"Wait," I said, my eye narrowing while I took a closer look at his face. "You look familiar."

The sharp eyebrows, the same black eyes. Even the cut of the jaw and the angle of the cheekbones, all of it sitting in an arrangement that my enhanced cognition was already cross-referencing against a face I had seen a few hours ago under very different circumstances.

[The peerless sword guy...] my brain clicked. [What was his name again? Jian?]

I looked at the man in front of me and felt a laugh building inside.

"You look just like this guy I know..." I said, half-chuckling already, "This dude who won’t shut up about his peerless sword."

The cultist’s eyes went wide, and the word came out of him before the rest of his thoughts had even finished assembling.

"Jian?"

"Yup," I said.

"How do you know him?" The question came out with real weight behind it, even the gritted defiance dropped for the first time since I had put the blade to his throat. "He is my... he is my son."

I stayed where I was for a full second, looking at him, and then at the building over my shoulder, and then back at him.

"Is he a cultist too?" I asked.

He shook his head, and the motion was immediate enough that I half believed it.

And that was when the laugh came out loud and completely beyond my ability to contain, because the punchline to the joke that had been this night was... well...

"You know where he is right now?" I managed, still laughing, while the twin streams kept detonating through the Outsider mass behind me and the knights kept cycling out of my Domain.

He shook his head again, slower this time, and when he spoke, the voice had changed entirely; the defiance was gone and something considerably more human had taken its place.

"I haven’t seen him in... years now. H-How is he?"

"If you really want to know..." I stopped laughing before leaning in close, "All you gotta do is walk into that little building over there... He’s in there, being tortured by the mind-rending illusions of your friends over there, along with 136 other innocent people... praying and begging that their sanctum remains unbreached by evil to whatever god that’d listen... And tonight, that god happens to be me."

The cultist’s eyes snapped to the building, and I watched him connect the dots one by one, the realization of what tonight had been and what he had been sent to do and who had been inside while he did it.

And when it landed, it landed across his whole face at once.

I laughed at him, which was, in my defense, a pretty appropriate response.

"Seems like your cultist overlords thought you deserved a promotion... and should truly be set free from all that binds to the world," I said, while the grin pulled hard at my lips. "... Too bad I ruined your shot at moving up in your little world."

He glared at me through gritted teeth, chest still heaving.

"Don’t!" he spat, "Call us cultists!"

"Ooh, my, oh my..." I said, keeping him talking because I wanted every word I could get out of him. "What are you then?"

"We are the victors of tomorrow!" He roared, chest heaving hard with it. "When you and everyone you know is ashes, annihilated by the Nights of the Red Moon, the ones who remain will be us!"

"Whatever you say, dude," I chuckled, shifting my grip on the kukri as I realized I could just put his body in the inventory and let Peko extract his memories.

And just as I was about to slit his throat, he spoke his last words.

"Do you truly believe this world can win? Do you even know the true nature of the Night of the Red Moon?"

Seeing me grow quiet, he chuckled.

"The Nights of the Red Moon will never stop," he continued, and there was no performance in it, just facts. "... No matter how many times it is defeated, it will never stop. Do you know what powers the gates of the Red Moon, through which those things fall into our world?"

He held my eye without flinching from the blade at his throat and spat through gritted teeth, "The mana in this world. Each gate permanently consumes a tremendous amount of it to birth itself into existence... It is no coincidence that the average Tier of our world has been in steady decline for the past three thousand years."

My brain had already taken the first step of the math even before I had consciously decided to engage with it.

"If what you’re saying is true..." I said slowly, "Then that means even if we somehow defeat every single Night of the Red Moon, the world’s mana pool will eventually run dry... And when the last gate opens, the world won’t have magic to defend itself against Nights..."

He said nothing. He didn’t need to.

"And that’s where your cult comes in..." While I continued. " You guys help your Eldritch ’papa’ in destroying the world before it runs out of mana... and in exchange, ’papa’ nets you a seat in the new world while he himself gets to play the one true god."

"For the last time! We are not cultists! Think about what I have told you. We do not do this out of blind devotion or some cheap script. We fight to preserve our legacy, our species, our magic, our existence!... Yes, the death toll would be immeasurable... but we would lose nothing that we cannot recover. Join us!... Let us begin anew, without these Nights of the Red Moon, in a new world, with a new order, with-"

"Nah," I cut him off, "You lot are hella creepy,"

He, and then something settled across his face that was quieter than anything he had shown all night.

"Too bad," he said, looking at me for a long moment. "Such a shame a talent like yours would die a dog, protecting a world that can no longer be saved."

And with that, he closed his eyes, took one long, slow breath, and when he opened them again, he was looking directly into my eye with the face of a man with no dirt in his conscience.

He craned his neck upward against the blade.

"Now," he said, craning his neck up to the blade. "Do it."

"Before I do," I said, looking down at him, "Do me a favor... Believe me, it would benefit us both."

He looked at me with a frown cutting between his eyebrows while I continued before the confusion could go anywhere.

"If you meet your god in whatever passes for an afterlife in your cult," I said, "... tell him that I seek no quarrel with him, much less a war. And it is my sincerest hope that he feels the same way."

He looked at me for a long moment, long enough that I could hear the Outsiders shrieking behind me and the Fragmentation Pebbles detonating in rapid overlapping chains, long enough to feel the cold of the basin settling against the back of my neck.

And then, slowly, he nodded.

-Slirdth-!-Gulk-!

-Shlk-!-Shlk-!-Shlk-!-Shkk-!-Shlk-!

The blade went across his throat, choking him in his own blood before reversing into my grip, and I drove it straight into his chest once and then again and again and again and again...

Red blood drenched my hand, my forearm, and the front of my jacket in a wet, warm gush, but I kept stabbing through him until his body had gone entirely still, until I had heard -

-Ding!

{Tier 5 Mid-Stage, Human Cultivator Killed.

1,800 EXP + 500% Bonus for killing an entity 5 Tiers above Host, rewarded.

Total EXP Received: 10,800}

I straightened up slowly, and everything that had been driving me through the rooftop and every crossing of the basin and every second of everything that followed simply wasn’t there anymore.

I thought it would leave behind a sense of triumph, or relief... But it didn’t.

But I just felt done.

Cranked my neck up and looked above the basin, at the full moon hanging there in the overcast sky with its pale light washing down over everything below, and exhaled a long breath through my nose that fogged in the freezing air.

This was the second time I had killed a person.

I thought it’d feel different, I mean, that was the strongest opponent I had ever faced in my life, and I was standing on a pile of his remains, having killed him even with one arm and one leg and a Tier 9 curse working through me, and I didn’t feel anything I could call... good.

[Things would get so much easier if I learned to enjoy this...]

-Ding!

{It is my sincere hope that you won’t.}

"Heh..." I reached down, touched the body, and sent it to the inventory.

And then I turned to face the shrieking horde of golden outlines pressing against the line-up of knights behind me.

The twin streams still running, the knights still cycling, and I couldn’t help but think [I need to get even stronger...]

Yes, the whole operation held itself together with mere afterthoughts of mine while I casually chatted with the cultist.

But still, looking down at the pieces of me I was missing, I couldn’t bring myself to say that I am now good enough.

[System, how long until dawn?]

-Ding!

{6 hours and 47 minutes.}

I looked at the endless horde, and the pebbles that kept detonating between them, and the knights that kept fighting like disposable tools, and just sighed.

"Gonna be a long night... System buy me a coffee, will ya~"