuries that left him unable to work or train. He was bedridden and relied on his aging wife and young daughter for care.

To make ends meet, the mother and daughter took on hazardous alchemical factory jobs—melting steel, handling catalysts, and the like, which were dangerous but paid decently.

The Nightblades occasionally needed help from locals for intelligence gathering or as couriers. Gilbert and his comrades had worked with this family a few times.

In a ruthless city ruled by self-interest, the two women were hardly saints, but they were reliable and decent—rare qualities in the capital's shadow.

Then, one day, they vanished. At first, Gilbert assumed they had simply abandoned the sick father, unable to afford to care for him anymore. It was a tragic reality of their world. But later, when passing by their home, curiosity led him to peek through a broken window.

Inside, he saw the withered corpse of the father, curled up on the bed, starved to death...

Gilbert had always believed himself to be a good man, one of the few willing to fight for the people of the kingdom. Even so, what he had seen stayed with him.

He thought it had just been another cruel twist of fate—until now. The ledger revealed the truth.

A noble had taken a liking to the mother and daughter—not for their beauty, which was unremarkable, but for the sheer thrill of exploiting those from the undercity.

They were handed over to the Cult of the Abyss, who took advantage of abyssal corruption to shatter their minds before subjecting them to unspeakable horrors.

In their final moments, even as their minds broke, both mother and daughter clung tightly to a locket containing a photo of their family.

The cultists, amused, threw that locket into the abyss. The last thing the two women saw was that locket falling into the endless darkness. Chasing after it, they too plunged into the abyss...

The cold indifference of the ledger's writing made Gilbert's blood boil with rage, but what sickened him even more was the casual amusement woven into the words. These were monsters, utterly inhuman monsters.

"Damn it... We should have wiped out this scum sooner, no matter the cost." Gilbert suppressed the emotions surging within him, forcing himself to remain calm as he quickly took stock of the critical information hidden within these dark dealings.

Some of the people involved would soon face the Nightblades' reckoning.

"No one truly knows what these so-called lunatics have done under the guise of their madness. It may already be too late, but at least we've purged them all now."

Wang Yu shook his head. Some things could never be undone. The only course of action left to them was to slaughter every last one of these damnable beasts.

"Indeed..." Gilbert nodded, closing the ledger marred with filth and sin. He walked to a corner of the stronghold, lifted a wooden plank from the floor, and revealed the deep, gaping abyss below.

Mental corruption seeped up from the chasm. Gilbert did not pray. He allowed the corruption to sting his soul, embracing the pain it brought.

Compared to the revulsion and disgust welling up from within, this slight pain was far easier to endure.

"Throw the bodies down here, then burn this place to the ground. If you find any further remnants of the cult, inform any Nightblades team immediately. They'll be eradicated right away."

Wang Yu stood before the passage noted in the ledger, which was used to dispose of those marked for elimination. His voice was cold as he issued his orders.

One by one, the broken corpses of the Abyss cultists were kicked into the chasm. These beasts, who had masqueraded as worshippers of the Abyss, were finally granted the ‘ultimate honor' of embracing the Abyss in death. A pity—too little, too late.

Alchemical incendiaries, scattered throughout the cult's stronghold, ignited as Wang Yu conjured flames via wizardry. The fire quickly spread, consuming everything within its grasp. These raging flames would reduce everything to ash—the traces of sin and the evidence linking the cult to certain nobles alike.

The Nightblade purge had nothing to do with the nobility. They didn't know which nobles these cultists served, nor the foul deeds these lunatics had committed under the guise of madness.

Anyone who inquired or examined the Nightblades' records would find only one explanation—this was merely a routine operation to eradicate a cult worshiping an evil god.

As for why the purge happened so suddenly, the answer was simple: the Nightblades had discovered a method to counteract the cult's use of mental corruption. The moment they gained the means to do so, they moved swiftly to exterminate what had once been an elusive threat.

Within moments, the evidence proving that the Nightblades knew about the cultists' ties to the nobles had vanished within the roaring flames consuming the cult's stronghold...

"Hey! When did you all come in? Let me check whether you've stolen anything." The barkeep scowled as several Nightblades emerged from within the tavern, his tone laced with dissatisfaction.

Since they kept their faces hidden beneath their hoods, the barkeep assumed they were thieves who had used the Lady of the Night's power to conceal themselves and infiltrate the cult's hidden stronghold. As one of the Abyss cult's informants, he had backing—and didn't fear a group of faceless, suspicious figures who appeared to be mere burglars.

Gilbert's sword cut through the air without hesitation. The barkeep's head, still wearing an expression of annoyance, flew into the air, blood spraying from his neck in a crimson arc before both his severed head and lifeless body thudded to the ground.

As drunken patrons in the tavern screamed in terror, the Nightblades wordlessly walked out of this den of sin that had long been overdue for reckoning.

Wang Yu had been listening through the prayer network when he heard a voice beside Gilbert speaking with the unmistakable tone of royalty. That was when he first began to suspect the true reason behind the chaos in the capital's shadow and the existence of the slums by the inner walls aboveground, so jarringly out of place amidst the capital's splendor.

Did the royal family have the power to govern the capital's shadow? Of course. If the nobles could extend their influence here, then the royal family certainly had the means to impose order as well. And could they improve the conditions of the wall district? Absolutely.

So why hadn't they? Wang Yu's thoughts drifted back to his first arrival in the capital's shadow—to that moment atop one of the three lighthouses, when he had first encountered the nascent will of the Abyss. The malice and chaos contained within... It hadn't affected him, but it made one thing clear—there was definitely something lurking beneath the Abyss.

"What exactly are you trying to cultivate down there...?" Wang Yu curled his lips in disdain. The Abyss had been formed by the mental energy overflowing from the capital's residents. The Mirror of the Stars, an unusual curio owned by the royal family, had been used to invert this energy and send it pouring downward, at which point it had coalesced into the Abyss.

From the capital's shadow, the inner walls, and all the crime-ridden corners of the capital, potent mental energy gathered and flowed into the Abyss below—almost as if it were feeding something. Was this what the royal family wanted? To nurture whatever lay beneath?

Hugin stared at the contents of the ledger transmitted through the communication crystal. Unlike Gilbert, his expression did not shift. He merely read through the accounts of the cult's depravity in silence, slowly exhaling wisps of smoke from his pipe.

The smoke curled and twisted through the room, shrouding his face in a hazy veil. As it churned, it took the familiar shape of a figure that often lingered near Hugin—the smoke demon. Its shrill voice rang in Hugin's ears, laced with mockery.

"My, my... Hugin, look at what your own kind have done. Honestly, compared to us, I'd say they're far more like demons. At least most demons—excluding myself, of course—are idiots. They'd never have the brains to come up with so many twisted ways to torment humans.

"Aren't you Nightblades supposed to handle things like this, dealing with voidspawn, demons, and criminals who threaten the empire's people? Are you really not going to clean up the scum in this ledger? Oh? Family members, are they? Well then, never mind. After all, you can't afford to make enemies of them, can you? How pathetic."

The smoke demon's voice droned on, each word a relentless taunt, ridiculing Hugin's helplessness—just as it always did. Normally, Hugin would have silenced its chatter, but today, he let it speak. The demon noticed his unusual silence and looked at him with curiosity.

"Perhaps," Hugin murmured coldly. "Perhaps Father Fang was right. This empire has accumulated too much rot. It needs change—and that change will require blood. The Nightblades cannot play that role, but a fabricated organization might."

Memories stirred in Hugin's mind, conjuring images he wished to erase. He would not allow history to repeat itself. Perhaps something like the Assassins' Brotherhood that Wang Yu had once mentioned should exist, after all.