Pain. Disbelief. Regret.

Utter wild-eyed panic.

Such emotions filled Feng Gu’s entire being as he watched his would-be target just take three stabs of his Snake’s Fang Dagger, whose porous metal had been thoroughly soaked in the Heartstopper Venom of a Divine White Serpent. Just a small nick of the blade should have been enough to take down a human, but he had wanted to be thorough, to make absolutely sure this monstrosity wouldn’t survive.

Yet… Here she stood, laughing in his face as he felt her turning his ankle into mush with an inhuman grip, his leg cramping and twitching all the while as electric current ran from her hand and through him. He felt his own heart fluttering under the rabid surging current, only able to get back to any sort of stable heartbeat through emergency breathing methods.

It did nothing to stabilize his mental state.

“Dgh… Do your worst, monster,” he spat in that onerous tongue, letting his accent shine through for the first time in months. “Your heart will-”

“-stop any moment now? Tell me, how come?” mocked the monstrosity, stifling a laugh. She squatted down, forcefully sliding her arm up his leg, twisting it around such that his ankle rested on her shoulder and her palm on his knee. Her fingers painfully dug through his chainmail and gripped his kneecap.

“I’ve been curious how that Heartstopper venom was supposed to work since the first time one of your kind tried it on me, considering that it stopped working after the first time… And even then, I simply decided to restart my heart. Now do like a good little rat and squeak before I bend your leg backwards and break your face with your own foot. If you’re good I’ll just hand you over to the city guard with most of your bones intact.”

“You’ve… You’ve been marked for death, for being an abomination against the natural order,” he sputtered, trying his best to conceal the fact he was trying to say as little as possible. He had never been good at this social game, but until now, he hadn’t had to play it beyond learning how to talk like a Snow Demon.

His stare was inexorably fixed on the beastly woman-shaped thing, but in his peripheral vision he saw them, all of the filthy Snow Demons and other kinds of barbarians that gathered in this den of degeneracy, all of them staring down at him with murder and inhuman glee in their eyes, some pointing guns at him. Feng Gu was absolutely certain that each and every one of them would revel in whatever unholy violations this thing intended to perpetrate upon him.

She pressed down on his knee. He felt it bending backwards some, feigning pain as it did. Being double-jointed had numerous benefits, this among them. It took an almost comical bending angle for something like this to grow painful to him… And it did. Because she just kept pushing, smugly remarking that, “I can tell if it really hurts, y’know. Same way I could tell you had somehow appeared behind me. Now come on, tell the whole class who actually sent you after me. Was it the Red One? Maybe one of the Pateirian senators?”

Utter, freezing fear shot through his body at the implication of one of the senators, for that was the case. How had she guessed? They had been playing along for decades! They had impenetrable alibis! There was no way a meat-puppet like this creature could ever uncover Luo Mu’s infiltration, therefore the answer to why she had mentioned him and Zheng Zemin was… Petty racism. That realization came quickly to him, but not quickly enough to avoid the monstrosity noticing his brief slip-up.

“The senators? Really?!” a laugh rumbled from her throat. She leaned into him, staring into his face with a predatory grin, mocking him with that utterly unwomanly, powerful voice. Her aura of static electricity and raw primal danger was almost overwhelming.

“There’s no need to be ashamed, little man,” she mocked him again. “You could’ve fooled someone other than me, you just got unlucky.”

Indignation had built within him well past his usual breaking point, but this act of verbal emasculation shattered his mental dam and washed it away in a deluge of anger. It wasn’t just her, she was a beastly mountain of muscle so far beyond a normal woman that he didn’t view her as one. It was that blonde darkstone-eyed dyke on the edge there, with the utterly heretical living gun that had blown his hand away just before he could complete the final hand sign to Fog-walk right out of here.

Feng Gu’s mouth was already full of spit and blood, and so...

He spat at her.

She reflexively spat back before it could hit her, channeling the small Fulgur charge she still had to whip a truly forceful spit at him with her tongue. Only, it wasn’t a glob of fluid or mucus that came out, but a sizzling, bubbling mass of white lightning that ripped through the air and carved a pit into his face as wide as an eyeball and deep enough to expose his brain through where his nose had been moments earlier.

The residual current had arcs spiderwebbing out through the hole like a grotesque Jacob’s Ladder whilst the assassin seized up, his eyes rolling into the back of his head. Zelsys thought that she might have unintentionally shocked his brain into a seizure, narrowing her eyes and tilting her head as she thought whether a jolt of intense pain might break him out of it.

An answer to that question never came. The moment she let her guard down even the tiniest little bit, he dropped the charade and before she could intervene just grabbed one of his knives and slipped it between his own ribs. A second later she felt his heartbeat cease.

With a frustrated sigh she folded his leg backwards all the way and let go, stating plainly, “He fuckin’ killed himself.”

She proceeded to stand up, look around, and add: “Let’s get this cleaned up!”