Chapter 1691: My Man Reigns Supreme
The silhouette looked down at Ryonosuke, and the Mad Dog of the Fujimori felt judgment settle over him like a second atmosphere.
He was being compared.
A systematic, absolute pressure was pressing against every stat in his body simultaneously, asking him to justify each one.
His status screen flickered without his permission, a thing that should have been impossible for anyone but his mind itself to trigger, and a notification seared across his vision in crimson script he couldn’t dismiss.
[The Hexwitch has invoked [My Man Reigns Supreme]. You are being measured against the Primordial Villain, Quinlan Elysiar. The devoted has decreed her soulmate’s supremacy absolute. Stand and be judged.]
Ryonosuke read it. His red-stained teeth bared in a grin that was mostly confusion.
"Hold on." He pointed his glaive at Vex. "Your spell is literally called [My Man Reigns Supreme]? I thought you were just shouting nonsense in the middle of our fight!"
The succubus tail at Vex’s hip swayed once and curled inward along her inner thigh in a slow, possessive coil, the tapered tip tracing the skin just below the hem of her clothes as if the mere act of declaring her man’s supremacy aloud made parts of her respond before her mind caught up.
She utterly adored this spell, these new powers, this transformed physique... All of it was...
Magnificent.
The dark cores of her pentagram eyes burned with ancient hunger, thoroughly and unapologetically in love.
"Nonsense?" She purred, and the abyssal energy bleeding from her brand deepened the red glow across her stomach. "It’s nothing but the undeniable truth~"
The comparison materialized in front of Ryonosuke’s eyes.
[Quinlan Elysiar]
[Vitality: 224]
[Strength: 174]
[Agility: 184]
[Magic: 271]
[Ryonosuke Fujimori]
[Vitality: 268]
[Strength: 298]
[Agility: 172]
[Magic: 78]
His grin faltered. His eyes moved through the numbers with the efficiency of a veteran reading a battlefield report, pulling conclusions from the shape of the data before the details finished landing.
The stat spread was too well-rounded. Vitality over 220, Magic over 270, everything else competitive. A balanced, jack-of-all-trades build not many could pull off.
"Not bad stats. I’ll give it to you, woman, your guy is great for barely being level 70. I bet he has some interesting class attributes," he muttered, and the grin came back with a grudging edge.
The tail went taut at her hip as the brand below her navel blazed brighter, and the smile she wore turned indecently smug.
"You haven’t been paying attention to the elders’ briefings, have you? Or maybe just no one bothered to tell you~" She pressed her fingers against the burning mark on her womb as if touching a shrine. "My Hubby is..."
A second notification seared across Ryonosuke’s vision in the same crimson script as the first, and the stat blocks hovering in front of him shuddered as new lines materialized above them.
[The Hexwitch has chosen to reveal the truth. Bear witness to the full scope of the comparison.]
[Ryonosuke Fujimori — Level: 74]
[Quinlan Elysiar — Level: 55]
Ryonosuke’s grin died for the second time.
"...What?"
The numbers were still floating in front of his face with the levels burning above them like a sentence he couldn’t appeal.
Vitality 224. Strength 174. Agility 184. Magic 271.
Those numbers belonged to a man in his mid-fifties? A man twenty levels below the continental ceiling was producing stats that would have made seasoned level-70 veterans look twice, and the distance between where he stood now and where he would stand when he reached the peak was so vast that the number twenty stopped being a gap and started being a death sentence for everyone who would have to face him on the way up.
Ryonosuke’s eyes lifted to the silhouette behind Vex.
It hadn’t changed.
The same red outline, the same armored shape, the same absent eyes looking down at him with imperial disinterest.
But the context had changed, and the figure that had been imposing a moment ago now towered as a preview of a monster the continent had never seen and would not survive if it was allowed to finish growing.
"Lord Ryonosuke! We’ll report you to the elders! Don’t try to stop us anymore!" Both retainers moved in the same breath, flanking Vex with their katanas drawn and angled for the kill.
Vex didn’t look at them.
Her eyes stayed on Ryonosuke as the finger she’d used to point at him earlier rose again, abyssal energy bleeding from the Bloodfather’s brand to gather at the tip of her nail in a bead of dark red light.
"[Hubby Supremacy Tax~]"
The drain hit Ryonosuke like a hand reaching into his chest and ripping out a fistful of what made him whole.
His Magic stat plummeted.
It had read 78 a moment ago.
Now it was falling, and the wrongness was so fundamental that his vision tunneled and his legs threatened to buckle.
The number kept dropping past anything he’d known since he first picked up a glaive as a boy.
78 became 50, became 30, became the kind of number he carried as a young man before reaching his first bottleneck at level 9, and it didn’t stop until it hit 10 and the world went quiet in a way he had never known.
Ten.
The baseline.
What he’d had at level 1, before stats meant anything, before magic resistance existed as a concept worth measuring.
Worse still... Mana Points were calculated as Magic stat times ten.
With his Magic stat flatlining to the level filthy peasants tending to crops in the mud had, his mana pool collapsed with it.
The reserve that had been sitting comfortably in his core, barely touched because Ryonosuke was a physical fighter who relied on his body more than his spells, simply evaporated.
What remained was a puddle so shallow he could feel the bottom of it, barely enough to power a couple activations of his abilities. His mana regeneration, the passive trickle that every fighter took for granted, slowed to near-nothing.
His Agility followed.
Less dramatic than the Magic drain but immediately physical, a heaviness settling into his limbs and joints that turned effortless movement into labor.
Twelve points vanished from beneath him, and the Mad Dog of the Fujimori found himself standing in his own body as if it had aged a millennium between breaths.
The curse operated on a simple, devastating principle: where the soulmate exceeded the target, the gap became the Hexwitch’s to drain.
She siphoned everything Quinlan was superior in and fed herself with it, turning the comparison into a taxation that punished every stat where the target fell short.
But the drain had hard limits. It could only extract what the target physically possessed.
Against a level 1 nobody with nothing to drain, the spell would yield nothing regardless of how vastly Quinlan outclassed them.
Against a level 74 Powerhouse with a respectable Magic stat, even a modest gap became a feast.
One cast per encounter. One chance. A cooldown long enough that the battle would be decided before it came off.
Ryonosuke was exactly the kind of target it was designed to devour.
The Mad Dog planted his glaive into the stone and steadied himself, his eye burning with veteran clarity.
He knew how curses like this worked.
Every debuff-type curse carried a cost on the caster’s end, a fundamental law of reciprocity that prevented any single curse from being a free win. If the Hexwitch’s spell measured two people against each other and drained the stats where one exceeded the other, then the reverse had to be true.
Where he exceeded Quinlan, the curse drained Vex, and the comparison had been very clear about where he stood above the Primordial Villain.
Strength 298 versus 174. Vitality 268 versus 224.
A savage grin split his face.
"You drained my Magic and nicked my Agility, I’ll give you that." He straightened, planting both feet wide. "But ’Your Man Only Reigns Supreme’ in two of the four attributes, curse-slinger! Which means right now, you should be feeling awfully weak in the knees!"
Vex’s tail unwound from her thigh and swayed behind her as the smile on her face reached a height of smugness that bordered on religious ecstasy. The shiver that ran through her had nothing to do with the battlefield.
"No." Her voice was soft, reverent, and dripping with absolute certainty. "My man is superior in everything."
Ryonosuke blinked. "Are you blind, woman? I just read the comparison! Your own spell says I’m stronger and tougher than he’ll ever..."
"Blind? No..." Vex purred, and her grin became unnaturally wide, unhinged, as she decreed, "I’m just [Closing My Eyes]."
