“Y-Your… Your cultivation climbed again?” Drystan stammered, face white as chalk. “Impossible! No one advances that fast!”
“Nothing impossible about it,” Jared replied, tone flat. “Real strength is carved through talent and endless work, not stolen through your filthy little tricks.”
With a crack of displaced air, he flashed forward, a thunderbolt in human form. Panicked, Drystan flooded his meridians with celestial energy, but the gulf between them was an abyss he could not cross.
Jared’s fist hammered into Drystan’s chest, one perfect, devastating strike that seemed to ignore bone and armor alike. Blood burst from Drystan’s lips as he sailed backward like a broken kite, smashing into the floor hard enough to leave a crater.
A wet cough tore free, another spray of scarlet. He tried to rise, his legs felt poured from lead, his body an unresponsive stranger.
“You…” Drystan whispered, terror eclipsing the pain.
“I promised you a swift death,” Jared said, gaze indifferent. He lifted his palm, lethal light gathering across the skin.
Suddenly, hurried footsteps echoed beyond the hall’s doors.
A tall man in flowing robes strode inside. His eyes were whetted steel, his presence a naked blade, Cormac, lord of the Fifth Hall.
“Drystan, what have they done to you?”
Cormac swept into the hall like a sudden thunderclap, his scarlet-trimmed cloak still shivering from the rush of wind that had carried him there. Though his bearing remained proud, a thin thread of urgency trembled in his voice when he demanded to know what had transpired.
Drystan, his brocade robe now torn, the blood at his temple already crusting, lurched forward as if salvation itself had just arrived.
“Cormac, at last!” he cried, the words cracking with relief. “Kill them, kill them now! They ruined my rite. Look what they did to me!”
Cormac’s gaze cut across the chamber and locked on Jared and Flaxseed. The look was twin daggers of cold appraisal, as though he meant to flay them open with nothing but his eyes.
“You two,” he said, voice low and lethal, “Are you the ones who shattered the Soul Urn and butchered my people?”
Jared regarded him with a calm, razor-thin smile that never reached his eyes.
“That’s right,” he said, every syllable soaked in contempt. “If you wish to keep breathing, I suggest you turn around and walk, no, run, far, far away.”
Cormac’s answering laughter rang off the vaulted ceiling—wild, echoing, and drunk on its own certainty.
“Laughable!” he thundered, the sound ricocheting through the hall. “You think an insect like you could end me?”
The manic mirth lingered in the rafters, a derisive chorus underscoring his absolute confidence.
Steel whispered free as Jared flicked his right hand. The Dragonslayer Sword dropped into his palm, runes skittering along the blade in pulses of deep gold.
A muted dragon’s cry swirled through the air, ever since the sword spirit had healed, its power had become a living storm inside the metal.
“Me alone is more than enough to consign you to the dust today,” Jared said, lifting the radiant weapon. The words drifted across the chamber like a winter gale—sharp, unpitying, and final.
Cormac’s smile died. Fingers blurred, forming complex seals faster than mortal sight. A surge of pale celestial energy burst from his core, spreading in front of him until it hardened into a translucent shield that shimmered with rolling bands of every color—an arrogant promise to defy any blow.
“That toy won’t save you for long,” Jared barked. He sprang forward, nothing but a streak of motion, and the hall floor cracked under the aftershock. Mid-leap, he raised Dragonslayer high.
A torrent of sword-light roared off its edge, a silver banner cleaving straight for Cormac. The very air split apart behind the strike, shrieking in protest.
