Bleak autumn winds carried a chill, and the sunset's hues were steadily swallowed by murky clouds as dull gray and black began to saturate the world.
An eerie gloom pervaded the dense forest, where the thinning light could no longer disperse the encroaching shadows.
The Saintess of Destruction's breathing was ragged and low as she stumbled through the woods.
By now, the cooldown on [Forced Dispel] had finally ended, allowing her to purge every status effect afflicting her.
Her throat no longer burned like it was being scraped by knives, and the assorted debuffs inflicted upon her—healing reduction, blood loss, and the rest—had all been removed.
Her feet moved without pause across the soft earth, damp and cold.
All she needed was to hide a little further away until night fell and recover a bit of her strength. Once the blood master awoke, she would have the backing to borrow the Blood Clan's authority and slaughter her way back.
Tonight, she would slaughter at least two of them... Rip open their bellies, hang them up inside the sanctuary, and leave them in agony as their entrails drained of blood until they died!
Better still... if she could capture that half-demon duke's daughter who was always at Lanqi's side, strip away her flesh, and spread it out across the sanctuary banquet table. When Lanqi walked into the sanctuary tomorrow morning, he would see with his own eyes the girl's most gruesome and hideous demise.
Would he still be able to maintain that nonchalant demeanor then?
Just picturing the look on Lanqi's face at that sight made the corners of the Saintess of Destruction's mouth quiver in anticipation.
Even if she still couldn't kill Lanqi tonight, once she tore away all of his claws and fangs and reduced him to a commander with no troops, no matter how many Epic cards Lanqi held, he would never be able to threaten her again!
As for that detective whose brain was made entirely of muscle, he had probably arrived in town only to discover the Shadow World's prompt, and was now trudging back halfway in disgrace.
He was probably quite pleased with himself, thinking his teammates had wrapped up everything ahead of time.
Yet he would never imagine that the moment he scaled the cliff once more would be the hour of his death—
The Saintess of Destruction would wait by the cliff's edge, watch the detective struggle his way up inch by inch, and sever both his hands with her Blazing Demon Sword, sending him plunging eight hundred meters down the precipice in shock and despair to splatter into a pulp!
"Your only mistake... was provoking the Resurrection Church... and crossing me..."
The Saintess of Destruction's voice was frigid and cruel, laced with venomous resolve.
Yet even as these thoughts crossed her mind, the Saintess failed to notice anything amiss beneath her feet.
Suddenly, the ground gave way, and weightlessness enveloped her whole body in an instant.
The next second, it felt as though she had tumbled from the physical world into nothingness.
A deep, pitch-black pitfall swallowed her whole, like the gullet of a beast in the night!
*Boom!!!*
With an earth-shattering crash that rattled her eardrums and shook her brain, she slammed heavily onto the bottom of the several-meter-deep pit.
She lay crumpled in the pit, her body shuddering in pain.
"Aaargh—!!!"
Lethal, venomous spikes inside the pit instantly pierced through her skin, dug into her muscle, and reached straight into her marrow.
The Saintess of Destruction's face twisted, her pupils contracting violently, filled with disbelief and terror.
This was a Tier 3 earth spell capable of instantly creating a pit trap in soil.
Yet the pitfall itself was not the deadliest part; the terror lay in the fact that it was lined with virulent ground spikes and bear traps.
Then came the agony—a piercing pain like tens of thousands of needles stabbing into her flesh. Her shriek carried boundless torment, echoing across the woods.
Right then, her trembling gaze caught sight of an elongating shadow above the pit.
Accompanied by ghostly footsteps, each stride seemed like a whisper from the Reaper itself.
A tall silhouette slowly came into view. He stood there quietly, unmoving like a statue carved out of the darkness, his long coat snapping in the wind as he gazed down at the Saintess of Destruction in the hole.
When the Saintess saw the man's face clearly, her heart seized as though squeezed in a vise.
It was a face she knew well.
Standing on the rim of the pit, he held a heavy hand crossbow. His face drifted in and out of the shadows; only those violet eyes above half-lowered sunglasses gleamed like a night sky glittering with cold light, insufferably haughty as always.
Frey looked down at the Saintess of Destruction as if watching a thrashing elk.
The Saintess's wide eyes brimmed with disbelief, and her heart plunged into a frozen lake.
The world around them fell silent once more.
It all seemed to unfold in slow motion, brutal and merciless.
"Why are—"
Before she could finish her sentence, a heavy bolt tore through the air the next second, piercing clean through her shoulder and pinning her to the pit's earthen wall, tearing another shrill scream from her throat.
Frey stood at the edge of the pit, shooting her without a single word.
Although bolts were limited in supply whenever brought into a Shadow World unless a battlefield card maker was present to repair and replenish them, the weapon itself was an armor-piercing heavy hand crossbow—slow-firing, but devastatingly lethal with every shot.
"Why are you here?!!"
The Saintess panted heavily, screaming at the top of her lungs.
"Are you stupid? Following the Shadow World's mechanics, no one should have climbed the mountain to solve the case."
Frey countered, as though genuinely questioning her intelligence.
"...?"
Hearing Frey's matter-of-fact tone,
she felt as though her intelligence was being dragged across the dirt and trampled into dust.
Then she remembered how the detective had vaulted off the cliff without hesitation that morning, tricking everyone.
And she finally understood: the detective had done that that morning merely to manipulate everyone's psychological pressure, leaving everything else to the even more insufferable Lanqi, while the detective transformed into a hunter, lying in wait in the woods for any fugitives who slipped through the net—waiting all the way until now.
"Give up resisting. Right now, my combat strength is unquestionably above yours."
Frey loaded a fresh bolt into the heavy hand crossbow and aimed the crossbow straight at the Saintess. The glinting bolt tip emanated a suffocating aura of death.
"Haha... Hahaha—!"
Ripping the bolt ruthlessly from her shoulder, spraying flesh and blood without a care, the Saintess raised her Blazing Demon Sword and laughed like a madwoman.
"Let's die together!!!"
Having realized that she had been utterly toyed with by these two today, the final thread of the Saintess's sanity snapped.
Whether Lanqi or Frey—
such humiliation was a burden she could not bear!
Even if she died, she would tear this detective who had played her for a fool to pieces with her own hands!
...
Inside the sanctuary's great hall, everyone's hope was like the lingering glow of the setting sun, on the verge of sinking into the pitch-black night.
In the corner beneath the rose window, the other Resurrection Church cultist—the imperial female priest, still guarded by Hyperion and the female guard—finally regained consciousness.
She took in the grim, suffocating expressions on everyone's faces.
Then she looked around at the battered, exhausted challengers, and noted the vanished Saintess of Destruction.
Throwing her head back, she burst into manic laughter, realizing that Saintess of Destruction Adelice had inflicted grievous wounds upon them before successfully making her escape.
Tonight was the hour of the blood sacrifice!
Chapter 141