Chapter 347 - A Battlefield

Chapter 347: Chapter 347 - A Battlefield

The remaining soldiers charged.

Not five. Not twelve. Twenty-three men, the full garrison, poured from every corridor. Some wore armor. Some wore furs. Some were bare-chested, their muscles scarred and painted with war marks. They came with axes, hammers, swords, maces, and bare fists.

Cruxius took his hands out of his pockets.

The first man reached him—a hammer-wielder, his swing wide and powerful. Cruxius caught the hammer head in his palm. Kinetic Control absorbed the full force of the impact. The energy traveled up his arm, through his chest, and out his other hand as a concentrated lance of pure force. The lance hit the hammer-wielder in the chest. His ribs caved inward. He flew backward, hitting three men behind him, all four crashing into the far wall.

He moved.

Electricity-fast. His body becoming a violet-white blur through the hall. He appeared behind a swordsman, grabbed his sword arm, and used Kinetic Control to amplify the man’s own swing. The sword completed its arc at triple speed and took the man’s head off.

He vanished again.

Appeared beside a spearman. Opened a portal beneath his feet. The man fell through and emerged from a ceiling portal, crashing onto five men below.

The hall became a slaughterhouse.

Portals opened and closed in rapid succession—appearing in front of attacks, absorbing the kinetic energy, redirecting it. A sword swing vanished into a portal and emerged behind the swordsman. A mace strike was absorbed and returned as a kinetic blast that caved in the wielder’s chest. Arrows from a late-arriving archer were caught in a portal wall and fired back at triple velocity.

Twelve men down.

Fifteen.

Eighteen.

The remaining soldiers slowed. Their charges becoming hesitant. Their swings losing conviction. They had watched eighteen men die in under two minutes, each killed by their own weapons, their own force, their own momentum turned against them.

Cruxius stood in the center of the carnage.

His boots in blood. His coat untouched. Not a drop on him.

He looked at the remaining five.

They looked at him.

One dropped his sword and ran.

The other four followed.

"’COWARDS!’" Vekar screamed from the platform. His fat body was shaking, his hands gripping the bone railing, his knuckles white. He looked at the retreating soldiers with the apoplectic fury of a man watching his authority dissolve. "’COWARDS! COME BACK! I’LL KILL YOU MYSELF!.’"

He turned to Cruxius.

Their eyes met across the blood-soaked hall.

Vekar’s hand went to his side. He drew a blade—a short, thick, ugly thing, serrated on one edge, designed for tearing rather than cutting. Zone Master energy crackled along the serrated edge, the ice-floor ability manifesting as frost along the metal.

Cruxius looked at the blade.

Then at Vekar’s face.

"’You,’" Cruxius said. His voice was even. Warm. Completely without hurry. "’Are dead.’"

He moved.

The distance between them—thirty feet of open hall, covered in blood and bodies—vanished in a single step. The violet-white blur of his movement cracked the air. He appeared at the base of the platform, his leg already swinging.

The kick carried the stored kinetic energy of every attack he had absorbed in the last three minutes.

Vekar raised his blade.

The frost-energy barrier activated—a wall of ice forming between them, thick, reinforced, the full power of a Zone Master’s ability concentrated in a defensive shield.

The kick hit the ice.

The barrier shattered.

The kinetic lance passed through the fragments and struck Vekar in the chest. The Zone Master’s fat body lifted off the platform. He flew backward, hitting the back wall, cracking the stone, his blade flying from his hand.

He slumped.

His furs torn. His chest heaving. His face white with shock and pain.

Cruxius stepped onto the platform.

He walked toward the fallen Zone Master. Slowly. Deliberately. Each boot step echoing in the silent hall. The surviving soldiers had fled. The torches flickered. The blood pooled.

He raised his foot.

Then the doors burst open.

"’PLEASE! STOP! DON’T KILL MY HUSBAND!.’"

The voice was high. Desperate. Female. Carrying the particular cracking pitch of a woman who had run a long distance and was now screaming through exhaustion and terror.

Cruxius’s foot stopped.

Mid-swing. Three inches from Vekar’s face.

He turned his head.

She stood in the doorway.

Pregnant.

Enormously so. Her belly was a full, round dome that preceded her into the room, the skin tight and low, the pregnancy advanced enough that she moved with the waddling, careful gait of a woman carrying significant weight. She wore a thin white dress—translucent in the torchlight, clinging to every curve of her body. The fabric was damp, the cold air outside having turned it nearly transparent.

Her breasts were enormous. Swollen with pregnancy, the dark nipples visible through the wet fabric, pressing against the thin cloth in heavy, wide circles. The dress hung from her shoulders by thin straps, the neckline plunging to accommodate the fullness of her chest, the fabric stretching tight across the mounds. Each step she took made them bounce, the heavy flesh shifting under the thin cloth, the dark nipples dragging against the fabric.

Her hips were wide, the pregnancy having spread them further, the thin dress riding low on her curves. Her thighs were thick, the fabric clinging to them, the outline of her swollen pussy visible through the wet cloth. Her dark hair was loose, tangled, falling around her flushed face. Her eyes were wide, dark, streaming with tears.

She was beautiful.

Thick. Pregnant. Desperate.

Her hands were pressed against the underside of her belly, cradling the dome, her thick arms beneath the mass. She stood in the doorway, panting, her enormous tits heaving with her breath, the thin dress doing nothing to hide the full, ripe curves of her body.

"’Please,’" she gasped again. "’Please don’t kill him. I’m begging you.’"

Cruxius looked at her.

Then at Vekar.

The Zone Master had lifted his head from the cracked stone. His fat face was no longer purple with rage. It was white. His eyes—small, pig-like, set deep in the rolls of his face—were fixed on the pregnant woman in the doorway with an expression Cruxius recognized.

Shock.

Genuine, unguarded shock.

And beneath it, buried under layers of fat and cruelty and Zone Master authority, something else.

Worry.

His thick hand came up, pressing against his cracked ribs. His mouth opened. His voice came out raw, cracked, trembling.

"’What are you doing here, bitch?’"

He yelled it. But the yell carried no authority. It carried the thin, reedy quality of a man who had been caught in a position he hadn’t expected to be caught in. His pig-like eyes moved from the pregnant woman to Cruxius, and the worry in them deepened.

Cruxius’s foot lowered.

He stood over Vekar. He looked down at the fat, broken Zone Master, then at the pregnant woman in the doorway, then back at Vekar.

He smiled.

Not the warm smile. Not the casual, conversational smile. The slow, knowing smile of a man who had just been handed a weapon more effective than any portal or kinetic lance.

"’You really got a beautiful wife,’" he said.

Vekar’s face contorted.

Cruxius looked at the pregnant woman. At her enormous, milk-swollen tits visible through the thin dress. At her full, round belly. At her wide, thick hips and her streaming dark eyes and her trembling, desperate mouth.

"’How many women have you impregnated, idiot?’"

The question was directed at Vekar. But Cruxius’s eyes stayed on the pregnant woman.

She stared back.

Her dark eyes—still streaming, still wide—found his face. She looked at him the way women had been looking at him for three days. The way the mother had. The way the daughter had. The way the succubus had. The way Soha had.

But there was something else in it.

Recognition.

Not of his face. Of his type. The type of man who walked into a room and changed it. The type who stood over broken Zone Masters with their hands in their pockets. The type who looked at a pregnant woman and didn’t look away.

Vekar made a sound.

A choked, pained sound from the floor. His fat body was trembling. Not from pain. From the sight of his pregnant wife standing in the doorway of the man who had just dismantled his entire garrison.

Cruxius crouched.

He looked at Vekar’s face. At the worry. At the fear.

"’So,’" he said conversationally. "’This is what you care about.’"

Vekar didn’t answer.

His pig-like eyes were fixed on his wife.

Cruxius stood.

He walked toward the pregnant woman.

She flinched. Her hands tightened on her belly. Her enormous tits bounced under the thin dress from the involuntary movement, the dark nipples pressing hard against the wet fabric. She stepped backward.

He stopped.

Three feet from her. Close enough to smell her—warm skin, the faint milk-sweet scent of pregnancy, the cold air from outside clinging to her dress.

He looked at her face.

"’What is your name?’"

She swallowed.

"’Ryna,’" she whispered.

"’Ryna.’" He said it like he was tasting it. "’How far along are you?’"

"’Eight—eight months.’"

He looked at her belly. At the full, tight dome of it. At the way the thin dress stretched over it. At her enormous, swollen tits, the nipples dark and visible, the fabric clinging to them.

"’Does he treat you well?’"

"Sorry?"