The Sinful Young Master

Chapter 464: Ten tailed nynthrall beast

The first duke watched him approach.

Jolthar raised his free hand, telekinesis engaging with effort that was now genuinely demanding rather than reflexive.

He wrapped the invisible force around the duke’s remaining upper body, pinning its arms, controlling its torso, and holding it in place against the rubble of the collapsed wall.

The duke strained against the grip. What had been effortful before was now an active struggle — the telekinesis was hitting its limits against duke-class strength while Jolthar’s reserves were reduced.

He couldn’t hold it long.

So he didn’t try to hold it long.

Knashii came up one final time, the remaining voidwrath energy concentrating into the blade with focused intent, pulling from every available reserve and channeling it into a single committed strike rather than spreading across a technique designed for area effect.

[Blade of the Forgotten Void.]

The technique that had opened the fight closed it, but what came out of Knashii now was different in scale from the first application — the reserves behind it were the dregs of what the Void Requiem had left him, compressed and committed entirely into one strike because there was nothing held back.

The silver light that extended beyond the blade’s physical edge reached further, burned hotter, and consumed more completely.

It took the duke’s remaining arm at the shoulder.

Then the torso.

The void ate through the first duke’s upper body in the space of the strike’s arc, the silver-white energy doing its slow work rapidly now because there was so much of it concentrated into so small a target.

The duke’s pale eyes held their cold light until the moment the void reached them, and then they simply weren’t anymore, the intelligence that had existed in them concluded without drama or ceremony.

What remained collapsed, and the voidwrath finished what the strike had started.

Two dukes. Both are gone.

Jolthar stood in the center of what had been the spire’s chamber — now largely a ruin, the floor crater-marked and partially erased, the walls cracked and opened in multiple places, the black moss completely absent from the lower thirty feet of the interior, having retreated from the sustained voidwrath exposure over the course of the fight.

He became aware gradually that his legs were not entirely reliable. The awareness arrived with the mental detachment of someone whose system was redistributing resources and finding some areas running at a deficit.

He leaned on Knashii, the sword’s point pressed into the remaining stone floor, and let himself breathe for a moment.

Two down. One remains, somewhere else in the Depths.

He started to turn toward the gap in the collapsed wall where the outside waited, where Haryntha was, where he could report that the spire was cleared and they needed to find the third duke before—

The ground shook.

Not the aftermath tremors of the fight’s destruction. Something else. Something rhythmic, regular, enormous — the footfall of weight that made duke-class nynthralls seem like a preliminary consideration.

It came through the collapsed wall, and the gap that had seemed large became suddenly inadequate as the thing squeezed through it and expanded into the ruined chamber.

It was vast.

The shape was difficult to resolve into specific anatomy — the mind kept trying to find a framework and finding nothing that fit.

Broadly, distantly, something that suggested a body, but covered in tails.

Not two, not four — ten of them, each one thick as an ancient tree trunk, moving with independent, purposeful motion, trailing behind and around the central mass like a living corona of corrupted appendages.

Each tail was different — some ended in points, some in shapes that suggested adapted functionality for reasons that were deeply unpleasant to consider, all of them radiating malice of a density that made the dukes feel like they had been a warm-up act.

Its presence alone pressed against Jolthar’s depleted system like a physical weight.

He understood immediately, with the clarity of exhaustion stripping away any tendency toward optimism, that he was not in a position to fight this thing.

Not right now. Not with what he had left after the Void Requiem and everything that had preceded it.

The ten-tailed entity moved toward him with the unhurried certainty of something that had never needed to hurry because nothing had ever successfully run from it.

Arms caught him from behind.

Haryntha had come through the collapsed wall at a speed that suggested she had been watching, had seen the thing arrive, had made the same assessment Jolthar had made and acted on it without hesitation.

Her hands found his arms, her grip firm and warm against the cold exhaustion settling into his limbs, and she was already moving them both toward the gap in the wall, toward outside, toward anywhere that wasn’t here.

“I told you to stay outside,” Jolthar managed, his voice coming out more frayed than he intended.

“You’re welcome,” Haryntha replied, and there was no humor in it, just focused urgency.

The last thing Jolthar saw before the edges of his depleted consciousness began pulling inward and the silver tint at the edges of his vision expanded toward the center was the ten-tailed entity filling the space where two dukes had existed moments before, its attention orienting toward them with the patient certainty of something that knew they couldn’t go far.

Then darkness came, and Jolthar let it, because there was nothing left to spend on keeping it away.

*

A while later, far away from the blackmoss spire.

Sound arrived before awareness did.

A roar that wasn’t sound so much as force — the kind that compressed air and transmitted itself through solid matter, reaching Jolthar through the tree trunk beneath him before it reached his ears.

Then the light, even through closed eyelids, was a brightness that pulsed in waves and threw shifting shadows across the inside of his vision.

He opened his eyes.

The sky above the Dreadland Depths — already wrong in its colors, already corrupted in its character — had been replaced by something that made the normal wrongness look pastoral. The ten-tailed entity had emerged fully from the ruined spire, and its presence was remaking the immediate environment in real time.

Explosions of concentrated malice erupted from its movements, each impact of its tails against the corrupted ground sending detonations upward that reached the dark clouds churning overhead and disappeared into them, the energy absorbed into the permanent storm that sat above the Depths like a lid on something that should never be opened.