Read Novel Full Chapter 1585 Endless Hunger
Chapter 1585 Endless Hunger
By the time his body dropped three more had taken his place.
She couldn't cut them. The blacksteel ate her edge and the dwarves inside it were built like siege towers, their Vitality so high that a slash that should have opened a throat left a scratch. She was faster than every one of them and it didn't matter, because speed without penetration was just dancing, and the dwarves didn't need to be fast when they could walk forward and let the numbers do the rest.
Lyra took a shield across the body that broke her [Bastion Stance] and sent her flying. Kaelira's latest barrier sputtered and a hammer caved her breastplate inward. Both went down. Both got back up.
"Both of you, go through the portal," Ayame ordered.
<No.> Lyra's response was instant, spoken mentally for she was in no state to speak using her lungs. <This is our job.>
<You can't take what we can,> Kaelira managed between ragged breaths, dragging herself upright on a manifested shield that cracked under her own weight. <Go first.>
<I'm ordering you as your leader, not asking your opinion!>
<I won't let you sacrifice yourself.>
<You can punish us later for insubordination.>
The two tankers were on the same wavelength, grinning through gritted teeth.
Neither moved.
A dwarven wedge drove into the breach Kaelira's collapse had opened and Ayame gave ground, her katana working in tight arcs that deflected axes and hammers but couldn't stop the press. They were being overrun. The soul soldiers on the flanks were dissolving, and the roots between them were being hacked apart, and the three of them were holding a space meant for twenty against an army that had stopped caring about losses.
A dwarven axe caught Ayame across the hip. She twisted at the last instant and the flat hit rather than the edge, but the force knocked her sideways and she stumbled.
A katana cut the dwarf's arm off at the elbow before Ayame's balance returned.
Black Fang appeared behind the dwarven line.
Her eyes were blazing.
"[Ouroboros: Endless Hunger]."
The air above her tore open.
A serpent materialized in the space over the battlefield, vast enough to cast a shadow across the dwarven formation. Its body was translucent purple venom given shape, coils twisting over each other in a mass that blotted the smoke-choked sky, and its jaws opened so wide the dwarves beneath it could see down its throat.
It screamed.
The sound was no roar, no battle cry but pure, raw, unadulterated hunger. A scream that belonged to something that had been starving since before the first dwarf crawled out of a mountain, and every soldier within earshot felt their stomachs drop and their knees soften because the sound bypassed their training and spoke directly to the animal underneath.
The serpent struck downward.
Its jaws closed around Black Fang and the massive body drove into her back, her shoulders, her spine, pouring into her like liquid through a funnel. The purple light hit her veins and she lit up from the inside, every vein in her arms and neck and face burning violet beneath the skin. Her katana blazed the same color, the edge weeping venom so concentrated the air above it shimmered and warped, and the ground beneath hissed and evaporated into thin air where drops fell.
Her body shuddered once. Her fingers tightened on the hilt until the tendons stood out like cables, and the hunger that had been the serpent's was hers now, screaming through every fiber, demanding to be fed.
She fed it.
The first dwarf died with his back to her. Her katana entered the gap between his pauldron and gorget and the venom-soaked edge dissolved the muscle it touched, the flesh blackening and falling away from the bone before the body hit the ground. The second dwarf spun to face her and she took his sword arm above the elbow, the venom eating through the blacksteel joint as if the armor wasn't there, and his severed limb was smoking on the dirt before his mouth opened to scream.
She was already on the dwarves who'd been pressing Ayame's position.
Her katana found the seams in the blacksteel. The gorget gap. The elbow joint. The hinge behind the knee. Every opening Ayame had spent four desperate strokes trying to exploit, Black Fang split open in one. The venom ate the blacksteel at the contact point, softened the metal in the fraction of a second the blade was touching it, and turned impenetrable armor into paper at the exact spot her edge arrived.
Between kills, the Hunger gnawed.
A vein burst beneath the skin of her left forearm. A line of purple-black that swelled and split, leaking blood that hissed when it hit the air. Her teeth ground together and she killed the next dwarf, and the Hunger fed and the gnawing receded, pulling back from her flesh to feast on what she'd given it instead.
A dwarven captain watched the eighth body drop and his eyes went wide as he realized, "That's her! The one the files warned us about, one of the deadliest humans alive, Black Fang!"
The rumors had undersold her.
But Ragnar's voice was still booming across the field.
"Dwarves, capture the villain and his allies! No retreat is allowed!"
The captain gripped his axe tighter and charged. His soldiers followed because their king had spoken and dwarves did not flee when their king commanded otherwise, even when the thing ahead of them was painting the earth purple with their comrades' blood.
They came at her in force. She cut them down. Each kill fed the Endless Hunger, and between kills the gnawing turned inward, chewing at her own channels because the hunger was bigger than what she was giving it. Blood seeped from her gums. A muscle in her thigh spasmed. She buried it and kept cutting.
Then, Black Fang's purple eyes found Ayame's.
Neither spoke. They were half-sisters who'd never shared a childhood, never trained together, never sat across a table and talked about the father who acknowledged one and abandoned the other. There was nothing between them that resembled family.
But Ayame knew what Black Fang standing here meant.
One look. Then it passed.
"Move," Ayame ordered.
Kaelira went first, hauled to her feet by Lyra, the two tankers leaning on each other as they limped into the portal.
Ayame went last. She backed toward the portal with her blade raised and blood running from both arms, and the shimmer swallowed her mid-swing.
<Everyone's through, Quin. Focus on yourself.>