The air was thick with a metallic smell and the low hum of something ancient and awful.
One by one, people were pulled from the terrified crowd, their cries swallowed by the chanting of the cultists.
The leader, a figure draped in dark robes that seemed to drink the flickering torchlight, stood at the center of it all.
With each person dragged forward, he'd perform a quick, brutal ritual, and a faint shimmer of light would flow from the victim towards him.
Su Mu watched, hidden in the shadows of the opposite building, the energy dome, as she and Xu'er found their stomachs churning.
More than half of the trapped civilians were now lifeless heaps upon the blood-soaked sigils, their bodies fueling the terrible ritual.
On a strange, almost invisible screen only she could see, numbers ticked upwards:
[Source Power: 88.7%]... [Source Power: 92.4%]... [Source Power: 95.9%]
