The field had become an ocean of blood. Not as a metaphor, not as an exaggeration.
The earth itself seemed to drink it, yet could not keep up with the flood. Crimson water spread in rippling sheets, thick as syrup, catching the faint, symbol of a new day, the sun.
The air was heavy, humid with iron. Every breath burned like inhaling steam from a boiling forge. And in the heart of that scarlet sea stood Wolf—the calm, still center of a slaughter that refused to end. His chest rose and fell slowly, rhythmically, like a beast savoring each heartbeat of the dying world around him.
The screams had thinned. The clash of metal and ether had dissolved into scattered, choking sobs.
Klion's group, once disciplined and unified, now broke apart like frightened cattle. Their armor, painted red, clanged as they stumbled through corpses.
Their formation crumbled into chaos—some dragging the wounded, others simply running, their boots slipping in the muck of torn flesh.
"Scatter! Split up! He can't follow all of us!" someone shouted hoarsely, voice cracking under terror.
They bolted for the treeline—anywhere, anywhere away from that man.
For a fleeting moment, relief crossed their faces. The wind touched their skin; the dark expanse of the exit lay ahead, open, free—
Until something moved.
A shape detached itself from the gloom. It stood there, vast and wrong, blocking the path like a nightmare sculpted from bone and wax.
The sunlight hit its wet, pale frame—a homunculus, one of Lenmi's creations.
Its body pulsed faintly, veins glowing like dull ember lines under translucent skin.
One man gasped, "Wh–What the hell is that—"Before he could finish, the creature lunged.
Its fingers clamped around his arm first—a wet crunch—and before anyone could react, its other hand seized his legs. With a grotesque, fluid motion, it ripped him apart, flesh and tendon tearing like soaked paper.
The scream that followed didn't even sound human.
Blood sprayed across the grass in a perfect arc.The homunculus threw the remains aside, its neck twisting unnaturally as it scanned for the next victim.
"Run! Run!" someone shrieked, scrambling backward and slipping on a corpse.
They scattered again—but every direction was the same. In the west, another silhouette shambled forward—bigger, heavier.In the east, something crawled, dragging its limbs through the dirt. In the north, another stood waiting, swaying gently like a marionette hung by invisible strings.
Four of them.
One in each direction.
Trapped.
Wolf had planned it perfectly. His voice echoed faintly in the air, a memory of command that now played out in flesh and terror.
He had told Lenmi to deploy them in all directions—to form a living cage.
He had even named the strategy after a dish from where he once came:
Dancing Crab.
A cruel parody of a delicacy where the limbs were severed and seasoned while the creature still twitched—alive, trembling on the plate.
Now, these people would dance the same way—legs torn, arms gone, twitching until the end.
High above, a shadow darted across the sky—a fifth homunculus, this one winged, scanning the chaos below. It circled the southern perimeter, exactly where Wolf intended to go next.
He began to move. His boots sloshed through the thick blood, the ripples catching sunlight as if the ground were made of molten rubies. His saber dragged slightly against the earth, whispering a wet metallic scrape with each step.
"Ah…" he muttered, glancing at his hands. The veins in his arms still glowed faintly, red traces ebbing out like dying embers.
My Red Tide's gone
He flexed his fingers, feeling the fatigue settling in like lead.
"It's been two minutes already…"
His gaze swept across the field—thousands of bodies, sprawled, mangled, still bleeding steam.
"Three hundred thousand…?" He chuckled quietly, shaking his head.
"That's about as much as I can get, I suppose."
The red mist that had thickened like liquid now began to dissipate, curling upward into thin ribbons of vapor. The stench of copper and ether mixed thickly in his nose.
"Now, the cooldown… five minutes," he murmured, as though calculating a recipe rather than recounting a massacre.He rolled his neck, the joints cracking.
"I'll have to watch my body carefully until then. I can't let my stamina's dipping lower than I want."
His smile returned—a slow, crooked pull of the lips that never quite reached his eyes.
"Well… not like these people can hurt me."
His voice was soft, conversational—eerily calm against the background of agony.
"If anything," he went on, as though musing to himself, "the only ones I'd call a threat are the hunting and exploration teams. At least they've fought monsters before. These ones…"
He looked down at a man trying to crawl away, dragging what was left of his leg.
"…most can't even reach level two."
He stepped on the man's back, pressing down until he stopped moving.
He exhaled slowly through his nose, expression thoughtful, detached.
"Still, there are flaws," he admitted, tilting his head slightly. "These homunculus… they only follow their last command. Lenmi can't direct them anymore. Poor girl—she must've passed out by now."
His tone softened just slightly, almost fond.
"She's the nearest to Lamentia, after all. I expected this…"
He ran a hand through his blood-streaked hair.
"And that field lamentia made—hah, even I can feel it pressing on me."
He turned his head slightly, glancing back toward the towering statue in the center of the camp.
A faint bluish aura trembled around it—the suppression field reacting violently to Lamentia's ether burst.
"The statue's holding her down now," he muttered. "Caught her the moment she tried to blow the ether outward. She can't see… can't even speak now."
A grin broke across his face—a grin that didn't belong on a man, but something far older, far crueler.
"I'm alone, then."He raised his saber, letting the blade catch the dim, red-streaked light of dawn that now peeked faintly through the clouds.
"Alone with a field full of corpses and the stench of fools."
He paused, eyes glinting. Then laughed—a sound too sharp, too loud, echoing across the entire bloody plain.
"Hahahaha—hahaha! Tell me!" he shouted into the distance, voice raw, feral.
"How are these people supposed to fight me?! Hahahahahahaha!"
The laugh carried across the field, past corpses, past the crawling survivors who froze in despair. Even those far beyond the carnage heard it—distant and distorted, a peal of madness that made the trees shudder.
The Field of Blood trembled.
The sun hung heavy above him, its light caught in the still pools of gore.
Wolf lowered his blade, still laughing quietly under his breath—as if mocking the very idea that anyone, anywhere, could ever stop him.
From above, the mountain no longer resembled a battlefield—it looked like a dying lung. The red spread unevenly, heavy at the edges, thinning toward the middle where only a few trembling clusters of life still stirred.
Bodies lay like discarded dolls, limbs jutting at impossible angles, weapons buried in the soft, wet earth.
The field had gone quiet, save for the dull hum of ether still crackling faintly in the air.
Only two patches of movement remained visible when viewed from the sky:The center, where Klion and Teddy stood surrounded by what few survivors they had left, forming a trembling ring of shields and spears.The north, where stubborn fools had run in desperation, hoping the dense ether field—Lamentia's lingering storm—would somehow protect them.
But Wolf was already there.
He moved like a crimson blur through the northern slope, cutting through that thick, almost suffocating ether. Each step left a faint distortion in the air, as if his sheer momentum split reality for an instant."Foolish," he muttered under his breath, his tone low, almost disappointed.
"Running toward her… toward death itself."
The closer he drew to the northern end, the denser the field became. The world felt heavier, colors warped—green into violet, blue into gray.
The survivors here coughed blood as they struggled to breathe. Ether pressure crushed their lungs, made their eyes sting. Yet still, they raised weapons.
They didn't run this time—they couldn't. Their bodies shook, but their eyes showed a kind of desperate faith.Faith that maybe, in this storm, Wolf's speed would falter.
They were wrong.
The first died before he even understood it.Wolf's saber slid through the air without resistance—shkkk—and a head lifted briefly before tumbling into the dirt.some screamed their name.
some begged.
some tried to parry and failed, the impact spinning them around before their body hit the ground with a wet crack.
Wolf's movements were precise, mechanical, almost quiet compared to the chaos he wrought.
After a few more cuts, the north went still.
Only the sound of the ether crackling remained, like faint static after lightning.
Wolf turned his head slightly and looked toward where Lenmi lay slumped by the statue—half-conscious, her blonde hair clinging to her sweat-drenched face, her hands trembling faintly as she tried to maintain connection to the homunculus.
"Rest now," he murmured, almost gently. "You've done enough."
He took one last look at her before turning back toward the battlefield.
The blood wind brushed past his face as he began to walk downhill—back into the open field, his boots leaving deep prints in the red-soaked mud.
The sun was now high above, glaring and pale through thin clouds.
Daylight made the carnage almost unbearable; everything that had once seemed cloaked in shadow now stood naked, bright, undeniable.The corpses steamed. Flies gathered. A faint wind carried the smell of charred ether and rot.
Wolf wiped his blade against a girl's torn cloak, sliding it clean with a single pull.
"Time for the last course," he muttered under his breath.
He crossed the field, his pace quick but unhurried, his eyes fixed on the center where the last group stood.
Klion, battered but resolute, was shouting orders.
Teddy, pale and silent, held his shield ready. Around them stood perhaps twenty men and women, weapons shaking but still raised.
As Wolf approached, his mind wandered—just slightly, but enough to crease his brow.
Why is the statue still standing?
His gaze flicked toward it briefly.
Did her method fail?Was it wrong from the start?
Or is it simply impossible to destroy from the outside?
A small frown tugged at the edge of his lips.
Strange.
He exhaled once through his nose, then rolled his shoulders back, loosening the tension."Well…" he whispered, almost smiling, "…no matter."
He stopped a few meters in front of the last humans on the mountain—blood-streaked, sunlight glinting off the edge of his saber.
The air was still, so silent that even the faint rustle of wind in the grass seemed deafening.
Klion's jaw was set tight, but his hands trembled.
Teddy's breath was shaky behind his shield.
The others looked half-ready to cry.
Wolf tilted his head slightly, his smirk crooked and calm.
He lifted his free hand in a lazy shrug.
"Relax," he said softly. "It's just the end of the line."
Then, voice dropping lower, he added with a hint of mockery,
"Let's make it quick, shall we?"
And with that, he lunged.
The motion was instant—one moment stillness, the next an explosion of force.
His saber cut the air with a low, brutal sound, a streak of silver slicing through the dust.
The blade met resistance—a shield.
A clang so sharp it made the air vibrate.
Wolf's wrist twisted, his eyes narrowing as something in his instinct screamed wrong.
He froze mid-swing, muscles reacting faster than thought, stopping the blade halfway before it landed. His body moved back—two steps, light, controlled—but too late.
Flash!
The shield erupted in white light—brighter than lightning.
His eyes burned instantly, vision drowned in searing white.
"—Tch!" He hissed, snapping his head aside and throwing himself backward, but the disorientation hit like a hammer.
Blind, he could only rely on instinct.His senses flared outward—air pressure, vibration, the faint hum of ether fields.
Then—a feeling!
A cold, sudden killing intent, sharp as a needle through his spine.It came from the left.
Without thinking, he turned and swung!
Clang!His saber crashed against something long—a spear! The shock ran through his arm.
But at that very instant—another force.A separate presence.Behind him.
He barely felt the rush of air before the pain hit—sharp, perfect, devastating.
Something pierced through his chest!
For a brief, impossible second, Wolf just stared down despite blinded right now.
The tip of a blade jutted out through his sternum, gleaming wet in the daylight.
"—Ah…"
His breath caught; his mind blanked.
The world dulled around him, replaced by the deep, slow thump of his heart struggling against the wound.
His instincts—pure, violent—took control.Before he could even think, his body moved.
He swung his saber down violently, the impact cracking the spear's shaft and cutting through the spearhead entirely.At the same time, he grabbed the broken haft with his other hand, using it as a balance point to spin—a full, feral twist—and kicked the spearman away with bone-shattering force.
The instant his foot landed, he used the momentum to reverse his swing, slashing backward at the direction from which the stab had come.
Clash!
Metal met metal.
Sparks erupted. His vision flickered—then cleared.
The world returned in a rush—the smell of blood, the blinding sun, the glint of talismans.A faint white glow pulsed from his chest, where a stone amulet shimmered—the Talisman of the First Breath. Its cloudy surface vibrated softly.
He glanced down at it, then back up—and his lips twisted into a wide, crooked grin.
Standing before him, calm and steady, was a man he knew too well.The faint ether glow around his hands, the eyes that didn't waver even after all this carnage—
"Ah…" Wolf breathed, the grin turning wild."It's you."
His laughter came low, raw, like something torn from deep inside his chest.
"Hahaha… hahaha!"He leaned slightly forward, blood dripping from his lips, the saber steady in his grip.
"If anyone were to injure me…" he said between laughs, "it had to be you, Hyung-woo!"