For the first time since he began to converse with Gadreel, Aurelius took a step forward. However, instead of preparing any defense, Gadreel sat back down on his throne. Aurelius felt the pressure build around him and calculated the best course of action.

He could pinpoint a deal of the soldiers hidden in the complex structure, but a surprise attack against them likely wouldn't have been very effective. His sole method to better his odds in the situation seemed to be driving a drift between Gadreel and the combatants he relied on. However, Gadreel had expressed a desire to make the interaction brief, so Aurelius had to make it something Gadreel couldn't outright dismiss.

"Where's your scar?" Aurelius asked.

Gadreel seemed amused, leaning back. "What scar?" he dismissed it outright.

"The one that lines your face. I saw it. It was real." Aurelius spat. "What kind of man hides his scars?"

"You want to talk about what kind of man I am? Oh, but you are much more interesting out of the two of us? I'd much rather talk about you, Son of Ares."

"No," Aurelius rejected his attempt at redirection, but Gadreel kept talking.

"18 years old and you've killed—what—thousands?"

"Not even close." Aurelius scowled, raising his tone.

"Oh, then how many?" Gadreel provoked with rising intensity. He gripped the armrests on his throne, leaning forward with eyes wide in a mocking gaze.

"You think I'm... What does it—"

"You don't even know. Not a clue. It's as if—"

"Shut up." Aurelius had no idea. He had seen so much blood, he didn't know.

Gadreel grinned at his reactions. "Now what I'm—"

"They deserved it. All of them."

"Every single one?" Gadreel shook his head with squinted eyes.

Aurelius seethed and felt the urge to rush him. His body tensed, and the essence inside him fired up as he leaned on his front foot. What good was talking anymore? No matter how many of them there were, he could take them. Kill them all.

However, he felt a need to convince Gadreel. To win this feud of words. "Every single one!" he yelled, spit flying. "And you." He turned and roared so that the whole hall trembled. "And everyone who opposes me now! You heard your master. My mountain of corpses goes beyond sight. So think, is today the day you are willing to die?" If they weren't concerned with any kind of morals or principles, at least they would listen to their survival instincts.

No response came, but Aurelius heard some slight movement. Most were likely hiding in the domes on the ceiling, some in the deepest shadows behind him. He had hypothesized many positions where they could be, so he was ready for whenever they would drop down and rush him. Aurelius was sure there were some behind the pillars, even though his earlier test slash hadn't hit anyone.

Then Gadreel laughed. Aurelius looked at him as he sat uncontrollably on the throne. It was like his whole existence was for mocking Aurelius.

"You must have wondered where I got the forces needed to face you," Gadreel said, gaining his seriousness back at an unsettling speed, and the momentarily lessened tension heightened evermore. "A year ago I set a close associate of mine on the task of gathering me a force needed for a man like you. Not an easy task in the least, even with my finances, but he delivered." Aurelius' eyes followed Gadreel's every little movement as he swept his hand across the whole hall in a grand manner. "In this hall are the strongest combatants in Numen, that is to say, Mircrest as a whole. They make up roughly 30 percent. The remaining are the highest tier of elites from Arkryk, Lundkirk, the Thropes, and even Zalfari." Gadreel looked as if he pitied Aurelius. "I figure the Evaporation Squadron posed you quite a lot of challenges even when you were not so lonely. And this... This is so much more."

Aurelius didn't respond. He wasn't sure he could. If there truly were hundreds of them, and they were on the same heights as the Evaporation Squadron, how would he handle them? No, but if they were higher... Aurelius' hands began to tremble. It was then that he noticed his fists had opened. When? He didn't know.

"These soldiers... they are quite similar to a historical military group. Possibly the most famous of all. The Elite Troop of the Great Zalfarian Empire... led by your father, the Zalfarian God of War." Aurelius perked up at that title and bit his lip, soon tasting blood. "That's right, they are the same breed of cold-blooded predators your father led to hundreds of battles with almost never a single casualty. They do not fear death, for they have lived with it their whole lives. Around them inside them. Nor do they have any allusions of morality in what they do."

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Aurelius cooled his heart and glared up at Gadreel with icy eyes. "Then you are all evil, and as I kill you without hesitation, I'll be a positive effect for all that is good in the world."

"Oh, ever the hero," praised Gadreel with a snicker. He corrected his posture and tilted his chin up with a smile playing on his lips. He blinked slowly as he looked down at Aurelius, and the smallest human element flickered out of his eyes. "Good and evil?" he asked the air and gave a slight shake of his head. "Such things don't matter to me. I see things for what they truly are. Everything under the sun is as meaningless as can be." He widened his dead eyes ever so slightly. "However, there is an experience in existence that can't be taken away. That experience is beyond good and evil, and it is the reason for my life." He paused and accentuated every single word that was to follow. "In other words, I am beyond good and evil."

Aurelius looked at the man on the throne, and only at that moment did he see the gaping pit in the middle of those genius silver irises expand. He had seen his share of human malevolence and sheer vileness, but never had he gazed into such a vast, empty pit of darkness. Gadreel was like the expression of all that he had seen at its worst. Aurelius has come face-to-face with absolute evil.

He looked down at his hands that were sunk in his flawless crimson gloves and stretched his fingers before snapping them into a firm fist. He felt a pulse of essence waiting to explode, and his confidence returned. If he lacked strength, he would simply evolve to a higher echelon of power. As Gadreel said, he was alone; nobody was there to hold him back.

He looked up at Gadreel, and utter silence followed to the point you could hear the muffled rain in the distance outside the grand hall. Aurelius looked further up from Gadreel and reflected. At that moment, it felt like the outside was a whole other world, only able to be seen through the collections of stained panels of glass. The flamboyance of their colors and formation made up a mess of symbolism that was incomprehensible to him. There was a meaning to it that was ungraspable to him. To all humans, he imagined, though many could probably sense that there was something there. He wagered that Gadreel could grasp it, though.

As he arrived at that though, there was another flash of light that shone inside in a plethora of different colors, painting the hall as beautiful for just a second. One of the windows showed the streak of lightning as white ripping through the sky. That was the moment when Aurelius shot his eyes back to Gadreel, who stood with expectation in his demonic eyes. However, Aurelius had lost the tension in his body and didn't seem about to attack.

Then thunder shook the hall, and Aurelius snapped into ferocious motion. He twisted with violence, slicing his right hand horizontally through the air, and sent a great slash to cleave Gadreel in half.

However, in the moment it took for that faint blue divide in space to cut its way to Gadreel, another figure appeared. She moved faster than anyone Aurelius had ever seen, to the point it was hard to believe she was real. Her purple hair swayed wildly as she came to the rescue of Gadreel and blocked the slash. She was so fast and the distance between him and Gadreel so vast that Aurelius doubted that enhancers would've made a difference. The woman then straightened only to fall back to Gadreel's side, hiding her body in her cloak and face behind a white mask. She seemed to be his personal guard. That was good. It meant she was probably the strongest of the bunch. Nothing Aurelius couldn't handle.

"How sad," Gadreel remarked. He hadn't been shaken at all by the course of the event and calmly retreated to his throne, where he sat cross-legged. Finally, with a hand on his cheek, he gave the command, "Bury him."

Only then did all the others engage. Their numbers were staggering, and Aurelius' hands trembled with the expectation of violence as the veterans landed all around him. However, they were still observing. Nobody wanted to be the first to die. Everyone wanted to be the one to kill him, but every opportunity was a gamble. Aurelius had counted on that greed.

Then came the first. Five men in completely black robes, not an inch of skin able to be seen. From all sides at once.

Aurelius' eyes slid from right to left in a split second before he sent his slashes. His hands moved like coiled snakes before tens of slashes riddled the air. For last, he sliced the air, bringing his straight hand together behind his back and sent off slashes that, for a moment, seemed almost like wings.

The slashes were blocked, but they did their job in holding the four in front and on his sides back. Then he turned to the one attacking from behind. His first target. The man was in the air with a balf compression growing in his hand. Aurelius had no intention of letting him use it.

He outstretched his hands and directed them at the man. The enemy panicked and materialized an object in the air that he used to push himself toward the ground. However, no beam shot from Aurelius' hands. Instead, he was there right when the assassin landed and grabbed him by the throat before putting a blade through his stomach.

For some reason, he felt that he recognized the man.

He took the man's mask off, and sure enough, he found a familiar face accompanied by a head of blonde hair and unaccompanied by one eye. And eye he had taken from the man over a year ago.

It was the man who claimed he had been sent by the president, but of course, it was actually Gadreel. He was behind everything.

The man gurgled on blood, Aurelius' materialized blade having gone through his spine. That wasn't quite enough, though. "I told you the next time we would meet, I'd take your head off."

There wasn't much time, but he was the man who had stabbed Cade. Aurelius would never let that go. He took his hand off the man's throat only to slice it with the same blade as he had stabbed him with. The blade went cleanly through and through, but the man twirled around before falling to his knees.

Aurelius was there to catch him, though, and instantly put the finger of both hands in the deep cut on his throat before, in an act of pure, unfiltered violence, ripping his head off. He left it fly away and thump on the ground before rolling around to stare blankly at his next opponents.

He let the headless body collapse to the ground and become meaningless while he looked at his crimson gloves. He had almost forgotten why he was so fond of them. Then he looked around at hundreds of elites who seemed to have backed off slightly since he last observed them.

"There will be no burial here," he said, addressing Gadreel's command. "Nobody buries scum." He wiped his hands on his black coat and raised his hands as he tuned into the heat of combat. His senses of taste and smell drowned out as he focused on his superior functions and uttered a single word, "Next."