The Sinful Young Master

Chapter 470: Battle against the horde of monsters – 2

The Naemarys contingent on the right flank was impressive in a different way. Daerius fought with overwhelming offensive commitment, his strikes carrying the kind of raw power that came from prioritizing destructive capability in cultivation at the expense of other considerations. He was effective and he was expensive — Jolthar could see even from a distance that Daerius was burning reserves at a rate that would become a problem if the engagement extended significantly.

Lyralei compensated for her brother’s approach with something more sustainable. The spatial manipulation Jolthar had observed earlier was refined and efficient, redirecting force rather than generating it, turning the horde’s own momentum against itself. A cluster of nynthralls charging at full speed suddenly found their trajectory bent ninety degrees, carrying them into the flank of a different cluster, the collision producing results that neither group had intended. She was doing more with less, and she was clearly aware that her brother wasn’t.

The nynthrall beasts were the most demanding element of the horde’s composition. They hunted in patterns that suggested rudimentary coordination of pack instinct, targeting isolated individuals, probing defensive formations for gaps, pulling back when a probe encountered resistance, and redirecting toward softer approaches. Against the coordinated defenses of two experienced expedition forces, they were finding fewer soft approaches than their instincts expected, but they were persistent and fast.

Jolthar encountered a pack of six moving to flank the Kaezhlar formation’s right edge, cutting them off from the main engagement with a burst of speed that covered the distance before the beasts processed his approach.

Horgath moved through the pack in four seconds.

Not four seconds of sustained combat — four seconds of chaobane energy finding six sets of fault lines and introducing the specific disruptions that turned accumulated malice from structural support to structural liability. The beasts fell in sequence, each one’s collapse triggering a proximity disruption that degraded the next one’s coherence before Horgath arrived to complete it.

He was back in his primary position before the Kaezhlar flank registered the threat had appeared and been resolved.

But the horde kept coming.

Thousands was not a number that depleted quickly even with chaobane efficiency, even with two experienced expedition forces and a Tier 10 cultivator working the flanks. The leading elements died and were replaced by following elements with the mechanical consistency of a process that didn’t require anyone to decide to continue — the creatures behind pushed forward because the malice drive that constituted their motivation didn’t include the capacity to consider stopping.

Jolthar pushed deeper into the mass rather than holding position.

Holding position against infinite replacement was attrition that eventually lost. Pushing into the mass and disrupting its coherence from the inside was different — the chaobane energy broadcasting outward from Horgath as he moved through the dense concentration of corrupted bodies created a propagating disruption field that affected far more creatures than direct contact could account for. Nynthralls twenty, thirty feet from his position were having their malice-structure relationships degraded by the frequency Horgath was generating at full expression in a dense field of compatible targets.

The horde began to thin around him not because the creatures were fleeing but because they were failing, their accumulated corruption becoming a liability faster than the malice drive pushing them forward could compensate for.

He was perhaps a hundred yards into the horde’s mass when the ten-tailed entity’s presence changed quality.

It had been background to the engagement until now — massive and present and radiating malice pressure, but not directly engaged, the horde serving as the initial contact force. But something in the horde’s performance — the rate of degradation, perhaps, or simply the entity’s timeline for escalation — triggered a shift.

Three tails came down simultaneously from different angles.

Each one was larger than the biggest giant nynthrall Jolthar had faced, moving with speed that was obscene for something their mass, trailing concentrated malice energy that left visible disturbance in the air behind them.

Jolthar’s telekinesis caught the first, redirected rather than stopped, sending it into the ground at an angle that dissipated most of its force into the corrupted earth. A massive crater appeared where it impacted, the shockwave flattening everything within thirty feet.

The second he couldn’t fully redirect — too much mass, too much momentum arriving too quickly after the first. He got under it instead, rolling beneath the tail’s path as it swept through the space he’d occupied, close enough that the malice energy in its wake pulled at his clothing and stung exposed skin.

The third connected.

Not directly — the telekinesis got enough purchase to deflect it from center mass — but the glancing contact of a ten-tailed entity’s appendage delivered with full commitment was still enough to send Jolthar traveling backward through the air, the corrupted ground receiving him thirty feet from where he’d been standing with an impact that knocked breath and orientation loose simultaneously.

He was on his feet before his body had finished deciding whether that was a good idea.

Horgath was still in his hand. The chaobane energy was still active, still broadcasting, and still finding fault lines in everything within its radius — including, at this closer distance, beginning to reach the ten-tailed entity itself.

The entity noticed.

Something changed in the quality of its attention — not pain exactly, but recognition that what it was feeling at its leading edges was different from the conventional damage its form was designed to absorb and regenerate through accumulated malice. The chaobane disruption didn’t produce wounds that healed. It produced contradictions in structure that malice regeneration couldn’t address because the malice itself was the thing being disrupted.

The entity pulled its tails back slightly, the first retreat of any kind it had shown since emerging from the spire.

Above it, on the mass of its back, the nyphorite’s amber eyes found Jolthar across the distance.

And something that might have been assessment, might have been anticipation, moved through those slit pupils.

Jolthar looked back at it, feeling Horgath warm in his hand, feeling the chaobane energy reading the nyphorite from this distance, the way it read everything — looking for fault lines, looking for the frequencies that would make accumulated power work against itself.

Finding less than expected. Finding something that the chaobane energy reached toward and found more complex, more layered, and more resistant to simple diagnostic reading than anything it had encountered since Jolthar had drawn the blade.

Behind him, Caelum’s voice carried across the battlefield with the cutting clarity of command.

“Hold the flanks. Push the center. Don’t let the horde regroup.”

The battle was not finished.