Chapter 13

Golden eyes, alight with a fury uncontainable, stared down at the sea of tents and torch light. Trace sniffed the air at first, which reoriented her with her surroundings. Her first step forwards, still in her humanoid form, caused a small tremor that radiated down the hill that she walked upon. After a few steps, she launched herself up, and into an arc. Her target, the very center of the massive encampment.

When Lionel appeared, hovering in the air with mist-formed wings, all he saw was chaos. Large fissures of earth had been raised, which displaced thousands of tents, that kept the majority of nearby crusaders from forming up. There was blood everywhere. Even in the dark of night, high up above it all, the demon lord could see the piles of fresh corpses, and the blood that ran off them in gentle streams.

He had not noticed at first, but Trace was not simply killing at random. A large circle of blood and corpses was almost completed, as she leapt about. Her claw-like fingernails were used like spears or blades, as she literally ripped her way through the sea of chaos and armor and flesh. Her attack had come out of nowhere, catching them all off guard. No one had seen her coming, until it was far too late.

Once the circle of blood was completed, Trace suddenly changed tactics as she made her way towards the middle, towards her real target. She had smelt them the moment she entered the camp. Their kind of blood always had a sweet smell to it, as if it was meant to entice her.

In one of the tents, a small group of important individuals had gathered together. They had a good idea of who it was that had attacked them, which meant that the information they were working off of was wrong. Trace was supposed to have been thousands of miles away, attending the demons' Calling.

"How did they bungle up this badly? She is right out there!" What looked like an elderly, and well decorated, general, stabbed his knife into the table, onto the spot depicting Ever-frost on their map.

"Worry not, we have an entire legion of crusaders. What are we to fear?" A holy woman, who looked to be in her early thirties, dressed in a simple white robe, calmly strutted up to the table. She was looking down at the same map.

"You can only say that because you have never seen that monster at work!" Another man, who looked to be a noble of some sort, was all but pulling his hair out. He had a run-in with her a few years back, where he lost a good deal of his merchandise.

"Calm down. Panicking will not solve anything." The robed woman replied to him. While her voice was smooth, and calming, it had an edge to it that was not usually there. However, neither of them seemed to notice.

A sudden and strange squelching noise, towards the front of the tent, drew their collective attention. But now, it was eerily quiet. They could still hear a commotion from in the distance, but not right outside, which had been just as loud only moments ago. A spray of blood rained through the gaps of the flaps that represented the large tent's front entrance.

"What?" As if to answer the question, the flaps opened as a White haired kitsune walked in. At least, their hair and fur had been white at one point. Now they were so thoroughly soaked in blood, as to color them bright red.

"So, this is where you were hiding?" A look akin to madness stared the three of them down. None of them wanted to move. None of them wanted to breathe. Old animalistic instincts were alive in them once again, as the apex predator of the northern wastes stared them down. Trace smiled, revealing her extended upper and lower canine like teeth. They wanted to retreat backwards, but their legs would not let them move.

"Please… I have a son now and he's still young… please" The crazed noble's hands fell to his sides, as he fell to his knees, tears leaking from his eyes. "Please, mercy." But Trace had heard none of it. Her eyes had locked with the robed woman's own eyes, as she took slow, stalking, steps towards her.

"What? What do you want with me?" Her lip was quivering so hard that her words were barely recognizable. When she suddenly spun around, to try and run, that same blood-crazed face was now only inches from her own.

"I thank you for your sacrifice, although it is a pity that you will die, still a virgin." As she spoke, Trace placed her left hand on the woman's shoulder. Her grip was not painful, but it was like steel, unmovable, as she drove her other hand, held flat and palm up, through her chest, and between rib bones. A sickening crack could be heard when she twisted her hand, and as she ripped the human woman's still beating heart from her chest.

The remaining two bolted, as she dropped the corpse and held her heart up at an angle, above her head. "With this, the head is removed." Blood spurted out of the ventricles of the stilled heart, as she squeezed her hand shut. Suddenly, the air felt heavy.

Lionel did not feel the movement of mana, at all, which confused him. Just like the portal the kitsune had made before, whatever she had just done required no magic that he could perceive. In a massive radius around her, like a fat halo, everything was smashed flat in a single instant. At least a quarter of the legion's crusaders had been killed with that one move.

In the moment before it happened, both Lionel and Gran noticed a strange shimmer. Everything in the affected area had warped at first, visually, just before it happened. Like a hammer, a force fell down that treated everything in its path equally, as it equally crushed them all. A small wave of blood and dirt sprayed out of both the outer and inner edges of the halo, soaking Trace in newer, fresher, blood.

As she turned to run towards the remaining troops, she heard someone land behind her. Not in a situation to think first, she aggressively spun around, as she raked upward with her right hand. Trace's entire arm was a blur, as the ground in front of her, in a cone, shredded itself apart from the air pressure wave she had created.

Lionel had to reach out and pull his subordinate back, out of the destructive path, as they had not reacted nearly quickly enough. "That should be enough to drive them away." The demon lord sounded calm, as he looked over at the blood thirsty fox. Even now, her rage was not truly sated. "Any more bloodshed would defeat the purpose."

Too angry to admit it, and not intelligent enough to plan that far out and ahead, Trace just squeezed her fists into tight balls, drawing blood from her palms at first, before the wounds healed themselves. The scream that came after, however, put her earlier show to shame in the demon lord's eyes.

The enraged scream that she released sounded more akin to a roar, as Lionel felt the air in front of her almost completely rip itself apart, forming small sparks that filled the air. The looming rainclouds rapidly parted, revealing a starry sky, as her roar carried out further and further away.

The crusaders, who were in the middle of a controlled retreat from the sudden and devastating night attack, stopped in their tracks, as they all turned to look towards the frightening sound.

Trace's scream had reached as far as Ever-frost, where it was just barely heard, like distant thunder. The old woman, Miriam, heard it too, as she was enjoying the nighttime air. She had never heard anything like it before, but she recognized the voice hidden in the roar like scream, and Trace sounded like she was crying again.