Where it passed, the air itself seemed to corrode, letting out a faint sizzle.

  In the blink of an eye, the poison-mask fog was on the burly man. He didn’t even have time to block or dodge, only managing to throw an arm up in front of his face.

  But—

  SSSSSS—!

  A sound like a hot brand on fresh hide.

  The second the poison-mask fog touched the man’s arm, the solid, knotted muscle and tough skin of his forearm began to rapidly fester and melt away, like a wax doll hit with strong acid.

  Flesh curled back, bubbling with yellow-green foam and nasty white smoke. Almost instantly, it showed the white bone underneath.

  “AAAAAAGH—!!!”

  A scream of pure agony tore out of the man’s mouth. The pain in it was enough to make anyone’s skin crawl.

  But that wasn’t the end. The man’s scream had just begun when, in the next instant, a mucus-slick, dark-red vine that had slithered from somewhere unseen, like a waiting viper, suddenly coiled around his ankle.

  And yanked hard.

  THUMP.

  The man lost his balance and crashed to the ground. Before he could even struggle to cut the weird vine, that ugly face made of dark-green poison mist was already pouncing down on him like a hungry ghost, swallowing his whole shape in its churning, death-stinking fog.

  The screaming and struggling stopped after a few ragged breaths. The poison fog churned a couple more times, then slowly faded, mixing back into the surrounding haze.

  All that was left was a corpse with skin utterly rotted and oozing pus, features gone, putting out a sharp stench. It didn’t move again.

  The whole western part of the garden had turned into a blood-soaked mess.

  Stray bullets found marks in the Ascension Road ranks now and then. One caught a man in the thigh, blood spraying out in a fountain. A sharp shriek followed as the wounded guy stumbled and fell, trying uselessly to clamp the wound shut.

  Another, with seriously bad luck, took a round right to the temple. A wet thump later, a mess of red and white goo splattered the dirt. He dropped stiff, no last words, dead for sure.

  But the poison vials and those creepy methods were just as deadly, even more sneaky and cruel. A mere splash or graze of the stuff on skin, and either the flesh would sizzle and smoke, melting like ice under a blowtorch to show bone, the victim thrashing on the ground in unbearable pain; or the skin would rot fast, ooze pus, sprout nasty blisters, and the victim would drop dead sudden, no time for help, their body left in a horrifying state.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  Severed limbs. Charred, festering corpses. Plants shot full of holes. The ground slick with a sticky mix of blood, poison, and brain matter…

  Together, they painted a picture of fighting at its most raw and ugly.

  Looking at it, it was hard to believe these people, using every dirty trick to kill each other in a frantic rage, were all apprentices from the same Demon Hunter Academy.

  But this, maybe, was the Academy’s cold, real teaching method. Using some people’s lives, blood, pain, and deaths to “feed” the growth and power of others. From the huge pile of apprentices, only a few were ever going to make it to “Demon Hunter.” And the ones who really lived through this cruel road were an even tinier few within that few.

  Most of the bodies were just meant to be fertilizer, paving the blood-soaked ladder that led up to more power.

  Pandora lay quiet, hidden in a patch of shadow at the edge of the fight, watching it all coldly through gaps in the leaves.

  This was the first time she’d seen a scrap this big, this brutal, up close. It seemed like every second, someone got hit, someone screamed, someone died. Life here was cheaper than dirt.

  For a first moment, she did feel a jolt of instinctive shock at the naked cruelty and blood in front of her.

  But she got steady again, fast. Somewhere along the way, she’d already seen too much. From the first nightmare under the red moon, to later fights and kills in the open and in shadows, to today’s carefully planned ambush and payback kills at the flower market.

  To a normal person, the scene in front of her might be too brutal to take. But to her, it wasn’t so hard to look at anymore. The lives she’d ended herself, the killing she’d done with her own hands, weren’t small in number. Thinking that, Pandora’s gaze got even cooler.

  Yet, in sharp contrast to her chilling, settling thoughts, her body—the blood moving in her veins—was getting more and more worked up by everything she saw!

  Her body, hidden in shadow, had muscles tensing just a bit. Her heartbeat picked up without her meaning it to. Her breathing got deeper, stronger. A hard-to-name feeling—a mix of wanting, excitement, even a thread of fierceness—slowly stirred in the bottom of her heart.

  Outside, the ever-present crimson moon threw its cold, weird light through the leaves, painting her in broken patterns.

  Under that light, the ancient Witch-blood inside her seemed to hum along with it, to pulse because of it!

  Her cold gaze swept calm and precise across the battlefield. Deep in Pandora’s eyes, the flicker of simple excitement slowly settled and hardened into something more solid.

  Killing intent.

  She was hunting. Hunting for a good “target.” Prey that would let this body, slightly stirred up by the Witch-blood, relax again.

  Her eyes locked onto a figure. A man with a gross poison-vial pattern tattooed on his right bicep, its lines shining with a bad-news glint under the ghostly blue light of the active ward.

  The man was built thick. Right now, from some potion’s effect, his knotted muscles were swollen and bulging like they were pumped full of air. Veins squirmed like worms under his skin, putting out pressure way beyond a normal second-ranker.

  His fighting style reminded Pandora of Iron Hand, the one who’d died at the flower market that afternoon. Same reliance on raw physical power, same reckless fury.

  But the difference was, Iron Hand’s defense came from his mutated bone scales. This guy’s defense clearly came from some potion that made his skin tough and hard. The skin showing on his arms and neck had a deep brown shine to it, like hardened leather. Stray bullets or bits of shrapnel that glanced off it only left shallow white marks.