The Sinful Young Master

Chapter 471: Fight against the Nyphorite – 1

As they were all focused on the horde, the nyphorite descended from the ten-tailed entity’s back with the unhurried grace of something that had never needed to hurry because the concept of being too late had never applied to it.

It didn’t seem bothered by the men fighting against the horde, or it didn’t care about them in the first place. As its gaze was focused on the young man who was moving towards the beast.

It dropped perhaps forty feet to the corrupted ground and landed without sound, without an impact crater and without any of the physical punctuation that should have accompanied something of its mass arriving from that height.

It simply was on the ground where it hadn’t been, the transition between positions more like a decision than a movement.

Up close, the grey skin had texture that distance had obscured — not smooth but structured, like compressed layers of something that had been refined over long accumulation into a density that suggested the skin itself was a form of armor rather than simply an exterior. The amber eyes caught the corrupted light and held it, two points of warm illumination in a face that was otherwise entirely committed to severity. The body was lean in the way that predators were lean, nothing carried that didn’t contribute, proportioned with an efficiency that suggested every element of its physical form had been arrived at through long optimization rather than simply grown.

It stood perhaps eight feet tall, which made it smaller than the giant nynthralls Jolthar had been processing through Horgath all morning, which somehow made it more threatening rather than less.

The giants were large because malice and accumulation had inflated them beyond their original forms.

This thing was exactly as large as it needed to be. No more, no less.

It looked at Jolthar across twenty feet of churned, corrupted ground and spoke.

“You carry three swords.” The voice was clean and direct, like a normal person.

“The void blade. The second one was of pure chaos, but this one, I don’t know exactly what this is. You are quite a peculiar young man.”

Jolthar frowned, seeing how it recognized his swords and was also aware of the swords he had used from his battle earlier.

Its amber eyes moved to Horgath with recognition that suggested familiarity rather than simple assessment. “This sword’s energy, I can tell that Chaos had been bred with something of more volatile energy. Though I have to say, it is an interesting choice given your current reserves.”

“You sure know a lot for some nameless creature,” Jolthar said.

The malice around the figure fluctuated as if it had been angered. It said, “I have a name, and it’s Yan.”

Jolthar’s lips curved into a smile, seeing how a malicious creature was showing such emotion.

“I know what everything is,” Yan said with arrogance, simply stating the factual relationship between its experience and the world it had moved through.

“The question is whether you know what I am.”

“Something that I should kill,” Jolthar said honestly.

Something moved across Yan’s expression that took Jolthar a moment to identify because he hadn’t expected to see it on a nyphorite’s face.

“You are a fool,” Yan said.

“Even more insane than the people who have faced me till now. They typically begin with confidence and arrive at the truth later, when arriving at it no longer helps them.”

The figure moved and it was abrupt.

The speed was the first revelation — not the explosive burst of the giant nynthralls or the fluid acceleration of the beast-class, but something smoother and more absolute.

Jolthar’s telekinesis fired before the conscious decision was completed, a pure, trained reflex extending invisible force outward to intercept.

It hit Yan and pushed through, partially, the resistance it encountered, not the solid wall of something that stopped, but the yielding resistance of something that had chosen how much to be affected and had chosen partially.

Yan’s strike landed on Jolthar’s forearm, where he’d raised it to reinforce the telekinetic deflection, and the force of it traveled up through his arm and shoulder and distributed through his frame with enough residual impact to move him backward three steps despite the telekinesis having absorbed a significant portion of the delivered force.

His arm was intact. That was notable.

Something of Yan’s apparent capability should have done more with a clean hit, which meant the hit hadn’t been delivered at full commitment. Which meant Yan was probing rather than trying to finish.

It seemed like Yan was gathering the same kind of information about Jolthar.

Meanwhile, Caelum had started fighting the ten-tailed beast. Caelum glanced at Jolthar fighting the nyphorite, he was worried how Jolthar was going to face him as he wasn’t healed. But he didn’t show it on his face.

Haryntha has been watching from a distance. Like before, she was ready to jump in and save Jolthar if needed.

The Naemarys siblings noticed Jolthar and the new figure that appeared on the battlefield. They knew it was a nyphorite and could tell how powerful it was. They were surprised that a young man was fighting against that creature. They couldn’t hide their disdain that a promising young man belonged to the Kaezhlar clan. Their own forces were dealing heavy damage to the horde; the magical assault was far stronger than what the Kaezhlar clan soldiers were doing.

Though they weren’t happy about it as they were focused on Jolthar.

Back where Jolthar and Yan were present,

Jolthar brought Horgath up and let the chaobane extend its diagnostic threads toward Yan, the blade reaching with its particular intelligence for fault lines, for the frequencies at which accumulated energy became structural liability rather than structural support.

The threads reached Yan and found—

Complexity. Layers of cultivated energy and malice and something else underneath both of those that the chaobane recognized as significant but couldn’t immediately classify. Fault lines existed — everything with accumulated power had fault lines — but they were deep, protected by the layering above them, requiring more penetration depth than a surface engagement would allow the chaobane to achieve.