The Sinful Young Master

Chapter 460: Fighting the two duke Nynthralls -1

Knashii moved.

Jolthar’s sword work at full commitment was something that existed in a different category from the efficient clearing he had been doing with Vorthak earlier.

Vorthak had been practical, powerful, and designed to move through bodies efficiently. Knashii was different. Knashii fought as if the void itself had been given purpose and a preferred direction.

Each arc of the blade left a trail of silver energy that persisted after the physical motion completed, extending the cut beyond where steel could reach, consuming nynthralls that hadn’t yet arrived at the point where the blade had been.

He was exerting more force as the time passed, and the number of nynthralls was also increasing.

He moved through the mass of creatures with measured movements that made the violence look almost naturalistic — angles and trajectories calculated so precisely that each movement accomplished multiple eliminations before it finished. The silver light danced around his form, making him look ethereal among the dark energy of the depths.

The giant variants came next, drawn by the destruction of their smaller kin, their massive forms cutting through the press of bodies like ships through water.

The first one reached Jolthar and swung a limb the size of a mature tree with force that would have flattened a building.

Jolthar stepped inside the arc, placed Knashii against the creature’s midsection, and let the void energy do what void energy does.

The giant nynthrall’s center shook violently, starting to shrink and ooze dark liquid. The two halves separated, fell in different directions, and the silver light moved on.

The nynthrall beasts were faster than the giants and smarter than the regular swarm, approaching in coordinated patterns that suggested at least rudimentary hunting instincts.

They split into groups, trying to surround, trying to find angles that Jolthar couldn’t simultaneously cover.

He let them think they were succeeding for approximately three seconds.

Then the voidwrath expanded outward in a controlled pulse — not his maximum output, not the landscape-reshaping attacks he was capable of, but a measured release that caught every beast in the surrounding radius and unmade them simultaneously, the silver energy burning through corrupted flesh with the thoroughness of something that found corruption sanely offensive.

The path to the spire was opening, carved through numbers that had seemed impossible ten minutes earlier, the ground behind Jolthar littered with the collapsing remains of creatures that had never understood what they were actually dealing with.

Haryntha walked in the cleared space behind him; she was just watching him, her expression carrying the particular quality of someone revising their understanding of something they thought they had already understood.

He was giving more and more surprises as the fight progressed. The power he was using, she knew it didn’t belong to this realm, but she couldn’t tell from where it was.

Jolthar, just how many hidden talents do you have?

Right then Jolthar let himself rise in the air, and then he raised his hand; he was using his telekinesis, and the ground beneath him split into long rectangular boxes.

He flipped his hand, which made the rectangular landmasses slam into the beasts, then creating a way for him.

The spire grew larger as they approached, its foul energy pressing harder now, reacting to what was coming toward it.

As they were reaching closer to the spire, the numbers were increasing; Jolthar used the giant creature to push his way through further. His telekinesis was used to his limits.

Inside those ancient corrupted walls, two duke-class nynthralls were becoming aware that something had entered their territory.

Something that their malice couldn’t touch and it was carrying a sword that answered corruption with a destructive power.

The silver light of Knashii blazed brighter as Jolthar walked through the last of the nynthrall swarm toward the spire’s base, the black moss on its surface beginning to wither and pull back from the ground level as the voidwrath energy reached it, as if even corrupted plant life understood what was coming and wanted to be elsewhere.

Two dukes inside. Both are aware now.

Jolthar stopped before the spire’s entrance — a gap in the stone that breathed outward with concentrated malice dense enough to be visible as a dark shimmer in the air.

He looked at Haryntha over his shoulder.

“Stay out here. Keep anything from coming in behind me.”

“Jolthar—”

“I won’t be long,” he said simply.

And walked into the spire.

*

The interior of the spire was vast in a way that defied its external dimensions — corrupted space folded and expanded within the ancient stone, creating a chamber that stretched perhaps two hundred feet across and soared upward into darkness that had no visible ceiling.

The walls breathed with black moss, pulsing in rhythms that matched nothing natural, and the air was so thick with concentrated malice that it had developed visible texture, moving in slow currents like oil in water.

Jolthar walked through it with Knashii raised, the silver voidwrath energy burning away the worst of the corruption immediately around him, creating a moving sanctuary of clean air in the absolute heart of accumulated wrongness.

There were no beasts here, making it easy for him to pass through.

He reached the center of the chamber.

Then the ground cracked.

Not from beneath — from above. Two shapes descended from the darkness of the upper chamber with the controlled speed of things that had no reason to hurry because they had never encountered anything worth hurrying for.

They landed simultaneously, the impact of each sending concentric fractures racing across the corrupted stone floor, cracks that glowed briefly with the same bruised luminescence as the moss on the spire’s exterior.

The dukes of the dreadland depths.

They were enormous — twelve feet tall, perhaps more, bodies that suggested something humanoid in the distant past before centuries of malice and evolution had finished with them. Their complexions were simultaneously black and ashen, the corruption having developed its own strange style across their forms, darkness and pallor existing together in patterns that shifted as they moved. Horns rose from their skulls — not uniform, not symmetrical, but grown in the organic way of things that had developed them gradually rather than been born with them, curved and branching and dense with the same foul energy that permeated the spire.

They were intelligent, beings with conscious minds.