The Sinful Young Master

Chapter 475: Fight against the nyphorite – 6

The strike never arrived.

A sword came from Jolthar’s left with a sound like consequence being delivered, clean and absolute and without any of the elaborate technique that Jolthar’s engagement had required because the person swinging it didn’t need technique to close the gap between intention and result at Tier 10.

Caelum’s blade took Yan through the chest in a single committed thrust that carried enough aura behind it to make the entry point irrelevant — the aura delivered through the contact did the work, the sword providing the interface, and what the aura did to Yan’s already-compromised layered energy structure when introduced at that intensity through a direct channel was total and immediate.

Yan’s amber eyes held their focus for one more second.

Then they didn’t.

The nyphorite’s form collapsed with the finality of something whose internal architecture had simply stopped receiving the instructions that had been maintaining it, the grey skin losing the structured density that had characterized it throughout the engagement, becoming something that had been a formidable opponent and was now simply matter that used to be organized differently.

Jolthar could no longer stand, and he had given up.

He went down, but Caelum caught him under the shoulder before he could fall.

The corrupted ground rose up and the sky — wrong-colored, wrong-textured, the permanent diseased overcast of the Dreadland Depths — tilted above him, and Jolthar’s awareness began the familiar process of pulling inward from the edges as his body redirected the last available resources toward the baseline functions that didn’t negotiate.

Haryntha appeared at Caelum’s other side, having crossed from wherever she’d been with a speed that confirmed what Jolthar had understood about her nature since the beginning.

She was concerned but she didn’t let it show on her face to others.

Caelum looked at her across Jolthar’s barely conscious form. One look, the kind exchanged between people who don’t share history but share immediate purpose.

“Take him back to the camp,” Caelum said it in a simple tone. He knew that she would keep him safe.

Haryntha took Jolthar from his hands and started retreating.

Caelum turned away.

Then his aura expanded.

Where Jolthar’s aura expressions were varied and layered, combining multiple energy types in the complex way of someone who had accumulated diverse power from diverse sources, Caelum’s aura was singular.

Refined past the point where diversity was interesting into the point where singular mastery became something qualitatively different from power expressed in multiples.

He was a swordsman.

Aura channeled through sword technique, refined across decades until the line between the swordsman and the sword was more philosophical than practical.

His aura reached outward with the comprehensive patience of something that didn’t need to hurry, and where it reached, the malice in the corrupted ground was suppressed.

Simply overwritten, the way a louder signal overwrites a quieter one on the same frequency, Caelum’s aura being sufficiently dominant that malice-driven purpose in its radius became uncertain about its own validity.

The nynthralls at the horde’s edges began to lose coherence.

“Retreat,” Caelum said to his men.

“Inside the perimeter. Now.”

The Kaezhlar forces moved without hesitation.

They pulled back in coordinated stages, covering each other’s withdrawal, the formation compressing toward the camp perimeter with the practiced efficiency of professionals.

The Naemarys contingent observed this and, lacking better options with their own forces depleted and the ten-tailed entity’s attention now fully oriented toward the field, followed the Kaezhlar withdrawal’s logic without acknowledging that they were following it.

Caelum walked toward the ten-tailed entity.

The aura preceding him continued its expansion, reaching the horde’s dense mass and introducing the suppression frequency that malice-driven creatures experienced as fundamental uncertainty about whether continuing to exist in this form was viable.

Nynthralls at the aura’s edge began to disperse, not fleeing with panic but simply losing the coherent drive that had been organizing their behavior.

The ten-tailed creature was different.

The ten-tailed creature understood power. It had spent its existence as the apex predator of the Depths. Yet as the presence approached, it experienced something entirely unfamiliar.

A threatening feeling.

Caelum struck only once.

The aura flowing through his blade was not unleashed recklessly. It was gathered, refined, and compressed into a single attack. Decades of training, countless battles, and a lifetime spent perfecting his craft came together in that moment.

Every unnecessary movement had been discarded long ago. Every flaw had been cut away through relentless practice.

What remained was simplicity.

One perfect strike carrying not only overwhelming power but also the full weight of the man who wielded it.

The ten-tailed entity made a sound that the Dreadland Depths had probably not heard before. It shook violently, the ground trembled, and the space around the beast took a heavy hit.

The next moment, the beast lay on the ground unmoved.

In its demise, the horde completed its dissolution. Seeing that Caelum was still standing, they were terrified, and his aura was still pressing on them.

The field cleared.

The corrupted ground around the camp perimeter emptied of organized threat until what remained was the baseline wrongness of the Depths itself rather than the active malice of directed entities.

Caelum stood in the cleared space and let his aura slowly retract, the expansion folding back with the same patient control that had characterized its deployment, the field around the camp settling into a suppressed state that would make the immediate vicinity hostile to Nynthrall approach for hours.

He looked at the Naemarys camp, where Daerius and Lyralei stood watching with expressions that contained everything they weren’t saying, and said nothing.

Turned back toward the Kaezhlar camp.

And went to wait for his nephew to wake up.

***

The Following Day

Jolthar opened his eyes to the canvas above him and the particular quality of air that Haryntha’s purification barrier produced — clean in the Depths, which felt like an affront to the surrounding environment and was entirely welcome.

He attempted to assess his internal state and the assessment was not encouraging.

His reserves were recovering, but his body didn’t feel right.

When he moved his energy through his channels, the flow felt rough and uneven. It was a subtle change, but one he noticed immediately. The strain from repeatedly pushing himself beyond his limits had left its mark. His channels had not broken, but they were no longer in perfect condition.

Haryntha was sitting beside him.

“How bad?” Jolthar asked.

“You pushed past the threshold twice in close succession,” Haryntha said, her voice carrying the directness.

“The earlier battle with the dukes drew from deep reserves. But the latter engagement and the sustained use of your distinct energies drew from everything above those reserves.

When deep reserves are accessed before they’ve replenished from the previous access, the channels that carry that energy don’t simply recover the way they would from normal expenditure.”

She paused, finding the correct words.

“If you do that again — access deep reserves before full recovery from the previous deep access — the channels will begin to degrade rather than simply deplete.

Degraded channels don’t replenish the way healthy channels do.

The damage accumulates.”

Her eyes held his steadily.

“Your life force will begin decreasing.