The sky-hanging mothership, which had been advancing at such speed that no one aboard even felt the motion, suddenly lurched — as though she had slammed on the brakes in midair.

Every person aboard was thrown forward. Those with slower reflexes couldn’t check themselves and went sprawling across the deck. Most managed to right themselves, and stared in bewilderment as the various goods temporarily stacked about the ship went clattering and crashing to the floor. Such a scene was a rare thing indeed; in all the Gannet‘s years of service it had likely happened only a handful of times.

Raven, who had been personally guarding Yue Yang, changed color at once and reacted with tremendous speed, leaping to the doorway to scan carefully for signs of the enemy. He barked a sharp order at Flower Duck and the other star bandits, who were beginning to panic: “You lot keep watch on him. Don’t let anyone near. I’ll go out and see what’s happening and be right back! It’s very likely a counterattack by Griffin, Golden Eagle, Mao Podi and the rest. And if Mao Podi really does come to rescue him, take the boy with you and get out on a glide-shuttle.”

Flower Duck watched Raven vanish like lightning, then hastily shut the cabin door.

He turned around and put on a smile for Yue Yang: “It’s not that Big Brother doubts you. It just isn’t safe to go out right now. Better we wait here for word.”

Yue Yang was quite at a loss for words. Could you people use your heads a little? If it really were the enemy, would they be this cooperative? One cabin door isn’t going to keep anything out!

Still, one doesn’t strike a smiling face — Flower Duck had treated him decently enough, and he couldn’t work up any anger over it.

Raven raced to the Gladiators’ Plaza at his utmost speed — and was struck dumb by the bloody horror before him. Corpses beyond counting, limbs snapped, bodies twisted, heaped up in pile upon pile.

Bodies stacked like a mountain.

On the floor, blood ran in rivers.

The ship’s guards, the border troops, the merchants, and even the star bandits who had been guarding them — all of them held here under central watch — had been slaughtered where they stood. There had to be tens of thousands of corpses, tangled and heaped together without distinction, severed arms strewn everywhere, severed heads everywhere with eyes that would not close. The stench of blood was so thick it fouled the very air, and Raven — a powerhouse long inured to death — vomited on the spot.

Ugh…

Raven was shaking from head to foot, as though he’d fallen into an ice cellar.

Now he understood, a little. Everything that had happened was a conspiracy.

Those enemies lying hidden did not care in the slightest whether the hostages lived or died. Indeed, they meant to use the lives of these tens of thousands to frame someone.

This Gannet, dyed red with blood, would become the ironclad evidence of some accusation. And the targets — the powerhouses whose interests had been touched — would vent all their fury upon the star bandits’ heads.

This time, the star bandits would face annihilation.

Worse still: the conspiracy was already complete, the outcome already decided. The star bandits could protest with a hundred mouths and never clear themselves.

He had to report this to Winged Tiger, Wind Hawk, and Flamingo at once. This was no longer a moment for seizing the Gannet and building her into a base of power. This was a moment for flight. From now on, the star bandits would be the target upon which divine-lord-rank powerhouses vented their rage. If they didn’t get away and go to ground quickly, the star bandits might well be exterminated forever.

“Roooar!” A roar of agony sounded from far off — like a wounded beast run down by hunters, loosing a helpless death-cry.

“That’s Pelican. He’s being swarmed… which means the bridge has fallen, and the elite star bandit guards there are finished. That’s why the Gannet has stopped!” Raven, in the very extremity of danger, grew calm instead. He suppressed the impulse to rush to the rescue and made first for a skylight opening onto the outer hull, looking out. The vast Gannet had — at some point he hadn’t noticed — been forced to a halt inside a chaotic, dangerous field of meteors. Raven’s eyelid twitched at the sight. He drew a deep breath, forcibly crushed down every negative emotion within him, and set off at top speed toward the place where he’d heard that agonized roar.

A giant, covered in wounds and bathed in blood, was resisting his attackers in a frenzy.

The several enemies swarming the giant were extraordinarily cunning. They never attacked head-on. They employed hit-and-run hunting tactics: one or two pinning him down while the others struck from ambush.

These wolf-pack tactics couldn’t kill in a single blow, but they were highly effective, and their power was tremendous — the giant was run ragged, unable to guard his front and rear at once, unable to mount any effective response. At this rate he would die on the field without taking down even one of them.

Most terrible of all, the enemy were far faster than the blood-soaked giant. Even fighting a retreat was simply impossible.

Had Raven not arrived, the blood-soaked giant would surely have died; when he fell was merely a matter of time.

“Bastards — get away from him!” Raven arrived at the battlefield like black lightning, his cloak flung wide like a wall of bronze and iron, blocking two cunning ambushers’ strikes for the blood-soaked giant. And in the same motion, Raven swung the cloak with force, generating an irresistible surge of forbidden power that blasted the ambushers a full ten meters back, both of them spitting blood, wounded no lightly.

“It’s Raven! Good — perfect. That saves trouble. Here I thought we’d have to expend some effort hunting him down, and the mole comes running out of the ground all by himself!” From the darkness in the distance, an enemy applauded in praise.

“Black Leaf — you, you fool! You’re normally clever. How could you be this stupid now? Do you know what hour it is? Why in blazes did you come running over here to die? Can’t you see I’m finished? Coming here doesn’t save me — it just throws you in with me. Do you want me to die with my eyes open? While I’ve still got a scrap of strength, get lost — get as far away as you can. Someday, avenging us will be your job!” Seeing Raven, the blood-soaked giant was not pleased at all; he was furious, and cursed Raven up one side and down the other.

“We leave together, Thornton. We may not have seen eye to eye normally, but this is the hour for fighting shoulder to shoulder. You can’t do without me. And if it were me trapped here, you’d have come for me too.” Raven pressed his hat down to shadow his eyes, and stood before the blood-soaked giant, his tone perfectly level.

“You’re a bandit — what are you talking about honor for? Damn it, no wonder you’ve had no future your whole life!” The blood-soaked giant swore savagely at him — but as he swore, the tears came.

Tears mixed with blood.

They became tears of blood, running down the giant’s cheeks, which had been carved open by keen blades in a dozen places.

From the darkness someone applauded loudly, and praised them at the top of his voice: “How moving! Truly a pair of good brothers whose friendship runs deeper than blood kin. Tsk, tsk, tsk, tsk, tsk — how enviable. Why is it that I, Flying Corpse, have never had brothers like that?”

At that moment another uninvited guest arrived out of the darkness, and sneered at the words: “Flying Corpse, what you want is to enjoy your good brother’s backside. You’re fit to talk about brotherhood?”

The applauding man choked, then laughed drily. “So I have a fondness for backsides. Better than you eating people, Hungry Ghost. At the very least, I’ve never seen a man uglier at his food than you gnawing on a human head, and I’ve never heard of another man whose highest pleasure is chewing a living face off a living skull. Hungry Ghost, to call you a pervert would be a compliment!”

The uninvited guest didn’t take offense; he chuckled strangely on and on. “Much of a muchness. I’m no good thing, and neither are you. We’re both human filth — or how else would we end up working together? It’s called birds of a feather. It’s called like attracting like. Flying Corpse, don’t go imagining you’re some paragon of virtue and light!”

Flying Corpse and Hungry Ghost?

Raven and the blood-soaked giant both changed color at the names.

Of these two — who fell to snapping at each other like dogs the moment they met — Raven had heard far, far too many rumors.

Flying Corpse and Hungry Ghost were both subordinates of Gu Hai, Left Marshal of the Western Divine Nation. Gu Hai possessed the strength of a super divine general, and the powerhouses under his banner numbered well over a thousand — but only five of them were truly remembered: Poison Maggot, Flying Corpse, Hungry Ghost, Nether Flame, and Phantom. These five evil degenerates were not merely notorious as the most savage running dogs in the Mountain Beyond the Mountain and Earth Valley; they possessed divine-general strength besides, beyond the reckoning of ordinary men. Apart from the eight divine lords and powerhouses of super-divine-general rank and above, no warrior could do a thing to them.

Worst of all, these five degenerates habitually moved as a group and were rarely found alone. As a rule, where one appeared, the other four were not far off.

Two of them were here now. Could Poison Maggot, Nether Flame, and Phantom be far behind?

Swarmed by all five degenerates — the odds were grim indeed… And now Raven understood completely why tens of thousands in the Gladiators’ Plaza had been butchered so quickly. The reason was that these five degenerates had come. They killed like mowing grass, their crimes beyond counting; only the five of them could possess a heart cruel enough to slaughter tens of thousands of living, innocent lives.

Wait.

Hold on.

The five degenerates had come here — so why, after all this time, were there only two?

Where had the other three gone? Could it be—?

A terrible answer struck Raven, and his body went colder still… The young man. They must be going to kill the young man! That youth was the most promising newcomer in the Southeast Divine Nation, perhaps a disciple the Southeast divine lord was secretly cultivating. And if the five degenerates killed him, then the star bandits would carry that blame forever — a pot they could never set down. Losing a Gannet would enrage the Southeast divine lord, certainly, but a Gannet could be retaken; a newly cultivated disciple, once killed, could never be recovered.

If that were so, then the star bandits were finished.

And the eight divine nations might well fall into war over it, starting the countdown to the destruction of Earth Valley and the Mountain Beyond the Mountain ahead of schedule.

And the one laughing last would be that true victor hidden in the shadows, sowing discord and setting every side to slaughtering one another through misunderstanding.

“This is bad. We can’t die here. We have to go save someone first — we have to get one man out, get him off the Gannet, so he can carry the truth of this place to the world!” The more Raven thought, the worse it looked. He roared at Pelican, the blood-soaked giant now on the brink of despair: “Cut our way out with me! We can’t die yet. If we die here, everything is finished!”

“What are you talking about? I don’t understand!” The blood-soaked giant Pelican clenched both fists. “But before I die, I’ll do as you say. You’re cleverer than I am. I think you’re right!”

In the cabin at that moment, all was silence. You could hear a man breathe.

Yue Yang lay on the sofa with his hands behind his head, one leg crossed over the other, eyes half shut, as though he had already fallen asleep.

Flower Duck and the other star bandits, however, could neither sit nor stand still. They didn’t dare make a sound, but every one of them stared anxiously toward the cabin door, holding their breath as best they could, waiting for Raven’s return. Slow-witted as they were, they could smell it now — a stench of blood that not even a sealed door could keep out. They didn’t dare imagine how many had died out there, to pool so much blood.

Because that blood was seeping in beneath the nearly airtight cabin door, slowly soaking a good half of the passage outside.

“Anybody home?”

And just as Flower Duck and the others were at their most uneasy, there came, from outside, a soft knocking at the door.

(End of Chapter 1144)