Level 1 to Infinity: My Bloodline Is the Ultimate Cheat!-Chapter 834: A Coat Thrown Over Blood

After Ethan issued the command, he did not spare a glance for the stunned expressions behind him. He broke into a sprint at once, crossing the hundred meters to the villa in a heartbeat, his focus narrowed to a single point ahead.

Inside, a mother and daughter clung to each other on the floor, their bodies shaking with uncontrollable sobs. The daughter’s cries were hoarse and broken, her eyes unfocused as if she had already retreated somewhere far away. Blood soaked the inside of her thigh, dark and sticky. Her mother rocked her back and forth, murmuring frantically into the empty air, her voice cracking as she pleaded for it to stop, for anyone to make it stop.

Across the room, a man in his thirties stood over another man wearing shattered glasses. He was an Energy User, and he was beating his victim with methodical cruelty, each blow delivered without haste or mercy. Blood dripped steadily from the bespectacled man’s mouth, splattering the floor beneath him. Despite the pain, he clung to the attacker’s leg with desperate strength, fingers digging in as though refusing to let go was the only thing keeping his family alive.

Just as despair threatened to swallow them whole, a figure appeared in the doorway.

In one smooth motion, the newcomer shrugged off a long black coat and sent it sailing through the air. It landed over the huddled mother and daughter, covering their exposed bodies and dampening their sobs. They flinched and cried out, instinctively shrinking away. Another Energy User, they thought. Another monster come to finish what the first had started.

The man on the floor forced his blurry vision upward, his heart sinking further when he saw the silhouette standing in the light. Hope was a luxury he no longer dared to afford. Yet as the heavy fabric settled around the women, offering warmth and a sliver of dignity, confusion flickered through their terror, followed by a fragile, trembling spark of something that almost resembled hope.

"Looking for trouble?" the attacking Energy User snarled as he finally turned, his expression twisting with irritation when he noticed Ethan.

"Trouble?" Ethan replied, his voice calm and cold. "No. I’m here for your life."

There was no need for anything more.

Blue light rippled over his body as stored kinetic energy surged through his muscles. Panther Form activated in an instant, and the world seemed to slow around him.

He vanished.

The Energy User barely had time to register movement before Ethan passed him. One moment he was standing, mid-sneer. The next, his body pitched forward, his legs severed cleanly at the knees. A heartbeat later, agony caught up with reality, and a guttural scream tore from his throat as he crashed to the floor.

Ethan stood several steps away, one arm extended, a single claw-tip glinting faintly. He had used Shred, but not in its usual wild arc. He had refined it, compressed it into a single blood-red crescent of energy, an invisible extension of a panther’s killing claw.

The room fell silent.

The mother, the daughter, and the bespectacled man stared, their minds struggling to process what they were seeing. The man on the floor was still clutching the severed leg. When the truth finally sank in, he let out a strangled cry and flung it away, scrambling backward on his hands and heels as if the limb itself might reach for him.

Ethan frowned slightly. He had intended to finish the crippled Energy User immediately, but that reaction gave him pause.

He walked forward at an unhurried pace. The legless man glared up at him, hatred burning through the pain. To his credit, he bit down hard, choking back his screams as his teeth ground together.

Stopping in front of him, Ethan bent down, seized a fistful of the man’s hair, and dragged him across the floor. Blood smeared in a long trail behind them until Ethan released him at the feet of the bespectacled homeowner.

"Kill him," Ethan said evenly, his gaze locking onto the trembling man. "Let it out. The world has changed. Only the strong survive now. Only the strong can protect what’s theirs."

He had seen the man’s courage moments earlier, the way he had clung to his enemy’s leg with nothing but stubborn will. Yet now, faced with the raw, irreversible reality of violence, the man had recoiled. The contradiction irritated Ethan. If it were his woman, his daughter, he would have torn the world apart without hesitation.

He forgot, briefly, that most people were not like him. Decades of peace, of laws and consequences, had built invisible walls inside ordinary minds. Killing was not a simple act. It was a psychological cliff.

Ethan was trying to push him over it, to force him to seize justice with his own hands before fear and trauma could rot him from the inside.

The man shook his head violently, backing away as far as the floor allowed, his hands raised as though warding off a nightmare. "N-no... no, I can’t... I can’t kill anyone!"

Ethan felt a flicker of disgust. Pathetic. A lost cause.

He lifted his hand, ready to end the wounded Energy User himself and be done with it.

A shrill scream pierced the air behind him.

"I’LL KILL YOU!"

Something gray and fast shot past his shoulder. Ethan stepped aside on instinct, his eyes widening in surprise.

It was the mother.

She moved with a speed that should not have been possible, a faint, murky gray light clinging to her body as she threw herself onto the crippled Energy User. There was no technique in her movements, only raw, feral rage. She wrapped her arms around his head and bit down on his neck with savage force.

The Energy User was far too weak to resist.

Human teeth, backed by the faint awakening of Energy within her, were more than enough.

A sickening crunch echoed through the room as flesh gave way. The carotid artery ruptured. There was no dramatic spray, his body having already lost too much blood, but the bite was final all the same.

The woman did not seem to realize he was dead. She kept biting, clawing, tearing at him, her fingers glowing faintly as that gray energy shredded skin and muscle alike.

Ethan watched with detached curiosity. Her Energy carried a strange quality, corrosive and destructive, as though it existed to break things apart. After a moment, he looked away. She was still naked beneath the coat, her movements unsettlingly exposed, and he had no interest in witnessing more.

He turned his attention back to the husband. The man stared at his wife, his mouth hanging open, his mind shattered by the horrifying, primal display.

Ethan shook his head once and vanished from the villa.

A few steps later, he stopped, remembering something.

He reappeared inside in a flash.

"He’s already dead," he said flatly.

The abrupt return seemed to snap the woman out of her frenzy. Her body shuddered, and she collapsed onto the blood-soaked floor, sobs wracking her as exhaustion finally claimed her.

Ethan paid her no further attention. He bent down, gripped the dead Energy User’s head, and with a sharp twist, severed it from the body. Holding the grisly trophy, he turned and left without another word.

Outside, Uncle Jed and the others were already far ahead, though still well within the reach of his Soul Sense. He had spent too long in the villa. Through his expanded perception, he could sense the ongoing purge across the area. Lyla and the others were cutting down Energy Users one after another. Even Rainie Chen was deep in the fighting, her armor smeared with blood, her eyes gleaming with a fierce intensity that made her almost unrecognizable.

Meatball stayed close to Victor, who had deliberately slowed his pace to keep the newer player safe. Ethan noticed something unusual about the boy, a faint, earthy yellow glow clinging to him.

’Has he awakened an earth-affinity Energy?’ Ethan wondered.

Victor appeared to be instructing him, gesturing and explaining as they moved. Meatball mirrored the motions with earnest concentration, his face lit with a mixture of excitement and determination as he struggled to keep up.