If any sane person had come to the square before the palace, they would undoubtedly have gone mad at once.
It was as though they had already left the mortal world and entered a terrifying nightmare.
As far as the eye could see, there was ankle-deep blood and thousands upon thousands of sprawled corpses. Many had been blasted open by gunfire, their guts spilling out; many more had been hacked to pieces, or even had their limbs torn straight off.
The makers of these tragedies bathed in filthy blood, panting heavily amid satisfied laughter and hissing.
A hundred meters behind them, another group of slaughterers were cleaning their guns and reloading ammunition.
"Stupid pigs!"
Kaisen hurried toward the temporary stronghold at the center of the square. Its main structure consisted of several damaged altars, reinforced with piled-up chunks of broken corpses.
As he climbed the horrifying mound of bodies, an Ork in blood-soaked armor, his face crisscrossed with scars, nodded at him.
There was so much blood on that executioner's armor that Kaisen briefly wondered why he had not simply painted himself red from the beginning.
"Where's Lorf?"
That bloodthirsty brute had vanished into the sea of corpses at the start of the battle. Kaisen had once thought he had been torn apart.
"Where is he?"
The executioner did not waste words on him, merely gesturing toward a taller pile of corpses nearby.
Lorf sat on the far side of the heap, picking fragments of bone from between the teeth of his chainsaw battle-axe. Two dead executioners lay beside him, their bodies carelessly piled in the corner, covered in too many wounds to count.
Lorf raised his head when Kaisen approached. So much coagulated blood clung to his battle-axe that it looked more like a club.
"Looks like you lot