There was no sound of rushing wind when the eighty swords took flight.
It wasn't that they were silent; it was that there was too much noise. Eighty shrieks overlapped, churning the air into a chaotic mess.
The ears weren't filled with the sound of the wind, but a vast, sharp, muffled buzzing from the atmosphere being torn apart.
Clutching the wound at her waist, Qiu Shubai looked up and saw the swords fanning out from behind Luo Yang.
Their silver blades lined up in a fan shape against the firelight of the viaduct, resembling a pair of unfolding iron wings.
The tips dipped slightly, then rose in unison.
In the next second, the eighty swords vanished from their spots.
The snow lion closest to Luo Yang didn't even have time to retract the claw it was swinging at Qiu Shubai before the first flash of sword light sliced into its right forelimb joint.
The silver radiance of the mane’s defense collided with the blade, sending blinding sparks flying.
The blade continued inward, passing through fur, skin, and muscle without any resistance, emerging from the other side of the joint.
The snow lion let out a short roar.
It looked down at the wound, its gaze filled with confusion.
It didn't understand why its fur hadn't shattered this low-tier longsword as it usually did.
As a Level 3 mutant beast that had lived for a long time, it had crushed countless weapons better than this; creations of this grade were usually as fragile as dry twigs in its presence.
But twigs shouldn't be like this.
A second sword sliced in from its left ribs, sliding all the way along the gaps between them.
The tip traveled half a foot beneath the skin, carving a wound deep enough to reveal the white periosteum, before emerging from its lower back in a spray of silver-red blood.
A third, a fourth, a fifth.
Sword light wove a net over the snow lion.
Every trajectory was unique, and every strike precisely avoided the hardest parts of the bone.
They sliced into joint sockets, muscle gaps, and tendon attachments, like a surgeon using a scalpel to dissect a specimen.
The snow lion writhed frantically, its silver mane flaring out like a full moon of cold light as it swiped with its claws, snapped with its teeth, and slammed its entire body forward.
Its claws struck the blades, only to be violently repelled.
Under the control of Weapon's End, Ember's Birth, the swords were entirely unaffected by physical impact. They weren't weapons held in a hand, and there was no wielder to be bounced back by the recoil.
They were the swords themselves, pure instruments dedicated solely to cutting and piercing.
When a claw swept past, the blade merely vibrated slightly before returning to its original trajectory in the next second, continuing its dissection.
The beast tried to bite them, resulting in a tooth-aching crack.
It was the lion’s teeth that shattered.
The snow lion finally began to panic.
It didn't fear sharp weapons, because no matter how sharp a weapon was, its effectiveness depended on who swung it.
But these things weren't being swung. They moved on their own, like a school of living piranhas swimming against its body, taking a piece of flesh with every pass.
It had no idea how to fight them.
The situation for the other five snow lions was no better.
Luo Yang had divided the eighty swords into six groups of thirteen or fourteen, each group surrounding a single snow lion.
The coordination between the swords was precise to the centimeter. When one sword lunged at a snow lion’s throat from the front and the beast tilted its head to dodge, another sword was already waiting where its head moved, the tip piercing the soft flesh beneath the ear.
One sword slid along the ground toward a belly. When the snow lion raised a leg to stomp on it, the blade flicked upward ahead of time, slicing through the thin skin on the inner thigh and severing the tendon responsible for retracting its claws.
The snow lion’s front paw instantly lost its strength. Its sharp talons slid out of their sheaths, hanging limp and unable to be retracted.
One sword grazed its eye socket, causing blood to flow down and obscure half its vision.
Another sword seized the moment it shook its head to pierce the other eye socket—not deep, only half an inch, but just enough to completely sever the tear duct.
The snow lions’ roars shifted from anger to pain, and then from pain to something more primal.
Fear.
Countless wounds of varying depths were carved into their bodies.
Some only sliced the fur, some cut through the entire layer of fat, and some were deep enough to reveal the thick white bones beneath.
Their silver-white manes were soaked in blood, clumping into dark red locks that clung to their skin.
Their once snow-white fur became a mottled mess of red and white; from a distance, they looked as if they had just been fished out of a pool of blood.
Six Level 3 snow lions were being slowly sliced to pieces by a pile of first-tier weapons before they could even display their destructive power.
The shock of this scene was simply too great.
Tang Xuan crawled out from under the bus, her face covered in dust and bubble gum stuck in her hair. Her mouth hung open, but she forgot to curse.
She watched the sword light dancing over the snow lions and the ever-increasing wounds, a muffled sound escaping her throat—it was unclear if it was awe or an oath.
Li Qiang propped himself up from the pile of broken bricks, his vision blurred, not knowing where to look.
Eighty swords were moving simultaneously, each with its own trajectory and rhythm, like a precisely choreographed slaughter ballet.
His brain struggled to categorize everything into a comprehensible image, but the amount of information his eyes received was too overwhelming.
The others on the defensive line—the surviving Punishers from the military and the Ability Bureau—stood there.
They watched the young man in spectacles standing in the center of the eighty flying swords, his hands in his pockets, his expression no different from usual.
Qiu Shubai wasn't looking at the swords; she was looking at Luo Yang.
Luo Yang’s expression was calm—unnervingly so.
The blood energy fluctuations of Clear Heart Level 3 rippled around him, and the phantom of the golden tree in his Sea of Consciousness flickered behind him, but his eyes were closed.
He was sensing.
He was looking for the Snow Lion King.
But he couldn't find it.
There was nothing unusual within his perception net—not under the bridge piers, not in the stairwells, not underground.
He sifted through every inch of the half-kilometer radius, leaving no corner unchecked, but there was nothing.
There were only these six.
Luo Yang let out a long sigh.
Fine, let it be.
The swords continued their dance, but the thirty-second limit was almost up.
Thirty seconds was just a moment of distraction for a normal person, but for the snow lions, it felt as long as an entire night.
Their movements grew slower and slower. Massive blood loss deprived their muscles of oxygen, and their limbs began to weaken. Their pounces, once as powerful as crashing waves, became mere stumbles.
But the swords did not tire. Weapons empowered by Weapon's End, Ember's Birth would always perform at maximum capacity until the very moment their lifespan was exhausted.
All eighty swords lit up with a final silver glow, their blades vibrating slightly under the firelight. Starting from the tips, cracks spread like spiderwebs.
Then the blades, then the guards, then the entire bodies of the swords.
One sword pierced the shoulder blade of the last snow lion. The moment it penetrated the fur, the entire sword turned into grey-white ash.
Every sword completed its final strike at the same instant, and at that same instant, they all turned to ash.
Eighty Grantee Longswords, like eighty ignited silver lines, burned away simultaneously in the night.
The grey-white powder was scattered by the hot wind, swirling into the firelight beneath the viaduct.
The six snow lions no longer looked like snow lions.
Their silver-white fur had vanished completely, replaced by a thick crust of dark red blood.
Blood gushed from countless wounds, congealing into viscous scabs on their bodies only to be washed away by fresh flow.
The largest one had a wound on its flank so deep the contraction of its lungs beneath the ribs was visible; every breath sprayed out pinkish blood mist.
Though they were still standing, the fear born of biological instinct froze their limbs in place.
They stared at Luo Yang, their golden beastial eyes reflecting the figure walking toward them step by step, their pupils shrinking to the size of pinheads.
Luo Yang raised his hand.
A faint light flickered on the surface of his space ring.
Eighteen Cloud-piercing Spears appeared behind him.
These were second-tier weapons, two point four meters long with tri-edged heads and shallow blood grooves carved into each face.
The shafts were forged from alloy, wrapped in anti-slip patterned grip tape, with weighted metal cones at the ends.
They weren't as nimble as the swords. They were meant for heavy assaults, for piercing armor, and for driving through the thick bone and muscle of large mutant beasts.
The eighteen Cloud-piercing Spears lined up in mid-air in six groups of three, their tips pointed down at the six snow lions.
The spearheads reflected the orange-red firelight from the burning vehicles in the distance, flickering in the night.
Luo Yang didn't speak. He simply locked his blood energy onto the six snow lions, and then the eighteen Cloud-piercing Spears tilted forward simultaneously.
The largest snow lion let out a sound Luo Yang had never heard from a mutant beast before.
It was a whimper, the kind of sound a dog makes from its throat after being beaten into submission, only amplified a hundred times.
Hearing such a sound from the chest of a three-meter-long predator was so unsettling it gave everyone goosebumps.
It turned and fled, and the other five collapsed at the same moment.
They spun around, their limbs gouging bloody furrows into the ground as their four sickle-like bone toes kicked frantically at the asphalt, sprinting for their lives in the direction they had come from.
Blood was flung from their wounds, trailing long, thin lines of dark red rain behind them.
The Level 3 snow lions had fled.
Tang Xuan’s open mouth finally closed. She glanced at Li Qiang, and Li Qiang happened to look at her at the same time.
Neither of them said a word. They both turned their heads back to watch the figure walking unhurriedly forward, followed by eighteen Cloud-piercing Spears.
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