“Bang!” “Ting!” “Ting!” three loud clashes of metal exploded in the air, it was due to three clashes of weapons between Josephine Wong and the man in a full suit of armor and wielding a scythe.

After the final clash, Josephine Wong was sent flying back and barely landed on her feet. While on the other hand the man wielding a scythe slid back on the ground leaving two lines of marks from his shoes in front of him. The blade of the scythe was damaged in the direct collisions and one could see a few cracks along the edges. On the other hand, the metal stave of Josephine Wong was also damaged, as Josephine Wong could see two very deep cuts on the stave, if it took on any more hits on the same place, it would be cut in two or three pieces.

“Looks like weapons wise he has it better.” Jianmen stood on the side and said: “Be careful.”

“Yeah I can tell.” Josephine Wong let out a bright smile while sweat was dripping down her face, and even though her hands were shaking, she still held onto the metal stave tight and steady.

This man, if Josephine Wong and Jianmen were not wrong, would be the powerhouse that was stationed here as an overseer, and the rest of the power wielders that were defeated by Josephine Wong were the guards of this place. This would make it so that all but one individual with supernatural powers in this town would have been handled. But out of caution, Jianmen was still paying attention to the surrounding area, because if it was him that was in charge of setting up the defences of this place, he would have had a few assassins stationed here just for situations like this.

“Bang!” the metal stave and the scythe collided once again, while their respective wielders were swinging them at full force, this time, the shining blade of the scythe cut through the stave, and the tip of the stave flew off. Josephine Wong had to lower and curl back her body in order to avoid being struck in the face by the scythe, and she spun her body slightly in the air and jabbed the stave’s sharp broken end at the man’s chest. Another loud bang from clashes of metal came out, the sharp end left a small puncture hole on the man’s chest piece, and a tiny stream of concentrated energy penetrated the defences through the hole and impaled the man’s chest.

One grey shadow shot out from a townhouse building nearby and shot at Josephine Wong while Josephine Wong leapt back from this successful strike and tried to gather herself. It was a person in full cloak with a long and thin wrist blade on their right forearm, and as they closed in on Josephine Wong, they readied the wrist blade and prepared to stick the wrist blade somewhere in Josephine Wong’s back.

Another shadow shot towards Josephine Wong’s back at a much higher speed, Jianmen appeared behind Josephine Wong, facing the fully cloaked individual. When the individual extended the wrist blade forward, Jianmen raised his right arm and caught the blade with his middle and index fingers.

The completely cloaked individual looked up at Jianmen through a long strip of hardened plastic that was transparent on only one side. But even with the full enchanted cloak and a tight body fitting armor hiding their physique, Jianmen could still see through the face mask and recognize the identity of this assassin - it was not a man nor a woman, but a humanoid creature completely made of long, scaly, wiggling and winding worms, with two curled up black worms with dozens of legs faking as eyes, and a “mouth” with several centipedes as “tongues”. The worms that made up this creature’s body were functioning both as exoskeletons and muscles of the creature.

This creature assassin swung its left arm at Jianmen with a curved dagger coated with poison in its hand. But Jianmen was able to catch the blade instantly, again with his middle and index fingers.

The cloth covering the creature assassin’s mouth tore from the middle and revealed its “mouth”, unleashing its centipede tongues at Jianmen’s face. Jianmen blew through his mouth and a stream of orange and golden fire shot at the centipedes. The centipedes screamed as their bodies were engulfed by the flames and were completely consumed in just an instant. The stream of fire flooded into the creature assassin’s mouth, its throat, its chest and then exploded from inside and blasted through all of the moving worms like hundreds of thousands of bolts of orange and golden lightning.

“Boom!” the assassin exploded from almost every fiber and every tissue inside of its body and the ashes, cinders and rags scattered everywhere.

Jianmen turned his right hand and flipped his fingers, the dagger from the creature assassin shot downwards and nailed one long-bodied lizard with night legs and severely burnt scales and skin to the ground.

Though stuck on a snake, the poison coated on the dagger took effect fairly quickly - Jianmen watched as the snake twitched and struggled and slowly became numb, limb then fell to the ground. 

“What a pitiful form of existence.” Jianmen picked up the now lifeless snake, inside which was once a very tormented soul - a barely sentient fragment of a human soul, bound by some kind of twisted magic into this vessel: “Who did this to you?”

A thin stream of light blue energy emerged from the dead snake and flowed onto Jianmen’s fingers, and along with it, a small piece of memory entered into Jianmen’s mind.

This was once a witch, a young and talented witch, full of power and potential. But her last minutes were spent bound to a throne - a throne she once admired and worshipped, with her entire being being sucked away by a lamp over her head. She managed to break free at the very last moment, but she fell when she stumbled out of a portal of her escape and never woke up again.