Chapter 1707: Hideous Monster Masquerading In Human Skin
She slammed him into the wall behind her with everything [Eternal Hunger] was feeding her muscles.
His back hit the cracked stone and his scream pitched higher, and her stare locked on Shiori across the cell as she spat the fingers onto the floor between them.
Then she pressed backward, pinning the dwarf flat against the wall. The stone cracked further behind him and his thrashing grew weaker and wetter until the sounds stopped, and the thing pressed between Black Fang and the wall stopped moving.
She hung from the manacles panting, crimson running from her nose into her mouth, the dwarf’s blood mixing with her own across her teeth. Still chained.
"W-what are you..." Shiori hadn’t moved.
Her hands were trembling at her sides, the fingers curling and uncurling without her permission, and her breathing had gone shallow enough that the soldiers flanking the door could hear it.
Black Fang’s eyes kept glaring at her through the blood and the haze, and Shiori’s composure broke.
"Stop glaring at me!" The scream ripped out of her before she could shape it into anything professional. "You hideous monster masquerading in human skin, stop looking at me like that!"
She raised her hand to slap the resistance off that face, but then Black Fang’s eyes began tracking the incoming palm.
Shiori yanked her hand back so fast she stumbled, clutching it against her chest as if it had already been bitten, and the sound that left her was closer to a whimper than she would ever admit.
"What in the Holy Mother?! You’re by far the most badass woman I’ve ever seen!" Myrasyn breathed from the side, her eyes wide, her restraints forgotten.
Then a grin split her battered face and she started rocking against her chains. "Go, go, Black Fang! Go, go, Black Fang!" She sang it bright and cheerful, her raw voice carrying the rhythm of a stadium chant through a dungeon that had never heard anything close to joy.
The trembling in Shiori’s hands turned to fists, and the fury that replaced the fear was worse because it was desperate.
She straightened her coat, wiped the sweat from her upper lip, and clapped twice. "Send another one in. And hold her this time."
Fujimori elites, Shiori’s underlings, filed through the door, four of them seizing Black Fang’s legs and torso while a fresh dwarven engineer moved toward the collar, swallowing hard.
Her knee found the first soldier’s sternum with a crack that dropped him, and the moment the engineer’s hands touched metal she thrashed hard enough to throw one of them clear across the cell.
More came. Black Fang fought every one of them, chained to a wall with blood pouring from the places where [Eternal Hunger] had eaten through capillaries beneath her skin.
"How does she still have this much power left?" A shudder rolled through Shiori’s whole body.
The door opened behind Shiori.
[Eternal Hunger] detonated inside Black Fang’s chest before her senses registered the shape in the doorway.
The spell had been screaming for hours, clawing at soldiers and engineers and dwarves with a hunger that wanted everything alive, but what hit her now was so far beyond that it rewrote the scale entirely.
Every nerve lit with a pull so violent her spine arched against the wall and her wrists twisted in the manacles hard enough to reopen wounds that had just clotted, and the hunger that had been eating her alive threw itself toward the door with an intensity that blacked the edges of her vision.
"Good, we need more of you." Shiori didn’t turn, her eyes still on the ugly creature in the chains. "The snake is more resistant than I ever thought possible."
"Is that so?"
The voice was deep and flat and it came from directly behind the torturer’s head.
Shiori’s spine went rigid, and through vision that swam with every pulse, Black Fang saw the man’s hand close around her throat.
"Wha- Who- Stop! Guards!" He lifted her off the ground by her neck with one arm, her feet kicking at empty air.
His grip shifted once, found the angle, and wrenched sideways.
The crack split the cell like a cannon shot, and Shiori’s head lolled at an angle necks were never built to hold.
He released her. Her body pitched forward toward the chains and on pure instinct alone, Black Fang’s knee met her skull on the way down with everything [Eternal Hunger] had given her.
The impact went through the bone. The torturer’s head left her shoulders in a spray of red and grey that painted the cell wall, and the body that hit the floor between Black Fang’s feet was missing everything above the neck.
"He-"
"Villain!"
"Here?!"
"Run!"
The soldiers released Black Fang and scrambled backward, and the engineers broke for the door.
None of them made it a step.
Black Fang felt the air change before she understood what she was seeing.
Wind surged from the man’s now freed up palm in a pressure wave that ripped every hostile body in the room off the ground at once, soldiers and engineers alike rising from the stone in a tangle of limbs and screams as invisible force pinned them against the ceiling.
"Please-"
"I’m innocent-"
"I have family-"
Before they could even finish their pleading, the lightning came.
It poured from his five fingers into the mass of bodies overhead in a sustained arc that turned the cell white, and the sound that followed was the wet crackling of flesh cooking from the inside out, muscle seizing and rupturing as the current tore through one body into the next, chaining between them because the wind held them close enough to conduct.
Fat rendered beneath armor, eyes burst in their sockets, and the stench of charred meat hit Black Fang’s nostrils before the light faded.
He held it for three full seconds, and then his open palm began to close.
The bodies pinned against the ceiling compressed inward as his fingers curled, the invisible pressure folding charred limbs into torsos, armor buckling and crumpling like parchment, bones snapping in sequence as the gap between each body shrank to nothing.
Blood wrenched out of the collapsing mass in every direction, spraying across the ceiling, the walls, the floor, painting the cell in a rain of red that fell on Black Fang’s upturned face and ran warm down her cheeks.
His fist closed.
What hit the floor was no longer humanoid bodies but a wet, compressed knot of meat and steel and shattered bone that steamed against the cold stone, and the sound it made on impact was heavy and final.
He stood bare-chested in the center of the cell with blood dripping from the ceiling onto his bare shoulders, his chest rising and falling with breaths that carried a fury so dense the air around him felt heavier for it.
The wrath pouring off him had nothing performative in it, no display, no message. It was the real thing, radiating from every line of his body like heat from a forge, and the dungeon that had been built to break people felt small around it.
The blur in Black Fang’s vision began to thin, and the silhouette of a face resolved until she could see those deep, deep eyes of the man who had turned her life inside out so unfairly fast.
His gaze found hers across the cell and he smiled, expression beyond complicated.
"Miss me?"
