A roar of pure, unadulterated fury tore from the Mad Prince’s throat.
The sound was not human.
It was the apocalyptic screech of a Transcendent Titan, heavy with the weight of ancient darkness and corrupted authority.
The sheer acoustic force hit the Chain Breaker like a physical hammer, cracking the sacred wood of the deck and sending violent ripples cascading across the liquid glass of the Great River.
“Curse you!” he screamed, his voice raw, rasping, and echoing off the empty horizon.
“Curse you to the deepest pit of the void!”
He thrashed his arms, sending waves of black shadow essence exploding outward.
The dark force shredded the ship’s rigging, snapped two of the auxiliary oars into splinters, and blasted a cloud of ash high into the gold-lit sky.
Everything.
Everything he had built across centuries of torturous, mind-bending loops—every domino he had painstakingly set in place to conquer this accursed Nightmare—was now compromised.
A gap.
A void.
An erased variable.
How could he execute a flawless plan when he did not even know what variable had been stolen from his mind?
In a game played against the Nightmare Spell and the shifting paradoxes of the Tomb of Ariel, a single blind spot was a death sentence.
Was it an artifact?
A secret route to the Estuary?
Or a person—a seventh presence whose very existence had been scrubbed clean from his memory?
A flurry of frantic schemes surged through his mind, flickering like violent lightning in a storm.
‘If I alter the course…
if I intercept the downstream currents early…
if I burn the river to ash…’
‘No.
What if that plays directly into the erased trap?
What if the missing piece is waiting for me at the Estuary precisely because I changed my momentum?’
His head throbbed violently.
The lightless void inside his soul sea seemed to twist and pulse, a phantom ache threatening to tear his control to ribbons.
His breathing grew jagged, heavy, and frantic.
His obsidian eyes darted wildly, scanning the serene, empty river as if expecting an invisible demon to leap from the water and strike him down.
He was losing control.
The razor-thin tightrope of absolute composure he had walked since butchering his past self was fraying at the edges.
For several long, suffocating minutes, only the sound of his ragged breathing and the soft lapping of the river filled the air.
Then, slowly…
the madness receded.
The Mad Prince went deathly silent.
The trembling in his hands stopped.
His wild, blood-red pinprick pupils expanded back into cool, lightless abysses.
A chilling, unnatural stillness settled over his pale frame, as smooth and cold as marble.
He closed his eyes, taking one long, deep breath of the ash-scented wind.
“Panicking is for the weak,” he whispered to himself, his voice dropping back into its familiar, dead rasp.
“And I am not weak. I am the master of this realm.”
If he could not remember the variable, he would simply crush everything in his path with such overwhelming, absolute force that no hidden trap could survive the aftermath.
He did not need foresight when he possessed the strength to turn the board to dust.
Opening his eyes, the Mad Prince turned toward the helm of the Chain Breaker.
He raised his hand and flooded the vessel with his shadow essence.
Tendrils of pure black darkness surged through the planks, binding themselves to the keel, the masts, and the rudder.
The ancient wood groaned, absorbing his Transcendent power, before the ship violently lurched forward, carving a line of white foam through the liquid glass as it accelerated downstream. Read the latest chapters at novelping dot com.
He was done playing defensively.
It was time to hunt.
[—–In previous iterations of the loop, the Mad Prince had acted as a shadowy puppeteer. He had carefully manipulated the movements of the Plagues, herding them, positioning them, and using them to construct an elaborate, agonizing gauntlet for his past self and the cohort to navigate. He had intentionally placed Undying Slaughter and Devouring Beast in close proximity, forcing a terrifying bottleneck along the river. But in this timeline, he had abandoned the play. He had no interest in guiding a past self that no longer existed. He was conquering the Nightmare alone. Without his dark intervention to group them, the Plagues had reverted to their raw, monstrous instincts. They roamed the Great River as independent horrors, occupying territories carved out by their own corrupt desires and insatiable Flaws. ]
For three days, the Chain Breaker cut through the misty expanse of time, propelled by a silent, dark gale.
On the fourth day, the horizon changed.
Emerging from the radiant glare of the seven suns was a jagged, mountainous island.
Its tall, basalt cliffs rose dramatically from the water, crowned by dense, primordial forests and ancient, crumbling stone ruins.
This island had once been a thriving sanctuary for the River People—a prosperous hub where thousands of temporal refugees built homes upon the ancient stone work of the First People.
But that was before Undying Slaughter had claimed it.
Now, a heavy, suffocating mist hung over the island like a funeral shroud.
The Mad Prince stood at the bow, staring at the grey fog.
He could feel the pervasive, icy aura radiating from the land—a necrotic stench that smelled of rot, frozen iron, and static souls.
Most of the River People had long since fled downstream in desperate flotillas, abandoning the island to the dead.
Yet, his sharp senses picked up faint, fluttering sparks of vitality lingering near the island’s central ridge.
A small, stubborn remnant of human defenders remained, entrenched in high stone fortifications, hopelessly waging a delayed war of survival against the encroaching death.
The Chain Breaker glided silently into the shadow of a jagged coastal reef, coming to a rest without making a sound.
The Mad Prince stepped over the side of the boat.
The moment his soot-stained boots touched the wet pebbles of the shore, his body dissolved.
He flattened into a thin, lightless smear, merging seamlessly with the jagged shadows cast by the rocks, and glided effortlessly into the island’s interior.
Moving through the shadows was as natural to him as breathing.
He traversed miles of terrain in mere seconds, passing through ruined villages choked with vines, past empty stone houses whose doorways were painted with dried blood, and up toward the fog-shrouded ridge.
It did not take him long to locate the epicenter of the necrotic fog.
The air grew bitterly cold.
Leaves on the trees were coated in a layer of black frost, and the ground was littered with the mummified, soul-drained corpses of wild beasts and River People alike.
Their skin was dry, drawn tight over bone, their eyes wide with frozen horror—their soul essence completely siphoned away.
The Mad Prince halted his shadow form beneath the overhang of a massive basalt boulder, carefully analyzing the territory ahead.
Undying Slaughter.
He knew her capabilities intimately.
In life, her Aspect was terrifying—an absolute offensive power that bypassed physical defenses, strike after strike severing the soul directly.
But her Flaw had been a constant, ravenous leash: her soul core was a leaking vessel.
If her essence hit zero, she died.
She was forced to kill continuously merely to remain among the living.
Corrupted by the Defilement, that Flaw had mutated into something nightmarish.
Undying Slaughter was not a living creature anymore.
She was an undead engine of war.
She possessed no flesh to bleed out, no organs to crush, and no mortal breath to extinguish.
She was a corpse sustained entirely by the stolen soul essence of her victims.
To kill her through normal physical combat was practically impossible; she would simply regenerate, absorbing the blows until her opponent’s soul was hollowed out by her scythe.
The only way to end her was a battle of pure attrition—forcing her to expend her accumulated essence pool until her core dried up, or striking directly at her shadow anchor to sever her tether to the world.
‘It will be an annoying, tedious fight,’ the Mad Prince calculated coldly, his mind running through the battle geometry.
‘Her soul strikes can ignore even my Supreme armor.
If I engage her directly, I will be forced to burn a considerable amount of shadow essence to keep my cores shielded…’
BOOM.
The ground beneath his shadow form suddenly surged upward.
The massive basalt boulder above him cracked in half as a terrifying, violent shockwave tore through the forest.
BOOM.
BOOM.
It was not an earthquake.
It was the rhythmic, earth-shattering impact of massive footsteps.
The Mad Prince narrowed his eyes within the darkness, raising his perception.
Through the thick, black-frosted mist, a colossal shape materialized, rising high above the canopy of the primeval trees.
It was a titan.
A mountain of dark, grotesque flesh and hyper-dense muscle, moving with a terrifying, heavy speed that quaked the very foundations of the island.
Trees snapped like twigs beneath its advance; stone ruins were ground into dust under its immense weight.
Devouring Beast.
The Mad Prince’s mind stalled for a microsecond.
‘Why is she here?’
He had calculated her position to be miles away, roaming the wild, unchartered islets of the upper river.
She was not supposed to be on this island.
In her original corrupted state, her territory was distinct from Jet’s.
Yet, as he stared at the looming, colossal horror crashing through the forest, the answer presented itself with stark, brilliant clarity.
Their Flaws.
Just like Undying Slaughter, Devouring Beast was a prisoner to an insatiable, monstrous Flaw.
In life, Effie’s Flaw forced her to consume vast amounts of food to power her staggering physical strength.
But as a Corrupted Titan, her body had grown to colossal proportions—and her appetite had expanded into an endless, black hole of gluttony.
She needed to consume thousands of pounds of living flesh daily merely to maintain her metabolic momentum.
Because the Mad Prince had not organized the river in this timeline, the two female Plagues had hunted their respective territories to total extinction.
Undying Slaughter had drained the souls of almost every living human on the nearby islands, while Devouring Beast had devoured every megafauna beast and refugee camp in her reach.
Driven by sheer, ravenous desperation, Devouring Beast had followed the scent of the remaining living humans—the desperate enclave of River People holding out on this very ridge!
They had both been drawn to the same tiny, flickering candle of human life like starved predators.
Devouring Beast was here to eat their flesh.
Undying Slaughter was here to harvest their souls.
A dark, incredibly wicked smile stretched across the Mad Prince’s hidden face beneath the shadow of the rock.
A coincidence?
No.
In the Tomb of Ariel, where time looped and twisted upon itself, coincidence was merely the cruel geometry of fate.
‘Two Plagues…
in one place.’
A wild, brilliant new scheme ignited in his mind, burning away the lingering paranoia of his lost memory.
Why should he waste his own shadow essence fighting an annoying battle of attrition against Undying Slaughter?
Why should he risk taking soul-damaging strikes when he had a mountain of ravenous, mindless flesh standing right in front of him?
Devouring Beast’s hyper-dense, Titan flesh was packed with immense vitality—a feast of physical essence.
Undying Slaughter’s necrotic aura was toxic to living things, a absolute poison to anything that breathed.
If two starved, apex abominations collided over the same tiny piece of prey…
they wouldn’t share.
They would tear each other to shreds.
The Mad Prince sank deeper into the lightless abyss of the obsidian shadow, his dark, manic chuckle dissolving silently into the cold, frosted air of the forest.
“How deliciously convenient,” he whispered into the fog.
“Let the monsters feed on each other.”