"My King, you really are untrustworthy."
"Ugh—Kane, that hurt!"
The two continued their conversation, unbothered by everything else happening around them.
"Blood Dance: Hurricane!"
The same technique that had leveled the room of that noble 'pig' erupted through the air.
'If I can't open the door, I'll destroy it,' Katarina thought. She was quick-witted, but the problem lay elsewhere.
'What!?' The door didn't so much as crack. What surprised her more was that nothing else did either—only the teacups on the coffee table shifted a few millimeters.
"How?" She looked around the room, searching for an answer.
*Yawn...* "You're much weaker than your sister."
"Ugh..." Katarina already knew that, but hearing it from Xalier—delivered with a yawn in the middle of her attack—stung all the same.
'So much defense... I can't get out.' She'd known from the start that this room, the king's study, would be reinforced with heavy magical defenses.
But knowing it and feeling the difference were two different things.
"Blood Lotus!"
With no way to escape, she changed tactics. All thousand of her blood blades froze mid-air, then turned as one and rained down on Xalier.
"Hm..."
Xalier calmly watched them arrive.
"This is a little better."
The blades crashed into the nearly transparent crimson aura surrounding his body.
One after another.
None reached him.
"But something still bothers me..."
"What is it, My King?" Kane asked while watching the barrage.
'Tsk. Still not enough!' Katarina bit back her frustration, annoyed that even now the two men had simply gone back to chatting like she wasn't there.
"Death Lotus!"
Black energy erupted from her body.
At the same time, threads of pale lime-green wind energy wound around the blood blades.
The pressure inside the office rose another level.
"Thousand Edge!"
Fresh blood streamed from her wrists.
It gathered inside her hands before forming two elegant, curved daggers unlike any of the other crude droplet blades.
She took one light step, pushed off it, and began to spin.
"Eat this!" She hurled the daggers, laced with both Death Energy and Wind Energy.
"...Hm?"
For the first time—
The crimson aura around Xalier rippled.
The daggers pushed several centimeters into it before finally stopping.
A smile slowly appeared on Xalier's face.
"Finally. We're getting somewhere," he said, unbothered, before turning back to Kane. "See? I'm the king, and still nobody respects me."
'Just a little more!' Katarina ignored him.
She continued spinning.
Every full rotation created two more daggers she flung at him.
Two.
Then four.
Then six.
Every turn increased both her speed and the number of blades she produced.
"Oh?"
"A combo technique." Now Xalier became genuinely interested.
Without taking his eyes off the attack, he casually spoke to Kane.
"I get why the old fogeys look down on me for being young. But why do random people keep jumping me?"
'Will this finally get her angry enough?' Despite his casual tone, Xalier wasn't ignoring Katarina—he was testing her.
She was weaker than the average soldier in his army, and he knew it. What he wanted was to see if she had something more: a real trump card, something he could make use of.
Only fools went into a fight with nothing held back, and this misunderstanding had handed him the perfect excuse to find out what she was hiding.
"People are reckless, and most don't believe the stories anyway," Kane said, playing along. He understood exactly what Xalier was doing.
"What stories?"
"About your strength, my King. How is a thousand-year-old at the World Source realm supposed to sound believable?"
While they talked, barely three seconds had passed.
*AHH—!* Katarina staggered to a stop with a hoarse shout.
'Two hundred forty... that should be enough.'
Most combo skills built toward a finisher, unlocked once the counter hits a certain number.
Katarina's...
Worked differently.
"Never Ends!"
Red energy flared around her as blood streamed from her wrists. She hunched forward, hands braced on her knees, breathing hard, her legs already slick with her own blood.
"Hm? This is..." Xalier watched the spilled blood rise off the floor and reshape itself into curved daggers—the same elegant ones she'd been throwing—and felt a flicker of real interest.
"Whoa." Even Kane was caught off guard by how many appeared above her.
There were exactly two hundred forty daggers. A moment ago, that had been the total she'd thrown in three seconds. Now it was the number she fired... every second.
Xalier's own blood-red energy surged to life. For the first time, he had to actually defend.
"This is..." In seconds, over a thousand blades burned away in flames from his hands.
"How long can you keep summoning this many?" he asked, incinerating another wave, then paused, genuinely puzzled.
'Her energy... why is it draining so slowly? An attack like this on her level should have wrung her dry in seconds.'
He couldn't work out how she was sustaining it. The output should have cost her a fortune in energy, yet she barely seemed to be losing any.
'Hmh...', he thought, she'd already looked half-dead after throwing the first 240. So why wasn't this worse?
"...!" Something about the burning daggers caught his eye. Then he looked closer at the newly forming ones.
'The destroyed ones dissolve back into energy... and reform? They're identical.' As one burning blade evaporated, a fresh one took shape above Katarina.
'So the ones that lose momentum or get destroyed cycle back and rebuild. But then—' He noticed a faint pull in the air around the forming blade, like suction.
'It's also drawing on ambient energy to rebuild itself! She's not the source, she's just the host. Her own energy only fuels the initial draw; the technique does the rest on its own.'
Xalier rested a hand on his chin, fire still rippling off his other palm as he thought it through.
'If she had proper support, this could theoretically run indefinitely. This isn't a real instant killing move, but it doesn't need to be. It just makes anyone facing it retreat, because there's nothing they can do about it.'
"I knew you'd be useful. Excellent, truly excellent." A wide grin broke across his face amid the flames.
"Ugh..." Katarina forced herself upright despite her ragged coughing, unwilling to stop.
Two more daggers formed in her hands. She gripped them backward, blood running down her fingers from blades too sharp for her own grip.
"Mm?" With a quiet sigh, Xalier vanished using World Crossing, noticing something.
"Dance of the—" Katarina began calling out a new technique.
"UH?" He reappeared directly in front of her and delivered a light kick.
*Bang. Cough.* She flew back into the door and crumpled to the floor, coughing blood from the internal damage.
As she pushed herself up, "That's enough," Xalier said, appearing above her. He stepped off the air and planted his foot on her head.
*Bang. Ugh.* Her skull met the floor.
"What I told you is true," he said, lifting his foot off her. "Your sister is fine. You don't need techniques that put your life on the line."
"Hmh... Actually, that thing you were about to do, don't use it at all from now on. You're useful to me. I need you alive."
"Understood?" He extended a hand to help her up.
Katarina lifted her head without taking it. "...How?"
"What?"
"My skill tracks you even through Transcendence. How did you get above me without the daggers following?"
"Simple. I didn't use Transcendence," Xalier said with a smile, giving his outstretched hand a little shake, as if to say *take it.*
"Ugh, I don't need your help!" She swatted his hand away, or tried, and stood on her own.
"So what do you want?"
"Hm? No more questions?"
"I'm not stupid. Either you killed my sister, or you really made her swear an oath. Either way, you could've killed me just now and didn't. I'm just asking what you want. It's not like I can run from you anyway."
"Hm. I like you."
"I don't."
"Doesn't matter. Anyway, your sister really is fine. You can see her, but only at the Forest of Mystery. Go in, and she'll be there within a few minutes."
"Then I'll—"
"Wait. First, I'll tell you what your job is."
"..."
"You'll be living in the Imperial Army's barracks from now on."
"What? I'm a mercenary assassin, I—"
"Not anymore."
"What do you mean?"
"From today, you're a soldier of the Imperial Army."
"...!?"
"You'll get the same treatment as everyone else, the same credit system, meaning you can earn whatever you want based on your contributions: scrolls, cultivation methods, skills, all of it. Same training, same routine as any other soldier."
"What the hell—"
"There's only one difference."
"...What is it?" Since she clearly had no say in the matter, Katarina just asked to get it over with.
"You'll only be sent on missions against elves. And you'll use that Thousand Edge of yours to force them to retreat, one way or another."
"Try to kill as few as possible, but make it as flashy as you can. My friend here will put together a team to support and protect you."
'Why would the Vampire King want to minimize elf casualties?' It was a question that, for once, Katarina's sharp mind couldn't answer.
"I can see you have questions. Ask my good friend here for the basics." Xalier turned and pointed at Kane.
'Of course he's dumping this on me again,' Kane thought, all too familiar with how this always went.
"He'll answer everything you're allowed to know, and he'll be the one giving most of your orders going forward. Everything clear?"
"I—"
"Clear?"
"Ugh..." Reading the look on Xalier's face, Katarina knew exactly what answer was expected.
"Yes."
"Good."
Xalier stretched.
"I'll be away for..."
He thought.
"...a week."
Another pause.
"...Or perhaps a month."
"What are you going to do?" Kana asked.
"I have to go laugh at a child trying to accomplish something impossible."
World Crossing.
He disappeared.
Silence filled the office.
"..." Katarina slowly turned toward Kane.
"..." Kane let out a long sigh.
"Ask whatever you don't understand," he said, resuming his duties like nothing unusual had just happened.
'Is everyone here insane?' Katarina couldn't very well ask that, so she moved on to everything else instead.
...
Almost two hours later.
'Finally, I get to see this.' Xalier stood before the barrier, rubbing his hands together in anticipation.
"Let's see it, then!"
He stepped through.
"What the...?" What greeted him on the other side made his eyes go wide.