Time seemed to have slowed down as the female student lunged at Keneric. The bundle of supplies Keneric was carrying limited his movement greatly. Plus, the two male students also flanked him on either side with their makeshift speakers easily becoming a nuisance.
Keneric sighed. Now that it had come to this, he tensed his muscles and prepared for hand-to-hand combat. It was just that his hands were not normal hands anymore. But his opponents didn't know that.
The woman was the closest, and her gardening tool sliced first towards Keneric. The two men were half a second behind but tried coordinating their attacks to stab at Keneric's back. It seemed from their attack patterns that these people were not trying for any vital organs and only wanted to immobilize him and steal his bundle. Well, it did not matter much now what their intentions were or who they worked for.
Keneric dropped the bundle and somersaulted over the closest spearman to get out of their encirclement. The three attackers were left dumbfounded when their attacks landed at nothing but air. They instantly turned around to face Keneric, but their leader smiled looking down, thinking that Keneric had abandoned the bundle. But at the next second when she looked up, Keneric had already closed the distance and a claw-like hand had suddenly appeared and slashed through the male student's neck, cutting it clean.
Before the three could think anything, the spearman's head fell down and rolled into the wet ground, not rolling further than a few meters. A hot red fountain sprayed out of his stationary torso and landed on the already stained bedsheet bundle on the floor. Soon the horror caught up to the female leader and she screamed "Monster!" and ran in terror, with her earlier confidence and elegance nowhere to be seen. The second man also abandoned his makeshift weapons and any thought of attacking Keneric and sprinted in a different direction.
Keneric really had a bad mood right now, and the female scout took the brunt of it. Keneric turned his dominant hand back to normal and summoned the green glowing fleshy axe and threw it directly at the escaping woman. The axe did two turns midair before stabbing itself into the woman's leg and cutting it clean below the joint. She immediately lost her balance and fell face first to the swamp, struggling and screaming continuously, painting the landscape another color than the regular green.
Keneric, however, didn't stand there in ceremony and watch her bleed but followed after the fleeing guy. And with his enhanced physique, it did not take him more than a minute to catch up. They were too close to the base, and they had seen Keneric transform. Now he couldn't let them expose his secrets to an unknown group. The tall man, watching Keneric almost catch up to him, screamed useless pleas into deaf ears. In return, Keneric just summoned his claws and stabbed at the back of his head, his sharp mandible-like fingers coming out from the other side of the scout's skull.
After he retracted his fingers, the man's body fell down but continued to spasm like a headless chicken that did not know it was already dead. Keneric turned back around, retracing his footsteps back to the way he came, but this time in a more timely and relaxed manner.
There he saw the female leader crying, with snot and blood flowing out from her respective orifices. By now she had colored the muck below in her own piss and blood, but without her dominant foot, she couldn't crawl that far off the place Keneric had left her. When she finally saw Keneric enter back into her view, she stopped and gave up on any attempt of running—well, crawling away.
"Please," she sobbed, with her broken voice and coughing many times between every breath. "P-lease don't kil-l me."
But Keneric's expression was stern and instead of replying to her, he took a knee near her face and stared directly into her shivering eyes.
"Who leads the law campus?" Keneric's voice was calm and cold, but the woman was caught off guard between her pleas and muttered out, "Wha-t?"
"Your leader. Who manages your group?"
Her eyes lost a lot of color hearing the question, but she still replied, hanging on a last strand of hope, "Marc-Marcus. He's a final-year law student."
"Anything else? Anyone else who operates a big group?"
She tried to shake her head but she couldn't because of the ground, so she said, "N-o." She coughed thrice before adding, "Only Law and Art's campu-s survived and there are no ot-her large groups."
Keneric studied her for a second and weighed his options but was interrupted by a weak, "Please, don't kill me now? I've told you everything. Let me go—I won't tell anyone about you." And Keneric nodded at her and got up, unsummoning his axe.
The woman finally felt a moment of happiness because her body had blocked the pain coming from the amputated leg temporarily. Keneric was now back at the place he had dropped the food bundle away and soon picked it up. Next, he started walking back in the direction of his second base.
But suddenly he heard the woman panic and cry out, "Wait! Don't leave me here!" but Keneric did not stop.
"Help me!" The woman started screaming again and again with the last of her energy and squirming back into the mud, but Keneric did not stop for her.
When Keneric was almost at the entrance of the clubroom, he heard another scream from the woman, but this time it was begging for something different. This time the woman was screaming, "Please kill me,", "Please kill me," but Keneric just entered the vined building and never looked back.