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Chapter 898: Dark Tide

Everything happened in the span of a breath.

The bone spear punched through the demonic bear’s chest in a white flash — so fast the eye could not track it. At that distance, aimed at Lorgar, she could not have avoided it.

The demon had seen her leap from the brush. But with its right arm still locked against the bear’s paw, it could not block or pivot in time; by reflex alone it threw up its other arm to cover its head.

That saved its throat. It left its left arm exposed.

Lorgar did not hesitate. She closed on the arm and tore it apart. The blood hit her mouth — heavy, immediate, nothing like the demonic bear’s near-impenetrable hide. A Mad Demon’s skin was soft by comparison, as pliant between her fangs as cloth despite the swollen muscle beneath.

The effortlessness of it sent a jolt of confidence through her.

She drove past the demon and created space between them.

She was unhurt. One of her opponents had lost the means to continue fighting.

By any measure, that was an exceptional opening.

The badly injured Mad Demon did not move until the hybrid beast finished falling. It stumbled back several steps and roared at her — fury without viable threat. It had lost its left arm; its right had already begun to shrink. It could barely keep itself upright, let alone press an attack.

But the other demon’s next action surprised her.

It reached into its garments and produced a horn.

“Woo————”

The sound was low and deep. It broke the forest silence and flushed a loose scattering of birds from the canopy above.

What does this mean?

Are there other demons nearby?

She had scouted the area thoroughly. Aside from the beehives and bird nests Lightning had asked her to mark, she had found nothing of note.

She set the question aside. Kill the one-armed demon first. If reinforcements came, they would find only corpses.

She surged forward. The demon dropped its horn, drew a stone ax from its waist, and slashed toward her.

Six months ago, she would have pulled back from that edge, traded ground for safety, and waited. But she was not the same fighter she had been six months ago. The battle with the Extraordinary, the Four-winged Eagle, and a long succession of hybrid demonic beasts had reshaped her instincts.

Lorgar dropped low and extended her weight to one side, launching from an angle that looked nearly absurd — her body flying out sideways — and the ax carved empty air.

But the dodge was not merely a dodge. While the demon’s attention snapped to her mouth and claws, she drove her real attack: her massive tail, curled and whipping through the arc of her whole body’s momentum, struck the back of the demon’s skull.

A muffled thud.

The demon left its feet and struck a tree trunk. The stone ax clattered to the ground.

“Roar——!”

Lorgar had already read for the finishing blow when a shriek from behind raised every instinct she had. She spun and swept her paw sideways in a wide block — catching the one-armed demon mid-charge. Her claws cracked through its ribs and pierced the leather armor over its chest.

It was a suicidal attack. The demon seemed to have thrown itself deliberately onto her paw.

Why?

The answer arrived before the question had finished forming.

The one-armed demon’s shrunken right arm was swelling again.

Seven minutes — it was only supposed to recover after seven minutes.

Lorgar tried to pull free. The demon’s grip clamped down like iron pincers.

She turned to the second demon — the one she had knocked into the tree — and her chest went cold.

Its arm was swelling too. Veins burst along the surface of the dry skin as the limb expanded.

Then the memory surfaced, half a second too late. On the hot air balloon over the Great Snow Mountain of the Western Region, Lightning and the others had encountered Mad Demons that threw spears twice within a short window. The second throw had come at greatly reduced power, and the demon’s enhanced arm had been rendered useless afterward — a suicidal technique, Lightning had called it. Not very threatening.

She had trusted a foolish girl’s word. She had nearly gotten herself killed for it.

Not that she could entirely blame Lightning. It was only now that she understood: in a genuine life-or-death corner, the diminished second strike was still more than enough to decide things. There was a saying in the Sand Nation that fit this moment exactly: Beware a cornered fighter. Having already accepted death, a fighter’s last blow carried a weight no calculation could fully prepare you for.

The demon gripping her arm could not fully restrain her — that would require an Extraordinary. But she understood its purpose. Even if she twisted or dodged, she would not escape cleanly enough to avoid what was coming.

The Mad Demon’s arm reached its full swollen peak. Blue blood seeped from the cracked skin as though the whole limb might detonate. It raised its last bone spear and trained it at the Wolf Girl.

There was only one play left.

Lorgar stared at the demon. She fixed her entire attention on every movement it made, and for a moment the jungle fell perfectly silent — nothing left in the world but the percussion of her own heartbeat.

The instant the Mad Demon threw the spear, she cut the magic power surging through her body.

She collapsed inward. In the space of a heartbeat, the enormous desert wolf shrank — and the iron grip around her became a gap she tore free from. To the spear-throwing demon, it was as though its target had been replaced at the last moment.

The bone spear, aimed at the head of a great wolf, punched through the broken-armed demon instead.

By the time it landed, she had finished her transformation back to human form.

She had won the gamble.

The spear-thrower stood stunned, staring down at its withered arm. Then Princess Lorgar was in front of it. It managed two syllables before she transformed her hand into a wolf’s claw and crushed its helmet.

“Ta…qui…”

The Red Mist dispersed. The demon crumpled to the ground with a soft, final weight.

Only then did Lorgar allow herself to breathe.

One against two. She had won.

The demons were not that formidable — not when you knew how to read them. Even with their arm enhancements, they had no real combat discipline. They fought by instinct, which was a waste of their physical gifts. The warrior’s path was one they had barely set foot on. A few more encounters with these creatures and hunting them would become routine.

The vast Barbarian Land stretching around her in every direction would make for excellent training ground.

Then she heard the tremors.

The earth itself seemed to be moving. Not the shifting of something underground but a rolling force advancing across the surface, like a wave that had left the sea behind and kept going.

“Sh— sh— ”

How is this possible?

She raised her ears toward the source and frowned. She was close to Graycastle’s lands — nothing like the Southernmost Region, where the ocean was near. There were no mountains here, no rivers wide enough for a flood.

She found the tallest tree she could see and climbed.

The tremors were coming from the direction of the Taquila ruins.

What she saw from the end of that branch held her motionless.

An uncountable number of demons moved on the horizon, advancing like a dark tide over the land. Above them, hundreds of Devilbeasts flew in formation, sweeping back and forth across the sky. And among the tide — colossal monsters, four twisted legs each, moving with a slow and irresistible weight, tall enough that they could have stepped over Taquila’s city walls directly. Standing before one of them, a person would be reduced to nothing. That was before you even considered what it would take to fight one; the sight alone stripped the will from the chest like a rag pulled through a ring.

Lorgar looked up. The sky above was the particular, washed blue that comes only after heavy rain. A soft breeze moved through it. White clouds drifted with the idle patience of things that had no awareness of what was happening below. The world held its usual sounds, its usual stillness.

There was no Bloody Moon. No sign of the Red Mist’s grim red stain across the air.

But she knew.

Disaster had arrived.

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