The Sinful Young Master

Chapter 468: The one controlling the nynthralls

Jolthar extended his enhanced vision toward the figure on the entity’s back.

At first, he noticed the color of the figure. It was grey, not the pale ash of Nynthralls but a different grey, structured and deliberate, like stone given living texture. The figure was roughly humanoid — bipedal and proportioned approximately correctly, which made it more disturbing rather than less because the eyes were wrong. Amber, slit-pupiled, catching the corrupted light and returning it in ways that suggested the eyes were processing more of the spectrum than they were designed to admit. It sat atop the ten-tailed monster with the ease of something that had never considered falling, positioned not like a rider in the conventional sense but like an extension of what it rode, connected to it in ways that weren’t entirely physical.

Nyphorite.

The recognition was immediate and certain — the grey skin, the amber eyes, and the quality of malice radiating from it were consistent with the elite guard class that surrounded duke-class entities.

But the level—

Jolthar reached with his senses, trying to determine what he was dealing with, running assessments that had never failed to produce at least a working estimate of an opponent’s capability. He knew it was a nyphorite because he fought them and killed one of them personally.

Nothing resolved. The reading kept sliding away, the way trying to look directly at something very bright produces only the afterimage rather than the thing itself.

The nyphorite’s level wasn’t hidden exactly — it was simply beyond the range his assessments were calibrated for, like trying to measure ocean depth with a ruler designed for carpentry.

“Can you read it?” Caelum asked quietly beside him.

“No,” Jolthar admitted.

Caelum’s expression didn’t show alarm, but it settled into the particular gravity of someone who had just received information that changed the parameters of a situation significantly. He turned to the camp, and his voice carried across it with the authority of someone who had commanded people in dangerous places long enough that the command and the compliance had become reflexive on both sides.

“Full combat readiness. Defensive formation alpha around the camp perimeter. Ward teams activate all prepared barriers. I want the three senior cultivators at the forward point in two minutes.”

The camp responded immediately, the organized controlled movement of professionals who had spent months preparing for exactly this kind of moment.

Across the distance, the Naemarys camp was doing the same.

Jolthar could see Daerius and Lyralei coordinating their own people with competence that he gave genuine credit for regardless of the complicated politics their presence represented. Two months in the Depths produced either capability or corpses, and the Naemarys siblings were clearly the former.

Jolthar looked at the horde, at the ten-tailed monster, and at the unreadable nyphorite positioned atop it and ran his internal inventory of what he had available.

The Void Requiem was off the table — his voidwrath reserves weren’t close to sufficient for that technique and wouldn’t be for another day at minimum. Extended Knashii work was possible but expensive given current levels. The chaosaura and telekinesis were functional, recovery there being faster than Voidwrath’s.

What he needed was something that produced maximum results for minimum reserve expenditure. Something that could operate effectively against numbers and against the kind of threat the nyphorite represented without drawing from the deep reserves that were still replenishing.

He extended his hand and from the ring, a long sword appeared.

Horgarth, the sword of chaosbane.

Caelum saw the blade and he could tell it was the sword of Madsovereign.

He could see that Jolthar was now fully adept with the sword. He felt like seeing his ancestor for a moment, seeing how Jolthar was wielding the Horgath and how his aura had changed completely the moment the sword appeared in his hand.

The chaobane blade was different from either of his other weapons in character and in cost. Where Knashii drew on voidwrath — deep, ancient, expensive — and Vorthak drew on chaos energy in its raw form, Horgath operated on a principle of disruption and amplification.

Chaobane energy didn’t consume like void or destabilize like pure chaos. It found the existing weaknesses in a target’s structure and expanded them, turning an opponent’s own density and power against them. Against large targets, against things with significant accumulated energy — nynthralls saturated with malice, a horde carrying the momentum of thousands — Chaobane was extraordinarily efficient. More results per unit of expenditure than either of his other swords in this specific context.

He drew Horgath, and the blade came free with a sound like a chord struck on an instrument tuned to a frequency that existed just below comfortable hearing. The blade had a black shade over the surface, and the handle had a red thread hanging. It was long enough to be called a long sword.

The horde’s leading edge was perhaps half a mile out now. Close enough that individual nynthralls were resolvable without enhanced vision, close enough that the collective malice pressure of thousands of corrupted beings moving in concentrated mass had become a physical presence against the ambient air.

Jolthar looked at Caelum.

“The nyphorite is mine.”

Caelum looked at his nephew — at the copper-amber light of Horgath, at the steadiness of his stance despite the depletion that two hours of sleep hadn’t fully addressed, and at the particular quality of certainty in his voice that wasn’t bravado but assessment.

Caelum nodded.

“It seems to be on a different level,” Caelum said.

“Think you can fight that nyphorite?”

“Working on it,” Jolthar replied.

He stepped forward, off the observation platform, down toward the open corrupted ground between the camp and the approaching horde.

Behind him he heard Caelum beginning to coordinate with the senior swordsmen, the Kaezhlar forces organizing into the formations that two months of Depths experience had refined into something genuinely effective.

Ahead, the horde surged forward, and above it the nyphorite’s amber eyes found him across the distance with the precision of something that had been looking for exactly this.

Jolthar rolled his shoulders, settled his grip on Horgath, and let the chaobane energy read the incoming mass — thousands of malice-saturated bodies, all of them carrying the accumulated corruption that was simultaneously their strength and, with the right blade asking the right questions, their fundamental vulnerability.