Shadow Slave

[You have slain a Great Tyrant, Soul of Kanakht.]

[You have slain a Corrupted Devil, Aletes of the Nine.]

Jet glanced up at the dark sky of the Eternal City.

She should have felt ecstatic, but instead, the thought that came to mind was...

‘D—damn.’

She had not been away for long, but the sky above her was crumbling.

The torrential rain had turned into an apocalyptic downpour, and here and there, colossal hexagonal pillars towered above the ruined city. From afar, it seemed as if they were supporting the invisible dome of the sky, but it did not take Jet more than a moment to realize what they really were. The vast surface of the invisible dome turned out to be composed of countless hexagons, and as some of them faded out of existence, the cold waters of the Stormsea rushed down under devastating pressure. The giant pillars were not supporting the dome — they were water falling through the breaches in the dome, still contained in their shape.

On top of that, the Palace was nowhere to be seen. Instead of it, a gargantuan mass of bent metal was floating in the air, groaning as it was being bent even further.

‘By the dead gods. I only stepped out for a moment...’

On the positive side, the Shadow Legion seemed to have been pushing the wraiths back. And now that both the Tyrant controlling them and the Devil controlling the Tyrant were gone, those wraiths were barely a threat. They would be wiped out before too long.

‘Right.’

Jet finally remembered what she had done. She had killed them.

The Soul of Kanakht, the Cursed Wanderer. The horror of the seas, Dutchman, and its fearsome captain were both gone, slain by her hand like many abominations before them. Jet had killed countless Nightmare Creatures throughout the years, but still... This was her crowning achievement. A Saint killing a Great Tyrant was not exactly a common occurrence — in fact, it was something that was not really supposed to happen.

And yet, Jet had done it.

In the end, it had all come down to the decision she made after activating the special ability granted to the Mist Blade by the soul of the Heart of Kanakht.

Jet had wanted to attempt killing the Cursed Wanderer, but she was not sure if she would be able to. It was a gamble, and a perilous one at that.

So, in the end, she went with a different gamble.

Instead of trying to slay the master of the Soul of Kanakht, he chose to be swallowed by it.

It was not an entirely reckless decision. Jet had been studying the Dutchman and its wraiths for a while by then. She had especially noted that the ghostly cutlass kept emanating torrents of ethereal light, summoning more spectral warriors onto the battlefield... which meant that its hold was not empty yet.

The Soul of Kanakht was a hungry beast that had devoured countless souls throughout the ages.

However...

Jet had quite an appetite herself.

She wanted to kill the Cursed Wanderer, but that was not her task. Her task was to hold him back and buy her allies enough time to accomplish their goals. The Soul of Kanakht was his source of power, so if she could destroy or weaken it, that would achieve the same result.

Plus, she had just the needed constitution to do that, being a wraith and all.

So instead of trying to kill the Cursed Wanderer in the single heartbeat granted to her by the Heart of Kanakht, Jet severed his hand and took hold of the ghostly cutlass instead.

She knew that it would consume her. In fact, the very purpose of stealing the Soul of Kanakht was to be consumed by it. Still, when she felt herself being drawn into the viridian blade, she could not help but feel unnerved and cursed quietly.

In the next moment, she was gone.

Out there in the belly of the Soul of Kanakht, the world was different.

There was no world there, actually, to begin with.

There was no space, no time, no life, no death.

Just a vague expanse of viridian glow that enveloped her like a mire...

And the presence of many souls that the Tyrant had consumed, just like her.

But there was one crucial difference between Jet and those subjugated souls. They had been killed before becoming thralls of the Soul of Kanakht. Jet, however, had been dead to begin with... she entered captivity as a malevolent wraith, not as a hapless soul stripped of its flesh.

And that allowed Jet a measure of independence, at least for a brief moment. She was on the verge of dying by then, her soul almost entirely drained of essence. The tyrannical Will of the Soul of Kanakht descended upon her, striving to suffocate her sense of self and make her a mindless, obedient thrall. It might have succeeded, as well — it would have, probably, given a chance.

But Jet did not give the Soul of Kanakht an opportunity to conquer her.

Instead, she used that brief moment to raise the Mist Blade and focused her killing intent into a razor-sharp scythe.

One slash of that scythe was enough to harvest every enthralled soul within the Great Tyrant.

After all, there was no space and no time there. That meant that all of the captured souls occupied the same space, and unleashing ten thousand strikes took the same amount of time as striking once.

So, like a fox in the henhouse, Soul Reaper Jet slaughtered every single phantom contained within the Soul of Kanakht in an instant.

‘Uh-oh.’

A tsunami of essence flooded her crumbling soul, mending it in an instant.

Much more impactful was the great torrent of fragments that flowed into her shattered soul core.

The core, which had been growing steadily for decades, suddenly ballooned, increasing in size at a speed visible to the naked eye.

It had instantly grown so vast and so heavy, in fact, that Jet’s Transcendent soul started to struggle with bearing its weight.

‘That’s... quite a boon. I think.’

Jet felt strange. Much more powerful, yes, but also... dangerously unbalanced.

She would deal with that later, though. For now...

Jet had slaughtered every soul enveloped by the viridian glow with her first strike. Her second strike was aimed at the walls of her prison itself.

It was as if she were cutting a way through the belly of a beast after being swallowed by it.

Soon enough, the strange unworld surrounding her shattered, and she found herself under the tempestuous sky of the Eternal City once again.

Standing in front of the Cursed Wanderer. The sinister wraith seemed greatly diminished now that the source of his power was destroyed. Jet, meanwhile, felt more powerful than ever.

So, she brought her scythe down and erased her adversary from existence.

That was how the dreadful legend of the Cursed Wanderer and his appalling ship ended.

That was how a new chapter was added to the glorious legend of the Soul Reaper Jet, as well.