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Ash drifted around him like snow. The battlefield had beco a graveyard of steaming corpses and crushed ambition. Blood pooled in craters, bone fragnts jutted like broken teeth from the mud. Bodies of three frogkin and many ant warriors alike—were scattered in every direction, twisted in defeat. Even the air reeked of iron, bile, and sothing ancient that didn’t belong in this world.
Kai was silent.
Steam curled off his shoulders. His aura pulsed faintly along the edges, glowing red-black with the dust. His hands were slick, dripping gore onto the cracked stone. He didn’t move. He didn’t need to. The entire world moved around him now.
Azhara arrived at Kai’s location and skidded to a stop beside a smoking crater, chest heaving as she took in the aftermath.
Her eyes scanned the carnage, widening with disbelief. Dozens of bodies. Frogs dismbered. Ants dissolved in acid. The battlefield looked like it had been swallowed by a god’s tantrum.
She swallowed hard.
"Holy hell," she muttered under her breath. Her voice was quiet but heavy with shock. "You’re too strong, sir..."
She took another step forward, her boots crunching over shattered carapaces and fragnts of shattered star cores. Her gaze turned to Kai’s silhouette—broad-shouldered, jaw clenched, eyes glowing with feral restraint.
"Your impact killed so many... I thought—" she hesitated, horror slipping into her voice, "Did you kill the ants too?"
Kai didn’t even turn.
He simply cracked his neck, the sound loud and deliberate, like stone grating against stone.
"No," he said, voice low and gravel-thick. "They died before I arrived."
He turned slightly, his glowing eyes cutting across the smoky battlefield like blades.
"Only two frogs remain."
His voice carried across the ruin halls like a death sentence.
And from the far edge of the battlefield, those two remaining frogkin survivors, one missing half an ear, the other limping from a cracked thigh—took an unconscious step backward.
They had been standing near the corpses, frozen in fear, pretending to act cool.
But Kai had sensed their fear.
Now, their trembling limbs refused to obey. Their hearts thundered in their throats. Their lungs forgot how to breathe.
"You know what happens now," Kai said softly.
His claws flexed. His foot shifted slightly, pressing into the ground. The two survivors didn’t speak. But their bodies did.
A faint squelch echoed across the battlefield.
Everyone froze.
The source?
One of the two remaining frogkin, his legs trembling, his eyes wide like a frog caught in a torchlight. He had lost control of his body.
A shaful trickle of urine hissed down his scaled thighs, steaming as it splattered against the still-warm body of the dead frogkin slumped beneath him. It landed face first in the muck like a fallen garden gno. The corpse twitched one last ti, as if even in death it was offended by being used as a urinal.
A sharp hsssssshhkkk! echoed through the silent crater, like soone pouring hot tea onto a skillet.
Then ca a splatter-plap-plap as the stream hit uneven swamp muck and the still-warm corpse’s back, splashing in erratic spurts.
Drip... drip... pssshhhhhh...
Naaro gagged beside Akayoroi. "It’s dripping into the...! Soone get a leaf or sothing!"
The sizzling sound grew louder, unnervingly so, as if soone had dumped vinegar into a deep fryer. The sll that followed was worse than poison sacs or burnt swamp rot—it was personal. An eye-watering cocktail of swampy piss, half-digested snail juice, and the kind of bile-scent that ca from pure fear-induced bladder failure.
Azhara made a face like she’d bitten into a raw onion. "Ugh. I can sll that through my soul."
Vel gagged loudly. "Is it burning the frog corpse? Is that smoke?!"
One of the assassin ants nearly fainted. "I thought frogkin stored water, not liquid humiliation!"
Even Kai raised an eyebrow. "You pissed on your own teammate’s body?" he said flatly.
The frogkin whimpered. "I... I didn’t an to! My bladder’s got separation anxiety under stress!"
The dead frog’s limp hand twitched.
Azhara blinked. "Even the corpse is trying to crawl away from him. Incredible."
Kai slowly shook his head. "This has got to be the most disrespectful funeral I’ve ever seen."
Akayoroi, watching from the crater’s edge, had her antennae flared high. "He pissed on a brother-in-arms. That’s forbidden taboo in six ant religions."
Another ant muttered, "He deserves to be slapped to death just for that."
In the distance, the Frog-Man’s face turned a deeper shade of green.
"YOU DEFECATE ON MY HONOR!"
"Technically it’s urine," Kai said.
"I WILL FLAY YOUR BONES!"
Azhara whispered to Kai, "You sure he’s not more mad about the piss than the deaths?"
Kai just nodded. "Understandable. Even fat frogs have standards." His expression remained carved from stone, his eyes glowing, exoskeleton slick with battle sweat and gore.
He took a step forward. The ground groaned under him. Both frogs fell backward like dominoes, landing flat on their asses in the filth.
One of the two surviving frogkin raised a trembling webbed hand, green skin quivering with each panicked breath. "P-p-please, mighty Ant... I... I can give you information! Valuable secrets! I know how to cook stew! I even took Frog-Only dancing classes for nobles—"
The other imdiately slapped his arm with a loud...
SPLUT!
"SHUT UP! Don’t tell him we dance! That’s classified swamp knowledge!"
Kai’s brow arched. "You dance?"
The first frogkin panicked. "I... I an only when our master licks won! He likes music and dancing while licking female bodies!"
A hush fell in the air for a second. Azhara blinked twice. Even Kai tilted his head, as if the swamp had just farted in his ear. "Excuse ?"
The frogkin was pale now, nearly grey-green. "I-it’s a cultural thing! You wouldn’t understand!"
"Cultural?" Azhara repeated, face wrinkling in disbelief.
From behind, Akayoroi’s mandibles clicked once—then she let out an audible, barely restrained giggle.
One ant hissed, scandalized. "Queen!"
"I an... look at them," Akayoroi whispered, glancing down at the squirming frogs. "They’re shaking like tadpoles in mating season. And he—" her glowing eyes lingered on Kai’s broad back and muscular hands, "—is just standing there like a tower of sex and murder."
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