Spitting out mouthfuls of blood, the mutant stared with blood-red eyes at the eyes behind the steel back and said, word by word, "To live in the face of death!"

boom!

The blood that flowed out instantly burst into flames, a raging black-purple fire engulfing the two of them in a hellish inferno.

"...Do you have children?"

Marcos, clinging tightly to the Man in the Iron Mask, heard these words suddenly in his ear as flames burned his entire body.

Thinking it was a hallucination, he used his last bit of strength to lift his head and look at the other person in the karmic fire.

Do you have children?

After confirming again, Marcos understood that the words had indeed come from the other person's mouth.

Marcos, who was not yet married, subconsciously shook his head, but a vivid black figure appeared in his mind.

Seemingly unconcerned about the dark purple flames surrounding him, the iron-faced man nodded slightly.

"That's good……"

He drew his sword with both hands and slashed with it in one fluid motion.

The last thing Marcos, decapitated, saw was...

The masked man, engulfed in flames, extended his right palm outward toward his chest. The towering flames were instantly absorbed into his body, leaving only wisps of smoke rising slowly from his armor.

The battle is over.

The short, stout man put away his weapon, put on gloves, and picked up Marcos's head.

Looking at the shapeless remains in his hand, burned beyond recognition, he shouted to the leader in the distance, "Boss, what should we label this alien species of the sun as?"

The man in the iron mask picked up the wooden box from the ground, crushed the top of the box with one hand, looked at the box full of stones, and said without turning his head, "Five."

Upon hearing this, the short, stout man took out a delicate little iron box from his bag and opened the lid. Inside were iron stamps, arranged in two rows.

The top row has 22 seals, each inscribed with a word in Latin, such as chariot, tower, and judgment; the bottom row has 12 seals, each inscribed with a number from 1 to XII.

First, he found the stamp with the word "sun" on the top row, and then the stamp with the number 5 on the bottom row. Next, the short, stout man turned on his portable charcoal stove, heated the stamp over the red-hot coals for a while, and finally pressed it hard on Marcos's forehead.

“Sun 5…” The short, stout man put the branded head of the dead into a cloth bag and then into his luggage, muttering, “Only five. I thought it would be higher.”

The man in the iron mask tossed aside the wooden box in his hand, stared at the stones scattered on the ground, and remained silent for a long time.

In the night sky, an owl flapped its wings and landed on the arm of the woman in white.

The woman teased the little messenger's face, untied a round wooden tube from its ankle, took out the note inside, and read its contents aloud to the leader: "A village at the border of Falling Star Mountains and Moon Creek Plain, a burned-down hut, the bodies of two wanted by the church, writing left in the cellar...nascentes_morimur."

The masked man slung his greatsword back over his shoulder, looked towards the western plains, and muttered softly, "Relief Society..."