Chapter 665 Blood Bath

Warriors returning from long patrols would pause in the courtyards just to lift her small body onto their broad shoulders and carry her a short distance while she laughed, her small hands gripping their hair or horns for balance.

The elders of the clan would set aside the softest pieces of ripe fruit and the mildest cuts of meat for her alone, and they would watch her eat with the satisfied expressions of people who had found something worth protecting.

Laughter followed her through the temple halls like a second shadow, and she moved through those ordinary days with the easy confidence of a child who had never once been forced to understand true fear.

She did not know that the world outside the temple walls could be cruel. She did not know that the safety around her was not a law of nature but a thing her parents built and maintained every single day.

Unfortunately, it all crumbled down quickly. It crumbled the way a wall crumbles when the foundation is struck at the exact right point—suddenly, completely, and without any warning that the moment had arrived.

A rival clan suddenly attacked. The assault arrived like a storm breaking over calm ground, and what followed was a slaughter.

Bodies fell across the open courtyards and along the stone steps of the temple.

The cries of the wounded mixed with the clash of metal and the roar of warriors who had already given up on surviving, and had decided only to take as many enemies with them as possible.

Almost everyone was killed in the chaos, save for a few powerful warriors from both sides remained standing, locked in desperate, exhausting combat.

Among those still fighting was Zanya’s father, locked in a brutal clash with what appeared to be a lizard beastkin—a tall, heavily scaled and tailed figure whose wide blade already dripped with the blood of fallen clan members.

Her mother moved with swift purpose. She swept Zanya into her arms and carried the little girl deeper into their temple, her steps quick and certain despite the chaos behind them.

She set her down in a shadowed corner behind a wooden screen, where the light barely reached and the sounds of the battle outside seemed both close and far away at once.

There she pressed one finger firmly against her own lips in a clear, silent command for the child to stay quiet and still.

Her eyes said what her mouth did not: do not move, do not speak, and do not make a sound no matter what you see or hear.

Then she drew her own blade and turned away to join the fighting outside. She did not look back. Perhaps, because she could not afford to.

From her hidden corner, Zanya watched everything unfold through the narrow gaps in the screen. The wood framed the world into thin slices of horror, and she saw each slice in turn.

She saw the lizard man cut her father apart with ruthless precision. The heavy blade opened the oni’s body in long, wet strokes until the powerful figure finally collapsed and did not rise again.

The man who had settled disputes with a glance, who had commanded respect from every warrior, who had lifted her onto his shoulders and laughed with her—he fell, and he did not get up, and the ground beneath him turned dark and wet.

She saw the same blade slash across her mother’s lower jaw in a single vicious motion, nearly severing it so that it hung loosely afterward, swaying with the motion of her body.

Then the blade drove straight forward into her mother’s chest.

Horror locked Zanya’s small body completely in place, but a thin, involuntary squeak escaped her throat before she could stop it—a small, animal sound, barely louder than a breath, born from a body too young to hold in its own terror.

The lizard man heard the sound.

His head turned slowly, the way a predator’s head turns when it has found something it did not expect to find.

He was already out of breath and heavily wounded from the earlier fighting, his chest heaving, his scales slick with blood both his own and others’, yet he still turned toward the source of the noise.

With the wide, heavy blade still dripping the blood of her parents, he began to move slowly toward the exact spot where she hid.

He reached the wooden screen that concealed her, raised one clawed hand, and pulled the barrier aside with a slow, grinding sound of wood against stone, and light fell across her face.

In that exact moment a hard, solid force crashed down upon the lizard man’s head from behind.

The impact drove his body forward and down until it struck the ground directly in front of Zanya. Blood sprayed outward in a hot, sudden arc and struck her face, her clothes, and the stone floor around her.

She felt it land warm on her cheeks, her lips, and her small trembling hands.

Her mother had attacked.

Even with her lower jaw hanging loose from the earlier slash and the open wound in her chest still bleeding freely, she had somehow forced herself upright again.

Her body should not have been able to move, but it moved anyway. She brought the weapon down once more. Then again. And again.

The warm blood bathed Zanya’s skin and soaked into her hair and the fabric of her clothes, while her mother’s arms kept rising and falling without pause until there was no head left on the lizard man’s shoulders.

She did not stop when he stopped moving. She stopped only when her arms could no longer lift the object she was using.

Only after the body finally stopped moving did her mother lift her gaze and glance outside the temple.

Enemy reinforcements were already arriving in growing numbers, their figures moving closer through the smoke and the bodies, and their voices carrying across the courtyard.

She turned back to Zanya.

Her lower jaw dangled, swaying slightly with every shallow, labored breath she took. But her eyes were still the same eyes that had watched Zanya eat ripe fruit and laughed at her small jokes.