Bertram was so angry that he was seeing red, but Alex quickly shut him up by releasing the full pressure of his aura upon him.
"You won't even be able to lay a finger on him under my eyes, especially now considering you lack the means to do so…" Alex shut Bertram up, even making a joke out of him as he pointed at his lack of fingers.
"Continue, Kilian. I can guarantee Bertram won't be able to hurt you."
With a heavy sigh, Kilian continued.
"At first, the Count seemed rather reluctant to speak, but after Bertram affirmed his loyalty to him, he revealed his plan to us soon after." Kilian looked as if he had lived a hundred lives when he reached this point.
"He had recently come across some ancient ruins, and through his expeditions there he had found an ancient summoning formation." "To put it simply, this formation when activated would summon a Variant class beast matching the rank of the one who summoned it."
Kilian stopped speaking there, only adding. "I'm sure you can guess where this is going from here."
Alex, contemplating on the side, nodded. "There's a catch — a certain condition needs to be met to activate this formation."
Kilian affirmed Alex's deduction with a nod.
"But what does this condition have to do with me? So far from everything you've said, none of it has anything to do with me at all, and quite frankly I don't see how it can." Alex questioned with a frown. His whole purpose of coming here was to find out the truth about the assassin.
At most, he came here only expecting to find out a little bit about the person who sent this assassin after him to take his life.
But it seemed like things were much more complicated than they seemed, and there was a scheme at play here that he had somehow become unwillingly involved in.
When Kilian heard Alex's questioning and untrusting tone, he sighed.
'In the end I can't hide it any longer.'
"The condition was the sacrifice of people." Kilian spoke to Alex, revealing the truth.
Alex was about to speak, shocked at what he was hearing, but Kilian continued.
"Tens of thousands of people. All needing to be sacrificed if the Count wanted to summon a Variant class beast at D+ rank, matching the Count's own rank."
This time, Alex was really shocked. But he also felt disgusted.
The moment he heard that tens of thousands of people were going to be sacrificed, he felt the urge to vomit on the spot, but he stopped himself as he didn't want to show weakness while he was still in front of the two men who were in on this plan.
At this point, Bertram had completely lost it. "You wanted the truth? Well there you go. Haha, tens of thousands of people are going to be sacrificed, and there's nothing you can do about it. The plan has already been set in motion! Not to mention you are no match for the Count's strength."
Alex wasn't in the mood to listen to the ramblings of a genocidal madman anymore, so with a swift movement from his sword, he penetrated Bertram's chest, directly piercing his heart.
A look of shock and horror plastered on Bertram's face as he couldn't believe what he was seeing. A realisation that he was about to die came across him, and in a final bid of madness, he did the unthinkable.
In the same instance Alex had penetrated his heart, Bertram knew he only had a few more seconds to live, so with his final act of life, he let his energy run rampant across his body.
In an instant, Alex felt a dramatic increase in danger well up inside him, realising what Bertram had just done.
He had turned himself into a bomb.
With how much energy Awakened stored inside of them, it wouldn't take a genius to realise what would happen if all of that accumulated energy was released all at once, in a suicidal act.
A big fucking explosion is what!
With only seconds to act, Alex had no time to run away, so he made a gamble and went straight for Bertram's body instead.
He grabbed his body and shot upwards with all of his power the instant he grabbed him. His momentum carried him through the ceiling, and every ceiling above that until he reached the open air, where in a last attempt at saving himself and every other person in the town, he launched Bertram as high up as he could.
He pushed so hard that he felt his bones in his arms shatter from overexerting himself, but he ignored it as he watched and hoped that his efforts had been enough.
BOOOOOM!
Silence. In the next second, the whole town was drowned in silence as the very air in the atmosphere had been sucked dry.
A blinding light spread out from far above the town, shining like a second sun had risen and many residents cried out in pain as they felt their eyes burn, temporarily blinded by the light.
Then, when the light receded, the true extent of the explosion revealed itself before their eyes.
A massive hole.
Alex had thrown Bertram so far up, that his body actually bounced off the ceiling of the underworld before it ignited in a blazing fury.
What ensued next shocked everyone below.
An intense flurry of light flooded into the cave.
The explosion had been so impactful, that the top of the underworld had been blown straight through and it had actually directly created a hole to the surface.
The illusion of a sky had long been broken by the explosion at this point, and the true sky had already started filtering in through the 100 metre wide hole in the ceiling.
Alex had still been over 400 metres in the air when the explosion went off, and was close enough that he could feel the heat directly on his skin, trying to burn him to a crisp.
But thankfully, his high resistance to fire didn't enable that, and he let out a heavy sigh of relief.
Then the resulting shockwave came, and he was sent flying back down towards the ground…