While hell was manifesting around Dex as he engaged the leader and his spearmen guards, turning their weapons into a molten liquid, a stealthy movement was occurring in the background of the scene. Two of the remaining mercenaries, who had stayed on the fringes of the initial tactical circle, slipped toward the rear with cunning and cautious steps.
They had witnessed the massacre. They saw how the noble boy crushed their comrades, and how he melted their leader's axe with his bare hands. These surviving mercenaries instinctively realized that facing this "monster disguised in human form" meant certain and agonizing death. Driven by the logic of cowards and dishonorable fighters, their frantic eyes sought the only remaining refuge: the weakest link.
Their gazes turned toward Lumia.
The silver-haired girl stood with unnatural calmness a few meters behind the main battlefield. Her simple cloak fluttered lightly with the currents of hot air emanating from Dex, as if she were completely unaffected by the ambient heat or the stench of burning blood. She was not trembling, she was not crying, and she did not attempt to run and hide behind the tree trunks as noble girls or maids would do in such bloody situations.
Instead, Lumia stood still, her wide silver eyes, devoid of any human emotional gleam, tracking Dex's movements with a strange and terrifying precision. Her pupils darted with superhuman speed to follow the angles of his strikes, the timing of his dodges, the way he exploited his opponents' weak points, and his method of delivering effective, dirty blows. She looked as if she wasn't watching a battle for survival, but rather recording a documentary, or more accurately... reading a highly complex textbook on human anatomy and how to destroy it.
"Grab the girl! She's our only chance! We'll take her hostage and bargain with her life!" one of the mercenaries shouted in a tone mixing despair and hope, lunging at her with all his speed, brandishing his broadsword in front of his chest to intimidate her. The other mercenary followed from a slanted angle to cut off her escape route.
The mercenaries expected the natural, programmed reaction in their minds for such situations: they expected the slender girl to scream in terror, raise her hands to protect her face, or turn to flee, only to trip over the hem of her dress and become easy prey. In the worst-case scenario, they thought she might unleash a terrifying magical aura or a wave of energy to push them back, like disguised monsters or high-ranking witches.
But what happened in the next few seconds was something the limited human mind of the mercenaries couldn't process, and something that made even Dex's blood freeze for a moment when he caught it out of the corner of his eye.
Lumia, the "Thousand-Year Disaster" who had forgotten her identity, did not use any complex defensive magic. She did not summon a shield, nor did she unleash explosive energy. Her silver eyes captured the trajectory of the sword rushing toward her neck as if it were moving in slow motion.
The moment the sharp, Rank (C) magical blade came within less than an inch of the white skin of her neck, she moved. Lumia tilted her body with a slight, precise, and fluid motion, to the extent that she seemed like a creature unbound by the laws of gravity or friction. Her lean and the change in her body's angle resembled the flow of pure "water" around a sharp rock obstructing a riverbed. She evaded the thrusting blade by mere millimeters, without wasting a single speck of energy on unnecessary movement, leaving the mercenary to stumble forward, carried by his own wasted momentum.
Then, with the exact same perfect timing, and from the exact same slanted angle Dex had used just minutes prior when he crushed his opponent's throat, Lumia raised her soft, white hand.
Her fist wasn't clenched with the force of anger. Her fingers were extended, straight and flat, like the blade of a spear.
"Move one: Throat strike," Lumia whispered in a low, completely flat voice, devoid of any emotion; no anger, no fear, no euphoria of victory. She was reciting the title of the lesson she had just learned.
The edge of her delicate hand struck directly at the first mercenary's "Adam's apple," precisely at the weakest point of the windpipe. But it wasn't a strike relying on human muscular strength, which she didn't possess enough of. Rather, her strike was reinforced by an invisible, microscopic layer of absolute "Void Mana."
There was no sound of a forceful impact. The Void Mana, by its nature of absorbing and destroying spatial existence, bypassed the outer layers of skin without scratching it, permeating directly inside. It crushed the hard cartilage within the neck and shredded the internal tissues and vocal cords, turning them to mush, without leaving a single external bruise or shedding a single drop of blood on the skin's surface.
The first mercenary's eyes widened until they nearly popped out of their sockets. He dropped his sword instantly and raised his hands to his seemingly uninjured neck, trying to draw a single breath of air into his lungs, but the pathway had been completely erased. He fell to his knees, suffocating in absolute silence, writhing in pure agony before drawing his last breath, his face turning a deadly shade of blue.
The second mercenary, who was rushing in from behind, froze in place for a fraction of a second as he watched his comrade fall without being touched by a weapon and without the sound of a blow. Horrified by what he saw, and driven by a blind survival instinct, he realized the distance was too close to use his longsword. He tried to use his foot, aiming a powerful, reckless kick at Lumia's waist to push her away.
Lumia did not retreat. She bent with supernatural flexibility, and in a smooth, lethal, circular motion resembling ballet in noble halls, she spun on her axis. Instead of blocking the kick, she targeted her opponent's pivot point. She raised her small foot, and forcefully and precisely kicked the left ankle of his pivoting leg, exactly as Dex had done when he shattered the knee of his blind opponent.
"Move two: Shattering the lower joint," she stated in the same cold, academic tone.
Crack! Whoosh!
The sound of crumbling bones echoed, followed by a strange noise resembling escaping air. It wasn't a normal fracture that results in a bone protruding. The Void Mana enveloping Lumia's foot didn't break the bone; it "nullified" the molecular bonds between the calcium atoms. The Void Mana caused the ankle bone and the strong joint to completely disintegrate, turning in a fraction of a second into fine white dust that collapsed within the mercenary's flesh, leaving his leg like a soft sponge devoid of support.
The second man fell to the ground gruesomely, his voice rising in a deafening scream of pain as he saw his leg twist at an impossible, sickening angle. He desperately tried to draw a spare dagger from his belt to defend himself, throwing it at her as he fell.
But Lumia didn't pause for a moment. Without blinking an eye, she caught the dagger's hilt as it flew through the air with breathtaking dexterity. She didn't grip it normally, but in a reverse-grip stance. And with a lightning-fast, smooth, and millimeter-calculated movement, she took a step forward while crouching, and plunged the blade directly into the precise point between the third and fourth lumbar vertebrae of his spine, which was curved due to his fall. Exactly... literally exactly... as she had seen Dex do in her visual memory copied from his previous fights.
Instant and total paralysis struck the mercenary's body. His scream was cut off, turning into a faint rattle, and his face planted into the wet mud, incapable of moving a single muscle from his neck down to the tips of his toes.
Dex, who was still standing over the burning Garrick, froze for a moment as he witnessed the end of this scene out of the corner of his piercing eye. Smoke rose from his hands, and the corpses of mercenaries lay around him, but the scene that unfolded behind him was what terrified him the most this night.
Lumia's successive movements were a carbon copy of his dirty, bloody fighting style, honed in his years of imprisonment: the throat strike, the shattering of vital joints, and the spinal stab to paralyze the opponent. But the difference was fundamental and terrifying... her movements were "elegant." It was a refined, perfect version, completely devoid of emotion, anger, or human errors caused by exhaustion or fear, and exponentially more lethal due to its terrifying integration with Void energy.
Dex felt a cold shiver run down his lower back, despite the heat filling his body. He stood watching this girl, this cosmic disaster who had lost her memory and become a blank slate, calmly stand up and dust imaginary dirt off her dress. He realized a horrifying truth: this girl was learning how to become a "perfect killing machine" purely through visual observation.
She wasn't learning magic or nobility; she was absorbing the dark, distorted survival instinct he possessed. In those few minutes, through her absolute imitation of his style without understanding the concepts of cruelty or mercy, Dex realized that he had inadvertently transformed her from a "gentle lamb and dormant disaster" into a "silent, conscious blade", a blade that tears souls apart with cold, surgical precision, without any moral hesitation or the flutter of an eyelid. He had been teaching her, without realizing it, the language of the prisons.