Chapter 1693: Rude Brats |
[Soul Reaper] hit Ragnar’s chest with three elements stacked behind the edge, magma softening, ice cracking, lightning following, and the saber that had split blacksteel plate on lesser dwarves skated across the fused armor-flesh and left a glowing score one fingernail deep.
Ragnar’s answer was a hammerfist that cratered the rock where Quinlan’s skull had been a fraction of a heartbeat earlier.
Wind carried the dodge into a spinning slash aimed at the seam between Ragnar’s fused shoulder plate and his neck, the narrowest gap in his armor where plate met flesh.
The saber found it, bit shallow, and the scratch closed before blood had time to fall. Three elements in one strike aimed at the weakest point Quinlan could find, and the whole sequence bought him nothing.
The ridge had stopped being a ridge. What remained was a cratered ruin of scorched rock and shattered earth, the ground glowing where magma pooled in fissures left by impacts neither combatant bothered dodging, and the air tasted of ozone and copper and heat.
...
Nyxara sat in the soul realm with her legs crossed and her chin in both hands, tracking the fight through the connection with her nail between her teeth.
Every impact Quinlan just barely escaped from registered as a dull ache behind her sternum.
Then her thoughts drifted to the other frustration occupying her attention, and the worry curdled into something significantly pettier.
Vex.
Nyxara’s eye twitched as the ugly words she uttered replayed for the fifth time.
However... The demon in her was impressed.
Grudgingly, irritatingly, undeniably so.
Vex had seen what she wanted, refused to ask permission, and taken it with both hands and a tongue sharp enough to skin a man alive.
That was how power changed hands in her world, and a young child performing it without a shred of hesitation was admirable by any demon’s measure.
But the woman in her wanted to put Vex across her knee.
’Slutty decor.’ Her tail squeezed tighter around her own waist, and the sound that left her was somewhere between a growl and a pout. ’She called me a slutty decor. Me. Nyxara. The Primordial Demon of Lust.’
’The next time that rude little creature visits my Ruin’s soul, I will spank some respect for her elders into her.’
She nodded to herself, satisfied with the verdict.
The voice hit the succubus’s consciousness like a splash of ice water, bright and sing-song and vibrating with an enthusiasm that had no right to exist on a battlefield.
Nyxara blinked. "...What now?"
"I know who you are. The girl who parted her legs the fastest out of anyone in the harem." Nyxara’s voice was flat and resigned, because this was the second ambush on her consciousness in a single minute.
She wasn’t even allowed to properly root for her Ruin’s arduous battle, which was her most basic right as a conquered succubus watching her amazing man show his manly fight!
Or so the demon believed.
<...Are you insinuating that I’m a slut?> The fox’s voice lowered to dangerous levels.
But then, as if nothing happened, her vibrance returned.
Nyxara’s mouth opened. "You already have your upgrade, just take a look at your butt and all the fluff there. How greedy can you be, girl?"
The answer came without a single breath of hesitation.
Nyxara pressed both palms against her face and exhaled through her fingers.
"Foxy..." Nyxara mused slyly, and the words carried something close to warmth despite her best efforts. "Even if I wanted to give it to you, the deeper current isn’t something I can just hand over to anyone. The predator in you must meet the predator in me and not flinch, and most importantly, you must have a natural predisposition toward my abyssal powers. Or so I believe after my interaction with that rude-mouthed friend of yours."
"..." Nyxara’s veins began throbbing on her forehead. It appeared Vex wasn’t the only one who felt more than comfortable spouting rude lines to her.
She truly had to teach these youngsters a lesson, Nyxara realized.
But she also had to admit... The fox girl did display a couple tendencies Nyxara’s kind was known for.
"Try your best then, you damned brat."
...
An arrow struck the copy Kitsara had left standing three meters to her right, and the image popped like glass.
The archer was nocking his second shaft before the first hit dirt.
She’d been carrying on a lovely conversation with Nyxara through the bond while fighting off a small army of foxkin. Well, at least, helping her allies do it.
But the main issue that she’d been dealing with, namely her illusions breaking on contact, remained, despite her unlocking more tails.
Silver’s forces were fast learners, and the bladed fighters had stopped flinching at copies entirely.
But pressing that attack came with a cost as Raika’s fist hit the ground.
The shockwave erupted from the Brutalizer’s knuckles in a ring of compressed force that cracked stone in a starburst pattern and turned the air into a wall. A foxkin assassin mid-lunge caught the wave at full extension and ragdolled sideways before his brain caught up.
Two more flanking from the opposite side met the same force.
High-agility builds with movement abilities that let them blur between positions, and none of it mattered, because the shockwave hit everything in radius.
No gap to slip through, no angle to exploit.
Raika straightened from her crouch with her tattooed arms streaked in grime and blood that wasn’t hers, the Bloodfather’s mark across her collarbone burning with steady crimson.
The Champion boon had done one simple thing to the woman who’d spent a hundred and fifty years hitting things until they stopped moving.
It made her hit harder.
Much harder.
"This is..." Raika couldn’t contain her excitement as she took a look at her own fists, unable to believe the power she was now wielding.
The devastation her mere punches were causing now was just like what she imagined while dreaming.
Her dreams became reality...
Because of the arrogant man. .
"...Gr!" It was a hard pill to swallow for the Brutalizer.
Instead of thinking about the subject, she cracked her neck and scanned for the nearest enemy to victimize.
A spectral arrow trailing blue luminance took a ranger through the shoulder from the east, and the man dropped his bow screaming.
A second followed before the first landed, catching an assassin through the hamstring as he circled Kitsara’s blind spot.
The archer stood thirty meters behind Kitsara’s position, translucent and glowing with the faint light of a bound soul. A foxkin male, tall and lean, firing with the mechanical precision of a marksman who no longer needed to breathe between shots.
The spectral bow reformed after every release, arrows manifesting from the soul’s own essence.
Silver’s soldiers recognized him before Silver did.
The murmur ran through the line like cold water: the dead prince, putting arrows into his own kin with the efficiency of a man who had long stopped caring whose blood he spilled.
Veyrin. Silver’s son. The one the Primordial Villain had killed, decapitated, and bound as a soul soldier.
The message was impossible to miss.
"They sent him here on purpose. They’re mocking me!" Silver growled with extreme hatred.
His tongue ran across his lower lip, and the hunger in the gesture had curdled into spite.
"Bring me the fox bitch alive. She will be my wife before this war ends, and the man who made my son into a puppet will watch me take his woman with eyes of devastation!"
Kitsara felt the words land through the noise and the last echo of Nyxara’s voice fading from the bond.
"Is that so?" she purred, and the brand on her womb erupted.
She didn’t even need to try... Just like Vex, the foxkin showed great affinity for a portion of Nyxara’s demonic heritage.
However, for a different part of it.
While Vex displayed the unhinged obsession of a succubus toward her soulmate, using that to fuel her curses, Kitsara took a different part.
Nyxara’s demonic current rushed through, and the predator behind the playful voice filled every corner of her with authority that brooked no hesitation.
Her white hair darkened from the roots, ink bleeding upward through the strands until the pale color drowned in deep dark that caught the firelight and threw it back with an unnatural sheen, as if the light itself didn’t want to touch her.
Every tail shed its white in the same wave of dark energy, the pristine fur that marked the Nine-Tailed Sorceress rippling away from root to tip as if the color was being drained from them by force.
What remained was sleek, sharp-edged, and entirely wrong, five dark appendages fanning behind the foxkin princess where five white ones had been, and the sight of it hit Silver’s soldiers like a physical blow.
Their race’s most legendary class every foxkin child was taught to revere, had been consumed by demonic filth, and the woman standing in its place looked like a desecration given form.
And more than any change in hair, her aura shifted.
Gone was the purring foxy, the girl slinging around playful lines even in serious situations.
What replaced her...
"You..." Silver’s voice cracked across the distance. "You wretched creature!" His composure fractured along lines that had nothing to do with the battle and everything to do with centuries of reverence burning in front of his eyes. "That class is the most sacred inheritance our race has ever produced, and you dare ruin your gift?! You were one of the few chosen foxkin!"
Kitsara looked at him with dark, patient eyes and said nothing, because the predator that had replaced the playful girl didn’t waste words on prey.
"[Demon Fox’s Domain]," she spoke with a lower, deeper voice, sounding so ominous the fur on many high-leveled foxkin stood on edge.