Chapter 242: Jackal vs Pig Emperor
The shadow empress looked at the bell, then back at him, weighing something behind her expression.
"I’ll give you this," she said, "if you give me that."
She raised a finger and pointed.
Neil followed the direction of it, found nothing behind himself but a stretch of ordinary trees, and turned back with a confused frown on his face.
"You want the trees?" he said. "Fine, tell me how many you need and I’ll have them—"
She rolled her eyes, took a step forward, and pressed her finger directly against his chest instead of bothering to explain further.
Neil looked down at the point of contact, genuinely puzzled.
"You want these clothes?" he said slowly. "That’s an oddly specific request, but alright. Do you want a fresh set, or the ones I’m currently—"
She let out a frustrated huff, raised her finger again, and pressed it firmly against his cheek this time.
"Could you please stop playing dumb?" she said. "It should be perfectly obvious by now."
Neil stood there for a moment, the silence stretching just long enough to be uncomfortable.
He had understood what she meant from the very beginning, if he was being completely honest with himself, and had simply been hoping the real answer turned out to be something less complicated.
"You want me to become a subject in your domain or something like that?" he said. "The treasure is valuable, sure, but that feels like an excessive price. I’m not interested in being anyone’s subject just to walk away with a bell, no matter how useful it is."
He had already started considering the alternative anyway, the option of having Jane ask her own teacher for a similar treasure, and simply leaving his domain stored within Cynthia’s territory in the meantime.
"No, that’s not what I meant at all," she said.
She sighed, and something shifted visibly in her expression, the playful edge draining out and leaving something far more tired underneath it.
"There’s a problem," she said. "One that could genuinely kill me if it isn’t dealt with properly. And as it happens, you’re the only one who can actually help me with it, simply because you’re a phantom."
Neil’s expression sobered immediately, the joking tone gone from the conversation entirely.
"Your father is the reason," she continued. "Jackal struck me with a poison a long time ago, more of a warning than an outright attempt to kill me at the time. I’ve managed to hold it back through my own strength for years now, but it’s becoming significantly harder to manage as time goes on." She paused, something heavier settling into her voice. "Your mother helped me track down a cure for it eventually, but I still need something from you specifically to actually use it."
Neil took all of this in without interrupting.
"You need my blood to cure it?" he asked. "Just tell me exactly what I need to do."
There was no hesitation in him at all, the determination plain across his face, and something in her posture eased visibly the moment she heard it, the particular relief of someone who had been bracing for a refusal that never came.
She pressed the bell firmly into his open hands.
Then she took his hand in both of hers, and the smile that crossed her face was softer than anything he had seen from her before, an expression that sat strangely on someone who usually kept the entire world at a careful distance.
Her black hair drifted faintly despite there being no wind to move it at all.
"Helping me will be very easy for you," she said. "Just marry me, briefly, and give me a child."
"Okay—" Neil started, and the rest of the sentence caught somewhere in his throat entirely. "Wait. What?"
Far away from Zoratian, on a world called Zenetor, the sky overhead burned a deep and constant red that never quite settled into proper night, and the moon hanging above the horizon was fully black instead of pale, casting almost no light of its own onto the land beneath it.
The ground stretching for miles in every direction had been torn apart into craters and shattered earth, the unmistakable aftermath of a battle that had clearly been building for far longer than just the past few minutes.
In the center of all that destruction stood a figure roughly seven feet tall, his entire body wrapped in something that wasn’t quite shadow and wasn’t quite smoke, a living darkness that moved on its own accord, pulsing faintly in rhythm with whatever was breathing beneath it.
Across from him towered something considerably larger.
A massive pig-like creature standing close to a hundred feet tall, tusks longer than a grown man was tall, small eyes burning with a fury that had nothing calm left inside it whatsoever.
"Jackal," the pig roared, the sound rolling across the broken landscape like distant thunder. "Get lost. Don’t you dare go near my daughter again, or I swear I will kill you myself."
Jackal laughed at that, low and entirely unbothered, and even the sound of it seemed to press against the surrounding air with real physical weight.
"A little late for that request, don’t you think," he said. "She’s already fallen for me completely. Keep pushing this confrontation and she might end up doing something foolish trying to protect what she believes we have together." He paused, almost thoughtful about it. "And I do need to find the right heir eventually. Your daughter carrying my child would be quite the honor for your entire bloodline, if you think about it properly."
The pig emperor’s fury doubled visibly at that, the air around his massive frame beginning to shimmer with barely restrained pressure.
He had no idea that Jackal had walked into his daughter’s academy wearing an entirely different face, calm and handsome and thoroughly human in appearance, charming enough and powerful enough in that disguised form that she had fallen for him completely without ever suspecting what was actually standing behind the mask.
"We are both at the 10th Origin," the pig emperor said, his voice dropping into something far colder than the shouting that had come before it. "There is no possibility I lose to you. Leave now, before my people arrive here and finish what I’m about to start."
Jackal only shook his head slowly, a faint grin settling across what little of his face could be seen beneath the shifting darkness.
"You think I’m afraid of your people," he said. "Or of you, for that matter. Let’s find out together whether the great emperor of the pig race amounts to anything more than empty noise."
The pig emperor didn’t wait for any further provocation before responding.
The ground beneath his feet split open violently as a Field erupted outward from his body, the entire battlefield reshaping itself within seconds, jagged pillars of earth rising on all sides, the air thickening visibly with the concentrated weight of his domain’s nature pressing down across the area.
Stone spears tore upward from beneath Jackal’s feet from every conceivable direction at once.
Jackal didn’t bother dodging any of them.
He simply walked straight through the barrage, each spear shattering harmlessly against the dark aura wrapped around his body as though they had struck something considerably harder than mere stone.
The pig emperor let out another furious roar and charged forward, the ground trembling violently with every single step of his massive frame, both tusks lowered directly toward Jackal’s exposed chest.
CRASH
The earth split open along the entire length of the charge, trees and boulders thrown aside as though they weighed nothing at all, and at the very last possible instant Jackal sidestepped almost lazily, allowing the full momentum of the attack to pass within mere inches of his body.
He raised one foot calmly and kicked.
The impact caught the side of the emperor’s skull directly, and the sound that followed wasn’t quite the sound of flesh striking flesh, closer instead to something enormous being struck by something far heavier than its apparent size should have allowed.
BOOM
The pig emperor’s hundred-foot body left the ground entirely from the force of it, sailing across the broken landscape before slamming violently into a distant ridge, the impact flattening what remained standing of it in a single devastating instant.
He was back on his feet within seconds regardless, blood running freely down the side of his battered face, his small eyes considerably wider now with something that hadn’t been present in them a moment earlier.
He clearly hadn’t expected that level of force from a single, almost casual strike.
He came at Jackal again, faster this time, abandoning the straightforward charge entirely in favor of a relentless flurry of strikes from both tusks and forelegs, each individual attack paired with another eruption of earth-based skills, stone walls rising suddenly to redirect Jackal’s footing mid-step, spikes erupting unpredictably from unexpected angles, the entire battlefield itself becoming a direct extension of the emperor’s own will and fury.
Jackal weathered every bit of it without ever reaching for anything beyond the absolute basics available to him.
He didn’t summon any weapons, didn’t call upon any elaborate or flashy techniques, just kept moving with exactly the minimum effort required to avoid what genuinely needed avoiding, occasionally allowing a stray strike to connect harmlessly against his shoulder or his side without producing any visible reaction whatsoever.
Then, somewhere between one exchange and the next, he reached out with something that wasn’t physical at all.
The pig emperor staggered visibly mid-strike, his enormous body losing all coordination for a brief fraction of a second, his small eyes losing focus entirely as something pressed directly and forcefully against the inside of his mind.
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