Beast Slayer Online: Initialization
Copyright© 2026 by CaffeinatedTales
Chapter 119: The Road Beyond Velen
The fight ended quickly.
Lannor flicked the blood from the blade of his superior Bear School steel sword and slid it back into its sheath.
He had drunk Thunderbolt and Blizzard before the clash. With the Gene Seed regulating the work of his organs, the two potions now left him only corpse-pale, with blackened veins crawling around his eye sockets. It was nothing like before, when even the whites of his eyes had gone pure black.
At his feet, five noble knights lay bleeding slowly.
Black blood.
Three of them had been cut down outright by his sword. The other two had died more slowly, poisoned by the Hanged Man’s Venom oil on the blade.
It was a witcher oil made for humans, dwarves, elves, and other nonhumans. Its toxin was cruelly efficient. Once the blade opened the skin, symptoms appeared within half a minute. Without treatment, death followed within five.
Combat was hard, violent work. Blood ran faster when men fought for their lives, and so did poison.
Lannor could tell these men had been elites among elites, the sort who would form the spearhead of a knightly charge in wartime. That was why he had coated the blade before moving in. It had saved him a fair amount of trouble.
Without the plate pieces fitted into his armor, his protection had dropped from heavy armor to something closer to medium. Any risk he could shave away was welcome. He was willing to count this as a practical examination in witcher craft.
He walked over to Stessa.
The count lay on the floor, shivering. Lannor tilted his head and looked down at him.
“Continue.”
His voice was soft.
The nobleman lifted his head by inches. What he saw was a beautiful face pale as a corpse, framed by blackened eye sockets and those cat eyes.
“Keep running.”
The words were gentle as a dream. The count screamed as if he had seen a swamp hag, scrambled upright, and fled past the guttering flames toward the outside of the building.
He ran as if death were after him.
No. Death was after him.
The commotion in Stessa’s estate could not be hidden from those with ears for it. More accurately, the only man in the estate with authority was fleeing like a lunatic, and the steward had been blown into scraps by the fireball he himself had conjured. No one with enough standing remained to seal the news in.
The trade quarter was packed with wealthy townsfolk and people of some rank. They stared in shock at the largest private estate in the district.
Firelight. Screams. Explosions.
Foltest has finally moved against Stessa.
That was the first thought in every mind.
Then those people lowered their heads and hurried home, bolting their doors behind them.
In this crooked world, every person ought to know what to do when trouble broke loose. Those who did not were better off dying early.
Political conflict was a bottomless mouth. It swallowed anyone foolish enough to lean too close.
The night patrols of Vizima noticed the disturbance at Stessa’s estate at once. Their commander asked his superior for confirmation again and again. The superior asked his own superior, and so it climbed, step by cautious step, until the question reached Velerad, the mayor of Vizima himself. Only then did they confirm that the king had issued no sudden order.
After that, and only after that, the patrol commander selected fewer than a hundred men and set off toward the estate, still half suspicious.
No one wanted to be the small insect crushed beneath the wheels of a political struggle.
None of them knew that the upheaval in the estate of one of Vizima’s highest powers had nothing to do with politics.
It was only a lone witcher doing his work.
Hunting a monster.
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