Freed
A burst of wind exploded from Maro’s body, a concussive force that knocked several of the wolf-shaped Maldrath sprawling across the deck. The creatures yelped and snarled, shadowy forms twisting mid-air before slamming into the ship’s railings or tumbling overboard into the darkness below.
Maro stood tall, his newly freed neck glistening with sweat, the remnants of the voidstone collar still smoldering at his feet. He thrust his hand toward another Maldrath, his fingers splayed wide. A violent gust answered his command, slamming into the creature with such force it flew off the deck, vanishing into the abyss beyond the ship’s edge.
Sabo, awestruck by the display, activated his [Aura Vision]. The world shifted, colors bleeding into vibrant streams of energy. Maro's aura blazed like a tempest, threads of brilliant jade intertwined with streaks of white, pulsing through his limbs and channeling into the roaring gales he conjured. The wind wasn't just air; it was infused with his very essence, an extension of his will made manifest. The barrage of Maro’s aura in the air was overwhelming and Sabo forced his [Aura Vision] to drop.
Maro moved with precision, sweeping his arms in fluid arcs, each gesture birthing another surge of wind that propelled the Maldrath away. Sabo struggled to maintain his footing, the powerful gusts tugging at his clothes, threatening to hurl him across the deck. He dropped into a low stance, anchoring himself as best he could.
Not all the prisoners were as fortunate. Several were caught off guard, their makeshift weapons and shields torn from their grasp. Some were lifted entirely off the ground, tumbling like ragdolls until they managed to grasp onto railings, ropes, or the jagged remnants of the ship's damaged structure. Despite the chaos, there was a growing sense of hope, the tide of fear ebbing with every Maldrath sent hurtling into the void.
Sabo clenched his grip on the maul, feeling its dark presence thrumming with approval. The battle was far from over, but for the first time since the attack began, victory no longer felt like a distant dream.
Sabo felt a stabbing pain at the back of his mind, like there were two clawed hands digging into his brain. Gritting his teeth, he pushed his entire will against the entity’s attempt to take control. “If you don’t stop that right now, you won’t be eating anything!” he hissed.
The maul’s physical mouth grumbled, but the sensation immediately ceased.
A burst of wind exploded from Maro’s body, knocking several of the wolf-shaped Maldrath into the air like rag dolls. With a fierce cry, he thrust his hand towards another, sending it flying off the deck, its shadowy form dissipating midair. Sabo, wide-eyed, activated his Aura Vision. Vivid streams of Maro’s aura infused the gusts, a dazzling display of raw, untamed power channeled through sheer will.
Maro continued his onslaught, masterfully controlling the wind, shaping it into cutting gales that shredded through the encroaching Maldrath. A subtle pulsing sensation in his mind was accompanied by script in the corner of his vision, indicating that his [Aura Vision] was activated. What he saw was terrifying. The bursts of wind Maro was launching from his hands were gigantic scythes of aura, slicing through Maldrath, which exploded in bursts of dark particles. Even at his distance, the force was overwhelming, a tempest of fury that kept the creatures at bay. Sabo struggled to maintain his footing, the deck a whirlwind of chaos.
Amidst the storm, Sabo noticed the white-haired young woman had stepped onto the banister at the ship’s side, balancing effortlessly as if the gale were nothing more than a gentle breeze. The air around her crackled ominously. With a slow, deliberate motion, she ran her fingers through the air, slicing it open as though it were fabric. Jagged, claw-like tears appeared, glowing with searing red energy that escaped the tears in the air like crimson electricity.
The rips widened as skeletal fingers emerged, pulling the tears apart with creaking resolve. White smoke billowed from the gashes in reality, mingling with the black smoke that still curled from the God-Eater maul. From within the swirling mist stepped a colossal figure—a twelve-foot-tall skeleton with crimson bones, though its skull was an ethereal fusion of white smoke and bleached bone. Red and white tendrils of smoky essence snaked from the back of its skull and along the edges of its crimson frame, flickering like ghostly flames.
The monstrous entity loomed behind the young woman, its burning coal-like eyes scanning the battlefield with a predatory gleam. The wolf-shaped Maldrath faltered, their charge hesitating under the oppressive presence of this new nightmare. The battlefield fell into a brief, dreadful silence, broken only by the distant roar of the still-advancing horde.
“Jebati!” the Olenish curse spilled from Sabo’s mouth. “What in the hells is that thing?”
The entity within him grumbled with hunger, the eye in the head of the maul glowing with a latent ferocity. Sabo knew it wanted nothing more than to devour the power it was witnessing that very moment.
Heat rolled off the crimson skeleton in suffocating waves, distorting the air around it, turning blackened leaves to ash before they even touched the forest floor. The Maldrath recoiled, their once-relentless charge faltering as if their hunger had finally found something it couldn’t swallow. But there was no escape. The towering figure leapt from the ship with impossible grace, its feet slamming into the writhing mass below.
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For a moment, the forest was still.
Then the screaming began.
Not human screams. Something worse. The cries of the Maldrath were a choir of agony, guttural and shrill, echoing through the trees as their inky flesh shriveled and burned away. They scattered, bodies melting mid-stride, their twisted, malformed features cracking apart in waves of black cinders. Even those that managed to turn tail didn’t make it far. The heat had already done its work, searing through their essence, hollowing them from the inside out until they crumbled into nothing. Black dust drifted away on invisible winds as they disappeared.
Sabo watched, the God-Eater maul heavy in his grip, its jagged mouth curled into something that might have been a grin. He could feel the thing inside him stirring, stretching, delighted by the carnage.
The mouth on the weapon’s head parted. “Go, my servant. Join the slaughter.”
Sabo exhaled sharply through his nose. “Do I really need to?”
The entity rumbled, not quite a laugh, not quite a growl. “What a foolish question! Cowardice does not suit you. There is strength to be taken here. Power to be Devoured.”
I think cowardice suits me just fine, Sabo thought.
He shifted his stance, watching the battlefield unfold. It wasn’t much of a battle anymore. Maro’s winds howled through the deck, tossing the few remaining Maldrath like ragdolls before the white-haired girl’s monstrosity finished them off. The thing waded through the fray in the forest clearing like a god of old, heat radiating from its bones, its clawed hands slicing through shades as though they were made of wet parchment. Those that still had enough sense—or luck—to run were already ghosts in the trees, their yellow eyes flickering out one by one. Strangely, the heat from the skeletal creature did not ignite the surrounding brush.
Sabo ran his fingers along the shaft of the maul, contemplating.
He had faced enough Maldrath to last a lifetime. Had seen what they did to people who weren’t fast enough, weren’t lucky enough. He should’ve been grateful to have a chance to crush them, to erase even one of the horrors that had haunted him all his life—in the Green Sea, in Solstice, even earlier, robbing him of a family.
But right now? Right now, he felt like a man who had arrived at the slaughterhouse five minutes after the pigs had already been gutted.
Still, the entity purred in his mind, attempting to stoke the embers of vengeance within him.
Sabo sighed, rolling his shoulders. “Yeah. That’s what I’m afraid of.”
The bear-shaped Maldrath loomed at the edge of the tree line, its form a writhing mass of shifting, ink-dark sinew. The snake-like appendages that slithered across its back shrieked in chorus, a cacophony of human and animal wails that clawed into the marrow of Sabo’s soul. The air seemed to contract before a pulse erupted from the bear-like Maldrath. The pulse hit Sabo, causing him to stumble back.
Then, the wolves began to boil.
Their shadow-flesh bubbled and seethed, their twisted, half-formed faces losing all distinction as their bodies collapsed into slick pools of night-black sludge. The skeleton demon summon by the white-haired woman seemed just as surprised as Sabo felt, even if it did have a face, as the lesser Maldrath around it melted away.
The inky substance spread, drawn toward an unseen force, its tendrils slithering together, coalescing. The forest groaned as something vast took shape, the dark tide rising, swirling, becoming something far greater than the sum of its parts.
A wolf—if a wolf could be born from nightmare—formed again from the massive pool of darkness. A mountain of ebon muscle and shadow, broad as a siege tower, eyes like twin pits of smoldering hunger. Its maw gaped, a yawning abyss that drank the light, and from within, the echoes of every dying howl, every whimper of prey caught in a predator’s teeth. Its shoulders bunched, its talons carved trenches in the earth, and it loosed a roar that sent the treetops shivering, the very ground quaking beneath its fury.
The white-haired woman did not flinch.
She merely raised one hand, fingers snapping open like a claw, and the rifts she had carved into the air flared with red-hot hunger. The skeletal giant she had summoned, a twelve-foot wraith of scorched bone and trailing white smoke, turned its burning gaze upon the newly formed colossus of shadow. Its shoulders rolled, its limbs creaked, radiating waves of blistering heat that made the very air shimmer around it.
Then it leapt, dashing forward with impossible speed.
A streak of crimson and white, it crashed into the umbral wolf with the force of a meteor, sending a concussive shockwave across the battlefield. The wolf staggered back, growling, as its inky flesh blackened and peeled where the heat touched it, but it did not retreat. It lunged, meeting the demon in a clash of fangs and clawed fingers, of heat and darkness. The ground split beneath them, the ship rocked upon its moorings, and the sky itself seemed to dim as their war ignited.
Maro, meanwhile, continued to be a force unto himself.
His laughter was lost in the gale that swirled around him, a tempest of his own making. His arms wove through the air, directing the storm, sending razor-sharp gusts lashing through the remaining lesser shades. They were shredded, torn apart, hurled from the ship’s deck like ragdolls. His wind was a shield, forming a barrier around the survivors that huddled as close to the leader as possible. With his arms outstretched, Maro pushed back the tide of horror inch by inch.
This is madness, Sabo thought.
A presence, near the tree line, drew in all of Sabo’s senses, both old and new.
He locked eyes with the twin-burning orbs of the Maldrath bear, and his gut twisted like something had latched onto his insides and was pulling him forward. A strange energy emanated from the hulking bear-like creature. Something Sabo didn’t fully understand and couldn’t explain.
This was it. It was the thing pulling the strings. The master of this horde. Instinct alone told Sabo that if this thing died, the rest of the horde would quickly follow.
So, he hefted the God-Eater maul onto his shoulder, its jagged iron mouth still dripping with the remains of the voidstone collars it had Devoured. “I hope you’re over that little stomach ache of yours, because I need your power once more,” he muttered.
In response, the maul coughed out another stream of black smoke.
The pull in his core became unbearable. Like gravity itself had shifted, and all roads now led to the bear. Towards a singular enemy. A singular target of destruction. A thing to be devoured. His body tensed, coiled, his legs bending at the knee. Then, he pushed off the deck’s edge.
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