The grip on her jaw was like a vice of absolute zero.
Torment sat paralyzed beneath the suffocating, crushing weight of the Mad Prince’s aura.
The air on the deck of the Chain Breaker had turned thick and unbreathable, choked by the sheer density of a transcendent Titan’s malice.
And then, Torment opened her eyes.
She was blind, of course.
She had always been blind.
But as her milky, unseeing eyes locked directly with the lightless obsidian pools of the Mad Prince, something shifted in the fabric of the world.
It was a subtle, terrifyingly quiet intrusion.
Deep within the Mad Prince’s soul sea, amidst the endless ranks of silent, frozen shadows, a foreign presence manifested.
It was not a physical attack, nor an influx of essence.
It was a cold, ethereal thread of fate—a needle attempting to pierce the absolute darkness of his mind, searching for a memory, a weakness, a fundamental truth it could alter.
The Mad Prince froze.
His eyes narrowed into slits of pure, crystalline fury.
He was the sovereign of his own madness.
He had nurtured his Defilement, built a fortress of atrocities to protect the core of his intellect, and drowned the Sin of Solace in his own dark will.
The very idea that this fragile, rotting oracle thought she could reach into his mind and pull a string was not just an insult.
It was a profound, fatal mistake.
‘You…’
His reaction was faster than thought.
Faster than the flow of time upon the Great River.
Before Torment could sever the thread, before she could even blink, the Mad Prince’s free hand shot forward in a blur of terrifying violence.
He did not summon a blade.
He did not weave a shadow.
He simply plunged his index and middle fingers directly into Torment’s eye sockets.
The sound was wet, sickening, and terribly loud in the absolute silence of the ship.
Torment’s body went completely rigid as the Mad Prince’s cold, cracked fingers drove deep behind her ocular cavities, his grip closing with iron force.
With a brutal, casual flick of his wrist, he ripped both of her eyes out of her skull.
Blood sprayed across the pristine silk of his tunic, painting the pale skin of his face in a grotesque, crimson splatter.
He crushed the ruined, fleshy orbs in his palm, letting the blood drip through his fingers onto the wooden deck.
“You dare enter my mind?” The Mad Prince whispered, his voice dangerously soft, carrying a coldness that froze the very marrow in Torment’s bones.
“Who gave you the authority to enter and change something in my domain?”
The shadows pooling across the deck of the Chain Breaker violently erupted.
They grew incredibly dense, expanding like a tidal wave of ink, devouring the light of the seven suns, devouring the wind, devouring the physical space of the ship.
The Mad Prince’s domain asserted its absolute authority.
Torment writhed.
She thrashed against the iron grip he still held on her jaw, her ruined, bleeding eye sockets weeping a torrent of dark, corrupted blood.
She channeled her Defiled essence, attempting to break free, but it was entirely useless.
The physical discrepancy between a Corrupted Terror and a Supreme Titan was an insurmountable chasm.
He held her with the effortless strength of a falling mountain.
She opened her mouth, her vocal cords vibrating with the raw, terrifying power of the Defilement, and let out a harrowing shout.
SCREEECH!
The sound was not human.
It was a weaponized shockwave of pure, fate-rending force.
Suddenly, a localized spatial tear—an invisible, razor-sharp thread of severed fate—snapped across the Mad Prince’s hand.
Squelch.
The four fingers holding Torment’s jaw were cleanly amputated.
Torment immediately threw herself backward, her body contorting with impossible, arachnid grace as she broke free from his severed grip, skidding across the dark wood of the deck to put distance between them. New chapters come out on novelping(.)com first.
The Mad Prince did not pursue her.
He stood perfectly still, looking down at the bloody stumps of his hand.
He didn’t even wince.
The pain was a distant, irrelevant detail.
“Oh? A spatial severing? Or did you just cut the thread of my physical continuity?” The Mad Prince chuckled, genuinely amused.
“Not bad, Tormant. Not bad at all.”
He willed his essence into the wound.
Instantly, the while liquid darkness surged from his shadow cores, wrapping around the stumps.
In less than a second, the shadows solidified, weaving flesh, bone, and skin back into perfect, flawless existence.
His fingers flexed, entirely restored.
But he was done playing.
Without a word, the Mad Prince’s obsidian eyes flashed.
From the churning darkness enveloping the ship, two distinct shadows detached themselves.
They moved with blinding, absolute speed, pouncing toward the bleeding oracle.
Torment was blinded, bleeding, and reeling, but she was still an oracle.
As the shadow blade cleaved through the air where her neck had been a millisecond prior, Torment leaned back at an impossible angle, letting the lethal arc pass over her skin.
The second shadow’s massive fist slammed down, meant to crush her spine, but she had already shifted her weight, spinning like a grotesque dancer.
She dodged every strike.
Left, right, duck, weave.
The two Titan-class shadows were phenomenally fast, but Torment was moving not according to their physical actions, but according to the inescapable trajectory of the future.
She saw the attacks before the intent to strike even fully formed in the shadows’ non-existent minds.
The Mad Prince watched the lethal dance with cold, analytical detachment.
‘She is reading the intent of the space around her,’ he calculated, a cruel smile returning to his lips.
‘She cannot be touched by what she can predict.
So…
one must simply strike from a place that has no future.
A blind spot.’
Torment elegantly sidestepped another sweeping blow, her ruined face turned toward the two attacking shadows.
She did not notice the darkness beneath her own feet.
A third shadow, completely hidden within the cast silhouette of Torment’s own body, suddenly surged upward like a striking viper.
It did not traverse the physical space of the deck; it simply materialized from her own darkness.
Before Torment’s foresight could register the impossible origin of the attack, the third shadow’s hand shot out and clamped down on her lower jaw with the crushing force of a hydraulic press.
Torment froze, her precognition violently short-circuiting.
In that exact fraction of a millisecond, the Mad Prince stepped into the shadows.
He vanished from his position at the bow of the ship and materialized directly in the air above Torment, gravity momentarily suspended by his shadow authority.
He inverted his body, reaching down with his pale, flawless hands, and grabbed her upper jaw.
His eyes met her empty, bleeding sockets.
“Predict this,” he whispered.
He planted his boot against her collarbone for leverage, and wrenched his arms upward with the full, devastating physical might of Transcendent Titan, while the third shadow anchored her lower jaw to the floor.
CRACK!
The sound of shattering bone echoed across the silent expanse of the Great River like a gunshot.
Tendons tore.
Muscles snapped.
The hinges of Torment’s jaw were violently, irreparably destroyed.
Her lower jaw hung uselessly from her face, attached only by a few bloody, ragged strips of flesh and skin.
Torment crashed backward onto the deck, her body violently convulsing.
For a second, there was silence.
And then, a sound erupted from her ruined throat.
It was the sound of an ancient, cosmic horror being unchained.
The scream vibrated through the sacred wood of the Chain Breaker, causing the hull to groan and splinter.
The waters of the Great River violently churned, waves of liquid glass crashing against the sides of the ship.
Torment was raging.
The meticulous, careful control she had maintained over her Corruption shattered completely.
She surrendered to the Defilement.
Her pale, delicate flesh began to boil and tear as the colossal, grotesque abomination hidden beneath her skin began to rapidly expand, bursting through her human constraints in a horrifying display of absolute, unhinged power.
The aura she projected instantly became toxic, heavy, and lethal.
It was a power that threatened to warp the very laws of reality on the ship.
The Mad Prince landed gracefully on the deck, his eyes narrowing as he analyzed the rapidly expanding horror before him.
‘A Corrupted Terror shedding its vessel,’ he noted coldly.
‘Annoying.’
He completely understood the situation.
If he allowed her to fully transform, tackling her would become a tedious, destructive endeavor that could heavily damage the Chain Breaker—a vessel he still needed.
He didn’t have time to waste.
His mind issued a single, absolute command.
The two shadows that had been attacking her—surged forward, completely ignoring the toxic, corrosive aura radiating from the transforming oracle.
The first shadow grabbed Torment’s left leg.
The second shadow grabbed her right leg.
But they were not alone.
The Mad Prince possessed seven shadow cores.
He commanded the absolute pinnacle of shadow manipulation.
Instantly, he channeled his remaining shadows, weaponizing the fundamental trait of his Divine Aspect.
He sent two of his formless shadows crashing into the each manifested shadow , layering over its form, multiplying there physical strength by an impossible, exponential margin.
Six shadows deployed.
Two acting as anchors, four acting as transcendent augmentations.
The physical strength contained within the grips of the two shadow eclipsed the limits of the Nightmare Spell’s logic.
They were holding her with the force of collapsing stars.
Torment, midway through her monstrous transformation, thrashed wildly, her broken jaw hanging loose, her corrupted essence lashing out in desperate, world-ending strikes.
But it did not matter.
Nothing mattered against the absolute, brute force of a Transcendent Titan.
The Mad Prince stood a few meters away, his hands casually clasped behind his back, his pristine face entirely devoid of emotion.
He gave a slight, dismissive nod.
The augmented shadows pulled left and right.
There was no drawn-out struggle.
There was no epic clash of wills.
There was only a sickening, catastrophic RIIIIP.
Torment’s body—flesh, bone, corrupted armor, and soul—was violently, instantly bifurcated.
The two augmented shadows tore her completely in half from the groin to the crown of her skull.
A geyser of black, corrupted blood erupted into the air, raining down upon the deck of the Chain Breaker like a torrential downpour.
The two halves of the oracle’s ruined, transforming body were tossed casually onto the blood-soaked wood, twitching uselessly as the dark light of life faded from them.
The deafening roar was silenced.
The crushing aura of the Defilement evaporated into the wind.
The Mad Prince stood in the quiet aftermath, the heavy rain of corrupted blood washing over him, soaking his raven hair and black silk tunic.
He looked down at the two halves of the blind oracle, his obsidian eyes entirely indifferent.
“Well,” he murmured quietly to the empty ship.
“That was entirely too loud.”