The last thing Wendy desired was for her lady to come face to face with Aza'zel at this moment.
If her speculations proved right, then the odds of her lady decisively cooperating with Aza'zel and asking for forgiveness are quite high.
With someone so powerful in the shadows protecting the little boy, it is no wonder her lady offered perfunctory answers and provided minimal, at most a token of assistance, to the other Rakshas.
Like the others, Wendy had believed that her lady was persevering her forces for the territorial war, especially since 3rd Street and 7th Street were well beyond 12th Street in terms of resources.
Wendy opted to eliminate any possible variables in her quest to usurp power, and this young boy is one such variable.
"What should we do then?"
Aza'zel asked a question that brought her back from the contemplative silence.
Wendy hesitated for a moment and said, "Lady Raksha will most likely keep some of her close attendants in the house, so we can't just barge our way in… I already made arrangements for my people to abandon the war when the conflict is at its peak, and so…"
"And so, you'll use the ruffians from 3rd Street and 7th Street to clean up her forces, and then proceed to lay siege to the house?" Aza'zel continued for her.
No matter how strong a Raksha was, they couldn't contend against so many armed combatants in an open environment. The only reasons Aza'zel could survive so long in the underground passageways were the dim lighting and narrow avenues of combat.
"Exactly," Wendy nodded her head with a smile, but her smile was somewhat venomous. "They will have to change their clothes and mask themselves, lest my lady recognizes them."
Aza'zel nodded his head and asked, "What are you doing here all alone, then?"
Wendy rolled her eyes. "I want to be by her side when the forces breach the house, that's the best way for me to wait for an opportunity to stab my lady in the back."
Aza'zel didn't know how to feel about this. This woman, his partner-to-be, was openly discussing stabbing her current lady in the back. Such a venomous, ambitious heart.
"That's why…" Wendy continued, "You should leave here lest you alarm my lady too early. Don't worry about me going back on my word anytime soon…"
She knew it was pointless to promise perpetual partnership, as even she wouldn't believe her own words, let alone the young boy in front of her.
Wendy didn't take this young boy's combat prowess seriously, as only naive people enter into the open world with the intent to fight, while the mature ones enter the world with the intent to kill.
While some kill for the sake of survival, the majority kill for the sake of killing.
These lectures tossed about in Aza'zel's mind as he traced the oppressive sounds of madness and slaughter to the heart of the territorial war.
Deep down, he knew that what Wendy said was true, and he knew that he wouldn't have pulled the trigger with the intent to kill.
Such things were beyond the mentality of a child of his age. As far as he was concerned, when it comes to killing enemies, Caidie was there for the task.
Furthermore, the ones who committed atrocities warranting death weren't these people at the bottom, but the myriad races who descended into this land together with Skysplit.
The closer he was to the heart of this conflict, the denser the waft of blood that tickled his senses.
'Blood and fire, the sweet stench of death and misery…'
Sure enough, the voices in his mind riled and clamored about. Slowly, they nibbled away at his rationality.
Far behind in the shadows, Caidie's eyebrows locked together tightly, her jaw clenched as she hissed in an inaudible whisper, "It's too early for you, too early!"
She understood how stubborn this little boy was, and be it intentionally or otherwise, the conversation with this Wendy Sunflower triggered his defiant temperament.
She knew he wanted to prove to himself that he could control these urges when surrounded by bloodshed and madness, but Caidie knew that the more Aza'zel feasted on blood and caused his bloodline powers to surge, the harder it would be to control these urges.
She wanted to step forward and stop him, but unless he was facing death, she couldn't act out rashly. Actions are made through choices, and so consequences follow intimately from behind.
As she watched the small figure inch closer and closer to certain madness, she could only close her eyes in desperate resignation and sigh heavily.
At this point, half of Aza'zel's sanity seemed to feel muddled, it felt more like a burden than a perk to his intelligent, young mind.
In the throes of chaos, he couldn't differentiate the voices all around from those in his mind.
Gunshots, the muffled and the not, be it bullets sailing the air or wedging into flesh, relayed horrendous scenes to his world of echoes. In little to no time at all, the world of echoes beyond a dozen paces in radius from Aza'zel turned into a distorted mess.
Little attention did he pay to these details as he stood by the roadside of an ongoing conflict, two opposing camps of ruffians huddled opposing roadblocks as they opened fire arbitrarily.
A stray hand grenade flipped over and stumbled into his clear world of echoes, followed by an intense sense of imminent peril. With a hint of sanity to his actions, Aza'zel reached over and grabbed hold of the grenade, and flung it to the sky.
This had him land within eyesight of the ruffian responsible for the grenade, and as far as the ruffian was concerned, anyone on the opposite end of this meat grinder of a battlefield was an enemy.
He slung a rifle from his shoulder and took aim in a matter of seconds. With a boom, a shockwave descended from the sky, weighing on his rifle, and shifting the trajectory of the bullet that followed.
It was this bullet that blasted the sanity out of Aza'zel's mind as pain and shock intertwined, intensifying the sense of haze in his mind whilst his entire body recoiled into the ground.
Blood gushed from his left shoulder after a double spin in the air, just as he thudded to the ground in a reek of viscous blood. He gasped, finding himself jammed in-between a mash of corpses and half-dead.
It felt as though he could smell the vitality boiling in the street from a couple of blocks away. It riled up the demons within his mind, and with a body discharging invisible steam, he groaned and scrambled to his feet.
His gasps revealed a pair of sharp fangs that protruded from the canines. His memory of the previous scene kicked in, and with a blast of contagious intent to wreak havoc, an instinctive hatred lunged his body in the direction of the former marksman.
Nails dug into flesh as Caidie struggled to take a step forward, yet her mission and the stipulations of the prince's test weighed down on her mind, forcing her to brace down and watch helplessly as the smoke and fire took his small body into an embrace of no return.