The final swallowing sound was heavy, wet, and sickeningly absolute.
Devouring Beast tilted her colossal head toward the golden suns, her throat working in rhythmic, convulsive bulges as the pulverized remnants of Master Jet slid down her gullet.
Dark, hot blood dripped from her lower jaw, splashing onto the frozen basalt below with a series of dull splats.
atop the crumbling ridge, the remaining human survivors did not scream.
They had passed far beyond the threshold of panic into a state of hollow, catatonic paralysis.
They simply stared at the towering abomination, their weapons limp in their hands, waiting for the end.
In the darkness beneath the shattered overhang, the Mad Prince watched the monster lick its blood-smeared lips.
‘Disgusting,’ he thought, though his obsidian eyes gleamed with cold, academic fascination.
‘A Tyrant reduced to a mindless, grazing animal.
How the mighty fall when the Spell strips away their sanity.’
Devouring Beast turned her sunken, red-rimmed eyes toward the terrified humans huddled behind the ruined wall.
A low, rumbling growl vibrated in her chest, shaking the loose pebbles on the ground.
She took a heavy step forward, raising a massive, tree-trunk arm to scoop up the remaining morsels of flesh.
She never completed the motion.
The temperature on the ridge plummeted to absolute zero in a fraction of a second.
The dark blood coating the tyrant’s face instantly froze into jagged, crimson icicles.
The moist air turned into razor-sharp frost, and a heavy, suffocating grey fog spilled out from the tree line, creeping over the mummified grass like a living shroud.
Devouring Beast halted, her massive nostrils flaring.
She turned her head slowly, looking down at the mist.
From the quiet gloom of the dying forest, a slender, pale figure stepped into the light.
Undying Slaughter.
Corrupted Jet moved with an eerie, weightless grace.
Her flesh was translucent and deathly pale, like polished ice over marble.
In her hands, she held a scythe forged from solid, black frost—a weapon that radiated a stench of such absolute, unholy death that even the air around it seemed to wither and decay.
She did not look at the fleeing humans.
She did not look at the blood-stained ruins.
Her milky, lifeless eyes fixed entirely on Devouring Beast.
The Mad Prince, observing from the depths of his shadow veil, felt a dry chuckle bubble up in his throat.
‘Ah.
Of course.’
It was a masterclass in tragic irony.
Devouring Beast, in her infinite, ravenous gluttony, had just devoured the very prey Undying Slaughter had spent days herding and cornering.
For Undying Slaughter, souls were not a luxury; they were fuel.
Her soul core was a broken vessel, constantly leaking vitality into the void.
Without a steady harvest of soul essence, her corpse-like existence would collapse into true death.
And Devouring Beast had just swallowed her dinner.
Two Plagues.
Two monstrous Flaws.
One tiny, starving island.
Devouring Beast let out a deep, territorial roar, a sound that cracked the basalt beneath her feet.
She did not see a former companion, a sister-in-arms who had walked the Nightmare beside her.
She saw only a nuisance—a tiny, frozen pest standing between her and her next meal.
The colossal tyrant lashed out first.
Her massive fist swung through the air with the speed of a falling thunderbolt, carrying enough physical force to level a mountain.
The shockwave alone flattened the surrounding trees, tearing up tons of earth and rock in a devastating arc.
BOOM!
The fist slammed into the ground where Undying Slaughter had been standing, pulverizing the stone into fine powder.
When the dust cleared, Undying Slaughter was still there.
She had not dodged.
She had simply phased through the physical impact, her ghostly, spectral form untethered from the material world.
She stepped forward, floating effortlessly over the crater, and brought her icy scythe down in a violent, vertical cleave.
SWISH.
The frost-blade passed through Devouring Beast’s colossal chest without leaving a single scratch on her thick, hyper-dense skin.
There was no blood. Visit g.com for the full chapter.
No severed flesh.
No physical wound.
Yet, Devouring Beast threw her head back and unleashed a scream of utter, agonized torment.
ROAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAR!
The sound was horrifying.
The titan stumbled backward, her massive legs buckling as she crashed against the cliffside.
A vast, dark section of her soul core had been violently severed.
The necrotic cold of the scythe had bypassed her impenetrable physical armor entirely, striking directly at the spark of life sustaining her massive form.
In the shadows, the Mad Prince’s eyes narrowed into sharp, calculating slits.
‘Brilliant,’ he remarked internally, his mind rapidly cataloging the exchange.
‘Effie’s physical defense is absolute—her Tyrant flesh can withstand blows from Supreme memories without a dent.
But her soul?
Her soul is just as vulnerable to Jet’s reaper-blade as a mundane Awakened’s.’
However, the fight was far from one-sided.
Devouring Beast, maddened by the sudden, excruciating pain in her soul, lost whatever thread of intellect she had left.
She became a force of pure, primal destruction.
She did not bother trying to punch the specter again.
Instead, she opened her cavernous mouth and unleashed a terrifying, shockwave-inducing roar of pure kinetic essence.
Simultaneously, she slammed both her massive palms against the ground, causing the very earth beneath Undying Slaughter to erupt into a geyser of shattered basalt, boiling mud, and physical pressure.
Undying Slaughter was forced to solidify her form to ground her essence against the raw kinetic energy.
The moment she materialized, Devouring Beast’s massive, stone-crushing hand swept across the ground like a scythe.
CRASH!
The tyrant’s backhand clipped Undying Slaughter.
Even a glancing blow from a corrupted Tyrant carrying the mass of a small mountain was catastrophic.
Undying Slaughter’s pale form was blasted through the air like a ragdoll, smashing through three stone pillars before slamming into the solid rock face of the ridge.
THUD!
Stone shattered, raining down upon the specter.
Undying Slaughter stood up instantly, her body dark and translucent as her leaking essence surged to repair her broken frame.
But the Mad Prince noticed the subtle tremor in her hands.
Her essence pool was dropping rapidly.
Maintaining her spectral intangibility, regenerating her shattered form, and wielding a blade heavy enough to wound a Great Titan was draining her at an alarming rate.
She was a ticking clock.
If she did not harvest a massive soul core soon, her leaking flaw would finish what Devouring Beast started.
“Feed…” a rasping, hollow voice echoed from beneath Undying Slaughter’s pale lips.
It was the first time she had spoken, a sound like dry leaves scraping over a coffin lid.
“Need… to feed…”
Driven by the desperate, instinctual dread of her emptying core, Undying Slaughter blurred into a shadow of grey mist.
She reappeared directly above Devouring Beast’s head.
With a wild, desperate snarl, she drove her black frost scythe straight down through the crown of the tyrant’s skull, burying the blade to the hilt into the monster’s brain and soul sea.
Devouring Beast stiffened instantly.
A thick layer of black, necrotic frost exploded across the tyrant’s colossal body.
Her skin turned grey, her veins turning into black, frozen threads beneath her flesh.
The monster fell to her knees, the ground shuddering beneath her immense weight, as Undying Slaughter began to forcibly siphon the titan’s massive, dying soul essence directly into her own core.
The grey fog surged, thick and triumphant.
Undying Slaughter’s pale skin began to glow with dark, stolen power.
In the darkness, the Mad Prince’s cold smile faded.
His eyes narrowed into dangerous, lightless abysses.
‘No,’ he thought, his mind snapping into razor-sharp focus.
‘That will not do at all.’
If Undying Slaughter successfully devoured the soul of a corrupted Tyrant, her essence pool would be completely replenished.
She would become an unstoppable, fully charged terror—a threat capable of tracking him down and severing his own Transcendent cores with her renewed vigor.
He could not allow her to finish the meal.
The Mad Prince stepped out of the shadow. New chapters come out on g.com first.
He did not make a sound.
He did not unleash a dramatic wave of essence.
He simply materialized on the edge of the shattered ridge, his soot-stained coat fluttering in the icy wind, his pale, cracked face completely devoid of emotion.
In his right hand, a blade of pure, lightless darkness materialized—the Sin of Solace, humming with dark, maddening whispers that echoed only in his mind.
‘Look at you,’ the blade whispered in his ear, its voice a sickening copy of his own past self.
‘Stealing the kills of your dead friends…
how regal.
How brave.’
The Mad Prince ignored the voice, as he had ignored it for centuries.
He raised his left hand, his obsidian eyes fixing upon the pale specter perched atop the kneeling tyrant’s head.
“Torment,” he whispered, his dead rasp cutting cleanly through the howling wind.
From the dark ocean of his soul sea, the shadow of the blind oracle reacted instantly.
She did not manifest physically; instead, her invisible, spiritual authority surged out through the Shadow Bond, locking onto the wounded, distracted mind of Undying Slaughter.
[Ability Activated: Memory Master / Near Sight]
For a fraction of a microsecond, Undying Slaughter’s milky, unseeing eyes locked onto the empty air above the Mad Prince.
It was all Torment needed.
An invisible, surgical spike of dark authority pierced straight through Undying Slaughter’s mental defenses.
It did not try to rewrite her life or alter her grand history—it simply deleted a single, immediate variable from her active consciousness:
The perception of the Mad Prince’s presence.
Undying Slaughter’s instincts, honed by centuries of predation, completely failed to register the Transcendent Titan standing fifty feet away.
To her mind, the ridge was empty.
There was only her dying prey beneath her feet.
The Mad Prince smiled—a cold, terrifying, triumphant expression.
“A master card indeed,” he murmured.
He moved.
He did not glide.
He did not run.
He simply ceased to exist at the edge of the ridge, re-appearing instantly behind Undying Slaughter, standing directly on the shoulder of the dying, frozen beast.
Undying Slaughter was still greedily pulling essence from Devouring Beast’s skull, completely blind to the death standing behind her.
The Mad Prince raised the Sin of Solace.
“Rest now, Jet,” he whispered, his voice dropping into a soft, wet purr directly against her cold ear.
“You’ve been dead for a very long time.”
He plunged the dark blade sideways, driving it cleanly through the side of Undying Slaughter’s pale neck, severing the soul thread connecting her mind to her decaying core.
Undying Slaughter’s eyes widened in sudden, senseless shock.
Her scythe dissolved into grey mist, her siphon broken instantly.
Before she could process the betrayal, the Mad Prince unleashed the full, terrifying weight of his Transcendent darkness.
Black tendrils erupted from his palm, wrapping around her pale form, dragging her screaming, dying soul directly into the lightless abyss of his soul sea, where millions of hungry shades waited to tear her spirit into manageable fragments.
With a heavy, wet collapse, Undying Slaughter vanished from the waking world.
The Mad Prince stood atop the colossal, dying head of Devouring Beast.
The corrupted tyrant beneath his feet gave one last, weak shudder as the necrotic frost settled permanently into her brain, her massive eyes rolling back into her head as her heart finally ceased to beat.
Two Plagues.
Two ancient companions.
Exterminated in a single, cold, effortless strike.
The Mad Prince stood amidst the howling wind, looking down at his pale, bloodless hands.
The dark essence of two powerful entities was already being processed within his cores, expanding his power to heights that made the very air around him distort with heavy, atmospheric pressure.
He turned his head slowly, looking downstream toward the horizon where the river flowed into the unknown darkness of the Estuary.
He had won the battle.
He had claimed the power.
And yet, deep within his mind, that empty, hollow void—the memory Torment had stolen from him—pulsed with a quiet, mocking rhythm.
A low, dry chuckle escaped his lips, carrying over the silent, frosted island.
“Two down,” the Mad Prince whispered to the sky, his obsidian eyes burning with pure, unadulterated madness.
“Four to go. Hide all you want, little oracle… I will tear this Nightmare apart until there is nowhere left for you to run.”