NOVEL NEXT Chapter 261: Bound
Jin Tu lunged to meet him, grinning madly, fists raised, teeth bared like a beast drunk on the promise of violence. He slammed into Vel'kharn head-on.
The world cracked.
A pulse of force radiated outward, shattering stone, vaporizing foliage, and flinging shattered bones into the air like a scream made physical. Jin Tu's grin faltered as he staggered back, ribs crushed inward, spine visibly twisting under the impact. Blood spattered from his mouth in thick, wet ropes.
Vel'kharn did not relent.
His tail curved mid-air in a perfect arc and smashed Jin Tu sideways, sending him cartwheeling into the cliff face with a crunch that broke the rock open like paper. The stone wasn't just split—it aged. Moss grew and died in an instant where his body hit. The cliff face wept, mourning something no one could name.
Yan Qinglan moved next, floating forward with elegance, her hands blooming with a swirl of silver mist.
"Sleep," she whispered, exhaling a wave of poison that shimmered like silk dipped in moonlight.
But the moment it touched Vel'kharn's aura, it twisted.
It recoiled.
The mist shrieked, folding inward on itself, devoured by the grief-warped field around him.
From the edges of his wings, it reformed, not as poison, but as coiling tendrils of memory, soaked in anguish and screaming with faces her sect had long forgotten.
Her own disciples fell first, staggering as the mist invaded their minds, not as venom, but as sorrow. They clutched at their chests, then dropped to their knees, sobbing like children while their insides ruptured from emotional overload.
"Impossible," Yan Qinglan breathed, her serene mask cracking. "My poison… rejected?"
Lu Shenyi clapped.
"Oh, delightful," he cackled, brushing a rune from his forearm. "His beast's field destabilized the molecular structure of airborne toxins! Brilliant. Let's see how he handles metaphysical detonation."
He snapped his fingers.
The air warped.
Language bloomed.
Death was written.
And then it exploded.
But Vel'kharn was already gone.
He had stepped sideways through space, not teleporting, not dashing, but phasing through a thread of space energy.
He reappeared mid-air above Lu Shenyi, his jaws wide open, dragonfire fused with sorrowful energy already exploding with tremendous power.
It was not a voice.
It was loss.
The sound that followed wasn't heard, it was felt—a detonation of emotion, a second-circle implosion, the Wail of the Abyss.
Lu Shenyi's lips moved to scream, but nothing came out. Not breath. Not words. Not power.
Only panic. He stumbled, hands raised, runes activating across his ribs in a frantic attempt to form a defense—but it was too late.
Vel'kharn crashed down.
His claws raked downward and split Lu Shenyi open from clavicle to pelvis, severing bone and inscribed flesh in a single, fluid motion.
Runes burst from the wound like insects fleeing a corpse, and for a moment, Lu Shenyi stood upright, his eyes wide and weeping, before his body collapsed inward, as though crushed by the weight of every failed spell, every betrayed principle, every life ruined in pursuit of brilliance.
Yan Qinglan turned to flee.
Vel'kharn's wing lashed out, flaying her back open with a whip of space infused bone. She shrieked, stumbling, her grace obliterated.
Her own poison screamed in her blood, now turned against her by the Second Circle's inversion. She fell, twitching, mouth full of pink foam and her eyes frozen wide as the death-echoes of her victims whispered sweet nothings into her failing mind.
Jin Tu rose from the rubble, only to feel the weight hit him next.
Not the claws. Not the lightning.
The implosion.
His mind fractured. The faces of every beast he had killed, every cub torn from its mother, every foe he had disemboweled with glee, returned. They climbed into his thoughts with talons and teeth and bit down.
His fists clenched.
His arms shook.
Then he screamed and punched his own skull, caving his head in as laughter, sorrow, and fury bled out in equal measure.
They had come to crush a beast.
Instead, they had been broken, one by one, by a demonlord of sorrow, touched by hell, crowned in mourning, and sharpened by grief.
At last, it ended.
Vel'kharn landed beside Damien again, body wreathed in gore and echoes. His wings folded inward, his six crimson eyes glowing with afterimages of the slain, while runes of sorrow pulsed along his plated ribs. He did not pant. He did not roar.
He just stood.
And Damien collapsed to one knee.
His chest heaved, lungs straining against the pressure that felt less like weight and more like presence, an avalanche of sorrow burying his every thought beneath the howling echoes of the newly dead.
"What's happening? I thought you had it under control?" Nyxara asked Lyrisa urgently.
"I did, but Fluffy's use of the Second Circle power had triggered its cost within Damien's soul as well." Lyrisa said frantically. "I don't think he would be able to survive a second pain treatment."
Damien's skull rang with names he didn't recognize, memories that weren't his, but the Second Circle didn't care. It made no distinction between what belonged and what had been taken.
Blood seeped from his nose in long, lazy streams. His ears rang. His eyes blurred. He couldn't tell if he was crying or if the world was weeping through him.
He didn't black out.
He woke up to them.
All four.
Wu Jinhai. Jin Tu. Lu Shenyi. Yan Qinglan.
He saw them, not with sight, but with soul-clarity, burning fragments tethered by trauma, floating within his death field like puppets without strings, still wrapped in the final shreds of ego and pride. They had died spectacularly. They had died violently. And that meant they were ripe.
Damien's right hand, trembling from exhaustion, slowly lifted from the blood-slicked ground. His necromantic core pulsed erratically, damaged but operational, and beneath it, the gateway to Vel'khara sighed open, not in force, but in invitation.
"Enough," he whispered, hoarse and ragged. "You're mine now."
And Vel'kharn moved.
The beast stepped forward without prompting. His claws dug shallow graves into the cracked stone, and his six crimson eyes fixed upon the drifting remnants of the slain elite as if they were meat presented on golden plates.
They did not flee.
They couldn't.
Damien's death aura surged, wrapped in sorrow-taint and hellfire echo. The souls screamed as they were drawn downward—not into the Ninefold Abyss directly, but into subordination, pulled through the First Circle's gate and forged anew in the mold Damien had crafted.
He didn't bind them to himself.
He bound them to Vel'kharn.