Incubus Lord: Lust Harem System

Chapter 172: Chapter 172: The Trial [2]

The Echo came down like a falling mountain.

Its wings were folded tight against its body, the full mass of it aimed at Damon in a single committed dive, the crimson sky screaming around it as it accelerated.

Damon didn’t move.

He watched the creature close the distance, tracking the angle of descent, the position of the forelimbs, the way the neck extended forward to lead the strike.

The ground beneath him cracked from the pressure alone before the Echo even arrived, hairline fractures spreading outward from his boots in a spiderweb pattern.

Then it hit.

The left claw came down exactly where he’d been standing, slamming into the stone with a force that sent a shockwave rolling outward in every direction, splitting the mountain peak in a jagged line and throwing chunks of rock the size of carriages into the air.

Damon was already gone.

Astral Steps carried him sideways in a blur, the displacement so fast that the afterimage of where he’d stood was still visible when the claw made contact.

He landed twenty meters to the right, skidding across fractured stone, and immediately sent another burst of sword aura blazing upward.

The Echo’s head swung toward him.

He kept moving, kept the sword aura visible, kept himself the loudest, most obvious thing on the mountain peak.

The creature’s attention was absolute. Its dying-star eyes tracked him with the focused intensity of something that had never been made to feel small, and was now experiencing something close to irritation.

It raised the claw again.

Damon ran directly toward it.

The move was so counter to instinct that the Echo hesitated for a fraction of a second, its massive head pulling back slightly, recalibrating.

That fraction was enough.

Damon ducked under the sweep of the second claw strike, the wind from the movement hitting him like a wall and nearly taking him off his feet, and drove the Chaos Devourer upward into the joint where the forelimb connected to the shoulder.

The blade found the gap between the scale plates.

The Echo screamed.

Damon wrenched the sword free and threw himself backward as the forelimb swept inward reflexively, the claw catching nothing but air.

He landed hard on his back, rolled, came up onto one knee.

The wound at the Echo’s shoulder joint glowed faintly, the same blue-white light as the neck wound from before, luminous against the black scales.

The creature pulled its wings partially open to stabilize itself, the massive membranes spreading wide.

There.

The wing joints were exposed, exactly as Seraphina had said, the overlapping scale plates pulling apart at the connection points as the wings extended.

Damon looked up.

Seraphina was directly above the Echo, barely visible against the crimson sky, a sphere of compressed wind qi gathered between her palms that had grown to the size of a house.

Twenty-eight seconds.

She’d done it in twenty-eight.

She released it.

The compressed sphere collapsed inward for a single instant, then detonated downward in a concentrated column of wind pressure that hit the Echo across the back of its neck and both wings simultaneously.

The force was enormous.

The Echo buckled, crashing onto the peak with a shockwave that dropped Damon to one knee.

The wing joints were wide open.

Damon was already moving.

He crossed the distance in three strides, Astral Steps compressing each one into something faster than a sprint, and drove the Chaos Devourer into the right wing joint with both hands behind the blade.

The sword went deep.

The Echo’s scream this time was different, lower, a sound of genuine damage rather than irritation, and the wing on that side collapsed completely, the membrane folding against the creature’s body in a useless heap.

Damon pulled the blade free and moved left.

The Echo’s tail came around fast, sweeping low across the mountain peak in a wide arc.

He jumped.

He ran up the tail before the Echo could react.

He reached the left wing joint and drove the Chaos Devourer in again.

The second wing collapsed.

The Echo was grounded.

It thrashed, crashing sideways, cracking the peak.

Seraphina landed beside him a moment later, her breathing harder than before, her hands still faintly luminous from the qi discharge.

She looked at the grounded Echo and then at him.

"Both wings." they said it at the same time.

The Echo dragged itself upright on its forelimbs, the wounded shoulder and both collapsed wings making the movement slow and grinding.

It turned its dying-star eyes on them, and the intelligence behind that gaze had shifted.

It opened its mouth.

Not to breathe. The crimson fire didn’t come.

Instead, the air around the creature’s head began to compress, the space itself warping inward toward its jaws in a way that Damon recognized immediately because he’d felt something similar from the Chaos Devourer.

"Move!" he said.

They split as the Echo detonated the compressed space, collapsing everything within fifteen metres into a point before scattering debris outward.

Stone, dust, and fractured rock exploded across the mountain peak.

Damon took a chunk of stone across the shoulder that spun him sideways, and he hit the ground rolling, coming up with the Chaos Devourer raised.

Seraphina was already back on her feet across the ruined platform, a cut along her jaw bleeding freely, her eyes fixed on the Echo.

The creature’s neck was extended low, its body weight forward on its forelimbs, the damaged shoulder grinding with every movement.

It was hurt.

But it was still standing, and the spatial attack told him the Echo had more tools than just fire and claws.

Damon looked at the glowing wound lines on the neck and shoulder, the two collapsed wing joints, and calculated quickly.

The neck wound from the first Chaos Slash was the deepest. The spatial tear had cut through something fundamental rather than just piercing the scale armor..

He looked across the platform at Seraphina.

She met his gaze and gave a single nod, reading the intent without needing words.

She understood. She would drive it forward, push its neck down and extend the wound, and he would finish the cut.

Damon fed the blade everything he had left, tribulation lightning crawling up his arms, the spatial edge sharpening until the air along its length simply ceased to exist.

The Echo watched him.

And for the first time since they’d arrived on the crimson-skied peak, the ancient creature took a single step backward.