The mercenaries' laughter dissipated, leaving behind a heavy silence saturated with hidden tension. They didn't understand the reason behind this weak noble's calmness, but arrogance blinded them.
"Listen, boy of the Williams family, let's cut this nonsense short," one of the mercenaries said with boredom, stepping forward from the circle. He was a skinny man sporting an ugly scar across his lips, wielding a strange, hooked dagger in his right hand. A viscous, green liquid with a pungent, sickening odor dripped from the blade, a poison extracted from corpse flowers, specifically designed to paralyze peripheral nerves with a single touch. "Hand over the girl without resistance, take off that necklace, and leave all your belongings here. Do it quietly, and I'll kill you with a quick stab to the heart as a final favor to your humanity. Resist, and I'll make you watch us amuse ourselves with your maid before I flay you alive."
The mercenaries, drawing on their long experience in hunting mages and nobles, expected one of two things: either Dex would collapse to his knees, crying and begging for his life, offering non-existent money; or, the most common choice for fools, he would stumble backward in fear and begin reciting a lengthy magic spell, waving his hands in the air with a trembling voice as taught to graduates of noble academies, giving the mercenaries ample time to throw a dagger into his throat before he could finish the first half of the incantation.
But Dex... did neither. He did not cry, nor did he utter a single syllable of any spell.
In a fraction of a second, faster than the skinny mercenary's eyes could process, Dex vanished from his spot.
Dex did not use the usual "Acceleration Magic" that leaves a trail of light and makes its path easy to predict. Instead, he used something simpler and far more lethal: pure explosive muscular power, backed by an intense, concealed flow of Phoenix mana into his leg tendons. He lunged forward like black lightning, keeping incredibly low to the ground, crossing the five-meter gap separating him from the skinny mercenary in the blink of an eye, bypassing the poisoned dagger's range before its wielder even realized what was happening.
Dex didn't draw his dagger or weapon immediately, as cold steel requires an angle and a stance. Instead, in a fluid, terrifying motion indicative of deeply ingrained fight experience, Dex crouched mid-dash and snatched a handful of wet dirt mixed with fine gravel from the forest floor with his left hand. The moment he grasped the dirt, he injected it with a small, critical, and incredibly rapid charge of fire mana, raising the temperature of the gravel to near melting point in fractions of a second.
With a violent whipping motion, he hurled this blazing handful directly and with pinpoint accuracy into the skinny mercenary's wide, stunned eyes.
"Aaaarrgghhh!"
A horrifying scream, the shriek of a slaughtered animal, tore from the mercenary's throat. He dropped his poisoned dagger instantly and threw both hands up to cover his face. It wasn't just dirt blinding him; the scorching gravel, like molten glass, embedded itself into his eyeballs, causing immediate third-degree burns to his corneas and utterly destroying his eye tissue in an instant of indescribable agony.
But Dex did not stop, nor did he wait a single second to gloat over his opponent or deliver a monologue like the heroes of novels. He capitalized on his opponent's absolute blindness and total loss of balance. He pivoted his body in a half-turn, channeled all his momentum into his right leg, and delivered a low side kick, direct and cruel as a steel hammer, targeting the lateral joint of the blind mercenary's right knee with surgical precision.
A sickening crack echoed through the silent forest, the sound of cartilage tearing and a shin bone violently separating from the femur, bending in a completely unnatural direction. The mercenary instantly dropped to his other, sound knee, unable to support his own weight, unleashing a continuous howl of pain, his head now lowered perfectly to the level of Dex's belt.
With absolute coldness, his face devoid of any expression save for lethal efficiency, Dex took a step closer. He grabbed the mercenary's long hair with both hands with brutal force, using it as an anchor point. Then, with a violent, full-body motion utilizing his back and shoulder muscles, he yanked the mercenary's head forward and drove it with immense force, smashing his forehead into the trunk of an adjacent, rock-solid iron-oak tree.
Thud! A muffled, gruesome sound of impact rang out. The hard bark of the tree shattered from the force of the blow, and blood splattered, mixed with wood splinters. The mercenary's body went completely limp, his screams abruptly cut off, and he collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut, a lifeless corpse with a split skull at Dex's feet.
Silence fell over the area for a single second. Just one second; the exact second the shocked human mind needs to process the contradiction between what it expected (a crying noble) and what it witnessed (a brutal execution in three moves).
"Rank (E)?! To hell with my gadgets!" Garrick roared in terrifying disbelief, his eyes practically bulging out of their sockets as his magical lens fell from his eye. "Those are not the moves of a mage! Not even a knight! That is a monster! Kill him! Tear him to pieces, kill him right now!"
Guided by their leader's scream, the mercenaries snapped out of their shock. Three of them attacked at once from three different angles, drawing broadswords coated in sharp, steel-cutting blue mana of Rank (B). They were professionals, and their coordination was designed to corner and slice the opponent.
But they were fighting with the traditional style of the guilds. Dex did not take a step back to adopt a defensive stance, nor did he try to parry the swords with his own. Instead, he lunged forward, diving into the narrow, forbidden space inside the perimeter of their weapons, moving like a demon dancing in a minefield.
Dex seized the wrist of the first attacker who tried to stab him, twisting it at a sharp angle with enough force to snap the bone, forcing the man to redirect his mana-infused blade straight toward the stomach of his comrade (the second attacker), who was charging in from the right.
As the second attacker's eyes widened in horror, desperately trying to halt his momentum to dodge his friend's sword plunging toward him, Dex fully exploited his wide-open defense. Dex didn't punch his face; rather, he delivered a devastatingly cruel kick with the mana-reinforced tip of his boot straight into the forbidden zone between his thighs. A vicious, dishonorable strike, but a hundred percent strategic; the resulting agony caused an immediate nervous shock that stopped the man's heart for a second, dropping him to the ground curled up in a fetal position, choking on his own tears.
Without losing his momentum, and with deadly fluidity, Dex spun around to face the third attacker, who had raised his sword high to bring it down on Dex's back. Before the sword could descend, Dex surged upward and struck the mercenary with a brutal ascending right elbow, concentrating all its force into the exposed throat.
The crunch of neck cartilage was heard. Dex's elbow completely crushed the mercenary's windpipe. The third man fell, clutching his neck, his eyes bulging as he desperately tried to draw air into his sealed lungs, suffocating on his own blood within seconds.
Three corpses, or near-corpses, dropped in less than ten seconds.
Dex stood in the center of the circle, wiping a drop of blood that had splattered on his cheek with the back of his hand. He hadn't used a single spell, hadn't launched a fireball, and had consumed only a minuscule amount of mana for physical enhancement. What he had just delivered was a terrifying and gruesome exhibition of dirty fighting. A style of combat not taught in academies, nor written in the books of noble knights. It was combat Dex had learned in the corridors of dark prisons and the bloodbaths of execution yards, where there are no referees to stop the match, no honor to boast of, and no points to score.
There, in his old world that he had brought with him, there was only one rule: a lone survivor left standing, and broken corpses on the ground.
Dex looked with his cold eyes at the terrified Garrick, as if silently telling him that his turn had come.