He shoved the grim image from his mind. Fear burned away, replaced by a sharper, more savage intent to kill.

  He stopped thinking about the shattered morale of his team. A low growl, like a wounded animal, tore from his throat. His muscles swelled, veins bulging violently beneath his skin. That surging, torrential power flooded back into his chest like boiling magma, burning away the last of the chill.

  Before, his desire to kill Pandora had been a hunter’s game—confident, almost playful. Now, it was deadly serious. This slender girl wasn’t prey. She was a legitimate threat, deserving his full and terrifying focus.

  “You… DIE!”

  Iron Hand roared and attacked again.

  His scaled fist tore through the air like a battering ram, each swing carrying his full, pulverizing strength, aiming to smash his nimble target into paste.

  Pandora didn’t meet his strength head-on. Not even once.

  Her form shifted like a fleeting shadow, twisting and evading between the gusts of his punches and the craters they gouged in the earth. Each dodge was narrow, precise, yet she kept that infuriating composure, as if the entire fight was unfolding exactly to her plan.

  Her real attention was fixed on the gunmen upstairs.

  They were clearly first-rank, followers of the Corpse-Plague Acolyte path—physically enhanced but psychically weak. Against her near-tangible spiritual assault, they had the defenses of infants. No resistance at all.

  But psychic attacks, for all their brutal simplicity, came at a steep cost. She couldn’t sustain that raw, brute-force pressure for long.

  So her strategy for these fragile shooters was simple: wipe them out. Fast.

  As for the cold, lethal presence she felt several hundred meters away…

  She didn’t need to spare it a thought.

  Her most trusted maid, who specialized in handling such “snakes in the shadows,” had already gone to deal with it.

  ………………

  Several hundred meters from the flower market, atop a derelict seven-story building shrouded in creepers, the sniper known as “Index Finger” had everything in place.

  Through the custom scope of his absurdly long-barreled rifle, the entire market lay bare below him, every detail crisp.

  He’d had the Baroness in his sights from the moment she arrived. His finger rested on the icy trigger, waiting for the perfect moment of distraction.

  It should have been a clean shot. High chance of an instant kill. Low chance of anything less than a fight-ending wound.

  But Pandora’s sudden move—her preemptive shot, the precise counterattack, the swift carnage—had shattered all their expectations. It wrecked the ambush’s rhythm completely.

  Their intelligence said the Baroness wasn’t third-rank. She was a second-rank apprentice, one who’d poured her time into Potioneering. Her actual combat power within the second rank shouldn’t be remarkable. It made sense—that was why she trained at Echo Quarry so obsessively. To compensate.

  Her main gun being at the Blacksmith’s for modification was key intel. Her first mistake.

  Leaving the East District for this desolate place was her second, and possibly fatal, error.

  Normally, a squad built around three seasoned second-rank combatants—himself, Iron Hand, and their coordinator—should have wiped out a lopsided apprentice like her with ease.

  Yet…

  It had all gone wrong.

  Their elite first-rank shooters, the ones meant for suppression, were being slaughtered in a one-sided rout. The efficiency was terrifying. They’d all be dead soon.

  He had to act. He had to seize back control of this spiraling fight.

  “Unreliable. All of them. It always falls to me.”

  Index Finger took a slow, deep breath, then exhaled completely, emptying his lungs.

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  He clenched his teeth, held his breath, and began methodically gathering his focus, pushing every distraction aside.

  He was one of the few in his line of work who’d taken a real interest in Wizard meditation methods. He’d never wanted to walk their complex, dangerous path, but he’d stolen some valuable tricks from their esoteric principles—techniques for calming his mind and achieving extreme focus under pressure.

  This skill had saved him countless times in his long career as a sniper.

  This time, it would help him take the Baroness’s head.

  The view through his high-powered scope was perfectly steady. The crosshairs were locked, unmoving, on the slender figure at the market entrance, now dancing around Iron Hand.

  Her chest was centered in the reticle.

  Most importantly—she hadn’t made a major, unpredictable move for two full seconds.

  Given her pace of clearing the upstairs shooters, and the pressure Iron Hand was applying… she likely wouldn’t move next, either.

  This was the window.

  At the same time, the fine, specialized sensory nodes covering his skin—erect like black filaments—constantly fed him data on wind direction and speed from the rooftop.

  All the numbers converged in his hyper-focused mind.

  The calculation matched his intuition perfectly.

  Now.

  No hesitation. No delay.

  Index Finger called on the core discipline of a top-tier sniper.

  He held his breath.

  His fingertip felt the cold, hard surface of the trigger, and that subtle, final breaking point.

  Then…

  He squeezed.

  Bang…?

  The gun didn’t fire.

  The expected roar, the bullet tearing through the air to find its mark—none of it happened.

  Index Finger’s eyes flooded with red. His pupils dilated in shock, his mind blank, completely bewildered.

  A jam? Or…?

  He didn’t have time to wonder. Purely on instinct, he started to lower his head to check the rifle he trusted with his life—the weapon that now felt alien in his hands.

  But in the next instant—

  His field of vision began to move in a way he’d never experienced. Completely out of control.

  He saw his own index finger, still curled around the trigger, trembling slightly.

  He saw the cold, dust-covered concrete wall.

  Then,

  his view plunged rapidly downward…

  Thud.

  A dull, wet impact.

  It was the sound of a head, suddenly unsupported, hitting the ground hard. It even bounced once, picking up grit and filth.

  The dead eyes, once sharp as a hawk’s, were now wide and unfocused, frozen in the incomprehensible shock of a final moment he never understood.

  With his last spark of consciousness, Index Finger tried to grasp what had… happened to him.

  But he’d fallen facing the wall.

  So those unseeing eyes never turned, never saw the crimson figure who had been standing behind him all along. They never saw the scarlet blade in her hand, its swing now complete.

  Elsa stood quietly, her pristine maid uniform a stark contrast to the rooftop decay. The only mark was a thin line of crimson on her scarlet greatsword, the blood already vanishing into the metal along the fuller.

  Her usually gentle eyes were now cold, utterly unruffled.

  She was about to send a simple “threat neutralized” through the direct, private connection she shared with Lady Pandora—a link far more secure than any Palmfiend.

  Then her gaze caught a small, trembling movement.

  It was a palm-sized creature, struggling as it crawled from the headless corpse’s embrace. A single round eye, full of terror, stared from its wrist-stump, darting between Elsa and the head on the ground as if it understood its fate even before its master had.

  This was Index Finger’s Palmfiend.

  These little creatures were mass-produced by the Demon Hunter Academy—standard issue for apprentices, cheap biotech constructs, essentially disposable.

  So the Academy didn’t bother with complex protections for them.

  A common practice in the brutal struggles between apprentices was simple: once someone died, the winner would use the deceased’s Palmfiend to transfer all their stored Contribution Points. Then, like discarding trash, they’d kill the now-useless creature.

  This Palmfiend had clearly been around. It had seen this happen to others of its kind. Its tiny body shook violently, its single eye pleading and resigned.

  Elsa felt no particular sympathy.

  She stepped forward, grabbed it cleanly, and touched it with her own Palmfiend.

  The single eyes on both creatures glowed faintly as data streamed between them.

  A moment later, it was done. Elsa felt the number in her own Palmfiend jump by a significant amount—far more than a typical second-rank apprentice should have. This sniper had done his share of profitable killing.

  But Contribution Points were just numbers to Elsa. Her purpose was tied to Lady Pandora’s will, nothing else.

  Her gaze stayed cool. Her fingers began to tighten, ready to crush the little creature and erase it entirely.

  Right then—the dead man’s Palmfiend vibrated in her hand.

  Not a fear tremor. A rhythmic pulse. An incoming message.

  Elsa stopped.

  She looked down. Light-point text scrawled quickly across the creature’s “palm” skin.

  It wasn’t from a known contact.

  It was anonymous.

  For the first time, genuine surprise flickered in Elsa’s cold eyes.

  She understood immediately.

  They’d sent more than just the two second-ranks and the shooters.

  There was another. Someone deeper in the shadows, who’d been in contact with this now-dead sniper.

  ………………

  Back at the abandoned flower market, roughly three minutes had passed since Pandora began her ruthless cleanup of the second-floor gunmen.

  Three minutes is an eternity in combat. It can also feel like a blink.

  Now the street was utterly silent, save for one sound: a labored, rasping breath, like a broken bellows.

  The second-floor windows that had spat death were all quiet. Each dark opening stared down like a blind monster’s empty socket.

  The air was thick, almost choking, with the smells of gunpowder, blood, dust, and rotting greenery.

  In the center, Iron Hand gasped violently for air.

  Though it had only been minutes of pursuit, he looked nothing like before.

  His bare upper body, once only partly scaled, was now completely covered in that eerie, bloodless white. All his subcutaneous bone plates had fully activated, jutting from his skin. They weren’t scattered defenses anymore, but a crude, layered armor fitted tightly over his torso, shoulders, and neck.

  On his back, turned from Pandora, the scales stood fully erect like porcupine quills, venting massive plumes of pungent white steam. He looked like an engine pushed far beyond its limits, ready to burst.