The puddle that was once High Priest Favian had not yet stopped steaming when the paralysis broke. The two remaining priests shrieked, a high, thin sound of pure terror, and scrambled away like startled rats. But the Temple Guards were made of sterner stuff. They were soldiers, trained to obey, and the sight of their commander being turned to slurry had bypassed fear and landed squarely on rage.
"Heretic! Demon!" the captain of the guards roared, his voice cracking. "Slaughter the beggar! Take the witch alive!"
Ten guards, a wall of polished steel and disciplined fury, lowered their halberds and charged. Their synchronized footsteps sounded like war drums in the stunned silence of the plaza.
Ravi did not move. He stood over the kneeling form of Velvara, a scarecrow in rags poised against a tide of steel.
Velvara, however, did move.
A feral growl escaped her lips. The awe that had frozen her moments before now ignited into a blaze of devotional violence. This silent, terrible god had passed judgment, and she would be his instrument. She launched herself forward from her knees, snatching the ceremonial dagger from the belt of Favian's remains. The blade was ornate, meant for blessings, but in her hand, it became an extension of her will.
She met the first guard in a blur of motion. She didn't block his halberd; she flowed under it, the dagger flashing up in a vicious arc. It slid between the plates of his gorget, severing his throat. Blood sprayed, hot and coppery. As he fell, she used his body as a shield against the second guard's thrust, spinning with a dancer's grace.
Her fighting style was a whirlwind of rage and precision, a prayer spoken in blood. She was a woman unleashed, every movement a testament to the years of brutal training her church had inflicted upon her.
But Ravi… Ravi was something else entirely.
He did not dodge. He did not block. He did not even seem to acknowledge the weapons meant to kill him. As the first halberd point drove toward his chest, he simply raised his hand.
He caught the steel shaft an inch from his body.
The guard, a man twice Ravi's weight, pushed with all his might, his face purple with strain. It was like trying to move a mountain. The halberd did not budge. Ravi's grip was absolute.
With a flick of his wrist, Ravi snapped the thick wooden shaft in two. The sound—a sharp CRACK that cut through the din of combat—was impossibly loud. He held the splintered half of the weapon for a moment before his hand shot forward. He didn't thrust with the point; he slammed the shattered end into the guard's face.
The impact wasn't just a strike. It was an obliteration. The guard's helmeted head exploded in a wet spray of red and grey. The sheer, silent finality of the act stunned the other attackers for a heartbeat.
That heartbeat was all Ravi needed.
He moved among them, a spectre of quiet carnage. His combat was not a dance; it was a series of pronouncements. There were no grunts, no war cries, no wasted motion. The only sounds were those made by his victims.
A guard swung his weapon in a wide, decapitating arc. Ravi stepped inside the swing and pressed two fingers against the man's temple. The guard's eyes rolled back in his head as his brain simply ceased to function. He crumpled to the ground, dead before his weapon completed its arc.
Another lunged. Ravi turned, his hand a blur, and cupped the man's jaw. There was a sickening, wet pop as he dislocated it with a simple, brutal twist. Before the guard could even process the agony, Ravi's thumb pressed into the soft flesh beneath his chin, crushing his windpipe.
A spine snapped with the sound of dry kindling. An eye was pulped by an indifferent thumb. A jaw was shattered by a casual backhand. He moved through the trained, armored soldiers like a butcher through a herd of cattle, dismantling them piece by piece with an unnerving, anatomical precision. It was over in less time than it took to draw a single breath.
Thirteen men lay dead or dying around him. Not a drop of their blood had touched his rags.
Velvara, having dispatched three guards herself, stood panting, her borrowed dagger dripping. She stared at the scene, at the silent, absolute devastation Ravi had wrought with his bare hands. Her own ferocity felt clumsy and loud next to his horrifying efficiency. He wasn't fighting. He was correcting errors.
A child, no older than seven, had been watching from behind a stack of rain barrels. His eyes were wide saucers of terror and wonder. He didn't see a beggar or a demon. He saw something alien, something that did not belong in the muck and grime of their world. He whispered the only truth he could comprehend to his mother cowering beside him.
"He's not from here."
The plaza was now a charnel house. The crowd of slum dwellers, who had been frozen in shock, now began to back away slowly, their morbid curiosity replaced with a deep, existential dread.
Ravi paid them no mind. He walked over to the body of the guard whose head he had pulped. He bent down and tore a strip of clean cloth from the man's under-tunic. He walked back to Velvara, who was still staring, her chest heaving.
He held out the cloth.
She blinked, confused. Her eyes followed his gaze down to her own hand. The one that wasn't holding the dagger was bleeding from a shallow cut she hadn't even noticed, a graze from a guard's blade.
He said nothing. He simply offered the makeshift bandage.
The gesture was so mundane, so human, in the wake of such divine slaughter that it shattered Velvara's composure. This being who could unmake men with a touch was tending to a scratch on her hand.
Her obsession, which had been born in awe, now began to curdle into something far more dangerous, far more personal.
She took the cloth with a trembling hand, her fingers brushing his. His skin was cold, like marble.
"Who… what are you?" she whispered, the question torn from her soul.
Ravi looked at her, his ashen eyes holding the weight of dead eons. He gave no answer. He simply turned and began to walk away from the carnage, disappearing back into the labyrinth of the slums as silently as he had appeared.
Velvara watched him go, then looked at the cloth in her hand, and then at the bodies littering the plaza. She knew, with a certainty that chilled her to the bone, that she would follow him into any hell he chose to walk.