Chapter 1692: Closing My Eyes
Vex’s pentagram eyes, the burning crimson irises with their intricate geometric patterns rotating behind the black cores, went flat.
The light drained from them in a single heartbeat, the pentagrams fading like embers being smothered, the crimson bleeding out until what remained was solid, featureless black from edge to edge.
Dead eyes in a living face, beautiful and empty and absolute in their refusal to acknowledge what they had just seen.
The backlash that should have crippled her vanished.
124 points of Strength differential. 44 points of Vitality differential. The system measured those gaps, prepared the reciprocal cost that every curse demanded of its caster.
Vex looked the universe in the eye and told it she didn’t see it.
The Hexwitch’s obsession with Quinlan Elysiar was not a mere biological reaction between a male and female capable of reproduction in any form a rational mind would recognize.
It was worship. It was mania. It was a devotion so total and so absolute that it had crossed the boundary between healthy emotion and biological urges a long time ago, settled into the bedrock of her identity, and refused to leave.
Quinlan was the strongest man alive.
Quinlan was the most brilliant, the most handsome, the most capable being to ever walk this continent or any other, and if the heavens themselves parted to present her with irrefutable evidence to the contrary, Vex would spit in the face of the divine and call it a liar.
She had blind, unshakeable, religious-grade faith in her man, and she had nothing but contempt for every living creature that decided to stand against him, and the combination of the two, combined with the Primordial Succubus’s powers, a woman who herself was far too capable of harboring similar mania for a single entity in the vast universe, her Ruin, had just produced an evolution that told the fundamental laws of reciprocity to go fuck themselves because the Hexwitch refused to live in a reality where her Hubby was lesser.
The retainers’ blades arrived at her neck from both sides in a synchronized scissor cut.
The woman from a few seconds ago would have died here, because that woman had been fighting with two centuries of inadequacy dragging at every limb, every dodge arriving a beat too late because she had already conceded she didn’t belong on this field.
The retainers had read that rhythm and built their coordination around it.
Vex stepped through the gap between their blades.
Forward, not back, through the seam where the steel hadn’t closed yet, her body turning sideways in one clean motion that left both edges kissing air on either side of her throat.
Twelve stolen points of Agility didn’t explain the difference, and both retainers knew it.
But what they didn’t account for was the holistic change Vex underwent: she had cursed at a primordial demon, ripped out what she needed with her own hands, and rebuilt herself on this battlefield from a weeping wreck.
The change was more than physical: it overwrote her insecurities, her self-loathing, and left her with nothing but confidence in herself and limitless devotion toward Quinlan.
"What?!" Ryonosuke’s composure shattered.
The silhouette behind Vex moved.
The crimson-edged outline of Quinlan Elysiar collapsed inward, the towering presence compressing into a current that rushed into the Hexwitch’s body through the brand on her womb.
The spell, the comparison, ended.
The silhouette’s purpose was fulfilled, and what it left behind settled into Vex’s frame like a second soul wearing the same skin.
Her aura detonated.
The pressure that erupted from the white-haired woman hit every fighter like a change in gravity, dense and suffocating and carrying the unmistakable signature of primordial authority that had no business existing inside a Hexwitch’s body.
Quinlan’s aura, filtered through demonic obsession. The sensation it produced was less ’a strong person is near’ and more ’the Primordial Villain is looking at you through her eyes.’
And just like that, Vex’s dead black eyes blazed back to life.
The pentagram irises ignited, crimson burning so bright the geometric patterns cast visible light onto the retainers’ faces as they scrambled to recover.
The black cores at their center burned hotter than the crimson around them, Nyxara’s demonic stain alight in tandem with Vex’s own fury, and the combined effect was a pair of eyes forged in an abyss and set on fire.
She looked at the retainer on her left, and the woman flinched.
Her sword lay on the stone where the fight had left it. She picked it up without breaking eye contact.
Vex closed the distance with stolen speed and the focus of a mind that had stopped second-guessing every movement it made, and the retainer’s guard was two full beats behind.
Her sword opened the woman’s throat in a stroke so clean the blood didn’t appear until the blade was already past.
The woman’s scream lasted less than a second before her body seized and dropped.
"Damn you!" The second retainer pivoted, but Vex was already behind her, stolen speed and predatory certainty carrying her through the gap in the same motion.
The sword found the base of the woman’s skull from an angle the retainer never saw, and the curse that followed the blade was surgical, a single thread of dark mana carrying abyssal hunger that severed the connection between the retainer’s brain and her body. The Fujimori soldier was dead before her knees finished buckling.
Vex stood between both falling bodies with the brand burning through her clothes and blood dripping from her sword.
Her tail swayed behind her, slow and satisfied, the tapered tip curling against the curve of her rear before drifting to rest against her upper thigh. The Hexwitch licked a drop of blood from her thumb with a tongue that lingered.
She looked at Ryonosuke.
Those blazing pentagram eyes, alight with stolen Magic and primordial fury and the bottomless devotion of a woman who had restructured reality around the premise that her man could not lose, found the Mad Dog across the scorched stone.
"Now then." Her voice was silk over venom. "Let’s conclude your execution. The faster this farce ends, the faster I can kiss my husband and congratulate him over his victory with big, amazed eyes like the perfect adoring wife that I am."
Ryonosuke stared at the woman standing between his retainers’ bodies, and the manic bloodlust that had been driving him since the battle started bled out of his remaining eye until what was left behind was quieter, sharper, and entirely too interested for a man who had just been told he was going to die.
He laughed, short and genuine.
"That guy truly is a weirdo." His eye traced the fading remnants of Quinlan’s silhouette, then dropped to the mark seared through her clothes, then rose to the horns crowning her white hair. "And so are you."
His glaive twirled once in his grip, the heavy polearm spinning a lazy vertical arc that whistled through the smoke, and the Mad Dog took a single step forward.
"I’ve crossed paths with thousands of mighty people." The grin that settled onto his face was crooked and genuine and nothing like the crazed edge he’d worn all day. "But you might be the most interesting of them all, Vex the Hexblade."
He’d been calling her ’white-haired lass’ since the fight began.
Now it was her name, spoken with respect Ryonosuke gave to almost no one, not even the elders.
Vex looked back at him, and nothing in those eyes acknowledged the gesture.
The condescension carved into her expression since she’d finished killing his retainers held firm, utterly unmoved by the courtesy a warrior of his caliber had just offered her.
She regarded the Mad Dog of the Fujimori, a level 74 Powerhouse who had paid her the highest compliment in his vocabulary as if he was dirt beneath her heel.
Ryonosuke read the words in her gaze as clearly as if she’d spat them in his face again.
’Cease existing already, worm.’
His grin widened, wry and oddly warm.
"Right then."
Both fighters launched at each other in the same breath, and the collision split the air between them.
...
While the Hexwitch carved her war into the plains below, the man whose mark burned on her womb and the demoness whose power she had taken had not been idle.
They were both terribly occupied, though with slightly different things.
