"Useless! All of you are useless! You couldn't even stop two people?"
Up on the village watchtower, the old woman who had rung the alarm screamed herself hoarse as she watched two men slaughter the fully armed villagers.
Annoyed by her racket, Zhao Si raised his gun and blew her head apart.
Zhao Si joined up with Bagralim. They kept Helena and Fia between them while Helena cast restorative incantations on the two men, replenishing their spent stamina.
Bill watched, dumbfounded. "Tarnished... are this strong?"
He had always thought the Tarnished summoned by the Two Fingers were about the same as soldiers. How strong could they possibly be? A bunch of people without even Grace, yet they could gather around the Two Fingers. It was absurd. In his view, Roundtable Hold should have recruited from the army. Why use Tarnished?
What he saw today completely overturned his worldview. As a soldier, he had never imagined that someone could single-handedly slaughter nearly an entire village. Well, of course, it had stopped being single-handed later, when another Tarnished joined in.
The two Tarnished warriors worked together with considerable coordination, like comrades who had fought countless life-and-death battles together. Circling their two female companions as they fought, they soon killed all those terrifying villagers whose very appearance tormented the mind. Bodies piled up on the ground, and blood seeped into the earth.
The other villagers scattered when they saw things going badly. With so few people on their side, Zhao Si and the others could not readily pursue them and had to let them flee. The edge of Zhao Si's blade had rolled from all the hacking, so he discarded it and took a fresh one.
The Glintstone Firearm's slide drew back, exposing the chamber and ejecting the depleted Glintstone Bullet. It tumbled