Chương 599: Limitless Path Chapter Six Hundred Nineteen

"W-what-?" he said, trying to turn his head to look at the source of the voice and failing. The woman who was his prey, who had been his prey, was holding in a grip that felt like it could crush mithril without effort, not even allowing his head to tilt, though he could still just barely breathe.

"I have to hand it to you," the voice said, another young woman walking around into his view, "you really almost pulled one over on us."

"I-I don't understand. What h-happened?" he asked, not at all liking the fear that was now worming through him instead of these beauties.

"You fucked up," another voice said, deep and just slightly raspy and clearly female. When he tilted his eyes to his right, he saw massive, glimmering fangs in a wicked grin right next to his face, slight wisps of smoke curling up from between them.

"You put in a good effort, but you didn't do enough scouting or pay enough attention to the area."

"You knew!" he said, the pieces started to click.

"That's right," the second woman, with pitch-black hair and burning silver eyes said, arms crossed as she stood behind the wolf.

"It took us two days of very careful investigation just to piece together what was happening and how. We didn't want to alert the person or people responsible, so we had to be very cautious in our approach, which was a massive pain in the ass, but we managed to figure out what was happening through a rather stealthy investigation."

"It also helped that you had gotten a bit cocky and awfully lazy," the third voice growled right beside his head.

"You didn't have the kind of defenses, the kind of warning systems and such that we would expect from an experienced killer. You're carelessness let us scout the area, analyze the victims and the attack patterns, and determine that it was a single individual with a routine procedure that was killing people in the area."

"I fucked up…" he growled, more angry at himself than anything. He had had close calls in the past, times where he had been nearly caught or even had technically been caught but gotten away. It was the reason why and, ironically, how he had the teleporting artifact that was his last resort; he had gotten too deep into his craft and was nearly caught by a Gold Emblem of the CRA, somebody that had just hit Enlightened.

He managed to steal the artifact just in the nick of time, using it to teleport away from his latest safe house and the angry Enforcer and get off-planet before he could be arrested.

"I still don't understand. What did you do?" he asked, almost pleading as the wolf lifted him off the ground and gave him a shake.

"You don't ask the questions here," she growled.

"I blocked your teleports," the raven-haired beauty said. He had slid his eyes over to look at her when she spoke, their eyes locking for a brief moment. In that singular instant, for just a blink, white fire that burned everything around it, even the space itself, glowed in her pupils, his whole body seizing up for just an instant.

"Enough," said yet another new voice.

"Fuck! How many of you were there?!" he swore, trying to look around.

"Far too many for you," the raven-haired beauty snickered. He would have snapped back, but he was studiously avoiding looking at her, making sure his eyes never found her again after that tiny display of hers. He didn't know how the others were so calm around her, all of them just focused on him and what he was doing, which wasn't anything with how the wolf had hold of him.

He had stilled very still the whole time, even though they had yet to bind him any further, as he could sense that any kind of moment at all would lead to a very unpleasant twisting of the lupine woman's hand and a very unpleasant snapping sensation in his neck.

He would think, even if they were all part of the same team, that the others would be some level of nervous in this woman's presence, the thing he had seen dancing in her eyes for just a moment more terrifying than anything he had ever witnessed, and that was coming from a man who butchered other people for fun.

The fourth voice turned out to be a very tall woman with very pale skin and far too many joints in her limbs that walked into his view before placing a hand with too many finger-joints on the lupine woman's shoulder. The wolf didn't acknowledge it, not with her head, keeping her focus entirely on him, but she did reach up with her free hand and pat the pale woman's hand in a reassuring manner. Kresnik, the thought came to him as he observed the fourth person.

They were a legendary clan, nearly as mysterious and powerful as the dragons and phoenixes, and he knew very little about them, other than they were considered much stronger than vampires and vampyrs, able to control blood and life energies to a much greater degree. The kresnik, whoever she was, lifted her other hand and made a gesture to somebody out of his range of vision, yet another person having joined the group that he hadn't detected, though this person was easy to notice now.

Whoever or whatever it was made a huge amount of noise as it moved, the floor groaning and creaking under it as it approached him from out of his line-of-sight. Just when he was questioning what it could possibly be, a hand the size of his torso closed on one of his arms, the process repeated for his other arm, before they were roughly dragged behind his back and manacled.

He was lifted up by one of the hands, the lupine woman releasing his neck, carried as if he were little more than a child, before he was set down in a chair where a collar and ankle cuffs were applied.

"Even ankle cuffs for me?" he asked, a slight grin back on his face and in his voice.

"They don't hinder you unless you try to run," the kresnik said coldly, though he already knew all this.

"If you try to run, they'll snap together and it doesn't much matter what position your legs are in at the time. Do be careful, or your legs will break from the force and angle, though I wish you'd try it." Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"Ah, for something only used for the best of the best," he joked before a massive hand closed around his torso. Now that his head and neck were free, he could look around, and he saw the thing that had been motioned to was a man, a man of extraordinary size and width, taking up nearly half the room on his own.

Not only that, the third voice, the one with the large fangs and the smoking problem, was very clearly a dragon girl, standing next to the door to the hallway and watching him with gold and purple eyes that glowed with power.

"You're wanted dead or alive," the massive man ground out, his voice like a slow-motion rock slide. He squeezed his hand, likely just applying a light force, but the murderer could feel his rib cage strain and start to fracture.

"Dead is perfectly fine."

"I get it! I get it!" the man gasped out, breathing a sigh of relief when the massive man's hand stopped squeezing and he stood up.

"Good. Keep that attitude," said the raven-haired beauty, the look in her eyes like a person of noble station examining some new, gross bug. Ironically enough, though he didn't realize it at the time, it was very similar to looks he had given his victims over the years.

"Dean Mackenzie?" the kresnik said then, looking at him coldly.

"Who's that?" the man asked, giving her a strange look, but his acting clearly needed work.

"Don't bullshit," the kresnik said before clearing her throat and calming a bit.

"I mean, don't try to deny it. We have done extensive work the last three days after our initial scouting in preparing for all of this. We know who you are and how you got here. If that is a false identity, which seems unlikely, we will find that out soon enough. Any cooperation you provide now will be considered in your sentencing?"

"I suppose it might be too late to just say this is all a misunderstanding?" Dean tried, giving everyone in the room a hopeful look, though that was damn hard with the giant, the dragon girl, and whatever the fuck the raven-haired beauty was all staring at him like last week's hog feed.

"It would be much too late," said another new voice. Fuck me, how many of these bastards are there?! Dean thought, looking over to the doorway, where a sixth person had now appeared, likely another member of this team. It was a gangly man with a bit of a faraway look in his eyes, though they were focused on Dean with laser-like precision at the moment. Behind this man came a rather short, very pretty woman who was looking around the room as if she was surprised at the place they found themselves.

The two of them walked over to the kresnik and handed her a couple things Dean didn't catch before assuming places around the room.

"I can't believe this harebrained scheme actually worked," the short woman said, laughing as she looked at Dean now from where she leaned by the fireplace. Ah, so that was it, he thought, realizing that she had been looking around in surprise because she hadn't thought the plan they had used to lure him with the lupine woman would really work. To give himself just a bit of credit, it nearly hadn't, for they clearly hadn't expected him to have the artifact that would allow him to get away.

Any criminal worth their salt, certainly one that had been active without ever being caught, would have one or more routes to flee should the heat get turned up, but this team didn't seem to have realized that. Then again, they had somehow blocked his artifact from working, and not in a way where they had set up an array or countered the effects.

No, instead, they had blocked him with raw power, the monster with the silver eyes being the culprit, he was sure of it, somehow directly blocking his teleport after the artifact had activated and tried to push him through space. He supposed that if a team had a horror like that as one of their number, they didn't really need to be meticulous about escape routes, hidden cards, or artifacts designed for fleeing.

"He got too cocky and lazy," the kresnik said, examining something.

"His last world, if the pattern matches and we can definitively prove it was him, he was active for a year without the authorities even getting close. It must have given him a bit of a big head, killing so many people in such a brutal way without any danger until the very last week. He operated here largely with impunity before we arrived, too, so it's not surprise he became…sloppy."

"It was my last, too," Dean said, unable to help himself, licking his lips as he stared at the lupine woman.

"Her blood would have been so beautiful, all over the floor and walls, painting everything."

"Okay, seriously fucked up, dude," the short woman said, miming gagging after his statement. The raven-haired monster just laughed, mostly ignored by the others, looking at him and shaking her head.

"What's so funny?" Dean asked, unable to help himself again, his poor impulse control manifesting now that he was already caught and felt no need to try to restrain himself.

"Blood," the woman said, which puzzled him for a moment, until he realized she was addressing the lupine woman and that that was the wolf's name. The wolf grinned, not a pretty sight to him, as there was something feral and very dangerous in that smile. She lifted a hand, lifting a finger up as if pointing up, but it was easily recognized as a gesture one might make if holding something up with just a finger.

A second later, an orb made entirely of blood appeared above her finger, beautiful and wondrous, slowly spinning as it painted the whole room red with its glow. The orb than split apart in an instant, becoming a dozen long, thin spears, the volume obviously more than what it had been but the addition so smooth that Dean hadn't even detected the magic being increased.

Those spears shot across the room so fast he couldn't follow them, all stopping within an inch of his head and body and hovering there perfectly still, ready to pierce him at a moment's notice. It was exquisite control and a display of extreme power, though, again, he was far more afraid of the silver-eyed woman than anybody else in the room, even the titan of a man that could crush him like wet cardboard box.

"Full mastery of blood…" Dean said in wonder, watching the blood closely.

"I can see why I was doomed from the start this time, even not to mention your power." Someone who could manipulate blood like that would have been a hard counter for him. While he exalted in the pain and blood, he didn't actively control blood or use it in his work. It was the cutting and the feeling that he enjoyed and, if he had to admit it, the raw terror in his victims, which meant he always made sure they were awake for his activities.

If he had really captured the wolf, taken her back to his rented cabin and performed a last little bit of cutting on her, it could have gone very badly for him, even were she very weak. She could have very easily seized the blood he created and used sparingly, and even a weak attack could cause severe damage or kill an unsuspecting person, at least, up to a point.

Had she really been the level and power she first displayed and not this terrifying Enlightened of overwhelming strength, well, it might have truly been a close thing if he had woken her up and she had played for time. He didn't keep his prey befuddled when he started cutting, and if she had had the presence of mind to wait and slowly manipulate her own blood while he started working… it could have ended with him on the chopping block, so to speak.

"Come on, we have everything we need," the kresnik said, nodding at the mountain of a man.

"Where are you taking me?" Dean asked, though there wasn't any fear in his voice, just resignation.

"We're Enforcers with the CRA," the terror said, showing a Gold Emblem.

"We were assigned to investigate what was happening here, as it had spiraled out of control. We're taking you in, where the Association with judge you and decide how to proceed."

"I would be shocked at being caught by a bunch of Gold Emblems, but you are certainly no ordinary Golds," Dean said, shaking his head as the enormous man lifted him effortlessly, Dean feeling more like a sack of grain than a person.

"You have been very lucky in your time," the kresnik said as they exited the cabin.

"This time, your lucked turned in the worst way. It always does, for your type; just too bad we got assigned this so late in your insane spree."

"I'll be taking this, by the way," the raven-haired woman said, reaching over and taking the ring from his right hand.

"Don't want you getting any ideas about teleporting again." Shit, he thought. I had hoped she was too cocky and thought she could just block everything. I still had an out with that that I could use. It's going to be a lot harder now.