The Sinful Young Master

Chapter 462: Fighting the two duke Nynthralls -3

The second took the worst of it — the ascending energy caught its left side and the void stripped away corrupted flesh, leaving silver-edged wounds across its ribs and flank that radiated the same consuming light as the injury Jolthar had given the first.

It was thrown sideways by the force, slamming into the spire wall hard enough to crack the stone beneath the black moss, the impact reverberating through the entire structure.

The first duke had managed to partially shield itself, interposing its injured forearm between its core and the worst of the ascending column. The existing void wound expanded significantly under the additional exposure, the silver light eating deeper into the arm with slow, implacable thoroughness.

The spire itself was reacting.

The black moss on the walls was retreating upward, pulling away from the ground level as if trying to escape the spreading influence of voidwrath energy.

The luminescent pulsing that had maintained a steady rhythm since Jolthar entered was becoming erratic, disrupted by the introduction of power that fundamentally opposed everything the malice was built from.

The second duke pulled itself from the wall with a sound like grinding stone and straightened to its full height. The wounds on its flank were not healing. Whatever regeneration the duke-class possessed, it apparently did not extend to injuries inflicted by void energy — the silver light continued its slow consumption at the wound edges, the void refusing to stop working just because the attack that had initiated it was technically over.

Both dukes stared at Jolthar across the massive crater that now occupied the center of their chamber, their pale eyes recalibrating, the intelligence behind them running assessments that were arriving at conclusions they clearly found uncomfortable.

“You are not simply powerful,” the first duke said. Its voice had changed quality — still deep, still layered, but carrying something that in a more human creature would have been identified as wariness.

“What you carry is antithetical to our existence in a way that strength alone cannot explain. Other strong mortals have entered the Depths. We have consumed them. You are different in nature, not merely in degree.”

“Correct,” Jolthar said, pulling Knashii free from the floor of the crater and straightening.

The silver light played across his features, still giving him that quality of something that had descended from somewhere cleaner and more fundamental than the corrupted world around him.

“You’ve been in this place so long that you’ve started to think malice is the only real power. It isn’t.”

“Though I have to say, for some creatures living in this dark land’s depths, you are pretty knowledgeable.”

They didn’t like monsters; they were aware of the techniques and seemed to be aware of the way humans fought. Withstanding two of his voidwrath techniques was no simple feat; those two creatures have quite the resilience.

He looked at the wounds on both dukes — the deep void channel in the first’s forearm and the broad, silver-edged injuries across the second’s flank — and let them see that he was looking. Letting them understand that he was assessing his own work with the calm consideration of someone who has more of it to do.

“We are not finished,” the second duke said, and its discordant voice carried something that might have been the corrupted equivalent of resolve.

“No,” Jolthar agreed, shifting his grip on Knashii as both dukes began to move again, their tactics evolving, their ancient intelligence working to account for what they had just experienced and find angles that the void sword couldn’t cover.

“We’re not finished yet.”

–

The dukes had adapted.

That was the dangerous thing about intelligence in an enemy — it learned.

The first duke was compensating for its injured forearm, keeping it protected and using its undamaged arm as the primary offensive tool while maintaining wider spacing from Knashii’s reach.

The second had stopped moving in straight lines entirely, circling in unpredictable patterns, trying to force Jolthar to choose between tracking movement and maintaining defensive positioning.

They were good. Centuries of existence had given them time to develop combat sense that went beyond instinct into something approaching genuine tactical thinking.

Jolthar gave them approximately thirty seconds of adaptation before he stopped playing by the rules they were trying to impose.

His left hand came up, and the telekinesis engaged without announcement.

The first duke found itself suddenly decelerating mid-charge, an invisible force wrapping around its massive frame and dragging it backward against its own momentum.

The creature strained against the grip — it was enormously strong, and Jolthar felt the effort of holding something that size, the mental exertion of telekinesis against duke-class resistance burning through his concentration like sustained strain on a muscle pushed past comfortable limits.

But holding wasn’t the point. Redirecting was.

He released the first duke suddenly, not backward but sideways; the telekinetic force spinning rather than restraining, adding rotation to its existing momentum and throwing it directly into the path of the second duke’s flanking approach.

The two collided with tremendous force, corrupted flesh and dense malicious bone impacting in a tangle of limbs and disrupted movement that bought Jolthar four seconds of both of them being off-balance simultaneously.

He used all four.

Knashii carved through the air in rapid succession — not the considered, technique-driven attacks from earlier but controlled aggression, pressing the temporary advantage, hitting the silver-edged wounds on the second duke’s flank again, and driving the void energy deeper while both creatures were still recovering their footing.

The second duke took three separate strikes on the existing injuries, the void consuming further with each contact, the silver light spreading across more of its torso with the patient thoroughness of something that didn’t need to hurry because it would finish eventually regardless.

The first duke recovered and came at him with both arms now, abandoning the protection of its injured forearm in favor of overwhelming commitment. The corrupted arm hurt it to use — Jolthar could see that in the way it moved, the void wound protesting extension and impact — but it used it anyway because the alternative was losing the spatial battle entirely.

Now they were starting to feel pain. Maybe it was because of the void energy, Jolthar wondered.

He let the arms come.