"Liuli!" Wu Qingsong screamed in heart-wrenching despair.

Yet he was rendered powerless, suspended in mid-air by the vice-like grip of the mastiffman behind him. Incapable of summoning any strength, he struggled in vain, like a puppet dangling from invisible strings.

A flurry of cherished memories flickered before his eyes.

Liuli may have had her shortcomings. She was timid, insatiably curious, and somewhat greedy, but she was his first genuine friend in this foreign world and the one who had lightened everyone's hearts with her mere presence.

Did he really just kill her like this?!

Wu Qingsong howled in savage anguish, eliciting a perverse sense of euphoria in Kleine. The villain was even tempted to erupt into ecstatic laughter.

For him, revenge was, indeed, the most intoxicating elixir.

The catastrophic fire that razed half of Rem City also left Kleine disfigured, scorching away a significant portion of his face. He owed his life to a potent magical elixir administered by a senior law enforcement officer who had hurriedly arrived from Sil City.

Nevertheless, his gruesome scars remained. To add insult to injury, after his second failed attempt to capture Moon Maiden Nina, he became the convenient fall guy for both the Rem City inferno and Commander Vals' death. Stripped of his military rank, he had come dangerously close to facing the guillotine.

If not for hastily selling all his assets and securing a large, high-interest loan to bribe the chief official of Baron Elyar's territory, he might already be dead.

His disfigurement also effectively ended any hopes of career advancement among the elves, a society that detested physical imperfections. This shattered all his aspirations, fueling an all-consuming hatred for Wu Qingsong and the Moon Maiden.

To capture them, torment them, crush them, and leave them yearning for the mercy of death. This had become his unyielding obsession.

For the sake of his vendetta, he had even forsaken his last remnants of dignity, assembling a hunting group primarily made up of mastiffmen criminals, and brutes.

Unlike mercenary groups, these hunting groups mainly served the interests of the Imperial military and various aristocrats. Their tasks included eliminating bandits, robbers, and rebels, capturing fugitives, and combating anomalies, all in exchange for bounties usually paid for severed heads.

The Imperial military acknowledged them as auxiliary forces, granting them access to military-grade equipment. However, their numbers and size were strictly limited, and they were required to be led by a half-elf to mitigate the risk of them becoming a threat.

In essence, these were individuals who voluntarily chose to be expendable for financial gain. Naturally, a significant portion of beastfolk also joined the ranks, attracted by the legalized means to engage in killing, looting, and other unspeakable acts.

To motivate these groups, numerous elven nobles tacitly permitted these groups to carry out slaughters and plundering in the "enemy-occupied zones" and "potential resistance areas" around their territories. As long as they submitted a share of their loot, they were allowed to legally keep the rest. However, such activities were strictly prohibited within the central regions of their domains.

Kleine and his squad achieved what Commander Vals had wanted to but ultimately failed to accomplish.

Under Kleine's leadership, they rapidly struck several wolfkin villages suspected of subversion, slaughtering all the inhabitants and securing a substantial profit. Before the Moon Maiden's forces could react, they swiftly torched the villages and withdrew, leaving behind no clues that could be used to trace them.

Their lean and mean force composition rendered them even more formidable than conventional military units when dealing with villagers.

The significant profits boosted the morale of the mastiffmen, and around this time, Kleine stumbled upon a long-awaited lead. A raccoonman who had recently returned to Karagados from Umber claimed to have seen a half-elf with black hair.

"Let him go," Kleine instructed the Mastiffman named Halo.

Gripping Wu Qingsong's head, Halo hurled him toward the collapsed catgirl on the ground with a smirk.

The moment Wu Qingsong hit the ground, he crawled and rolled frantically toward Liuli. 'She can't just be dead,' he thought, his eyes already misty with tears. Although he knew it was a futile effort, he began performing chest compressions and blowing air into her mouth repeatedly.

"Has this guy gone mad?" The mastiffmen burst into uproarious laughter.

In their eyes, Wu Qingsong's attempts at resuscitation looked like the desperate actions of a man unhinged by fear, providing them with an unusual form of entertainment. In their previous raids on villages, the wolfkin had always fought back with every fiber of their being, even the women. It was a rare occasion for them to enjoy such a spectacle so casually.

A sense of escalating excitement filled Kleine.

"Bring the half-breed over," he ordered one of the mastiffmen.

However, Harold positioned himself in front of Ling, foreseeing what was about to happen. Instead of allowing her to undergo such torment and degradation, he thought it better to swiftly slit her throat with a hook, granting her a quick and dignified death.

"Catch him," Kleine commanded, preempting Harold’s intentions. Another mastiffman tackled Harold from behind. As the mastiffman reached for his dagger, Kleine intervened.

"Easy, let's take this one step at a time," he said, his eyes ablaze with sadistic glee from behind his mask. "After we're done with her, we can take our time flaying this old man alive."

At that moment, Wu Qingsong halted his attempts to resuscitate Liuli.

"Where is Karazhan?" Kleine asked Wu Qingsong, gripping Ling's clothing with one hand and hoisting her off the ground.

Wu Qingsong's face registered complete astonishment as if he'd just discovered something absolutely extraordinary.

"I'm asking you a question!" Kleine bellowed, stomping his foot on Wu Qingsong's face and pressing the latter's head against Liuli's body. "Where is Karazhan? You have ten seconds to answer. Fail to do so, and can you even imagine what will happen next?"

Wu Qingsong offered no response. Yet another voice broke the tense silence, drawling lazily, "Meow~ Could you be any more annoying?"

Sharp claws darted toward the foot Kleine had firmly planted on Wu Qingsong.

Reacting instinctively, Kleine yanked his foot back. In the next heartbeat, the feline attacker shoved Wu Qingsong aside and lunged at Kleine with ferocious zeal.

"Meow~ Annoying pest, die!" she roared, hurtling into Kleine's chest before he had the chance to evade the attack. The force of the impact sent him flying.

The tremendous power tore Ling's clothes asunder, and she was flung to the side. A towering catwoman leaped gracefully into the air to catch her, then gently deposited her into Wu Qingsong's awaiting arms.

"You... you are..." Wu Qingsong's eyes widened in disbelief as he gazed at her. He had witnessed the entire astonishing transformation but struggled to reconcile what he saw with reality.

"Meow?" The newly enormous catwoman scratched her head with her paw, equally perplexed by her own altered form.

"Kill her!" Finally, Kleine's body collided with a tree before tumbling heavily onto the ground. The impact had dented his breastplate inward, igniting a sharp pain in his chest–likely indicative of a broken rib or more.

"Kill her!" he screamed, utterly bewildered by the turn of events.

Is this some form of magic from Karazhan? Impossible!

A chilling sense of impending doom washed over him.

"Kill her!! Kill them all!!" Gathering every last shred of strength, he unleashed a guttural, heartrending scream.