The Grand Duke's Son Is A Heretic

Chapter 548 548: 548

"Papapa... you can do it."

He stopped and his body went still. The smile faded just slightly at the edges as the voice settled into him. It was small and soft and it didn't belong in a place like this. He blinked.

"Huh."

Then another voice came.

"Kael... you can do it."

Emilia.

He recognized her immediately and something in his chest moved in a way it hadn't a moment ago.

"Brat, don't you dare fail."

Ramos..

"Kael."

"Lord."

"Leonard. Go for it."

The voices came one after another like waves. Countless of them, rushing into his mind from somewhere far away and close at the same time. Each one carried weight. Each one carried a feeling.

He stood there and listened and the craziness inside him didn't disappear but it stopped spreading. The voices held it in place.

And then the power came.

It rushed in like a flood breaking through a dam. It surged through the space around him and traveled across distances that shouldn't have been crossable. It poured through him and it was so potent and so strong that for a moment he genuinely believed he could wipe out half of everything with nothing more than a snap of his fingers.

He looked around trying to understand where it was coming from.

Then he saw them.

Ruth, Ramos, Emilia, Chris, Gare, Handle, Vic, Seraphina, Martina, Lyria, Elfie and many others who had known him personally. Nina, Asana, Christina and Steampunk stood among them like pillars, their faith pouring out of them stronger and purer than almost anything else around them.

It was their belief. Their genuine and unshaken belief in him. And it hit him harder than any sword ever had.

The authority of slaughter began to settle into him differently now. It wasn't crashing against him anymore. It was sinking in. Taking root. Spreading through him the way roots spread through soil, slow and certain and impossible to pull out.

He was taking it over and making it his own.

Slaughter.

From the very beginning up until this moment there had never been a person who had killed more than him.

Not one.

And that wasn't something the world could ignore. That wasn't something that could be handed to someone else or argued away. It was his. Exclusively and completely his. The world recognized what he had done and it gave him the right. Every life he had taken, every battlefield he had walked off of alone, every moment where he had chosen to keep going when stopping would have been easier, all of it mattered. All of it counted.

And then the world answered.

BOOM.

The power that had been building around the entire world began to concentrate. It pulled inward from every direction like the planet itself was exhaling for the first time in centuries. The energy moved with purpose and it moved toward him.

In various places across the world, members of the Church were moving through crowds. They were beating people. Provoking them. Their voices were loud and certain and cruel.

"If you are worshipping him then where is he?"

"A puny god dared to defame ours."

The words echoed through streets and squares and open fields. People on their knees looked up with bloody faces. People who had whispered his name in prayer flinched under boots and fists. The Church members laughed and kept going because they believed nothing was coming.

But just then a figure materialized above them.

A man sitting on a throne, drenched in crimson intent, hovered in the sky above their heads and looked down at them. The air around him churned with something ancient and heavy.

He said nothing and simply looked but moment his gaze met the crowd below him, BOOM.

The intent of slaughter exploded outward and anyone with ill intentions didn't get the chance to run or beg or breathe. They simply burst.

Bodies exploded across the streets without ceremony and without noise beyond the wet and horrible sounds of it happening.

The people nearby screamed and scrambled backward. Some froze completely. Some fell to their knees shaking so hard they couldn't speak.

One man in the crowd looked up at the figure in the sky and his mouth moved without sound for a moment before he finally managed to whisper, "He's here."

Kael looked down and his expression didn't change much. His eyes moved through the crowd steadily and without hurry. He wasn't angry. That was what made it so terrifying.

There was no rage on his face.

Just a quiet and absolute certainty in every line of his body.

He could feel them.

Through years of slaughter he had developed something beyond a skill.

He could sense the weight of blood on a person's hands. He could feel the depth of the evil they carried inside them and the intent they harbored toward others.

And with a single look he made his decision. Live or die. It wasn't random. It wasn't mindless. Each choice was made with more clarity than most judges ever brought to a courtroom.

He cant kill people above A like this but for small fies it didn't worth it.

He specifically targeted the Church members and those who belonged to organizations built on cruelty and harm. One by one they were killed in ways that made the people watching turn their eyes away.

The deaths were not quick for the ones who had done the most. And the ones who had simply been afraid and followed were left breathing on the ground.

The street was silent except for the sounds of people trembling.

And somewhere in that silence, among the people still standing and staring up at the figure in the crimson throne above them, the image became something that would never leave them for the rest of their lives.

Kael.

The God of Slaughter.

Not a title given to him by a ceremony or a scripture. A title carved out of every battlefield he had ever walked through and every life he had ever taken and every person who had ever called his name and meant it.

It had always been his.