The Sinful Young Master

Chapter 459: Voidwrath sword Knashii

They had smelled it before they saw it.

The corruption in the air thickened gradually over the final miles of approach, developing layers that went beyond the general wrongness of the Depths into something more specific and concentrated. Like the difference between standing in a room where something has gone bad and standing directly beside the source of the rot.

Then they crested an elevated formation of blackened rock and saw it.

The spire rose from the corrupted landscape like a wound that had calcified into permanence. Ancient stone — or what had once been stone before the malice finished with it — stretched upward perhaps three hundred feet, its surface completely consumed by black moss that pulsed with faint bioluminescence the color of bruised flesh.

The structure leaned slightly, as if the ground beneath it had shifted under the weight of what it contained, and from its peak radiated visible distortions in the air, heat shimmer but cold, reality bending slightly around a concentration of foul energy that had been accumulating for what might have been centuries.

Around it, the nynthralls.

Jolthar had killed several hundred since entering the Depths.

What surrounded the spire made that number look like a skirmish warm-up.

They covered the corrupted ground in a mass that was difficult to estimate precisely — the creatures moved and shifted constantly, overlapping, the larger ones visible above the seething press of smaller bodies.

Giant variants stood among the regular nynthralls like dark architecture, their malformed limbs reaching heights of fifteen or twenty feet. Nynthrall beasts moved at the edges of the formation, things that had once perhaps been corrupted animals but had grown into something that belonged to no natural taxonomy. Four-legged, six-legged things with too many joints and mouths in places that made the eye want to report something different to the brain than what it was actually seeing.

And over all of it, the foul energy pressed down like weather.

“Two dukes inside the spire,” Haryntha said, her divine senses extended toward the structure with the focused attention of someone reading dangerous information from a distance.

“I can feel them separately — two distinct concentrations of malice that have evolved beyond what the nynthralls around them can comprehend. They don’t command those creatures through intelligence or orders. They simply exist, and the malice they radiate is so concentrated that nynthralls are drawn to it the way moths are drawn to flame.”

“Brainless things following the strongest signal,” Jolthar said.

“Exactly. The nynthralls don’t protect the dukes out of loyalty or strategy. They protect them because proximity to that level of malice is the closest thing to satisfaction that creatures built purely from corruption can experience.”

She paused, still reading the energy signatures.

“The dukes themselves are different. They’ve been evolving for a long time. Long enough to develop something approaching awareness, if not quite intelligence. Long enough to have preferences. Long enough to be genuinely dangerous in ways that go beyond simply being large and resilient.”

Jolthar stood on the elevated rock and looked at the numbers below with the calm assessment of someone running practical calculations rather than experiencing the terror the sight was probably designed to provoke.

Then he reached to his side, where Vorthak hung, and returned it to the Strodem ring with a smooth, practiced motion.

His hand moved instead to Knashii.

The void sword came free of its scabbard with a sound that wasn’t quite metal on metal — more like the absence of sound, a small pocket of silence carved into the ambient noise of the Depths. The blade was dark in the way that went beyond color into the suggestion of holes in reality, its surface humming with silver energy that seemed to contradict its own darkness, light and void existing simultaneously in the same steel.

The effect was immediate and remarkable.

The malice in the air around them simply retreated.

Not dissipated — retreated, like something with survival instinct recognizing a threat and putting distance between itself and the source.

The oppressive corruption that had been pressing against Jolthar and Haryntha for hours pulled back from the sword’s radius, leaving a pocket of air that was clean in a way that felt almost physically relieving after so long breathing wrongness.

Haryntha took an involuntary step back, her divine senses suddenly overwhelmed with information about what Jolthar was holding and what was flowing through it.

The silver energy expanded outward from Knashii, following the lines of Jolthar’s aura, enveloping him completely. It moved like liquid caught in invisible wind, tracing the contours of his form and then extending slightly beyond them, creating a luminous outline that genuinely resembled something celestial — something that had no business standing in the Dreadland Depths looking entirely comfortable.

“What is that sword?” Haryntha asked, and the question carried genuine bewilderment rather than casual curiosity. Her voice had the quality of a scholar encountering something that doesn’t fit any existing category.

Jolthar glanced at her with a slight smirk.

The silver light caught his features and made the expression look like something carved from myth rather than worn by a young man from a border barony.

He didn’t answer. He started walking down the path toward the spire.

Haryntha stared after him for a moment, her extended divine senses still processing what she was feeling from that blade.

The power coming from Jolthar in that moment wasn’t simply strong.

It was fundamentally different from strength measured in tiers or levels or any framework she used to assess mortal capability. It touched something older than those frameworks, something that existed before the systems of power that both mortals and deities used to understand themselves had been formalized.

She had come here to help him survive.

She was beginning to understand that framing had been fundamentally mistaken from the beginning.

She followed.

The nynthralls reacted to Jolthar’s approach the moment he reached the base of the elevated rock. The nearest ones turned toward him with the blind orientation of creatures following sensation rather than sight, drawn by the presence of something living and powerful.

Then the silver energy of Voidwrath reached them.

The effect was like watching darkness react to light, except more absolute.

The closest nynthralls didn’t simply retreat — they came apart, their corrupted forms destabilizing as the void energy consumed the malice that held their bodies together.

They fell apart without drama, without sound, simply ceasing to maintain coherence and collapsing into matter that no longer remembered what it had been organized into.

The creatures further back surged forward, the deaths of their fellows apparently not registering as a warning through whatever passed for collective awareness among them.