The jungle was terrifyingly silent. The ambient sounds of the Savage Lands, the screeching of prehistoric birds, the rustling of massive insects had vanished, suffocated by the sheer killing intent pouring from the heavens.
Elara, the S-Rank Mage of the Silver Coalition, was on her knees. Her beautiful face was pale and contorted in agony as she clawed at her own throat. The two A-Rank Tanks beside her were already unconscious, their bodies shutting down under the divine pressure.
Ren Hanshin stood over her, the massive Severance of Destiny humming in his right hand. The crimson blade cast a bloody, shifting light across the dark foliage.
"W-Why...?" Elara choked out, blood dripping from her nose. She looked up at him, her piercing blue eyes filled with incomprehensible despair. "We just... asked for help..."
Ren looked down at her. He felt a distant pang of pity. She was just a hunter trying to survive a rigged game. She didn't know that the cosmic board they were playing on was ruled by an insane, jealous tyrant.
"You shouldn't have smiled at me," Ren said, his voice was hollow. He swung it with the cold efficiency of a guillotine dropping.
The crimson blade flashed. Jubei had taught him how to strike the thread of a life instantly. Elara and her two unconscious Tanks were cleanly decapitated before their nervous systems could even know they got cut.
[Target Eliminated: S-Rank Avatar 'Elara'.]
[Target Eliminated: A-Rank Avatar (x2).]
[The God of Rivers is weeping in despair.]
The crushing, freezing pressure in the jungle vanished. The temperature returned to normal. The crimson screen hovering in Ren's vision burst with bright, joyful text.
[The God of Fate is clapping her hands in sheer delight!]
[God of Fate]: YES! Perfect! You erased her filthy eyes! You erased her lips!
[God of Fate]: But there are more of them, Ren. I can see their strings. Four hundred and ninety seven rats hiding in a canyon to the north.
[God of Fate]: Go. Burn them all. Wash your coat in their blood.
[The God of Fate has donated 20,000,000 Karma Points!]
Ren flicked the blood off his blade. He closed his eyes and expanded his Divine Perception outward, miles across the prehistoric landscape. Past the dense jungle, over a river of boiling mud, he felt them. A concentration of human mana signs huddled together inside a jagged obsidian canyon.
The Silver Coalition.
"Four hundred and ninety-seven," Ren muttered.
For a mortal hunter, even a Level 80 Chosen, storming a camp of five hundred A and S-Rank Avatars alone was suicide. The sheer volume of magic, arrows, and sword strikes would overwhelm any barrier, but Ren was no longer mortal. His stats had evolved. Ren bent his knees slightly. The ground beneath his boots cracked.
BOOM!!
He launched himself forward, activating his Divine Agility. The force of his takeoff carved a trench into the jungle floor. He blurred into a streak of black and crimson, moving so fast that the giant plants of the Savage Lands didn't even have time to snap their jaws as he passed.
In less than three minutes, he crossed ten miles of hostile terrain. He arrived at the edge of the obsidian canyon. The Silver Coalition had not been idle. They had spent their first hours in the Savage Lands building a fortress. The shining blue barriers arched over the canyon entrance. Dozens of S-Rank archers and mages stood on the ridges, acting as lookouts. Inside the canyon walls, hundreds of armored avatars were preparing their weapons, resting, and waiting for orders.
Ren stood on a high cliff overlooking the entrance. The wind swirled his midnight black coat around his legs. He didn't try to sneak in or to activate Void Step to evade the guards. The Goddess had ordered an annihilation, and he was going to deliver a spectacle that the Pantheon would never forget.
Ren stepped off the cliff. He plummeted a hundred feet, landing in front of the glittering blue S-Rank barrier blocking the canyon entrance. His landing caused a small earthquake. The shockwave knocked the lookouts on the ridges off their feet.
"Intruder!" a lookout screamed, pointing down at the solitary figure in the dust. "Front gate! It's one man!"
Inside the camp, the Coalition erupted into chaotic action. Hundreds of weapons were drawn. Mages began chanting, their staffs glowing with volatile energy. The Commander of the front guard, a man wielding twin battleaxes, marched up to the inside of the blue barrier. He looked at Ren's simple clothes and the crimson scythe resting on his shoulder.
"Are you insane?!" the Commander shouted through the magical shield. "You're trying to breach an S-Rank Aegis Barrier alone? Turn back, or we'll turn you into a pincushion!"
Ren didn't say a word, raising his free left hand and placing his palm against the shiny blue energy of the barrier.
"Fire!" the Commander yelled.
Dozens of S-Rank fireballs, lightning spears, and armor piercing arrows rained down from the ridges, converging on Ren.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
A cloud of fire and smoke engulfed the canyon entrance. The ground shook from the bombardment. The Avatars inside the camp cheered, lowering their weapons. Nothing could survive a volley from fifty S-Rank mages.
The crimson screen hovered patiently in the smoke.
[The God of Fate is resting her chin on her hand, looking bored.]
[God of Fate]: They threw firecrackers at a dragon. How embarrassing.
As the smoke slowly cleared, the cheering abruptly stopped. Ren Hanshin was still standing there. His hand was still resting against the barrier. The Embrace of the Weaver hadn't even sung. The Mythic threads pulsed softly, having absorbed and neutralized the magical impact of the barrage.
Ren looked up at the terrified commander through the transparent blue shield.
"My turn," Ren whispered.
He simply pushed his Divine Strength into his left palm.
CRACK!!
The impenetrable S-Rank Aegis Barrier, designed to withstand the siege of a small army, shattered like a cheap pane of glass. Millions of glowing blue shards rained down onto the canyon floor.
The Commander's jaw dropped. "H-How...?"
"Domain Activation," Ren said, his crimson eyes flaring. "The Executioner's Block."
A massive spherical field of red energy erupted from Ren's body. It expanded at speed, swallowing the front half of the canyon and trapping over two hundred Avatars inside its radius.
The moment the red domain settled, the screams began. The gravity inside the sphere multiplied by thirty. It was a physical, crushing weight of divine authority.
The A-Rank Avatars were driven to their knees, their bones cracking under the pressure. The S-Rank Avatars managed to stay standing, but their movements were slowed to an agonizing crawl, as if they were submerged in water. Ren walked through the shattered gates.
Inside his Domain, he was unhindered. He moved with the terrifying, silent Flow that Jubei had taught him. He was a ghost dancing through a slow motion battlefield. He stepped up to the paralyzed commander.
SWISH!!
The scythe flashed. The Commander's head fell to the dirt. Ren moved into the crowd of struggling Avatars. He didn't use massive mana blasts. He simply walked, and his scythe moved with him.
Left. Right. Spin. Sever.
It was a massacre. Blood sprayed in red arcs, painting the obsidian walls of the canyon. Severed limbs and broken weapons scattered across the ground. Ren moved with such precision that he didn't even break a sweat. He was killing elite, veteran hunters as easily as a farmer harvesting wheat.
[Target Eliminated: A-Rank Avatar (x14)]
[Target Eliminated: S-Rank Avatar (x6)]
[Target Eliminated: A-Rank Avatar (x22)]
The blue system notifications flooded his vision, but the crimson chat box pushed them aside, growing larger and more frantic with every kill.
[The God of Fate is purring.]
[God of Fate]: Yes! Yes! Look at how they fall! They are nothing compared to you!
[God of Fate]: Cut the archers on the ridge! They dared to shoot at your beautiful face!
[The God of Fate has donated 100,000,000 Karma Points!]
Ren glanced up. The Avatars on the high ridges, outside the radius of his domain, were trying to knock their arrows and cast spells, their hands shaking with terror. Ren deactivated his Domain. The red sphere collapsed, releasing the surviving avatars from the crushing gravity. They gasped for air, scrambling backward over the bodies of their fallen comrades.
Ren gripped the Severance of Destiny with both hands and used a fraction of his Divine Mana.
"Second Form: Thread of the Guillotine," Ren commanded.
He swung the scythe upward in a sweeping arc. A thin, dense crescent of crimson light unleashed from the blade and shot upward. It expanded, passing cleanly through the left ridge of the canyon. There was a moment of silence. Then, the top half of the obsidian cliff simply slid off. Thousands of tons of solid rock, along with fifty terrified archers and mages, collapsed into the canyon below, burying a section of the Coalition's camp under a landslide of stone and dust.
The remaining Avatars in the back of the camp broke. The sheer scale of the destruction shattered their minds. They dropped their weapons and turned, fleeing frantically into the Savage Lands, abandoning their fortress, their alliance, and their pride.
"They're running," Ren muttered, resting the scythe on his shoulder.
[God of Fate]: Let them run. It makes the hunt more entertaining.
[God of Fate]: Chase them down, Ren. The Quest demands absolute annihilation, not a single rat is allowed to survive.
Ren exhaled slowly, his breath pluming in the dust filled air. He looked at his hands. They were covered in blood. He was no longer just surviving the game. He had become the most terrifying monster on the board. He stepped over a shattered shield bearing the emblem of a minor god, his crimson eyes looking onto the running survivors.
"Understood," Ren said.
He vanished into a blur of black and crimson, hunting down the remnants of the Silver Coalition one by one, painting the canyon red as his Goddess commanded. In the starry halls of the Pantheon, the minor gods watched their screens go dark in horror. The 'Blood-Soaked Tyrant' had officially arrived at the Sovereign's Draft.