After a brief conversation, Yun You and Tian En parted ways again, returning to their quarters for so rest.
The day's journey left them both sowhat exhausted, wishing only to have a good night's sleep before the concert the next day.
However, that night was destined to be anything but peaceful...
Yun You woke up from a nightmare for the first ti at two in the morning.
At that mont, Mokaka had just finished composing a song and intended to have a rcenary from the guard bring so late-night snacks.
Yet, despite calling several tis, the guard, half-hidden in shadows, made no sound nor reply.
Realizing sothing was amiss, Mokaka hastily sent a drone to investigate.
Only then did she discover that the rcenary's head, lost in the darkness, was already nowhere to be found... The whole person was leaning against the wall in a sowhat twisted posture, with only half of the throat spraying blood, as if narrating their tragic end.
Another rcenary had been assassinated.
This ti, however, the composed Mokaka did not sound the alarm.
For she knew it was futile, rely alerting the killer.
So, she discreetly awakened Tian En and Yun You, summoning them back to her side.
There was no doubt that this victim, too, perished at the hands of the swift assassin.
Because the cut on the person's neck also bore the rose-thorn-like wound pattern.
And after so investigation, Yun You quickly found that the new victim, like the previous two, had a few blemishes on their record, hands stained with the lives of innocents, and managed to enter Mokaka's guard team only by erasing their criminal evidence.
As for the shattered corpse, Mokaka herself was evidently a bit weary.
She had stayed up for several weeks in a row, catching only two to three hours of sleep per day, and lately had been pulling all-nighters to compose a song in ti for the concert.
She didn't have much energy left to worry about other matters, and now, with repeated incidents in the guard team, it was truly exhausting.
However, Mokaka's response was pretty swift.
Seeing the continuous incidents, she did not hesitate to recall the guards on patrol outside, forming them into groups of five, each led by an Apprentice Death God, supported by four rcenaries, ensuring near invulnerability.
With such an arrangent, even if attacked, there should be a chance to send out a ssage.
However...
What happened next once again went beyond everyone's expectations.
In the camp, the third squad, led by the Rank 2 Apprentice Death God "Gale," belonging to the Shaman Sequence, with four rcenaries equipped with civilian prosthetic bodies, was quite formidable.
Yet, at precisely three in the morning, this squad completely lost contact, with no signals detected by radar or life spectrum analyzers.
Half an hour later, a civilian stepping out at night discovered them in an abandoned tent.
By then, the squad mbers were devoid of life signs.
Their deaths looked slightly better, rely strangled to chanical asphyxiation, but rose-thorn marks remained on their skin.
Similarly, these individuals carried scandalous baggage, though slightly less severe than the previous victims.
Perhaps this was why their deaths seed less grueso than those prior.
At this point, Yun You basically realized sothing.
All the eliminated individuals had murky pasts, and by legal standards, even if not sentenced to death, they could hardly escape life imprisonnt or other severe penalties.
Yet, these people ultimately evaded punishnt for various reasons, even laundering their reputations to beco legitimate guards.
"Could it be that the killer is judging them...and the gravity of their sins correlates with the brutality of their executions?"
Yun You contemplated this possibility.
But just as she intended to scrutinize the mbers of Mokaka's guard team, another incident occurred in the camp...
"Boom——!"
A loud explosion broke the silence in the camp, drawing everyone's attention.
Over there, it was the warehouse storing supplies.
The sturdy alloy door was violently battered open, and then a man stumbled out, trailing thick smoke behind, as if sothing had caught fire.
"Save ... Help , please!"
The man's shirt was drenched in sweat, his tattered black robe hung by his shoulders, and he appeared extrely disheveled.
Yun You recognized him, the leader of the fourth squad, Apprentice Death God "Lynx," a Rank 2 Mad Dog, certainly not weak.
At this mont, his face displayed a post-survival ecstasy, as if he had just crawled back from the brink of hell.
"I saw... I saw the murderer..."
He gasped for breath, running toward Yun You and Mokaka.
The young female leader straightened from the sofa, her cat-eared headphones flickering with a red light, as if issuing a rescue command to the drones.
But just then, Lynx's step suddenly faltered...
In the shadows, people witnessed his right index finger inexplicably fall off, fluttering to the ground like a dead leaf.
Next was his forearm, skin, and muscle, as if sliced by an invisible scalpel, peeling away in pieces, revealing the stark white bone beneath.
"Ah——!"
A harrowing scream echoed in the square, unimaginable agony brought Lynx to the ground, and his left cheek began to peel, exposing the muscles twitching beneath. Blood dripped from his chin, blossoming into blood-red roses on the ground.
Mokaka's pupils contracted sharply, but without any hesitation, she swiftly moved her fingers in the air, summoning up the holographic monitor.
"dical team! Call the dical team quickly!"
For the first ti, her voice carried a panic Yun You had never heard before.
Mokaka's reaction was swift, but it was already too late.
Lynx's chest began to collapse, the bones cleanly stripped of flesh and vessels exposed to the air, his organs suspended as if by magic, before suddenly bursting apart, turning into a rain of blood.
The crowd in the square scread in terror, children had their eyes covered by adults, but even the adults could barely hold back their nausea.
"It was... It was..."
With his last bit of strength, Lynx raised his bloodied arm, seemingly pointing in a direction.
But before he could finish, his entire head split open like an overripe waterlon, brain matter and blood spattering the ground with a series of pops.
When the last piece of skin fluttered to the ground, no words were spoken on that plaza, leaving nothing but a deathly silence.
Mokaka jumped down from the levitating couch, her pink short hair moving without wind, the cat ears on her headphones displaying an unprecedentedly angry symbol.
[╰（‵□′）╯]
She squatted down, lightly touching the bloodstain on the ground with a gloved finger.
"Nano-scale delayed decomposition knife technique..."
She muttered to herself: "This technology used to be seen only on battlefields."
Seeing the girl's increasingly grave expression, Yun You suddenly realized sothing.
Perhaps, there never was any true safety within this sanctuary.
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