The air in the cell block suddenly turned heavy, the smell of ozone thickening until it was a suffocating weight. Inside Cell 402, the space next to Maya began to shimmer and warp.
Slowly, the light bent back into place, and the Shadow Veil dissolved.
Kael stood there, his tall, lean frame crackling with a faint golden static. His eyes weren't human; they were twin pits of white-hot celestial lightning. The golden-haired girl shrieked, scrambling back, while the twenty buyers and the Syndicate handlers froze, their eyes bulging as they realized a stranger had been standing inches from them the entire time.
"Who the hell are you!?" Marcus screamed, his cybernetic eye spinning frantically as it failed to read Kael's power level. "How did you get past the sensors!?"
Kael didn't look at the cages. He looked directly at Marcus, his voice a low, vibrating hum that seemed to come from the walls themselves. "I am your death."
A momentary silence followed, then General Grime let out a booming, gravelly laugh. The other buyers joined in, a chorus of Rank-D and Rank-C mockery filling the hall.
"Your death?" Grime sneered, his shadow-aura flaring. "Kid, you're a Rank-E brat who crawled into the wrong hole. You're in the wrong place at the very worst time."
"No," Kael said, his shadow stretching across the floor as the lights overhead began to flicker and pop. "I am exactly at the place where I should be right now."
"Kill him!" Marcus barked at his Syndicate guards. "Don't damage the girls, just gut the boy!"
Five Syndicate guards, all high Rank-D combatants, lunged forward with tactical mana-blades. To them, they were moving at peak human speed. To Kael, they were moving through molasses.
Kael didn't use a spell. He used Agility (82).
He became a blur of golden light, vanishing from the spot. Before the guards could even blink, a series of sickening, wet thuds echoed through the chamber. Kael reappeared in the center of the hall, his hands clean, standing perfectly still.
For a heartbeat, the guards stood frozen. Then, simultaneously, all five dropped to their knees, their faces turning a ghastly shade of grey. Their tactical trousers were shredded, soaked in immediate, heavy crimson. Kael hadn't aimed for their hearts or their throats. He had moved with surgical, god-like precision, his fists moving faster than the speed of sound to utterly pulverize their private parts into a red mist.
The screams that tore from the Syndicate members were primal—high-pitched, agonizing wails that echoed off the concrete walls. They clutched themselves, rolling on the floor in a state of shock that surpassed any battlefield injury.
"I told you," Kael said, looking down at the writhing men with a cold, detached disgust. "I'm not here to kill you yet. That would be too merciful."
He turned his gaze toward the buyers—the Baron, the Madame, and the General. The laughter had died. The Rank-D buyers were backing away, their hands trembling as they realized they hadn't even seen him move.
The screaming of the mutilated Syndicate guards provided a haunting orchestral backdrop to the sudden, icy shift in the room's atmosphere. Kael stood in the center of the kill zone, his presence expanding until the very molecules of oxygen in the warehouse felt like they were buzzing with ten thousand volts of electricity.
Baron Vane, Madame Sola, and General Grime—the three Rank-C pillars of Silverport's underworld—finally felt the primal instinct of prey. Their auras flared instinctively, shadows coiling around the General's boots and toxic crimson mist leaking from the Madame's sleeves. But before they could even utter a syllable of a high-tier incantation, Kael snapped his fingers.
"[MANA BIND: ETERNAL RESTRAINT]"
The air didn't just shimmer; it fractured. From the reinforced concrete floor and the lead-lined ceiling, hundreds of spectral, golden chains erupted with the speed of light. These weren't the flickering, temporary bindings of a mortal mage. Fueled by Infinite Mana and a Divine Class, the chains were solid, humming with a frequency that bypassed physical armor and latched directly onto the mana cores of the three VIPs.
Baron Vane's silver-tipped cane clattered to the floor as his arms were wrenched behind his back, pinned to the wall by glowing shackles. Madame Sola's crimson mist was instantly sucked into the golden links, her body suspended three feet off the ground in a star-shaped spread. General Grime, the strongest among them, roared and flexed his shadow-clothed muscles, but the more he struggled, the tighter the divine mana bit into his flesh, searing his skin with holy ozone. They weren't dead—Kael needed them conscious to witness the end—but they were utterly, biologically immobilized.
Kael turned his gaze toward the seventeen remaining Rank-D buyers. These men and women, who had spent their lives purchasing the freedom of others, now scrambled backward, drawing their mana-blades and staves in a frantic, disorganized circle.
"Kill him! He's just a mage!" one buyer screamed, lunging forward with a Rank-D [Heavy Strike] skill.
Kael didn't dodge. He wanted to calibrate his Divine Body against the peak of human capability. He stood perfectly still as the heavy claymore smashed into his shoulder.
CLANG.
The sound wasn't of bone breaking, but of steel hitting a mountain of solid diamond. The buyer's arms vibrated so violently from the recoil that his elbows literally dislocated. Kael didn't have a single scratch on his jacket.
"My turn," Kael whispered.
He moved. At 82 Agility, Kael wasn't just fast; he was a glitch in reality. To the Rank-D buyers, he simply ceased to exist in one spot and reappeared in another, leaving a trail of golden afterimages. He began his assessment. He caught a spear mid-thrust and snapped the shaft with two fingers; he took a fireball to the chest and inhaled the flames, his Thunder Divine Body converting the heat into a momentary spark in his eyes.
He was four times stronger, five times faster, and infinitely more durable than any human at his rank. The realization was cold and absolute. These people weren't opponents; they were fragile porcelain dolls.
And then, the "Feast" turned into a surgical nightmare.
Kael didn't use lightning. He used the shattered remains of the buyers' own weapons. He blurred through the crowd, a whirlwind of gold and shadow.
SHLICK. SNAP. SHLICK.
The sounds of the next sixty seconds were a rhythmic, terrifying tally of justice. Kael moved with the terrifying precision of a machine. He didn't aim for vitals. He aimed for mobility. With surgical strikes, he severed the Achilles tendons and femoral nerves of all seventeen buyers. As they collapsed to the floor, howling and clutching their ruined legs, Kael didn't stop.
He caught each of their right hands by the wrist. With a flick of his fingers, he didn't just cut—he used high-frequency mana blades to cauterize the wounds just enough so they wouldn't bleed out in seconds, but left the nerves exposed to the air. Seventeen right hands, the hands they had used to sign checks and point at "merchandise," were sliced clean off at the wrist, hitting the floor in a grisly pile.
"You like to own things," Kael said, his voice echoing through the chamber where hundreds of girls were now waking up to witness the carnage. "Now you own nothing. Not even the ability to walk away. Not even the hands to feed yourselves."
The cell block was now a lake of shallow blood and severed limbs. Seventeen Rank-D buyers were slumped against the cages they had come to inspect, their legs useless, their right arms ending in charred, weeping stumps. They were alive, but they were broken beyond any magical healing. They were destined to die slowly in this dark, cold warehouse, reflecting on every life they had sold, while the three Rank-C "Masters" watched in paralyzed horror from their golden chains.
Kael stood in the center of the bloodbath, his boots clean, his eyes fixed on the Baron.