Chapter 271: Where Is My Sister?!! Part II

Lola’s laughter died in her throat. For a moment, she just stared at him, and something flickered across her face that might have been surprise before it twisted into something uglier.

"You just don’t know when to quit, do you, brat?!" She snapped her fingers, and the three Diamond-Tier beasts regrouped around her, their eyes fixed on Raiden with renewed hunger.

"Fine. If you want to keep getting up, keep getting up. My cuties will just keep knocking you down."

The spider lunged again as Raiden met it with his scythe, but this time he didn’t try to block. He dodged, barely, the creature’s leg whistling past his head close enough to ruffle his hair.

The hound came from the other side, and Raiden twisted away, but he wasn’t fast enough to evade its claws as they caught his arm, tearing through skin and muscle.

Raiden hissed in pain, a sharp, involuntary sound that he hated himself for. But he didn’t stop. He swung his scythe in a wild arc, catching the hound across the face and sending it stumbling back.

The smoke serpent coiled around his waist, tightening, and Raiden drove his elbow into its core, dispersing it into a cloud of black mist.

For a moment, he was free. For a moment, he could breathe again. But he wasn’t given much rest as the spider was on him again, and the hound, and the serpent reforming from the mist, and the world collapsed back into pain and motion and the desperate, animal need to keep moving.

Three Diamond-Tier beasts against one Gold-Tier human. It wasn’t a fair fight at all; it was a beating. Raiden blocked, dodged, struck, got hit, got knocked down, got back up, got knocked down again, got back up again.

Over and over, until the cycle itself became the only thing keeping him upright. His blood sight was flickering badly now, barely giving him more than a half-second warning before each attack. His scythe was chipped and dull, his arm was numb from the shoulder down, and he was pretty sure at least two of his ribs were broken, each breath pulling a sharp, white-hot line of pain through his chest.

But he kept asking. "Where is my sister?" Lola laughed. "Still asking? You really are stubborn." "Where is...my sister?" Trevor, who had been watching from the sidelines with a growing expression of unease, finally spoke up. "Lola. Enough. This isn’t working. He’s not going to break like this."

"Then what do you suggest??" Lola snapped, her eyes never leaving Raiden. "He just keeps getting up. It’s annoying."

"Then we stop playing around." Trevor’s voice was cold now, stripped of the casual arrogance he’d worn earlier. "All of us. At once. No more one-on-one. No more taking turns. We bury him."

Lola’s smile returned, wider this time, hungrier. "Now that’s more like it." She snapped her fingers, and the three Diamond-Tier beasts surged forward. Behind them, the others moved too. Trevor’s flaming eagle, the blurry man’s stone golem, the laptop guy’s shadow wolves, and the Terra Beasts of the remaining Battle Masters— all of them Platinum-Tier or higher, surged toward Raiden like an unstoppable tide.

Raiden’s blood sight screamed at him. They were too many, too fast, and they were coming on way too strong. He tried to dodge but he couldn’t.

The first attack caught him in the side, a claw from the flaming eagle that tore through his shirt and dug into his ribs, and Raiden felt something inside him give way, a wet, sickening shift that told him exactly how bad it was.

The second was a fist from the stone golem, slamming into his back and sending him flying across the warehouse. The third was a bite from one of the shadow wolves, sinking into his shoulder and holding on, and Raiden hit the ground hard, blood pooling beneath him, his vision blurry and his ears ringing with the echo of his own heartbeat.

Somewhere above him, he could hear voices, distant and muffled, as if he were underwater. "Is he dead??" "No. Still breathing. Stubborn bastard." "Should we finish him??" "Not yet. The main family wants him alive. For now."

Raiden’s fingers twitched against the concrete. His blood sight flickered, weak and stuttering, but it was still there. Still his.

He pushed himself up, slowly, painfully, one hand braced against the wall, one knee on the ground, blood streaming down his face, his arms, his chest, soaking into the fabric of his shirt until it clung to him like a second skin. But his eyes were still burning, and that was the thing that made everyone in the warehouse go quiet.

"Where," he said, his voice barely a whisper, "is my sister?"

The warehouse went silent. Even the Terra Beasts seemed to hesitate, their growls dying in their throats, their bodies shifting uneasily as if they could feel something in the air that their masters couldn’t name.

There was something in Raiden’s voice, something in his eyes, that made them all take a step back.

Something that said, very clearly, that he was not going to stop. No matter what. No matter how many of them there were. No matter how many times they knocked him down. He was going to keep getting up, and he was going to keep asking, until someone answered, until someone broke, until someone told him where his sister was.

Bai Zheng’s face was pale now, his earlier confidence completely gone, replaced by something tighter, something that looked almost like fear. "This is insane," he muttered. "He’s just a Gold-Tier Battle Master. How is he still standing??"

"Because he’s not just a Gold-Tier Battle Master," Lola said quietly, her eyes fixed on Raiden, and for the first time there was no mockery in her voice. "He’s from the Ashen family...."

Raiden took another step forward. Then another. His blood scythe dragged along the ground, leaving a trail of crimson behind him, and every step cost him something he couldn’t afford to lose. But he kept walking. "Where," he said again, his voice louder now, rougher, carrying a chill that settled into the bones of everyone who heard it, "is my sister?"

Nobody answered. So he kept walking, and the warehouse held its breath, and somewhere in the shadows beyond the walls, three pairs of eyes watched and waited, held back only by the promise Raiden had made to them, that they would not interfere unless he said so.

Woolie controlled himself really, really hard not to charge in as he looked at Raiden’s bad condition.

But even they could feel it now, the thing building in the air around him, and they knew, with a certainty that needed no words, that the promise was getting harder to keep.