Tracking three armored terror-horses through the Blackwood Forest wasn't difficult. The beasts left deep, heavy tracks in the mud, and the Enforcers rode with the arrogant carelessness of men who believed they were the top of the food chain.
They were wrong.
For three days, Dver trailed them like a ghost. He didn't rush. He didn't push his body to exhaustion. He simply maintained a steady, calculated pace through the treetops, using the stolen Qi in his veins to mask his presence entirely. He spent the travel time perfectly integrating the Asura's Iron-Blood Mantra into his muscles, his body growing denser and more lethal with every mile.
On the evening of the third day, the dense canopy of the Blackwood broke, revealing the soot-stained depression of Ash-Ridge Valley.
It wasn't a town; it was a miserable mortal mining camp. Rickety wooden shacks clung to the sides of a massive, open-pit iron mine. The air tasted of rust, cheap coal, and exhaustion.
Dver crouched on the thick branch of a dead oak tree overlooking the camp. His face was an emotionless mask, his eyes completely flat as he looked down at the mud-slicked streets.
Below him, the three Enforcers rode directly into the center of the camp. They didn't announce themselves. The scarred leader simply drew his spiked whip and lashed it out, wrapping it around the neck of a passing miner and brutally yanking him into the mud.
"The family of the boy named Dver," the Enforcer barked, his voice laced with suffocating Qi that made the surrounding mortals drop to their knees in terror. "Where is their hovel?"
The terrified miner, choking on blood and mud, pointed a trembling finger toward a dilapidated shack at the edge of the pit.
Dver watched from the branches. He didn't move a muscle.
"They are about to sever your only loose thread for you," the Void God purred in his mind, its ancient voice vibrating with dark, genuine amusement. "Most humans would feel a sickening knot in their chest right now. Pity. Guilt. Do you feel anything, Vessel?"
"I feel hungry," Dver replied simply.
Down in the mud, the three Enforcers kicked the door of the shack off its hinges. Two figures were dragged out into the rain—a frail, soot-covered man and a weeping woman. The biological parents of the boy whose skin Dver was currently wearing.
"By order of Deacon Shen, you are coming with us," the scarred leader sneered, dismounting his horse. "Your rat of a son has offended the Discipline Hall."
"Our son?" The frail man coughed, his eyes wide with utter confusion and terror. "No, my lords, please! There must be a mistake! Dver... Dver sent us a letter two weeks ago. He said he failed the outer court exam... he said he was being sent to the mines..."
Up in the tree, Dver's eyes narrowed slightly. Ah. The original Dver had known he was going to be assassinated. He had lied to his parents to spare them the hope of him surviving. It was a pathetic, sentimental gesture.
The scarred Enforcer didn't care about the story. "Shut your mouth, mortal." He kicked the father brutally in the ribs. The sickening crack of breaking bones echoed through the camp.
The mother screamed, throwing herself over her husband. "Please! Take me! Leave him, he has the lung-rot! He won't survive the journey!"
The Enforcers laughed. The scarred leader raised his iron-booted foot, placing it directly on the father's throat. He pressed down.
Dver watched from above. He saw the father's face turn purple. He heard the mother's agonizing screams. He watched as the life was slowly, methodically crushed out of the only two people in the world who could identify him as a fake.
He didn't blink. His heart rate didn't elevate. He just watched the problem solve itself.
With a final, wet crunch, the father's neck snapped. The mother let out a sound so utterly broken it made the surrounding miners cover their ears. She scrambled backward, grabbing a rusted mining pick from the mud in a fit of absolute, blind grief, and swung it at the Enforcer's leg.
It bounced off his Qi-reinforced skin.
The Enforcer sighed, annoyed. With a casual flick of his wrist, his spiked whip lashed out, taking the woman's head cleanly off her shoulders. Her body collapsed into the mud beside her husband.
The camp was dead silent, save for the patter of the rain.
"Idiot," one of the other Enforcers grunted, looking at the two corpses. "Deacon Shen said to bring them back alive. He wanted to skin them in front of the boy."
"They resisted," the scarred leader spat, wiping his whip. "We'll just cut off their heads and bring those back. Shen can throw them at the rat's feet. It will send the same message."
The leader drew his hunting knife and knelt in the mud next to the bodies.
That was Dver's cue. The loose ends were dead. Now, it was time to eat.
Dver simply let himself fall from the branch. He plummeted thirty feet, landing directly behind the two standing Enforcers without making a single sound. The rain seemed to curve around him, avoiding his skin as the heavy, suffocating aura of the Void began to leak from his pores.
"Feast," the Void God hissed.
Dver raised both his hands.
The shadows cast by the Enforcers' lanterns suddenly turned pitch black, rising from the mud like a tidal wave of liquid tar. Before the two standing Enforcers could even turn around, the Void crashed over them.
There was no fight. There was only erasure.
The scarred leader, still kneeling by the corpses, froze. He heard the sudden, terrifying silence behind him. He spun around, his knife raised.
His two men were gone. The horses were gone.
And standing in the rain, looking at him with eyes that contained the absolute, crushing emptiness of a dead universe, was a sixteen-year-old boy in ragged grey robes.
"You..." the leader breathed, his Qi instantly locking onto the boy's face. He recognized the description. "You're Dver. What... what did you just do?"
Dver tilted his head, his face entirely unreadable. He stepped over the headless corpse of his "mother." He didn't even look at it.
"You failed your mission," Dver said, his voice a flat, dead whisper that cut through the rain. "Shen wanted them alive. Now, he's going to be very disappointed in you."
The Enforcer's eyes widened in pure horror as the boy's shadow suddenly expanded, rushing across the mud to swallow his feet.