The Sinful Young Master

Chapter 466: Meeting his uncle, The patriarch of Kaezhlar

Jolthar recognized Caelum before his enhanced vision fully resolved the details.

His uncle.

Caelum Kaezhlar walked toward the ten-tailed entity, and his aura preceded him.

It was not explosive, not a display. It expanded outward steadily like dawn expanding across a landscape, comprehensive and patient and deeply, thoroughly dominant.

He was a man of aura and the person who reached tier 10.

The corrupted ground around Caelum’s footsteps stabilized where it contacted his aura’s edge, the malice in the soil temporarily suppressed by proximity to something that simply outweighed it.

The ten-tailed entity noticed.

For the first time since emerging from the spire, it turned away from the Naemarys group and oriented toward the new arrival. The intelligence — if that word applied — behind its ten-tailed form recognized that the threat calculus had changed.

Caelum’s first strike landed before Jolthar fully processed that he had moved.

The technique was unadorned, which was itself a statement — no elaborate naming, no visible gathering of energy into dramatic form.

Just a simple sword strike that carried the weight of a Tier 10 swordsman. Caelum’s sword, Ocuelas’s rang, was vibrating with raw power as he sliced through the air.

The entity’s lead tail, already swinging toward Caelum, stopped.

Then bent backward against its own trajectory. The sound of the impact arrived after, a concussive report that rolled across the corrupted landscape and reached Jolthar’s position as something felt in the chest rather than heard with the ears.

Two more strikes followed in the space of a breath. Each one landed with the same absolute commitment and the same devastating precision, and each one moved something that weighed as much as a building as if the weight were negotiable.

The entity responded — the remaining tails converging on Caelum from multiple directions simultaneously, a genuine attempt at overwhelming through volume what it couldn’t overcome through individual force.

Caelum’s aura expanded to meet them.

Not with techniques. Just with presence.

The tails hit the edge of that aura and decelerated, as if the air itself had become denser around Caelum, resistance increasing exponentially with proximity to him.

The Kaezhlar clan members around him were untouched — his aura creating a boundary that the entity’s physical strikes simply couldn’t cross efficiently.

He was not fighting the entity so much as informing it, through direct physical education, that continuing to be in this location was not going to produce outcomes the entity would find acceptable.

The entity learned this

Or whatever process served as learning in something built from pure malice learned.

It took six more exchanges, each one with Caelum landing and the entity failing to answer effectively, before the ten-tailed form began to withdraw.

Not fleeing in any panicked sense — retreating with the slow dignity of something that had reassessed priorities and determined that remaining was inadvisable.

It moved back into the deeper Depths, the massive form diminishing with distance until the corrupted landscape swallowed it, the explosions fading, the malevolent energy pressure dropping from overwhelming to merely significant.

In its wake, the immediate territory was quiet in a way the Dreadland Depths almost never achieved.

The nynthralls that hadn’t been consumed by the entity’s rampage had dispersed; Caelum’s sustained aura presence was apparently sufficient persuasion for even corrupted instinct to seek other locations.

Caelum didn’t pursue it. He just stood there watching the beast leave the area.

The Naemarys group had survived.

Jolthar could see the two leaders — Daerius and Lyralei, standing in the aftermath with expressions that his enhanced vision resolved clearly enough to read.

Frustration. A particular quality of anger that came from being saved by someone whose family was complicated in the Naemarys worldview.

The awareness that they owed survival to Kaezhlar’s intervention and finding that awareness deeply objectionable.

They were alive and furious about the manner of it.

He was feeling two strange auras from somewhere.

Caelum’s attention moved across the cleared territory with the systematic sweep of someone conducting an assessment, and then it stopped.

Fixed. His enhanced senses had found something, and the direction his gaze settled was directly toward the tree trunk where Jolthar sat.

Jolthar met his uncle’s eyes across the distance.

He pushed himself carefully off the tree trunk, testing his legs, finding them functional if not yet reliable.

Haryntha was at his side immediately, her hand under his arm, supporting without making a demonstration of it.

“Your uncle?” she asked quietly.

“Caelum Kaezhlar,” Jolthar confirmed.

“Patriarch of the clan.”

He paused.

“We have a complicated relationship.”

“Most of your relationships seem complicated,” Haryntha observed, and there was the faint warmth of genuine affection in it rather than simple observation.

“Fair point,” he acknowledged.

They descended from the tree together, Haryntha matching his pace, neither hurrying nor making the assistance more apparent than necessary.

The corrupted ground was more stable here than most of the Depths, Caelum’s aura having suppressed the worst of the malice from the immediate area, and Jolthar found his legs becoming more reliable with each step as movement encouraged circulation and his depleted system continued its slow recovery.

The distance between them closed, and Caelum did not move to meet him halfway.

The Kaezhlar clan members around him watched Jolthar’s approach with expressions ranging from surprised recognition to undisguised awe; several of them were beyond surprised seeing him alive and well.

Because the dreadland depths were not a place where the young man like him could survive, that’s what they thought. They didn’t know Jolthar was now on the edge of becoming a tier 10 swordsman.

Jolthar stopped before his uncle.

Caelum looked at him for a long moment; there was no expression on his face.

Then he looked at the direction of the ruined spire.

At the massive craters visible from this distance. At the void-smoothed walls of the canyon Jolthar had carved on entry. At the silver-edged remnants of voidwrath energy are still faintly visible where it had consumed corrupted matter and left the absence behind.

He looked back at Jolthar.

“The tremor we felt earlier,” Caelum said, his voice carrying the depth.

“That was you.”

“That was me,” Jolthar confirmed.

Another pause.

“Did you fight in the spire? That place was the meeting point of dukes.”

“I fought two of them,” Jolthar agreed.

Caelum’s expression moved through something that wasn’t quite readable, settling into something that contained both pride and the complicated emotion of someone who had underestimated another person significantly and was in the process of revising that assessment with full awareness of what the revision implied.