Night slowly shrouded the entire sky like an enormous black cloth. The village, still relatively peaceful during the day, was now gripped by an oppressive deathly silence, broken only by scattered firelight.
The air reeked of burned wood, cheap liquor, and... a faint, elusive trace of blood. This place had become a temporary den for the jackals of the Black Sand Alliance.
Several bonfires crackled in the clearing at the center of the village, illuminating faces twisted with vicious triumph. Amid the thugs' raucous laughter, a burly man as fat as a pig dragged a sobbing, struggling girl out of a house with broken doors and windows, a savage grin on his face.
The girl's clothes had been torn into disarray, her face covered in tears and terror. Her pleas and cries only drew louder, more unrestrained laughter, steeped in lust, from the men around her.
"Hehehe, little beauty, stop crying! Tonight, I'll take real good care of you!"
The fat brute's voice was coarse and vulgar, and one filthy hand had already reached roughly for the girl's collar. His accomplices whistled and egged him on with filthy remarks, ready to enjoy an atrocity they had long since grown accustomed to.
Yet just as the brute's grin stretched to its widest, an unfamiliar explosion, deep and loud, tore through the night without warning!
Bang! It sounded nothing like an explosion of Dou Qi, much less the clash of weapons. It was brief and sharp, yet carried an unmatched penetrating force.
Immediately afterward, a horrifying sight unfolded that none of them would ever forget-the fat brute's head burst like a rotten watermelon struck by an iron hammer, exploding with a wet pop into a mangled mass of red and white!
Scalding blood mixed with brain matter splashed onto the accomplices closest