Alex returned back to the Stepstones tribe with tears flowing down his face and holding the dead body of Li Yun.
His mind was all but blank as he slowly made his way toward the hall where everyone was gathered.
The hall was just as gloomy, if not more, and entering the room only made Alex feel worse.
The chief turned around to look at him and saw his wounded daughter. "Yun!" he shouted as he swiftly made his way to his daughter to check his injuries.
He grabbed her away from Alex's arms.
"Quickly, we should place you by the fi--" his words stuck in his throat when he saw her pale skin and lifeless eyes, reminding him of what he had seen 7 years ago when the previous beast horde had attacked them.
That time, it had been his wife that had died, and this time...
"Daughter? Yun? Wake up. Please, wake up. Yun?" he started shouting. Everyone turned to look and saw that she had died as well.
Most thought of consoling the chief, but they were too busy mourning for their own kin.
The chief cried for minutes as Alex stood there blankly. The chief finally looked up at him with clear rage in his eyes.
He grabbed Alex by the shirt with one hand. "You said she was safe!" he shouted. "You lied to me."
Alex tried to speak but no words came from his mouth. There was nothing he could say here that could remove the blame from him. In some ways, he wanted the chief to blame him so that the feeling of guilt he had been having could be justified.
"You let her die!" he shouted.
A few members of the tribe quickly came up to the chief and tried to calm him down, fearing that Alex would lash out.
However, Alex didn't have it in him to lash out. He couldn't even take any action. There was anger in him, boiling on the inside, but he couldn't find it in him to pour it outside. All he could do was say, "I'm sorry. I couldn't save her."
The chief couldn't find it in his to say anything and simply cried.
"How... just how could it have happened? You said you left her far away," the chief said. "How did the beasts get to her?"
The anger boiling inside Alex finally found a way out as viciousness filled his voice. "It wasn't the beasts. It was the men responsible for sending those beasts," he said.
"What?" the chief asked with a confused voice. The others beside him were confused as well.
"This beast horde attack, it wasn't random," he said. "Some men purposefully sent the beasts here so that there would be fewer beasts they would have to worry about. It is likely that... that they found her while returning."
The chief's face darkened as his eyes grew hateful. "These were the task of men?" he asked. "Not only did they kill my daughter, but they were responsible for all the tragedy today?"
"Yes," Alex said. "And I will go kill them."
He turned around without waiting for a response and walked out. The fury that had been dulled due to the shock of seeing Li Yun dying had resurfaced and the only way to calm it down was to kill her murderers.
"They couldn't have gone far," he said to himself softly and brought out of the leopard from before. The leopard was the only beast that was swift enough to make the journey he was about to make.
In doing so, the blood beast was most likely going to get weaker to the point where it would become useless. If the current status of the beast was anything to go by, it would most likely disappear entirely.
But, that was the last thing Alex cared about at the moment anyway.
He rushed the blood beast, making it spend every little blood aura it had in it, rushing through the desert at a very high speed.
His spiritual sense covered a large area as he searched every direction in search of any signs of humans.
The blood leopard ran through the half-moon night even as its speed dropped continuously by every second.
After an hour or so, the beast was so slow that it was weaker than Alex himself, having slowly lost its blood aura. It had, after all, fought for hours even before this.
Still, Alex found it better to ride on the beast instead of running to rest his body which had worked for too long without any sustenance to keep him going.
Besides, there was no point in changing his steed at the moment. After all, he had found the people.
A group of men and women either rode on a few beasts or simply walked as they slowly made their way northwest. Some of the people there were wounded, but not all were.
There were nearly 40 different people here, along with 12 different beasts that they rode.
The ones that rode the beasts were mostly the ones that were wounded. They all looked very similar in terms of clothing, but they all had different types of tattoos on their chests or arms to denote which tribe they were from.
Nove l B(in).C OM
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