Boom thundered through the field like a stone hammering a vast bell. Then the blade-light met shield and barrier, not with an explosion but with a sickening hiss—the sound of a hot knife sinking into fat.
In Jared’s widened eyes, the four-hued arc slid forward as if nothing existed to slow it, parting Morven’s black shield and shredding Malcolm’s ninefold blood screen. The shield burst. The screen fractured. Both men vomited blood and were flung hundreds of yards, a bone-deep gash bursting across each of them.
Morven’s left arm was severed at the shoulder; Malcolm’s right chest was blown straight through, the wound crawling with four hostile forces that would not let the blood clot. The glowing blade-wind died out, spent.
A pulse of backlash punched Jared’s ribs; he coughed up more blood and tasted iron. Gerald’s borrowed fire was vanishing as quickly as it had come. The human body could not hold that fury for long. That slash had been the last he could pull from empty lungs and shaking arms.
Morven and Malcolm lay wounded yet unbroken. Malcolm pressed a trembling hand to the ragged hole in his chest. “He’s spent… Utterly spent! Kill him! Now! This instant!”
Pain twisted their faces, yet both hurled themselves forward again. They abandoned sorcery; raw muscle and murderous instinct would finish what blood magic could not. But just then, the air around Jared seemed to pause, waiting.
“Divine Bow!” Jared’s roar tore from a throat already full of blood.
Light flared from his storage ring, and an ancient bow shimmered into his grasp. He had hoped never to show it; displaying a treasure like this invited storms he could not afford. Yet no trace of pressure leaked from the weapon; it simply existed, as if as old and natural as the sky itself.
“That… That’s the Divine Bow?!” Morven’s pupils shrank to pinpoints, his voice warping with disbelief. Jared caught the moment Morven’s pupils narrowed to the size of needle tips, his words twisting under the weight of raw shock.
The roar cracked across the battlefield. “Forget the damn bow, just kill him!” The words slapped Malcolm’s ears, raw and desperate. Shock rippled through Morven too, but it only drove the blade-edge thirst in his chest harder, until it vibrated against his ribs like a trapped hornet.
Across the ruin, Jared bellowed, “Fire!” The single syllable punched the air, loud enough to bruise.
Malcolm’s gaze snagged on Jared’s frame. The younger man seemed to empty his entire skeleton into the pull of the cord, shoulders trembling as he dragged the Divine Bow to its full, impossible arc. Something answered that pull. All around, stray shards of malice—the residue of ten thousand dying breaths—peeled from the air and streamed toward the gold limbs of the weapon.
The field was littered with bodies; Malcolm had long since stopped counting, but now every ounce of hate they had died with lifted like gray steam. It poured into the bowstring, thickening, hardening, until the miasma knit itself into a single, gleaming bolt. The string thrummed, an iron-throated hum that rattled Malcolm’s molars. It wasn’t a sound; it was a storm god shrieking, an ancient thunderhead splitting open inside his skull.
Then time quit. The drip of blood at his elbow, the flutter of ash, even the quake in his lungs—everything halted in mid-fall. Space followed, locking around him like glass cooling on molten sand. Pressure smothered thought, movement, heartbeat. Malcolm’s own pulse felt confiscated by unseen hands.
Helpless, he watched the golden arrow leave the string. It drifted, languid as a falling feather, yet Malcolm knew it outran every law that had ever governed matter, racing straight for him and Morven. The void fractured in its wake, lines snapping open with surgical neatness, each black seam bleeding a chill that promised total erasure.
Color abandoned Malcolm’s cheeks; even Morven looked ashen, a corpse caught standing. He could feel it—no, he could taste it—this shot had fastened onto the root of their very souls. Run, tunnel, vanish into any realm—the arrow would still arrive. The certainty hollowed him out.
The old whispers about the Divine Bow stirred: once a shaft was loosed, destiny itself bent to ensure blood. There was nowhere to run, nothing to hide behind. Survive by enduring, or not at all.
His throat shredded around the order, “Together, hold it back!” Terror warped the words into a raw snarl.
Beside him, Morven rammed the last of his Ninefold Nether Demonic Aura into his severed stump; the stuff writhed and birthed a new, oil-black limb. That limb flew through a string of seals, solidifying into a shield etched with a leering Ninefold Nether Ghostface.
Malcolm went harsher. He bit down, shattering three of the soul fangs fused into his own spirit—the anchors of every reincarnation chant he had mastered. Their explosion spilled pure soul force into his reincarnation aura, stacking before him as a gray-black wall ten yards thick.
The moment Morven’s swirling black shield fused with Malcolm’s flickering soul-wall, the air tightened around Jared’s lungs. The layered barrier pulsed like a living thing, every throb daring him to believe it was impassable. He kept the bowstring drawn, tested the tremor in it, and felt a quiet certainty bloom: no wall born of darkness or bone would matter now.
His fingers released. Light erupted, coalescing into a single golden arrow that screamed forward faster than thought. A thin hiss reached him, high and almost polite—the sound of reality tearing along a razor line. The note floated through the battlefield, nothing more than a breath, yet every spine flinched at its precision.
Watching it, Jared felt the memory of heat sliding through butter, the hush of a droplet folding into a lake—effortless, inevitable. The golden arrow slipped through the demonic shield, through the wavering soul-wall, and then straight on, boring a clean tunnel through both chests before vanishing behind them.
A wet pop followed, as if lungs had clapped together in protest. Another, uglier burst answered an instant later, the echo almost mocking the first. Morven and Malcolm doubled forward, vomiting black blood laced with gray shavings of their own organs that spattered against the stone like spoiled ink. Each man stared at the bowl-sized void yawning in his chest, the edges too smooth to be real.
There was no gush of blood, only a shimmering absence; flesh, bone, even the space itself had been erased, as though the arrow had stolen the idea of them. Morven lowered his gaze to that impossible hole, night-black eyes swimming with disbelief that looked almost childlike.
Deep inside, he could feel the root of his Ninefold Nether Demonic Technique splinter—half of a millennium’s labor undone in the span of a heartbeat. And the divine force clinging to the wound kept gnawing, patient and unstoppable, sealing every path his flesh might take toward healing.
