chsdbacks Chapter 1725 Damnation's Fang
Chapter 1725 Damnation's Fang
Black Fang dove headfirst down through the open sky with the battlefield rushing up to meet her and the wind tearing at her clothing hard enough to strip the violet comet trail into wisps behind her.A second into her freefall, her hand found the katana's grip.
She drew it in a single motion and the blade rang free of the scabbard with a clean metallic note that cut through the wind like a second edge, high and sharp.
"[Damnation's Fang]," she murmured, and her serpent tattoos moved.
Every inked serpent on her body lifted from her skin in the same heartbeat, flowing from her shoulders, her back, and her thighs in dark rivers that converged along her right arm toward the hand gripping the katana, and where they reached the steel they bled into the metal and became part of it.
The edge ignited in an infusion so dense the blade looked dipped in concentrated night.
Purple-black venom threaded with necromantic script crawled the steel from guard to tip, and the serpentine patterns of her tattoos were still visible within it, coiling and shifting beneath the surface as if alive.
Black Fang's eyes found the blade, and the difference struck her immediately.
Her usual poison coatings wept, dripping and seeping in excess. She had fought that way for as long as she could remember.
[Damnation's Fang] sat on the steel in a film so concentrated and so perfectly contained that not a single drop fell despite the wind tearing at her from every direction. Every serpent tattoo that had once crawled her skin was compressed into a layer thin enough to show her own reflection in the blade.
Her lips were curled.
It took her a long moment to recognize the expression, because it did not belong on her face. She had coated her blade thousands of times, and not once had the act of preparing a weapon made her feel anything beyond cold readiness.
But now...
The woman staring back at her was excited.
The realization hit her hard, and she who wore her expressions the way other people wore armor, rarely and only when strictly necessary, stared at her own little smirk in the purple sheen of a spell she had cast for the very first time.
She forced her expression to return to normal, then her eyes left the blade and swept the battlefield below.
The targets that mattered were easy to find from this height. The undead lords. Elvardian elites.
The Fujimori elders locked against Alexios and the Scarlet Lilies.
Chizuru looked up.
The old woman found her through the smoke and the carnage, and the grief that climbed her weathered face was a soft, grandmotherly pity aimed at Black Fang as if she were something tragic falling out of the sky.
"Child... My heart still aches..."
What Black Fang gave back was hunger.
The aura that poured off her swelled into the shape of a coiling great serpent.
A serpent that had already chosen its meal and was deciding when to eat. The promise in those violet eyes was readable from the ground: I am coming for you, but not yet.
You're dessert.
Chizuru's composure broke.
"What happened to you?!"
Her sword arm dropped into a guard aimed at the violet streak screaming toward her, and when Black Fang's trajectory swept past the elders without slowing, the relief that cracked across the old woman's face came tangled with confusion she couldn't hide.
Black Fang's eyes had already moved on.
She found Ayame.
Twenty years old and crossing blades with a creature even Black Fang struggled to kill.
And she did it in a display so clean and so determined that the Venomborne Terror almost smiled for a second time.
Kaede's head was Black Fang's to take, but Ayame had earned first rights as far as the woman was concerned.
However, if the girl couldn't finish it, such generosity wouldn't be shown a second time.
Then...
"Quinlan Elysiar... This power. I'll test it."
She twisted mid-fall and angled toward the densest cluster of Fujimori infantry and dwarven footsoldiers below the elders' position, close enough for every one of them to witness what came next, and hit the ground like a violet meteorite.
"...and decide whether you deserve to live after daring to mark me."
The Venomborne Terror perfectly ignored the fact that her branding was a result of circumstances Quinlan had no control over, and was already killing before the dust settled.
Three soldiers died in her first step, the katana's arc so fast the violet trail it left in the air outlasted the men it cut through.
The fourth raised his shield. The infusion ate through the steel and the arm behind it in the same swing, and the scream that started in his throat ended as her backswing opened it.
"The venomous woman the reports spoke about!" A dwarven officer's roar cracked across the ranks. "Everyone, fall back and-"
She split him from collarbone to navel mid-word, and the two halves of his body peeled apart in a curtain of violet-tinged gore that splashed across the soldiers behind him.
A Fujimori elite screamed six soldiers into a shield wall. Black Fang went through them the way a hand passes through smoke, her blade finding gaps between shields that weren't supposed to exist, and the officer was dead with her katana in his spine before his wall knew it was missing half its number.
The survivors turned to swing at her and found their sword arms ending at the elbow, cuts so clean the stumps took a full second to understand what they'd lost.
The soldiers nearest the carnage noticed something worse than the killing: the Venomborne Terror was silent.
No battle cries, no grunts of exertion, not a single breath loud enough to hear over the dying, just the wet whisper of a blade passing through things that should have stopped it and the soft thud of bodies folding into the dirt in her wake.
A young Fujimori soldier threw down her weapon and dropped to her knees. "Please! Lady Hanako, I surr-"
The katana passed through her without pausing, and Black Fang was three kills deeper before the body finished falling.
Somewhere behind her, a dwarven footman's legs buckled and the dark stain spreading down his iron greaves had nothing to do with the blood on the ground.
Men and women who had held formation against the uncanny blue horde all morning broke and ran from a single killer cutting through their center with a blade that burned violet and a face that carried no expression.
The killing lasted less than ten seconds, and in those ten seconds the Venomborne Terror reminded every soldier on the field why the continent feared her name.
When she stopped moving, the silence that replaced the screaming was worse.
Black Fang stood alone at the center of a circle of the dead with her katana loose at her side and [Damnation's Fang] still burning in its serpentine patterns along the edge, and the ground beneath her boots was so thick with gore it had gone soft.
Every living soul within thirty meters had become a corpse, and the nearest breathing enemy had retreated to twice that distance with the face of someone who would never sleep properly again.
Her gaze lifted from the carnage and found the sky.
Quinlan stood in the air above the battlefield where she had left him, and when her violet eyes found his across the distance between earth and sky, the pride burning in those red irises was so open and so shameless she could feel it in her chest before she could read it on his face.
Their eyes held as she exhaled.