Chapter 1690: No-Name Trash
The red glow crawling up Vex’s abdomen reached her chest and kept climbing, the lines splitting and branching through the fabric of her clothes as if the brand beneath was rewriting itself in real time.
Vex felt the current of a foreign power flood through the Bloodfather’s architecture, a heat that burned every wound shut and lit every nerve ending on fire.
Her palm pressed flat against the ground, fingers spreading, and the push that followed was not the scramble of a beaten woman dragging herself upright.
She cartwheeled backward from the ground in a single fluid motion, one hand planting as her body arced over it with her white ponytail trailing through the air, legs sweeping overhead in a rotation so clean it belonged in a performance hall.
She landed on both feet with her boots cracking the stone beneath them, spine straight, chin level.
Ryonosuke’s grin stretched wider.
The transformation finished as she landed.
Tiny pointed horns pushed through the hair above her temples, dark and gleaming.
A sleek succubus tail, ink-black and tapered to a fine point, pushed free from the base of her spine and swayed once behind her before curling at her hip with a mind of its own.
The crimson tattoos that had always traced her skin flared bright and began extending, new lines crawling upward from the Bloodfather’s brand on her womb to meet and intertwine with the Hexwitch markings already there, three systems of ink fusing into a single lattice that covered her stomach in patterns that were equal parts demonic scripture and art.
And the brand itself, the Bloodfather’s mark, burned so bright and so hot that it seared through the fabric covering it and blazed visible against her skin for anyone with eyes to see.
Vex felt it happen and didn’t suppress it, didn’t cover it, didn’t even think about committing such a heresy.
She wanted it visible.
She wanted every person in the whole universe to see Quinlan’s mark burning through her clothes, because Vex had never once in her life hidden who she belonged to and the day she started would be the day they buried her.
She blinked once, and when her pentagram eyes opened, they were different.
The red was deeper, almost black at the center where the pentagrams burned, as if something ancient and hungry had settled behind them and was looking out through Vex’s face for the first time.
She looked down at herself, at the tail swaying at her hip, and the brand burning through her clothes.
The smile that split her face was the widest she’d worn since the battle started.
"Much better~"
Ryonosuke planted his glaive in the stone and cracked his neck. "Done with your preparations, white-haired lass? Let’s have some fun!"
Vex looked at him, and the smile didn’t fade, but the warmth behind it did.
Those red eyes, burning dark at their new cores, regarded the Mad Dog of the Fujimori the way a cat regarded a beetle that had wandered onto the floor in front of it, something present and noted and entirely beneath consideration.
"I don’t play with other men," she said, and her voice turned disinterested. "Hubby doesn’t like it. Makes his possessive heart go all sorts of ways, and I can’t have that."
The tail at her hip curled tighter, as if the mere mention of Quinlan’s discomfort made it restless.
Ryonosuke’s red-stained teeth showed. "Your man, eh? The Primordial Villain?"
He pulled his glaive free and rolled his shoulders. "Don’t worry about him. I’ll deal with that one myself once I’m done here. Can’t have the hairy midgets killing the man who slaughtered so many Fujimori, can we? That’s our kill to claim. I’ll brandish his head on my glaive."
Vex’s expression instantly flattened.
The tail went rigid at her side, and the brand burning through her clothes flared bright enough to cast red light on the scorched stone at her feet.
The dark centers of her pentagram eyes consumed what little warmth was left in them until what remained was black and empty of everything except a single, absolute truth.
"You?" The word left her incredulous. "Kill him?"
She laughed, and the sound that came out was sharp and ugly, voice full of cold hostility.
"Look at yourself. You’re a meager ant. An insignificant worm crawling beneath his feet, looking up at an existence so vast you can’t even begin to comprehend the gap between you two. You’d deserve a standing ovation if you managed to remain on your feet in his presence without pissing yourself, you no-name piece of trash."
Ryonosuke’s grin died.
The casual amusement drained from his face one shade at a time, replaced by something colder and harder, and the veins in his bare arms pulsed at the surface as his grip on the glaive tightened until the wood groaned beneath his fingers.
"What did you just say to me? No-name? I’m Ryonosuke, the Mad Dog! One of the strongest Fujimori, capable of fighting anyone on this continent! I’m a level 74 Powerhouse!"
"Is that so?" Vex spoke with utmost dismissal evident in her tone.
Then, her chin tilted back and her eyes looked down at him from beneath half-closed lids, mocking, imperial, utterly certain.
"Yet you’re nothing compared to him. None of you are. Not you, not the elders, not your progenitors, not even the divine comes close to the man whose mark I wear on my womb."
She raised her hand, index finger extended, and pointed it at Ryonosuke’s chest.
The Mad Dog’s composure shattered and he launched forward with his glaive aimed at her throat, every ounce of his considerable killing intent compressed into a single lunge.
Vex didn’t flinch. The finger stayed raised, the eyes stayed condescending, and the brand on her skin blazed as something vast and absolute reached through.
"After all... [My Man Reigns Supreme]!"
The air behind Vex split.
A silhouette took shape in the space at her back, radiating a pressure that had no business existing this far from the ridge where its owner fought.
Quinlan’s presence, drawn through the bond by the spell that bore his supremacy as its name, towered over the Hexwitch in a crimson-edged outline, armored and looking down at Ryonosuke through eyes that weren’t there with the same imperial disinterest the woman in front of him wore on her face.
