Read Novel Full Chapter 395: The Duke Who Felt Nothing [1]
Chapter 395: Chapter 395: The Duke Who Felt Nothing [1]
Some days back, Jax and Echidna had been running their usual routine, the one titled “Exactly How Useless Is Echidna,” when she’d started listing off her supposed talents without her physical body.
Scaring people half to death by simply dropping the veil on her mana and letting the raw pressure do the talking.
And, her personal favorite, slipping into an enemy’s consciousness and setting up shop inside their own mind’s space.
It had sounded like a party trick, and Echidna knew it, but she’d puffed it up anyway, going on about the sheer terror of ambushing an opponent inside their own skull.
Jax had teased her mercilessly for the nonsense. But privately, he’d filed it away because worming into an enemy’s mind was, in truth, one of the finest tools he could ever hope to have for breaking one.
Right now, though, that mind-skill wasn’t for breaking anyone. He had something else entirely in mind.
Because a moment ago, he’d caught the celestial’s hand tremble as it took aim at Athanasia with those lances. The shot had gone wide. Deliberately, maybe.
Even dead. Even a shell scraped clean of its soul. The body had still recognized its own daughter.
‘There has to be some memory left rattling around inside that hollow thing,’ Jax thought.
His eyes tracked the fight unfolding overhead, and it drove home just how long a road he still had ahead of him if he ever wanted to put down monsters like these. T
he celestial was swatting away everything Athanasia hurled at him like a man brushing off flies.
The fight dragged on and on, until a thoroughly frustrated Athanasia drank in every last drop of celestial essence scattered across the field, siphoning even from the man himself, and packed it all into a colossal fireball, golden at the core and sheathed in dark purple flame from the mana around her. Then she flung it at her father.
The sphere, easily the size of a boulder, got dragged into one of his halos after a brief struggle.
VWOOOM.
And then it came screaming right back at her, carrying twice the force.
Athanasia, back on the ground, scrambled to gather mana, or celestial energy, anything to throw up a shield.
But there was nothing left to grab, so she abandoned the celestial method entirely and switched back to the human way, wrenching mana straight from her core.
Too late.
The massive ball came down and detonated into the earth just off her right side.
KRA-BOOOM.
The shockwave of that fused energy caught her and sent her tumbling across the ground.
“Tsk.” She hissed, dragged herself upright, and squared up for another attack, while the celestial simply stared down at her, blank as a wall.
The magic circle taking shape around her hand collapsed into shimmering motes of mana the instant Jax caught her by the wrist. “Get a grip. Don’t let your anger think for you. Whatever you are doing it’s useless, and I think you already know that.”
She ripped her wrist free and rounded on him, eyes ablaze. “Who in the hell do you think you are, stopping me? You know nothing about any of this. So step aside, or I swear I’ll see you fall in front of him first.”
Jax sighed. ‘Echidna, this one’s completely lost the plot. Reasoning with her’s a waste of breath. Let’s just go with the forceful plan B.’
‘You certain about that?’ Echidna said. ‘You do realize, the second I drown this whole stage in my mana, every soul still breathing out here witnesses it. Which puts you squarely on the radar for a fresh batch of problems and questions.’
‘Not an issue,’ Jax said. ‘I’ll swear a mana oath to the lot of them and explain there’s a witch riding around inside me. But don’t worry, I’ll be sure to add that she’s a completely useless good-for-nothing whose one talent is spooking people with her mana.’
Echidna cursed him black and blue. ‘Keep running that mouth. The very day I get my own body back, I’ll show you precisely why the celestials used to scatter like cockroaches the moment they caught so much as a whiff of me.’
Moments later, pitch-black mana began seeping out of Jax’s body, unspooling into the air like a living mist. It crept silently outward across the battlefield, swallowing everything it touched.
Every soul still clinging to life dragged themselves frantically away from the terrifying tide rolling toward them. And the unlucky ones already caught in it stood trembling and gasping, choking on the pressure alone.
Meanwhile, Jax stood dead center of it all, thoroughly savoring what he’d personally decided to call his “main character aura.”
Athanasia stared at him, thrown. “What… are you?”
Jax raised one hand, palm out, in the manner of a saint delivering a benediction to the unwashed masses. “I go by a great many names, my child. But people like you tend to find it easiest to just call me a god.”
He tilted his head with insufferable serenity. “Kneeling’s optional but encouraged.”
Athanasia glared pure murder at him, but Jax had already turned inward. ‘Alright, Echidna. Do it. He’s within your presence now.’
Echidna singled out the three bodies caught inside her domain, then forcibly wrenched Jax’s and Athanasia’s consciousnesses loose, threading them down toward the faint, lingering consciousness buried deep inside the celestial vessel.
For both of them, the world simply blinked out. And when they opened their eyes again, they found themselves standing together in an endless white space.
Athanasia, rage boiling over, grabbed a fistful of Jax’s collar. “What have you done to me? Undo your spell, right now, before that man slips away.”
“Sorry, no can do,” Jax said. “It can’t be undone. The one who actually cast it isn’t with me at the moment. And frankly, you really shouldn’t go around disrespecting the only spell she’s got to her name.”
Athanasia seethed with killing intent, but here, in this domain, not a scrap of her power would answer her call as it was their mere consciousness.
And it was right then, in the middle of all that tension, that an image bloomed across the white space. A boy. One who wore the celestial’s face, only younger and softer.
His memories was playing out for them like a stage show.
“Athanor, you shouldn’t be slacking off.” A woman’s voice. His mother, speaking to the boy who lay napping in the middle of a training arena. “You know full well you have to grow strong. You’re to become the next duke of this land.”
She pressed on. “Nearly all of your brothers and sisters are already enrolled at the imperial academy, and here you are, treating none of it seriously. Understand this, your failure won’t be yours alone to bear. It’ll be mine as well. If you lose the battle of succession, we’ll be cast out of the nobility entirely. So if you won’t do it for yourself, then do it for your mother. Do it for me, Athanor.”
A boy of merely five years, being carefully brainwashed by his own mother.
And those innocent eyes hardened once more with borrowed resolve as he turned and loosed his magic on the training dummy, hammering it until his small body finally gave out and collapsed.