Athar's swift and brutal action had frozen the other two guards to their very core. Alice, too, stood rooted to the spot, her body locked in place by disbelief and terror. Never in her wildest dreams could she have imagined such a scenario.
It took a few agonizing moments for one of the remaining men to recover enough to manage a strangled cry, "You…"
He was cut short. Before the word could fully form, Athar's sword flashed again, the black metal piercing the man's throat, silencing him forever. Blood spurted from the wound, soaking Athar's hand.
With a slight exertion of force, Athar continued the upward motion, the sword cleaving vertically through the man's head, emerging from the top of his skull in a gruesome display.
The last man, his eyes had been widened and he was petrified with shock, stumbled backward, but there was another glint of the sword, and another head rolled onto the cracked road with a sickening thud.
In the darkness, illuminated only by the faint glow of the moon, Athar stood facing the massive iron gate like a grim reaper. His face was devoid of any emotion, save for the intense fire burning in his eyes.
Athar pressed forward and used his left hand to push against the iron gate. The rusted metal groaned as it creaked open, the sound momentarily disturbing the heavy silence.
"Who is there?" someone shouted from within the compound.
Athar stepped inside onto a brick-paved path that led straight to the building. As he drew closer, he took in a more detailed look. The three-story structure before him was indeed unremarkable, a dilapidated brick façade. It was clearly an abandoned building, now serving as the Red Rose Group's base. Even the brick-paved path beneath his feet was crumbling.
He had taken only a few steps when he spotted three men running towards him. One of them carried a long iron pipe in his hands. Their eyes widened in shock as they saw a figure approaching their base with a bloodied sword.
"Who are you?" shouted the man in the middle, just as the man with the pipe lunged towards Athar. If only he had witnessed how easily Athar had dispatched his three companions at the gate, he might not have made the same fatal mistake.
Athar barely flinched. With a swift swing of his sword, the hands with which the man had swung the pipe were severed at the wrists. He let out a mighty scream of agony as he waved both of his now shortened arms.
Ignoring the injured man, Athar stepped past him in a blur of motion and, with a single, brutal blow, killed the remaining two men. They barely had time to react before the blood vessels in their necks were sliced open.
The man with the severed hands continued to scream in pain before Athar's blade mercifully relieved him of his life as well.
Meanwhile, the screams had drawn the attention of all the men inside the building, and within moments, figures began to pour out through a doorway that led directly inside.
Athar continued to move forward when one of the men leaped at him with a knife, aiming for his heart.
Athar did not even raise his sword. He simply clutched the man's wrist just before the knife could pierce his chest. With a sharp twist, he snapped the bones within as the man growled in pain and rage. In the same fluid motion, he plunged the man's own knife into his heart, killing another one.
Meanwhile, Alice, who had now returned to her senses, had arrived at the gate and witnessed the scene of Athar going on a rampage.
But the rampage had just begun.
The doorway vomited forth a stream of angry men. They carried a chaotic mix of makeshift weapons—steel pipes, long knives, hockey sticks, and rods.
Athar did not appear to be fazed in the slightest. He met them head-on as corpses continued to pile up.
A burly man with a scarred face charged with a rusty axe. Athar met his charge, his sword deflecting the clumsy swing of the axe before slicing through the man's arm and then his head in a swift, brutal arc. The axe clattered to the ground as the severed head of the man tumbled, his blood staining Athan's clothes and the crumbling brick.
More and more men surged forward, their initial anger replaced by a desperate shock and fright.
They swarmed him, tried to overwhelm Athar with numbers. But Athar was a man on a mission. He was unyielding and deadly.
He spun and swung his sword as if it were an extension of his own body. Anything it met was cleaved—it was something granted to him as a blessing, after all. Anything that approached him was cut down.
He pushed deeper as he entered inside the building. The air had thickened with the scent of blood as the rusty smell struck his nostrils. He had already killed almost a dozen men.
The ground floor was a makeshift common area: a stained sofa, overturned crates serving as tables, and the lingering smell of smoke and alcohol. But all these things hardly mattered.
The entire building was echoing with sounds of screams and growls as people were being decapitated left and right.
He took mere moments to clear the ground floor. Another ten men had been killed as Athar walked ahead, leaving behind a scene of utter devastation.
Athar, still expressionless as ever, ascended the creaking stairs. He killed a couple of more men on the stairs as he reached the first floor. The silence on the upper floors was a stark contrast to the chaos below.
The first floor, likely living quarters of these thugs, offered no resistance. Not a single man remained on this floor.
Probably, half of them had already been sent to their deaths, and the rest might be on the top floor. This was what Athar guessed as he moved forward towards the second floor.
The final moments of the massacre were a blur of desperate parries and brutal strikes. Athar killed almost twenty men on this floor. Two of the men had also carried guns, but Athar had dispatched them with little difficulty.
As he killed the second last of the men on that floor, only one person remained standing. He was a scantily dressed man in his late fifties and, in all likelihood, the boss of the Red Rose Group.
"Who are you?" The man stammered. Seeing how all his men had been massacred, he had little hope of making it out alive. Even so, he wanted to know this man—this demonic killer.
"What did we do to you?" He almost pleaded for an answer.
Athar loomed over him, his sword dripping crimson. His entire body was drenched in blood, and he looked like a demon who had just walked out of hell.
The fiery intensity in his eyes seemed to pierce through the man's soul. Without a word, the sword fell, and another head rolled on the ground. He deserved no answer.
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