Sai's fingers loosened around the girl's throat, and she collapsed against the cold stone wall, coughing and clutching at her neck. Her brother scrambled to her side, wide eyes brimming with tears, but too terrified to move closer than arm's reach.
Sai pressed his palm against his face, dragging it down with an exasperated groan.
"Damn it… this demon crap is seriously annoying."
The flickering torchlight licked across his form, making his shadow stretch long and monstrous on the wall behind him. He could feel the urge—sharp, gnawing, whispering in his chest—to finish what he had started.
A little squeeze and a twist. End her. The demon inside him almost purred at the thought.
But he shoved it down, like choking smoke back into a furnace.
"Listen," he muttered, his voice hoarse but steady, "I get it. I look like the monster. I...am the monster. But I didn't bring you here to kill you." His violet eyes flicked toward her, then softened just a fraction as he glanced at the boy. "You don't have to believe me right away. Just… don't make me regret giving you air to breathe."
From the corner, a lilting voice echoed with almost playful curiosity.
"My lord," Vyriss purred, stepping closer. Her golden hair shimmered faintly, like oil over water. "Your restraint is admirable. Painfully admirable. But you are what they summoned—a Demon King in waiting. They want you to feast, to rule. You cannot pretend to be merciful forever."
Sai shot her a glare sharp enough to slice glass. "I don't care what they want. If anything—" He glared toward the door, toward the faint chanting beyond. "—I'd rather tear their whole damned cult to pieces."
The girl's breath caught. Her brother whimpered. But it was Vyriss who reacted most sharply.
Her eyes widened as she instinctively stepped back. "Tear… them apart?" she repeated, shaking her head as though trying to make sense of it. "Then...you mean to sow chaos. To break the order of this realm and unleash ruin across the land. That's what you truly seek, isn't it?"
Sai let out a humorless laugh, as he rolled his eyes. "Ruin? Fuck no. Escape? Absolutely. But if burning down their little clubhouse of maniacs is what it takes, then fine. Let them choke on their own ashes."
Vyriss stared, lips parting but no sound coming out. For the first time since she appeared at his side, there was something like shock in her expression.
Sai sighed and turned away, his boots crunching against stray shards of glass from the shattered mirror. He strode out of the washroom, shoulders heavy but steps deliberate.
The siblings hesitated but followed with their eyes, the boy clutching his sister's torn sleeve.
Sai stopped at a tall glass case set into the stone wall. Inside, rows of exotic weapons gleamed under torchlight—ornate swords, jagged spears, axes carved with runes. His gaze drifted past them all until it landed on the most unassuming of the lot: a simple, curved blade, short enough to fit in the palm.
Without hesitation, he smashed his fist through the glass. Shards rained down, ringing out like tiny bells. He plucked the kunai-like weapon free, weighed it in his hand for a moment, then turned on his heel.
The siblings tensed as he walked back toward them. Vyriss tilted her head, curious, lips curving into a knowing smile.
But then—Sai tossed the blade.
The girl barely caught it, her trembling hands closing around the hilt. She looked up at him, wide-eyed.
"Kill me if you can. Show me if you're truly worth sparing."
The words hung in the air, heavier than any steel.
"I won't block. I won't fight." He gestured to his chest, directly over his heart. "Right here. Do it, and you're free. No more demon lord. No more cult."
The boy gasped, clutching his sister's arm. "S-sis… don't! It...might be a trap."
Sai's crimson eyes locked onto hers, burning—not with rage, not with hunger, but with a raw, cutting honesty that froze her in place.
"But if you do," he added, his voice lowering, "you'll have to get your brother out of here yourself. Past the cultists. Past the guards. And once you're outside…" He smirked, humorless and cold. "…you'll have to live with the fact that you killed the only one in this dungeon who wasn't trying to bleed you dry."
Silence.
The blade quivered in her grasp, her knuckles whitening as she stared at him, torn between instinct and doubt.
Sai leaned closer, his voice a whisper sharp as a knife's edge.
"What's it gonna be?"
"Are you serious? You're really not going to defend yourself?" she croaked, voice raw and small, even as her eyes dared the lie. Her fingers trembled against the kunai's hilt; she knew, somewhere in the back of her skull, that if he wanted to lie he could weave steel into soft words and make any promise sound true. Still, she wanted an answer. Wanted to know whether the last scrap of hope was an echo or a lie he'd thrown to watch her dance.
Sai's face was a slab of calm. No smile. No sneer. Just the quiet of someone tired of theatrics.
She swallowed the tremor in her throat and, with a motion that was more stubbornness than skill, began to walk. One slow step after another, knuckles white on metal, every step a negotiation with a terror that lived beneath the skin. The boy stood at the far wall and stared at the floor; even he could see how little she wanted this to be true.
When she was close enough that heat rose off him like a thought, she shouted—half prayer, half command—and lunged. The kunai flashed for a heartbeat, an ugly, hopeful arc aimed squarely at the hollow of his chest.
CLANG.
Steel met scale. The sound exploded, tiny and mortal, and then the kunai flexed and split with a dry, final crack. A thin line snapped down the blade; the tip fell away into his boots.
Her eyes went wide, not with triumph but with something that looked precisely like the last gasp of a candle. Her legs folded beneath her and she collapsed to her knees, the strength that had allowed her to lunge draining out as if the world itself were siphoning it away.
Sai let out a soft sigh — not satisfied, not pleased; just… disappointed, the way a teacher might be when a student gives up instead of learning.
"If that's the best you could do," he said quietly, "you have absolutely zero chance of getting out of here alive."
She stared at the broken blade in her lap as if it had betrayed her personally. All hopes of getting out were seemingly smashed with the blade.
Vyriss laughed—thin, amused—leaning against the doorjamb with all the languid menace of someone who'd never b. Her blonde hair was an island of light in the torch glow; her pupils were the small, precise slits of something not human. "Useless," she said, voice candy-sweet. "Why spare someone who can't even stab properly? Master should just—" She stopped herself and looked at Sai, the joke curdling into genuine curiosity.
Sai crouched until they were eye level. For all his demonic features—his piercing violet eyes, obsidian scales catching the torchlight—his expression was almost plain, like a man reading instructions for the first time. He watched the girl as if cataloguing a broken thing, then spoke, blunt and unadorned.
"You're weak." The words landed without mercy. "You can't survive on your own unless you become stronger. Acting like this, defiant without strength, will only lead you faster to the grave than any demon. Think about that."
It was less an insult and more a map: not comfort, not cruelty, but an ugly kind of lesson. She made no reply—only a hollow, half-laugh that might once have been defiance. The boy sobbed once into his sleeve.
Sai rose, dusted imaginary lint from his tunic, and moved to the weapons rack with slow, deliberate steps. Fingers traced blades—tempers, histories—then settled on a slender rapier that caught torchlight like a promise. He did not need the weight of it. He wanted the statement.
Vyriss flitted to his side, taut curiosity softening into something like… support? She folded her hands and gave him a look that mixed coyness with long, patient calculation. "Don't you think that was a little harsh?" she cooed.
"I thought you wanted me to eat her, not comfort her," Sai said, not breaking stride. His violet eyes glowed faintly for a heartbeat—the same color as the bruise of a cloud at sundown. "She needs this. Just like I did… once."
A small, almost rueful curve of his mouth. Then: "Now." The glow sharpened. "I have a cult to burn."
They reached the door and stepped back into the corridor. Outside, the palace thrummed with the same chant that had welcomed them in—low, fervent, and absolutely repulsive.
A guard bowed at the sight of them, face open and reverent, the sort of reflexive respect that put a neat cork over moral thought.
The guard's bow was ordinary. The rapier's point was not.
Sai did not hesitate. He planted the tip under the man's jaw and drove it across his throat in one clean motion. The guard's eyes went wide and then lifeless.
[You have killed a human.]
[You have levelled up]
Sai glanced briefly over the message, taking it all in.
"That's one down. The first."he said resolutely. This wasn't his first massacre.
What followed was neither ritual nor frenzied slaughter. It was a careful, clinical unmaking of the cult's image. Sai moved through the halls like a blade through shadow: precise, contained, terrifyingly calm. Where the cultists had stood in ranks to pray, they now screamed in peril. Blades wreathed in shadow sliced through the darkness with lethal grace as he destroyed the cult of the Obsidian Palace one scream at a time.
Torches were kicked over; rugs soaked with the dark, slow red that made the air taste metallic. Vyriss was at his side, always present, cackling—sometimes approving, sometimes just smiling smugly—at his choices. She had wanted a demon king. She was getting something else: a man who had found his purpose in breaking his own chains.
For every throat he slit, for every chalice he shattered, the palace's songs flipped from praise to panic. The echoes of their terror rolled up the stone like a tide.
When the last of the chanting died, the corridors quieted into an eerie hush that had nothing to do with reverence. Sai stood in the great hall, blade dripping familiar red, shoulders not a hair less tired than before. He looked at the mess—at the bodies, at the ruined altar, at the way the light now glanced off blood instead of gold.
He breathed in slow, tasting the smoke and the iron, and found, oddly, that he felt no triumph.
"They wanted a demon," he said, voice low enough that only Vyriss heard it, "they got what they wanted."
Vyriss smiled then—no coyness this time, only something like hunger and something like reverence braided together. "And if you want a king," she murmured, "I will crown you with whatever remains of the ashes."
Sai sheathed the rapier, wiped it on the sleeve of a dead cultist, and then, with the same flat, tired cadence he wore like armor, turned toward the room where the last of the cultists, including that so called High Priest had stationed themselves.
"So far no one was worth making me use my skills." He said as he felt the immense surge of abysmal energy converging behind the large stone door, his mouth curled into a sharp sneer as his bloodlust surged. "Make this interesting."
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[A/N]
Aiden: ಠ_ಠ Ah, I guess he's still an assassin after all.
Vere: ಠ ೧ ಠ I was actually starting to like that other girl. Don't drop her please.
Aiden: Maybe. Lemme know your thoughts in the comments section guys. ⟵(๑¯◡¯๑) Sorry for the long chapter (ب_ب)