Chapter 172: Naga Clan Leader
The estate disappeared beneath purple light.
The attack left his body before the decision fully formed, the mana he had spent weeks accumulating across a dozen rifts releasing all at once in a single outward surge that didn’t discriminate between targets.
It lasted less than two seconds.
When the light subsided and the thunder finished rolling across the mountains, the clearing had changed.
The three Naga fighters were gone.
Not fallen. Gone, the same total absence that had taken the Stone Stalkers on Vael when his lightning had stopped being controllable and become something else entirely.
The Naga leader was still standing.
Damon’s frown came before the surprise did.
He stood in the centre of the clearing with his massive blade planted in the ground, one hand on its hilt, the other hanging at his side at an angle that said something in it had stopped working properly. His scales were darkened across the left half of his body, the snakes on his arms motionless, their flat eyes open and unseeing. Blood ran from a cut above his eye that he didn’t acknowledge.
He was injured, but he was still standing.
The two of them looked at each other across the smoking clearing.
Neither moved.
The Naga leader’s expression had shifted from the grin he’d worn over Ayame to something more difficult to read, not fear, not respect, the particular expression of someone trying to reconcile two pieces of information that refused to sit beside each other. He was a divine beast. The mortal before him had arrived from nowhere and done this much damage.
Those two facts weren’t supposed to coexist.
Damon’s hands were empty of lightning for the first time since they’d arrived. The mana that had been overflowing since the first core absorption was not overflowing anymore. It was simply gone, the reserves he’d built across weeks of wrong worlds spent in a single motion.
The purple sparks that had crawled across his forearms since Vael were still.
His arms bled quietly from the cuts.
The clearing held its silence.
The Naga leader looked at Damon for a long moment before shifting his gaze briefly to Ayame behind him, then back. Something moved behind his eyes, the private calculation of someone assessing a situation with the particular honesty of someone who had nearly died and knew it.
"You’ve bought her another day," he said finally. His voice carried the deep particular quality of something that had been speaking for considerably longer than any human lifespan. "I’ll give you that."
He pulled his blade from the ground slowly.
"Tend to her wounds." He turned. "We’ll finish this another time."
He took one step toward the treeline.
Then Yuki shifted beside Damon.
She moved close enough that the distance between them made the words carry to him and nowhere else.
"Absorb some of my mana," she said quietly, her voice barely a whisper that the enemy couldn’t hear.
Damon looked at her with a raised brow.
"You’re nearly out of mana, aren’t you?" she said before he could ask. Her expression had lost all of its usual lightness. "We can’t let him walk away."
He looked at her for a moment.
She looked back without flinching.
He reached for her shoulder.
The Void Edge glove made contact, and the tug came immediately, faster than the rift cores, faster than anything living he’d tested it on, the mana flowing out of her and into him with the particular speed of an ability that didn’t distinguish between willing and unwilling sources.
He set a limit in his head, though the ability didn’t fully cooperate.
The notification came before he could pull his hand back.
[You have absorbed 500 Mana]
One of Yuki’s four tails dissolved.
It didn’t fade or dim. It came apart into a mist of pale blue light that dispersed upward and was gone, leaving three tails where four had been. The colour left her face in the same instant, and her legs stopped holding her weight with the particular suddenness of something that had been managing and then simply wasn’t anymore.
She collapsed a moment later.
Damon caught her with one arm before she hit the ground and lowered her without taking his eyes off the Naga leader’s back.
The leader had stopped walking.
He turned slowly, his frown deepening as he looked at the pale figure on the ground and the man crouched beside her, trying to understand what had just happened and coming up with no satisfactory explanation.
His mouth opened, ready to ask for an explanation, but in that moment, Damon vanished.
Shadow step carried him across the clearing in a single instant.
It wasn’t the chained rapid succession he’d used through the forest but a single direct line, the full distance covered between one breath and the next.
He came out directly behind the Naga leader.
The leader’s instincts were fast, faster than anything he’d ever seen, the kind that had been developing for decades and didn’t require thought to operate.
He was already turning when Damon appeared behind him, but unlike his instincts, his body wasn’t quite fast enough.
The mana that Yuki had given was far from enough to replicate his earlier attack, but against the heavily injured enemy leader, it was just enough to do the job.
Purple light flashed across the battlefield once more.
It was brief and fast, nothing like the wide indiscriminate surge that had opened the fight.
The last thing Damon saw was the Naga Clan leader’s widened eyes before the purple lightning consumed him.
The leader hit the ground.
The silence that followed was different from the one before it.
It was absolute. As if the world held its breath for a moment upon the death of one of the six divine beasts.
Damon stood over him for a moment, the last of the borrowed mana already gone, his forearms bleeding steadily onto the stone beneath him.
Then, a series of notifications rang loudly in his head.
