The Sinful Young Master

Chapter 463: Fighting the two duke Nynthralls -4

Telekinesis caught one at the elbow, deflecting it enough to change the angle without stopping the force entirely. Knashii handled the other, the blade catching the duke’s wrist in a redirecting parry that sent the strike scraping past Jolthar’s shoulder, close enough that the displacement of malice-laden air stung his cheek.

He was inside the duke’s guard now, too close for its reach advantage to matter.

His free hand pressed flat against the duke’s chest.

The telekinetic force fired point-blank.

The force that came out of that contact wasn’t the directional push of his normal telekinetic work — it was compression released all at once, like a shaped charge detonated against the surface of something immovable.

The duke left the ground, traveling backward through the chamber with speed that turned its enormous body into a projectile, and when it hit the far wall the stone didn’t just crack — a section of the spire’s exterior gave way entirely, the wall collapsing outward and letting the corrupted outside air rush in through a gap twenty feet wide.

The first duke lay in the rubble of the collapsed wall, stunned, the void wound on its forearm flaring silver where the impact had aggravated it.

Jolthar turned to the second duke.

It was standing. The wounds on its flank were extensive now, silver light consuming a significant portion of its left side, but it was standing and its pale eyes were burning with something that went beyond the cold assessment of earlier into genuine, focused malevolence directed entirely at the mortal in front of it.

It attacked with everything it had left — no tactics, no coordination with its companion, just the absolute commitment of something that had decided the only acceptable outcome was complete destruction of the target in front of it.

Malice energy concentrated around its fists and forearms, dark power building in a visible corona that represented the duke pulling on reserves it had been protecting since Jolthar entered the spire.

The chamber darkened as that power gathered, the few remaining light sources overwhelmed by concentrated corruption. The pressure it generated was physical, the kind that pushed against the chest and made breathing require conscious effort.

Jolthar felt the weight of it, the genuine danger of what was coming. Duke-class malice released at full commitment was not something to dismiss even with Knashii in hand and Voidwrath burning through his system.

He planted his feet.

Drew breath.

And reached deeper than he had reached since arriving in the Depths, down into the reserves of voidwrath energy that he hadn’t accessed yet, the layers beneath the techniques he’d been using, the foundation that the Blade of the Forgotten Void and its lesser expressions were built upon.

[Void Requiem of the Black Heavens.]

The name came out quietly, almost gently, which made what followed feel like a fundamental contradiction.

Knashii didn’t simply release energy. It became a focal point through which a different quality of void manifested — not the consuming void that ate matter and malice at the edges of wounds, not the ascending column that restructured space, but something older and more absolute. The silver light that had characterized every other technique turned to something closer to absolute white, a color that was less a color and more the absence of darkness so complete it registered as light simply because the eye had no other framework for it.

The Requiem expanded from Knashii in a sphere.

It passed through the second duke first, and the duke simply ceased.

Not killed in any way that involved the stages of death — not injured fatally and then stopped functioning, not overwhelmed by superior force and destroyed.

The Void Requiem passed through it and the existence of the second duke was retroactively incompatible with the space it had occupied. What remained collapsed inward and then didn’t, the silver-white energy having completed an erasure that left no remains, no residue, nothing that had been the second duke for centuries of corrupted existence.

Gone.

The Requiem continued outward, consuming the corrupted floor in expanding rings, the stone and malice and black moss all subject to the same absolute negation that had taken the duke. The crater from the Abyssal Void Storm of Ascent doubled in size, then tripled, the new void carving smooth concave walls of absolute emptiness into the spire’s foundation.

The walls shook. The ceiling — finally visible now that the darkness had been consumed, revealed as black stone perhaps a hundred feet above — developed fractures that raced outward from the spire’s center.

The sphere reached the first duke, still in the rubble of the collapsed wall, and the edge of the Requiem caught its legs.

The void consumed to the knee on both limbs before the energy dissipated, the Requiem reaching its limits and collapsing inward, the white light dying back to silver and then to the normal darkness of the Depths environment.

What remained of the first duke was on the ground, its legs ending in silver-edged wounds that were continuing their slow consumption upward.

The creature was alive. Its pale eyes found Jolthar through the settling dust and debris of the destroyed chamber, and they held something that might have been the closest thing to fear a duke-class nynthrall could experience.

Jolthar walked toward it across the ruined floor, stepping over the edges of new voids where stone had been erased, navigating a chamber that looked like something had detonated at its center and worked outward.

He was aware of the cost.

The Void Requiem had reached into reserves that weren’t designed for casual access, the kind of power that the body could generate but couldn’t sustain or recover from quickly.

His legs felt distant, the connection between intention and movement requiring more conscious effort than it should. His vision had developed a silver tint at the edges that was the voidwrath energy still cycling through his system, looking for somewhere to go now that the technique had been completed.

He was significantly depleted. Not done, but significantly depleted.

He had been continuously fighting for days now; now the exhaustion was catching up to him in a way that felt almost suffocating.