The commander, watching all his elite comrades drop one by one like flies, completely lost his nerve.
"Retreat!!" he shouted at the top of his lungs, finally realizing the utter futility of their assault. "Fall back and regroup with the others!"
The remaining men disengaged abruptly, desperately scrambling backward to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the terrifying force they had so gravely underestimated.
At most, all of these soldiers were in the C-Rank realm. Even their commander was no higher than C+. With my ten minutes in the A-Rank realm, the gap between us was so vast that I didn't even need to use skills—just moving fast enough made it look like a complete massacre.
From their perspective, I was using grand, high-level magic. In reality, I was merely leveraging my raw speed to close the distance and strike them down with basic attacks using the sword in my hands.
Lilia watched the entire display in stunned disbelief, looking like someone who couldn't comprehend what she had just witnessed. In her breathless silence, her tear-stained face reflected the blinding fury of the brief clash.
She remained pressed firmly against the wooden wall, her eyes wide with awe and terror as she took in the sight of the man she had once falsely accused—now standing like a specter, mercilessly slaughtering Hendrix's minions.
The lead soldier glared at me from a safe distance near the doorway, his pride deeply wounded, but his survival instincts were screaming at him to run.
Before they could even manage to cross the threshold, my body blurred. Moving with speed that defied normal human limitations under the 10x multiplier, I instantly cut off their exit, standing directly in front of the door.
I rested the bloody blade loosely over my shoulder, staring down at them with dead, merciless eyes.
"Is that it?" I asked smoothly, a dark smirk returning to my face. "Has the level of the Royal Guard fallen so low these days?"
I lunged forward, my movements blurring in the dim light of the room. In a split second, before the remaining men could even process my trajectory, the heavy steel blade sliced through the air.
A clean, wet sound echoed through the room as their leader's head was severed from his neck, rolling heavily onto the blood-stained wooden floor.
"Who's next?" I asked softly, flicking the crimson droplets off the tip of my blade.
Now, only two were left standing.
The two remaining soldiers froze in place, utter terror etched into every line of their faces as they stared down at their leader's lifeless eyes blinking up at them from the floorboards.
The small room instantly filled with a thick, suffocating tension. All of their prior bravado and arrogant confidence completely evaporated as the grisly fate of their commander set in.
One of the soldiers, a young man who looked barely older than Lilia herself, completely lost his nerve. He dropped his iron sword, letting the weapon clatter loudly against the floorboards as he fell hard to his knees. His hands trembled violently as he raised them high in a desperate gesture of surrender.
"Please!" he begged, his voice cracking with sheer, unadulterated fear. "We... we didn't know! We were just following orders!"
The other surviving soldier stood completely paralyzed, too stunned to react or raise his weapon. His frantic gaze shifted back and forth between his fallen comrades and me. In his eyes, I was no longer just a disgraced exile. I was the living, breathing embodiment of his worst nightmares.
The metallic scent in the room grew thicker as they finally realized how catastrophically they had underestimated the Speedrunner.
Lilia, still pressed tightly against the wooden wall, watched the brutal scene unfold with a volatile mixture of horror and sudden relief. Her eyes flickered between the surrendering soldier and the bloody floor, her breath catching sharply in her throat as she waited for my next move.
The young soldier swallowed hard, his tear-filled eyes pleading desperately for a shred of mercy.
"We have families waiting for us back home!" he implored, utter desperation seeping into his breaking voice. "We're just trying to survive under Lord Hendrix's rule, just like everyone else in this damn kingdom!"
I let out a low, mocking chuckle that sent a visible shiver down his spine.
"You folks are funny as hell. You're perfectly ready to march into a man's home and take someone's life... but you aren't ready to have your own lives taken in return?"
I stepped over the corpse of their leader, my iron-plated boots thudding heavily against the floorboards as my oppressive presence filled the small room.
"Did you think the people you've slaughtered didn't have families? Do you think they were just lonely dogs waiting to be thrown out onto the street?"
My eyes narrowed into slits of pure ice.
"This is exactly why I hate idiotic fuckers like you the most."
Without uttering another word, I swung the blade in a swift, merciless horizontal arc. The heavy steel cut through the remaining distance in a flash, cleaving the standing soldier's neck before he could even blink. His headless body slumped over with a heavy thud, painting the wooden floor in deep crimson.
In less than a minute since the front door had been kicked open, almost the entire squad had been wiped out.
The young soldier who had pleaded for his life watched in mute, hysterical horror as his last comrade fell beside him. He stumbled backward on his knees, tripping over his own feet in a desperate, pathetic attempt to escape the inevitable fate that had just decimated his team.
"Please," he whispered, his voice barely a squeak as tears streamed freely down his dirty cheeks. "I... I don't want to die."
He shook violently, staring up at the terrifying, stoic figure whose merciless efficiency had just eradicated an elite extraction unit without breaking a sweat.
Lilia remained completely silent, her fingers clenching the fabric of her stained gown so tightly that her knuckles turned stark white. Her wide blue eyes were locked onto the gruesome scene before her.
She watched the young man beg for his life, her heart pounding frantically against her ribs like a trapped bird as she awaited my final verdict. She wanted to stop me, but she knew exactly what would happen if she tried—sooner or later, it would be her ending up as a corpse instead.
The young man, sensing the cold finality in the air, gathered the absolute last of his courage to speak.