nagpurpolice Chapter 630 - 629 - Capturing the Running Away Demoness
Chapter 630 - 629 - Capturing the Running Away Demoness
The silence after his words was heavier than the battle had been.Evriana stood there, mouth still hanging open, the echo of her own strangled "EHHHHH" fading into the blood-soaked air. Her brain was trying to assemble a response — any response — from the scattered pieces of everything she had witnessed in the last hour. The hovering. The healing. The thousand invisible swords. The massacre. The bowing. And now this.
’Useless Ktorians.’
He had said it. Out loud. In front of soldiers who had just pledged their lives to the Ktorian name. In front of commanders who carried the Ktorian sash. In front of her — a Ktorian princess.
And he looked bored.
Viktor stood with his sword resting on his shoulder, blood dripping from the blade in thin, lazy lines that pooled at his feet. His violet eyes swept the field with the disinterested glance of a man who had just finished a chore and was wondering what was next. There was no triumph in his expression. No pride. No exhaustion. Just the calm, flat, almost sleepy look of someone who had done something tedious and was ready to move on.
She opened her mouth again.
"I — you — how can you —"
The words would not assemble. They sat in her throat like stones, each one too heavy to push past the others. She was a princess. She had been trained in rhetoric, in diplomacy, in the art of saying the right thing at the right time. And right now, she could not string three words together.
Viktil looked at her.
One eyebrow raised. The faintest curl at the corner of his mouth.
"What?" he said. "Cat got your tongue?"
She wanted to hit him.
The urge was visceral, physical, rising from somewhere deep in her chest. She wanted to draw her sword and smack him across the head with the flat of it, the way Celestia had smacked her when she’d said something stupid as a child. He had just called her family useless. He had just — in front of everyone — rejected the name, the lineage, the blood that flowed in both their veins.
And he was smiling.
That faint, devil-may-care, I-don’t-give-a-damn smile that made her want to scream and also made something low in her belly clench in a way that she refused to acknowledge.
"Viktor," she managed. "You cannot just —"
The horn blew.
The sound came from nowhere and everywhere — a deep, resonant, bone-shaking blast that vibrated through the ground, through the air, through the blood-soaked earth beneath their feet. It was not a human sound. It carried the wild, discordant, ancient frequency of something that had been crafted by hands that were not human and had been blown by lungs that did not breathe air.
Everyone froze.
The soldiers. The commanders. Evriana. Even Viktor’s head turned, the lazy disinterest vanishing from his face, replaced by something sharper. Attentive. The focused alertness of a predator hearing a new sound.
The dead moved.
Evriana’s eyes went wide. Her hand found her sword hilt on instinct, fingers wrapping around the leather grip with the automatic precision of decades of training. The monster corpses — the thousands of dismembered, diced, scattered remains that Viktor had left across the battlefield — were moving. Not regenerating. Not healing. Lifting. The pieces — the arms, the legs, the torsos, the heads — rose from the ground, hovering, suspended in the air like puppets on invisible strings.
They joined.
The pieces flew together — goblin arms fusing with boar legs, demon torsos merging with wolf heads, bone and flesh and sinew knitting together in a grotesque, impossible, flesh-and-bone collage that grew and grew and grew. The mass of assembled corpse-matter rose into the sky, ten feet, twenty, thirty, forty — a towering, skeletal, impossible thing that blotted out the clouds.
A skeleton soldier.
Not a real skeleton. A construct — the massive, forty-foot-tall, bone-and-flesh amalgamation that dark mages created from battlefield corpses. It stood on legs made of a thousand fused bones, its torso a wall of screaming faces and tangled limbs, its head a skull the size of a carriage with hollow, burning eye sockets that leaked green fire.
"What is that beast doing here?" Viktor said.
His voice was calm. Almost curious. The tone of a man who had encountered an unexpected obstacle and was assessing it.
Evriana stared. Her mouth was open again — she could feel it, the jaw hanging, the breath caught. She had read about skeleton soldiers. In the Ktorian family’s military archives, in the old campaign records, in the musty, leather-bound accounts of wars fought decades ago. They were siege weapons. Constructed by demon mages from the corpses of fallen soldiers and monsters, animated by dark horn magic, used to breach walls and crush battalions.
They required a horn.
Her eyes moved. Past the skeleton. Past the hovering corpse-mass. Past the burning green eyes and the wall of screaming faces. To the source.
A figure.
At the edge of the tree line — small, distant, partially concealed by the forest’s edge. A woman. Thick-bodied, wrapped in a dark cloak that covered her from head to toe, her face hidden beneath a deep hood. In her hands, pressed to her lips, was a horn. A massive, curved, spiraling thing — dark as obsidian, carved with symbols that pulsed with green light.
She was blowing it.
The sound — the deep, resonant, bone-shaking blast — was coming from her. She was animating the skeleton. Controlling it. Commanding it.
Monsters appeared around her — smaller ones, the ones that had been hiding in the forest, the ones that had not charged the battlefield. They swarmed from the trees, surrounding the cloaked woman, forming a living barrier between her and the soldiers.
"Capture her," Viktor said.
His voice cut through the chaos like a blade. Sharp. Commanding. The voice of a man who had assessed the situation in two seconds and identified the solution.
Evriana blinked. Looked in the direction he was pointing. Saw the woman. Saw the monsters. Saw the horn.
"Capture her!" Viktor yelled again, this time at the soldiers, at the commanders, at the frozen, staring, what-the-hell-is-happening men who were standing with their swords drawn and their jaws hanging. "You idiots! Go!"
He moved.
Not toward the woman. Toward the skeleton. His body launched from the ground — the explosion of dirt and blood and shattered earth that accompanied his takeoff, the blue-amethyst wings erupting from his back, spreading wide, catching the air. The wings were enormous — spanning fifteen feet on either side, the membranes translucent, veined with purple light, the feathers — if they could be called feathers — shifting and flowing like liquid amethyst.
He looked like an angel.
An angel from hell.
The particular contradiction of a beautiful, winged, luminous figure descending toward a monster with a drawn sword and murder in his violet eyes. He rose toward the skeleton, his sword blazing with aura, the blade extending — not physically, but in intent, the sword aura projecting outward, lengthening the effective reach by feet, by yards.
He collided with the skeleton.
The impact was thunderous. A shockwave rolled across the battlefield, knocking soldiers off their feet, flattening the tents, sending equipment flying. Viktor’s sword aura carved through the skeleton’s torso — a clean, horizontal cut that severed the massive construct at the waist, the upper half separating, falling, crashing to the earth with a sound like a collapsing building.
But it regenerated.
The green fire in the eye sockets flared. The severed pieces moved — pulling together, bone knitting to bone, flesh crawling across flesh like worms. The torso reattached. The legs regrew. The skeleton stood, whole again, in seconds.
Viktor cut it again.
And again. And again. Each cut deeper, wider, more devastating. Each regeneration faster. The skeleton was learning. Adapting. The horn magic was feeding it, powering it, making it stronger with each cycle of destruction and rebirth.
"We have to move, Princess!" Berenga’s voice — raw, urgent, stripped of the post-fuck daze that had clouded it earlier. She was a commander again. A soldier. Her amber eyes were sharp, her bull-kin body tense, her sword in her hand. "Or she will run!"
Evriana’s head snapped from the sky battle to the tree line.
The cloaked woman was running.
She had turned — the horn tucked under her arm, her thick body moving with surprising speed, her cloak billowing behind her. The monsters around her formed a retreating guard, a wall of flesh and claw and fang that moved with her, protecting her as she fled toward the caves in the cliffside.
"Everyone! Capture her!" Evriana ordered.