Monster Paradise absorbed the haul without complaint. Crystal after Demi-God crystal fed into Xhalthuun’s queue until the shop practically hummed with anticipation.
John spent the better part of an hour distributing the resources he brought from the shop. Growth pills went to Alfred and the rest of his freshly Eldritch-evolved pets. Attribute-refining draughts went to Yuna, Azelis, and Jibril. A handful of techniques he simply tucked away for later, without explaining to anyone what they did yet.
"Everyone’s a little stronger by morning," Chuthulos reported cheerfully. "Some of them considerably more than a little."
...
Two days later, John stood at the edge of Dranvok’s northeast territory, staring down at a walled estate that looked entirely unremarkable from a distance.
[Max: Yep, that’s the place. He’s the shittiest bastard, sparing neither people nor beasts. He’s acquired some kind of method recently, and he’s fusing human children, age one to ten. He needs to die fast, before he sacrifices another batch.]
Max’s voice carried a fury John hadn’t heard from him in a long time. Every word came controlled and precise, and none of them were softened even slightly.
[Max: I’ve wanted him dead for two years. I couldn’t get close enough. You can.]
"How long until the next batch," John asked, already moving.
[Max: Three days, maybe less. My source inside heard him bragging about accelerating the timeline.]
"Then we don’t have three days," John said. "We have tonight."
...
They planned fast, gathered in a shielded clearing a mile from the estate’s outer wall. None of it took the shape of anything Mr. Tauren would recognize.
Black cloth replaced white robes. Plain, unmarked masks hid every face. No crest. No symbol. Nothing a survivor could ever trace back to anyone real.
"If this goes right," John said, "Dranvok spends the next month terrified of an organization that doesn’t exist. If it goes wrong, we improvise."
"It won’t go wrong," Azelis said. Vhastra paced beside her, crystalline fur threaded through with faint violet lines where John’s Eldritch attribute had settled days earlier, no longer bound to this world’s ordinary laws.
Vaelirash stretched her wings once, storm-feathers catching that same violet undercurrent. Beside Yuna, Kaelstrom’s six eyes had gone dark and star-flecked, enough that even John still did a double take every time he saw it.
"Everyone knows their part," John said. "Fast where we can be. Loud where we can’t. Nobody who isn’t guilty gets touched."
They moved as one.
...
The outer wall fell in under a minute. Terravax lent his borrowed strength to Alfred through the Cube’s Kinship Awakening, and one shoulder-check turned solid stone into rubble before the first guard even finished raising an alarm.
Jibril moved through the courtyard like something poured rather than running. Chronoshard Fang recorded five strikes before two soldiers had even drawn their weapons, and the cascade she released a heartbeat later ended the fight before it properly started. A third soldier lunged from her blind side. Vaelirash simply wasn’t there anymore, storm-wings folding him backward into a wall hard enough that he didn’t get back up.
"Movement, west wing," Azelis called, already gone. Vhastra blurred beside her, crystal and shadow moving together. Shadow Ink swallowed the ground beneath four more guards at once, and Vhastra worked through the resulting chaos with the same patient efficiency centuries had taught her.
Three of the duke’s household guard barely got a scream out before Vaelirash dropped from the dark sky and ended the argument entirely, storm-feathers cutting cleaner than any blade should.
Yuna split into overlapping afterimages at the eastern stair. Emberlune’s illusion-fire drew a squad of soldiers into a corridor that wasn’t actually there, while Kaelstrom took the real one from behind, six star-flecked eyes tracking every motion before it happened.
"Left flank’s clear," Yuna called, not even breathing hard. "This is almost embarrassing."
"Don’t get comfortable," John said. "The real ones are still ahead."
...
The generals met them in the great hall, four of them, seasoned and confident and utterly unprepared for what had just walked through their front gate.
"Bandits," the eldest general spat, drawing a curved blade wreathed in crackling energy. "You’ll die screaming for this."
"Funny," John said. Feralsteel claws extended as Chronolight bent the space between one step and the next. "That’s usually my line."
He closed the distance before the general finished his sentence. The fight, if it could even be called that, ended in the same breath it began.
The other three generals broke formation, and panic replaced confidence in an instant. The second lunged for John’s exposed back and never made it. Terravax’s Eldritch Soul Gear opened a rippling barrier that sealed the hall’s only other exit, while Rexion’s coils wrapped the man mid-stride and his ember-colored gem flared, corrosive breath ending the fight in a single scalding exhale.
The third tried to flee toward a side passage. He found Levi’s void-threads already waiting there, patient and quiet, and they snared his ankles before he’d covered ten feet.
The fourth simply dropped his weapon. John let him live, since a witness proved more useful than another corpse.
Within minutes the great hall held nothing standing but John’s own people.
...
Duke Monfroy waited in his inner sanctum, exactly where Max’s information had promised he would be. A heavyset man in dark ceremonial robes stood over a stone altar stained in ways John refused to look at directly.
"Whoever you are," Monfroy said, voice trembling somewhere between fear and outrage, "you have no idea what you’ve just interrupted. Do you know what I’m building here? What I’m this close to achieving?"
"I know exactly what I’ve interrupted," John said, and his voice went flat and cold in a way none of the girls had heard from him in weeks. "That’s rather the point."
Monfroy’s composure cracked entirely. His form began to shift, dark energy bleeding up through cracked, ritual-scarred skin, and something monstrous and half-formed clawed its way toward the surface.
"You’ll regret this," he snarled, his voice already deepening into something that wasn’t quite human anymore. "I have consumed enough potential to challenge a Sovereign-rank Tamer outright."
"You consumed children," John said, and something in his tone made even the half-formed horror flinch. "There’s a difference between potential and theft."
Monfroy lunged, clawed hands trailing corrupted energy, fast enough that a lesser opponent might genuinely have struggled.
It didn’t matter. John crossed the room in a single Chronolight-bent stride, closing the distance before the duke’s swing even finished its arc. Voidspace swallowed the transformation whole, folding Monfroy’s half-formed horror out of existence one grasping limb at a time. What was left of him hit the altar he’d built his crimes upon, and stayed there.
The duke didn’t get to scream for very long.
John stood over him a moment longer than necessary, breathing hard, letting the anger settle before he finally turned away.
...
They found the children in a warded cellar beneath the sanctum, frightened but whole. It took every ounce of John’s control to keep his voice gentle once he knelt in front of them.
"You’re safe now," he said. "Nobody’s going to hurt you again."
Jibril and Azelis handled the rest. They wrapped small shoulders in borrowed cloaks and murmured the kind of soft, steady reassurance that came easier to them than either would ever admit out loud.
The treasury took considerably less care. Vaults of crystal and coin, along with old hoarded artifacts, swept into storage rings within minutes. Everything of value left the house that had earned losing every last piece of it.
By the time John’s people vanished back into the dark, the estate stood gutted. Generals lay dead. The treasury sat empty. The children were already being quietly ferried toward Max’s people, waiting three miles out.
...
Word reached the capital before dawn, garbled and terrified in equal measure. A duchy’s private army had been destroyed in a single night by an organization nobody had ever heard of. It left behind nothing but rubble and empty vaults, and a growing certainty that something far more dangerous than rumor had just declared itself Dranvok’s newest problem.