CHAPTER 394: 394: THE HUNDRED ELITE FALL PART TWO

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The fourth tripped over the third’s legs. The second tugged his spear from under Kai’s foot too late. Kai grabbed the shaft, yanked, and brought the man into an elbow to the nose that broke it and drove bone shards back into the brain. He dropped with a flat sound.

"Stop dying!" the captain screamed again, voice cracking now.

Kai killed the fiftieth elite with the short sword he had taken earlier, snapped to a dagger when the sword broke in a rib, and used the dagger like a needle, fast and precise.

[Ding! System notifications- Experience threshold reached. Congratulations to the host you Level Up. Current level: 48.]

He heard the system and put the sound aside like you put a bowl on a shelf without looking. The shelf could hold it. He kept going.

Around the edges, three-star soldiers lay in rows, some still awake but unable to move, some quietly weeping in shame they could not hide, some praying under their breath to no one. Four-star men still in the camp sawed back and forth between stepping and not stepping. A few made a choice: they dropped their spears and fell to the sand and acted like they had fainted from the previous roar. They were trained to obey, but fear is an old teacher too.

Mardek spat in the dust. "Cowards," he said. He raised his voice, loud and clear. "When I finish with the white hair man, I will punish every back that touched the ground for fear instead of sleep."

His captains heard him and flinched and then yelled at the rows to move forward with more force than before. The chosen hundred had become the chosen sixty, then the chosen forty. Now it was the chosen twenty and the ones gathering to fill their gaps, willing or not.

Kai planted his feet. He had stopped thinking of them as men. They were just the things between him and the cage, his daughter. He pushed them out of the way.

A man came at him with both hands on a heavy axe and the look of someone who wanted to make his father proud. Kai stepped inside the big swing and headbutted him under the lip of his helm. Bone cracked. He fell like a dropped sack. Another came low. Kai turned his hip and let the blade slip along the plate there and off, then put his knee into the man’s face as he came up. The man spun and hit the ground and did not get back up.

The seventy-fifth elite tried a trick: sand in the eyes. He kicked a spray at Kai’s face with a heel. Kai closed his eyes in time, took the grit on the lids, and stepped forward anyway. He opened his eyes as the man laughed, took him by the throat, lifted, and slammed him to the ground. The laugh cut off.

[Ding! System notifications- Experience threshold reached. Congratulations to the host you Level Up. Current level: 49.]

The crown above him brightened more. It hummed a little. The men around him did not know why they wanted to back up all at once, but they did.

"Close in!" the captain yelled again and again as if the word would change the math.

It did not.

They stopped trying to hold him and started trying to stay out of his reach. That was worse. He did not chase men who ran; he took the ones who froze. They freeze often now.

The elite captain himself stepped forward because that is what a captain must do when the line stops being a line. He was a five-star and he moved like it. His steps were correct. His edge control was clean. He came in with a shield press and a short thrust that aimed to take the space under Kai’s heart and end the nightmare.

Kai hit the shield with his shoulder and made a dent, then drove a fist into the captain’s face. The blow should have broken a bone and sent the man rolling. It did not. The captain rocked, but did not go down. His skin under the plate went hard. The plate itself rang like iron hit by iron. It was his unlimited skill.

"Now," the captain snarled through his teeth, tasting blood but thrilled he had not fallen. "Now we fight."

His eyes lit with a small thing that had not lived in him for the last ten breaths: hope.

"Iron Body," he spat, and his flesh shivered and set like hot metal quenched too fast. A dull gray sheen crawled under his skin and across the thin plates at the joints where plates do not cover well.

Kai hit him again anyway. The captain’s head snapped back. A tooth flew. He grinned. "You cannot punch iron," he said, almost laughing with relief. Around him a ripple of men straightened. If their captain could take it, maybe they could too. They pulled breath into their chests. They began to step in again.

Kai did not say he was done punching. He did not say anything. He let Predator’s Instinct do what it did when he stopped being stubborn for a single breath and listened to it. It turned his eyes to the exact place that was soft.

The captain saw his gaze drop and laughed too late.

Kai’s heel came up in a brutal, short kick that lifted his own hip only a little. His foot smashed into the only part of the captain’s body that Iron Body did not fully harden. It was his balls. A crunch. A wet crack. A sick sound that made two men gag behind the captain’s shoulder. The five-star’s mouth opened in a sharp O. Blood came out with no sound at first. Then a raw howl.

Men all around grabbed their own groins by reflex. One fell to his knees just from the sight. Another turned around and bent over and made small coughing sounds. Someone said, "Holy—" and did not finish.

Kai did not stop. He kicked again. And again. The captain’s eyes rolled. His legs wobbled. His shield dropped. He tried to move it back up. He could not. He was making a noise now that had no words in it.