Not easily. Not cleanly. This was a true struggle.

But they were most certainly falling.

And for the first time in years…

Slave children smiled.

Their chains still dug into their ankles. Their bellies still empty. But their eyes…

Their eyes had stars in them.

Hope had returned.

…

When the final golem fell, they poured forward like a tide unleashed.

Hands clawed at the air. Voices collided into one another, frantic and pleading. A thousand tiny, broken pleas and confessions came. Some tugged at Kaiden's sleeves, some simply dropped to their knees and beat the ground with fists of helplessness. The cavern filled with a single animalistic sound: need.

Words came in dozens of tongues. A woman shoved herself forward, voice raw as wire: "Msaada! Tafadhali, tunaomba!"

A man near her cried in another cadence: "Madad kijiye! Kripya, bachao hamein!"

A child screamed a third plea: "Tulong po! Pakiusap, tulungan niyo kami!"

They weren't a single nation. They were a patchwork of faces and accents: some Asian, some African, some who had been dragged across oceans and stripped of names and papers. Their clothes were rags. Their hands were callused. Their eyes kept darting to Kaiden as if he might vanish like a ghost and leave them with the cruel white-skinned humans again.

The noise climbed until it became pure mayhem, and when Kaiden saw that the people were about to approach his girls as well to clutch at their clothes like saviors, he had to clap his hands together to release two sharp, iron blows that rang through the cavern. The sound snapped heads up; the pleading stuttered into a stunned hush.

"Is there anyone here who speaks English?"

A few youths shuffled forward. One small boy, no older than twelve, stepped up and swallowed hard before answering in halting English, words thick with accent: "We… we speak. Please. Help." A thin girl beside him pushed forward as well. Her voice was trembling but understandable: "Lords sell us in home, old men and women buy! Ship and lock here!"

Kaiden nodded gravely, understanding the gist of what had happened. These people were enslaved in their home countries, in places where the mana apocalypse allowed warlords to rise up and rule with a tyrannical fist over the populace, thanks to their governments being toppled.

Such warlords needed money to protect their rule, and ChronosX was swimming in it. ChronosX needed a workforce to keep their secret hideout going, and the warlords had an abundance of human resources they thought of as burdens.

A match made in heaven.

He looked at his girls, scanning them quickly, then found the most ideal for the job he had in mind. The three Valkyries.

"Girls, please step up."

Kaiden crouched so he was eye-level with the oldest kid who'd spoken. "These three beautiful ladies are my lovers. Please tell them everything that you can, show them your rooms, work places, everything. The torture is over, kids, you are safe. You'll be fed. But for the old men and women who did this to you to be punished, we need you to tell us your stories."

The trio instantly understood what was going on; they needed to gather as much evidence as possible to serve as more and more mounting justification for what they'd done today. After all, many millions were watching their broadcast, which would then be compiled into a video and uploaded, finding even more eyes.

It was the perfect chance to create a truth bomb that could not be ignored or debated.

Kaiden asked them to do this because they were tight on time.

The awakened groups the government sent to restrain them, which he was sure they did; the combatants must already be on their way here, no matter how much the President might've liked what they discovered. The country needed to save face. Letting such vigilante actions go without saying a word was simply not acceptable.

He feared that if they got here too quickly, then he and the girls wouldn't be able to continue gathering evidence for the crimes of ChronosX and justification for the crimes Kaiden and co committed today.

Even worse, if the combatants who came were crooks, there was a chance the right things wouldn't be asked of these people, the right rooms wouldn't be checked, and so on. Which, in turn, would mean that they would be in even bigger trouble than they already were.

But he couldn't do it all himself, because they came here for the kidnapped American men and women.

It wasn't that Kaiden cared less about these imported slaves, not at all. He had to march on because of the absence of the people they actually came here for, which meant that they were likely hidden somewhere further in, used for something other than farming crops.

And, with the ruckus he and his girls caused, Kaiden feared that they might be relocated… or worse, to try hiding the evidence.

…

"Gh!" *Bam!*

Maximilian grunted, accompanied by the heavy thud of his fist connecting with soft flesh, satisfying the dark, hot rage deep in his belly.

The woman below him was crying as her body convulsed with pain against the metallic restraints.

"Shut up!" he bellowed. His voice was thick with exertion and spite. The rage wasn't truly about the resistance of the woman, but the stress he'd suffered thanks to a bunch of nobodies. How dare the pink slut and her retarded boyfriend do this to him?!

"Stop squirming! I said shut up and stop resisting!"

A vile, delicious, sadistic glint shone in his small, piggy eyes. He was large, sporting a great deal of fat and muscle, strong enough to crush the woman beneath him effortlessly. The metallic restraints were more symbolic than anything, making it feel as though his power was absolute, and he utterly reveled in it.

In the world outside his kingdom, he had lost control. Agents were digging through everything that had his name attached to it, while the public called him ugly names. He could not control the narrative.

But what he could control were the lives of the people down here.

Which was why he found himself spending more and more time underground, where he could act as king.

Maximilian raised his heavy hand for another blow, savoring the shudder of terror that ran through the woman's body just before the impact.

*Hiss.*

The sound of the thick, soundproof metal door sliding open behind him was an immediate, jarring intrusion.

Maximilian's rage instantly turned into furious impatience. This was his private time, and he never tolerated being disturbed.

"Who dares interrupt me?!" he roared, keeping his back to the door. It must've been one of his damned executive friends who didn't see the room was occupied already.

No one answered. The door did not close.

The silence that fell was heavy, far more unnerving than any noise.

Frowning, Maximilian finally turned his huge, sweating body toward the doorway.

And then, his world ended.

His mouth went instantly dry.

The sadistic glint in his eyes was violently extinguished, replaced by a wide, frozen mask of shock and sheer, unadulterated terror.

His heart launched itself against his ribs.

Standing there, framed in the light of the hallway, was a man who was everything Maximilian wasn't: tall, handsome, muscular, and radiating an aura of pure dread, something that the CEO could only replicate against restrained and pleading women, and even that paled to what the man before him emitted… aimed right at Maximilian.

The man's muscles were coiled tight beneath his clothes, and his face was a portrait of unimaginable fury.

The large man stumbled backward in the bed with his ham-sized hands shaking violently. The words that left his lips were a desperate, broken shriek of recognition.

"K-K-K-K-Kaiden G-G-G-Grey?!"

The muscular man's face, already dark with rage, seemed to darken further in response to hearing his name be uttered by this disgusting human. He took a single step into the room, and the heavy metal door hissed shut behind him, sealing Maximilian in with him.

"I didn't dare hope that I'd find you here. How lucky," he said as he began walking toward the stuttering man with ominous steps and a pair of clenched fists.

At this moment, while watching the man take step after step in his direction with the most wrathful of expressions, Maximilian finally understood one thing:

The hopeless feeling of dread that assaulted all his victims' hearts when they saw him approach.

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