With a crowd already gathered, the leader of this group of attackers walked up to stand beside the trapped Yi Yang Group guard. Then a suitcase sized Magical Tool appeared in his hand and he set it upon the ground. With everyone watching he placed a memory sphere onto a small pedestal upon it, and a handful of Spirit Stones into a large container to the side of it. Then the Magical Tool created a huge rectangular screen of darkness into the air above it. After a moment colors shot up into the sky, the vertical shafts of light swirling and flailing around for a moment before converging upon the dark screen that had formed earlier. Then the colors overlapped and a painting appeared.
Or at least that’s how the locals thought of it. Projections were quite rare and a spectacle usually reserved for sixth rank Cultivators. To suddenly see it coming from a Magical Tool was truly an eye opener for them. The Prosperity Company’s movies had not yet traveled to cover the Dou Kingdom yet.
In a few moments the scene started to move and the few mortals that were brave enough to get close enough were astounded to see these moving pictures. Then they all realized that these images were from a part of their own city! It was a very famous intersection in their town and it was quite busy. The Cultivators were less surprised to see this sort of thing and were more wondering what exactly these mysterious attackers were showing them this sight for. Then the view slowly zoomed in on a specific member of the crowd. This individual was wearing a very wide brimmed bronze helmet with a short spike on its peak. Yet, he wasn’t wearing the dark guard uniform that the Yi Yang Group was usually seen with. Instead he had on the light and air garments of the common folk and he was distributing food to a group of orphans.
“Hey, that’s him!”
Someone in the crowd pointed it out to the others, making the connection they were all supposed to be making. The man on the screen was the same as the one who was trapped in front of them all. Most were confused, why would they want them all to see that this person was doing good deeds? Wasn’t this some sort of execution or a justification for their attack?
Their questions were answered a few moments later as the scene changed to a dark alleyway. The man was followed by a dozen others wearing the same sort of helmet. They split up and went two different directions. Then the view switched again to a top down shot of a small ramshackle hut in the middle of a different alley. They could see from high above that the two groups of helmeted men were approaching from both ends of the alley. Four of them stood shoulder to shoulder to block the alley while two more walked in front with mancatchers in their hands. These staves were as tall as they were and had a ‘C’ shaped piece of metal on them with the open end pointed straight up.
A gasp spread through the crowd as these men conducted their next actions, tearing off the tattered cloth curtain over the shack’s door and stabbing their polearms inside. The open end of the weapon fit right over a neck and then there was a little click as these weapons that were Magical Tools moved, locking on like a collar mounted on a stick. The four helmeted men rapidly captured four people, pulling them out of the little shack and guiding them onto the street by the sticks now attached to their necks. The gasps resounded at this point as the people being pulled out were those same orphans the man had been feeding in the previous scene. They handed the sticks of the weakest children to a few of the eight men blocking the path and then went back into the shack.
There was a commotion and a larger teenage boy pushed down the wall of the shack onto the guards. Then he threw a young girl up just high enough that her fingertips clutched the windowsill on the second floor above them. Her feet pressed onto the wall, trying to run up it while she pulled. The boy who started the commotion was dragged down by a nearby guard, but he had a triumphant smile on his face. Then the leader of these guards, the ‘star’ of the show, took a running start and then leapt into the air. His feet touched one wall of the alley and then bounced in the opposite direction to the other wall of the narrow alley. He wall jumped back and forth twice before reaching the windowsill where he grabbed the girl by her collar and tore her down. The girl screamed loudly, but when they dropped back down to the ground a collar was pushed onto her neck and even though her mouth was still open no more sound came out. Those watching the show suddenly realized that the other orphans were also crying and screaming, but they were completely silent with those Mancatchers around their necks.
Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.
Since the girl screamed, they quickly pulled these children out of the alley and turned down another one. Whoever was filming them followed along and got more of a side angle down the alley. Now as the scene zoomed in they could more clearly see the kids crying along with the fear and pain on their faces. The helmeted men had blank eyes, completely uncaring of their plight as they placed collars around the kids necks and removed the mancatchers. Then they brought out large sacks and tossed them over the children, pushing them down and scooping them up. Six guards carrying large bags over their shoulders left the alley and then the scene switched again, this time showing the group of twelve with six big bags heading into the back entrance of the Yi Yang Group’s building.
At this distressing scene, the screen finally switched off. All the eyes of the crowd moved down to the leader of this group of perpetrators who was trapped in front of them. The mortals and more righteous people were eager to get an answer for such an atrocity, but the majority of the people watching were more callous. This was a world ruled by the strong, and those little orphans were truly the weakest humans around. They were just curious about what sort of show this was going to be.
The leader of this group clad in glowing auras reached out to flick a finger against the metal helmet of the trapped guard leader. It let out a loud clinking sound and he turned to look at the crowd, “This is not just their uniform. These helmets allow the Yi Yang Group to control the mind of those they put it on. They may seem like normal people, but once they have this on their head the only choices they can make are those told to them by their masters. In fact, the only reason this man is still alive is because we killed his master before he could order all his troops to suicide.”
A few in the crowd narrowed their eyes. This bit of information wasn’t unknown to all as it was the core of the Yi Yang Group’s strength and hence their main deterrence to other groups. By having troops that didn’t care about their lives, they had a whole cadre of suicide warriors. Suicide warriors didn’t fight fair. The threat of a fatal injury wouldn’t deter them. You could swing to cut them into two pieces at the waist, but if that also put the suicide warrior into position to slice your throat, they would still complete the move. A normal person would abandon their attack and switch to defense, because if you die in the process of winning the fight, what’s the point? This is why those fighting for a cause were more dangerous than normal warriors, but suicide warriors were worse as they might chose the path of mutual destruction on a whim and not only when pushed into a corner. That meant any battle against suicide warriors would be very costly and gave the Yi Yang Group a great deterring power.
On the other hand, the clueless members of the crowd were astounded. Had such vicious people been living so close beside them all this time? There were still many naive Cultivators in the crowd that had trained to become strong in order to be a hero like all the stories they’d heard when they were young. These people had a fire in their eyes and they looked at the Yi Yang Group’s base like it was their greatest enemy.
That was when the show truly reached its climax. The man with the glowing aura extended a blade from his fingertip and used it to shear through the metal chin-strap of the guard’s helmet. Then his glowing aura surrounded the whole helmet and he tore it off the guard’s head in one swift motion.
The dead look in the guard’s eyes suddenly disappeared, replaced with a look of relief. The guard looked up at the man with the glowing aura and smiled, “Thank you for freeing me. They made me do so many terrible things. I’m so sorry.”