nagpurpolice Chapter 631 - 630 - Boyfriend Caught in Tree Branches
Chapter 631 - 630 - Boyfriend Caught in Tree Branches
Her voice rang across the battlefield — the trained, commanding, carrying projection of a Ktorian princess giving an order. The soldiers moved. The commanders moved. Berenga moved. The entire remaining force — minus the men too stunned to stand — surged toward the tree line."Shouldn’t we help him?" a soldier yelled, pointing at Viktor, who was still cutting the skeleton apart and watching it regenerate.
"We would only get in his way!" Evriana shouted back. "Move! Capture the woman! Now!"
They ran.
Evriana was faster.
Much faster. The Ktorian bloodline — even half-blood, even diluted — carried gifts. Evriana’s gift was Flash Replacement. The ability to teleport. Not freely, not without cost — she needed a target, a destination, something in her line of sight to swap positions with. A tree. A rock. A person. She saw it, focused, and her body replaced it, appearing where it had been while it appeared where she had been.
She used it now.
The trees ahead of her — the pines at the forest edge, the oaks deeper in, the birches near the cliffside — became stepping stones. She focused on a pine thirty feet ahead. Flashed. Was there. Focused on an oak fifty feet beyond. Flashed. Was there. The forest blurred past her in a series of static-freeze-jump-static-freeze-jump movements that covered ground faster than any horse.
She passed her own soldiers. She passed the retreating monsters. She passed the terrain itself — the rocks, the streams, the fallen logs — arriving at the cliffside caves before the woman could reach them.
The cloaked woman was still running. Her monsters had fallen behind — they were slower, ground-bound, unable to match the pace she set. She was alone. Panting. Her hood had fallen back, revealing a face that was not human. Dark skin, violet-tinged. Horns — small, curved, growing from her temples. Eyes that glowed faintly red.
She raised the horn to her lips.
Evriana focused on the horn.
Flashed.
The horn vanished from the woman’s hands and appeared in Evriana’s. Evriana’s body appeared where the horn had been — directly in front of the woman, above her, falling. The collision was graceless. Evriana’s weight — the full, dense, bull-kin mass of a Ktorian princess in armor — crashed into the woman, driving her to the ground.
The woman screamed.
"Oppa! Oppa, please save me!"
The voice was demonish. The accent was foreign. The words were broken — the common tongue spoken by someone who had learned it as a second language, the grammar mangled, the pronunciation thick with the particular growling, guttural quality of a demon’s vocal cords shaping human words.
Evriana pulled her sword.
The blade rested against the woman’s throat. Cold steel on dark skin. The woman’s red eyes went wide, the glow intensifying with fear, her body trembling beneath Evriana’s weight.
"What did you say?" Evriana asked.
Her voice was low. Dangerous. The voice of a woman who had been trained to kill and was currently holding a sword to the throat of someone who had just tried to kill her entire battalion.
The kick came from nowhere.
The impact caught Evriana in the ribs — not a kick but a hammer blow, the sheer, overwhelming, bone-rattling force of a foot the size of a shield striking her body with the power of a battering ram. She flew. Not stumbled. Not fell. Flew — her body launching sideways through the air, the sword leaving her grip, her armor screaming against the impact.
She hit a tree.
The trunk cracked. Not broke — cracked, the wood splintering inward from the force of her body against it. She slid down, her back scraping the bark, her ribs screaming, her vision swimming.
Her sword was on the ground. Three feet away. She reached for it.
The foot came down on the blade.
She looked up.
The man — the thing — standing over her was enormous. Not tall. Enormous. The massive, dense, barbarian build of a creature that was shaped like a man but was built like a mountain. His muscles had muscles. His arms were thicker than her torso. His chest was a wall of flesh and bone and scar tissue that had been built — not grown — built through decades of violence and combat and the relentless, brute-force accumulation of muscle on muscle on muscle.
His face was not human. The jaw was too wide. The brow too heavy. The teeth — visible, bared, the fangs of a predator — were too large, too sharp, too numerous.
"How dare you touch her?" he said.
His voice was a growl. A rumble. The sound of a rockslide in a cave.
"You humans," he continued. "Stinky pigs."
He rushed.
His sword — a massive, crude, unrefined slab of iron that was less a blade and more a sharpened wall — came down. Evriana rolled. The sword hit the ground where she had been, the impact cratering the earth, sending dirt and rock flying.
She grabbed her blade. Rose. Defended.
The barrage was immediate.
He did not swing. He barraged — the rapid, continuous, relentless, one-after-another-after-another rain of blows that a brute-force fighter produced when he had overwhelming strength and no interest in technique. Each blow was heavier than the last. Each impact sent vibrations through her blade, through her arms, through her shoulders, through her teeth.
Her steel trembled.
Not vibrated. Trembled. The blade — a Ktorian-forged, military-grade, enchanted steel sword that had cost more than a peasant’s annual income — was shaking. The metal was flexing. Bending. The enchantments were flickering, the runes along the blade guttering like candles in a wind.
She was overwhelmed.
The realization hit her with the clarity of a blade to the face. She could not win this. Not with swordsmanship. Not with speed. Not with technique. The gap in raw, physical, brute-force strength was too wide. He was not a skilled fighter. He was a strong one. And right now, strong was winning.
Her sword cracked.
A fracture — running along the blade, from the tip to the midpoint, the metal splitting under the stress of absorbing blows that exceeded its design parameters. The enchantments died. The runes went dark. The blade was breaking.
’I am going to die.’
The thought was clear. Cold. The particular, calm, resigned clarity of a woman who had been in combat before and recognized the moment when the combat was no longer winnable.
She would die here. In a forest. At the hands of a demon barbarian. Holding a broken sword. Having accomplished nothing.
’I never told him.’
The thought came unbidden. The particular, regret-laden, I-had-more-to-do recognition of a woman who was about to die with her words unspoken.
’I never told Viktor that I—’
The vines erupted.
From the ground. From the dirt. From the moss and the roots and the soil that had been dormant and quiet and still. Three thick, dark, thorn-covered vines burst upward — not growing, not emerging, but punching through the earth with the force of spears.
They found the barbarian’s arm.
The one holding the sword. The vines wrapped around his wrist — once, twice, three times — the thorns digging into his skin, piercing the muscle, anchoring themselves in his flesh. He yelled. Pulled. The vine held. More came.
From his left. From his right. From behind. From below. Vines — thick, dark, covered in thorns that curved like hooks — erupted from the earth and found him. His other arm. His chest. His legs. His neck. They wrapped around him — coil after coil after coil — the thorns catching his skin, his clothes, his armor, pulling tight.
He tried to break free. His muscles bulged — the massive, mountain-sized muscles straining against the vines, the veins in his neck standing out like cables. One vine snapped. Two more replaced it. He bit one — his fangs sinking into the vegetable flesh, tearing, the sap running green and thick down his chin.
The vines tightened.