Chapter 74: Puppet Strings

"I need five Sun Charms," I said, holding my hand out to Sera before I had even fully caught my breath from the last fall.

She blinked at me. "Five? What happened to—"

"No time. Trust me."

Something in my voice must have carried more weight than I intended, because she didn’t argue further. She just reached into her pocket and pressed five small, warm discs into my palm, each one humming faintly with stored light.

"You’re going to owe me an explanation," she said.

"I’ll owe you a lot of things by the end of tonight."

I turned back toward the tree without waiting for her reply, already climbing, already running the plan through my head one more time like a blade I needed to keep sharp until the exact moment it mattered.

Choez was waiting exactly where I knew it would be.

I didn’t hesitate this time. I injected my spiritual power and threw all five charms at once, and light exploded outward in a single, blinding column, drowning the branches, drowning the corpse below, drowning everything in a white so total it felt like standing inside the sun itself.

Choez shrieked, wings flaring, and I felt its shadow lunge toward mine on pure instinct, desperate to find purchase.

It found nothing.

There was no shadow left to overlap. Not with this much light burning through the canopy.

Blind, furious, and cornered, Choez did exactly what I had bet everything on. It gave up on the physical fight entirely and drove straight for my mind instead, strings snapping forward, aiming for that same soft, undefended place it had broken into three times already.

’Not this time.’

I let it come.

The moment its strings brushed against the edge of my consciousness, I activated Ability Theft, and I felt the theft land clean, felt something vast and cold and utterly foreign slide out of Choez’s grip and settle into my own chest instead, like catching a knife by the blade and somehow not bleeding for it.

Choez’s strings went slack mid-motion.

I didn’t waste the opening.

I turned its own ability back on it and dove straight into its Domain of Mind before it even understood what had happened.

What waited there was nothing like my own.

There was no mountain.

Just a small, jagged outcrop of stone, barely enough to qualify as a hill, memories so thin and sparse they looked more like scattered debris than an actual landscape.

And the sea surrounding it wasn’t blue.

It was opaque, thick, and roiling, choked with something that felt less like water and more like concentrated malice, waves crashing against that pathetic little island of memory with a violence that had nothing natural about it.

’This thing doesn’t even like itself.’

I didn’t linger to feel sorry for it.

I summoned Voice of Death and let it ring, once, directly into that churning black sea.

The sound didn’t fade this time. It spread, whisper after whisper blooming across the water’s surface, each one carrying the same quiet, patient message. Because it was echoing I felt my ears and mind burning as well, however the effects were lower because my true physical body was not inside its domain of mind but rather outside.

However, Choez would be feeling the full affects considering it was ringing directly in its domain.

The sea began to shake.

Cracks split across its surface, wider and faster than anything I had seen in my own collapsing Domain, and I understood, distantly, why. ℯℯ𝘭.

There was nothing holding this consciousness together in the first place.

No foundation. No anchor. Just negativity stacked on negativity, ready to fall apart the second something gave it a proper push.

I gave it a very proper push.

I pulled myself out the second the first true crack tore through the middle of that black water, not willing to risk getting caught in whatever came after.

I opened my eyes back in my own body, hanging from the branch, Choez was frozen mid-thrash below me, his wings twiched uselessly, his eyes wide and unfocused, its mind somewhere far away, drowning in whispers it had never expected to hear from the inside.

I didn’t waste the moment.

I summoned Thunder Sunlight, heat roaring up my arm one final time, and swung.

The blade went through its belly clean, it gave no resistance at all, like cutting through something that had already, somewhere deeper than flesh, decided it was finished.

Choez’s body dropped.

Below, all at once, every Calfeeth still standing simply collapsed, limbs going slack mid-motion, bodies crumpling into the mud like puppets with their strings finally, mercifully cut.

’Looks like they were all his...Puppets. Right. Of course they were.’

For a moment, the whole clearing went perfectly silent, the kind of silence that only follows something that’s been screaming for far too long.

Then Sera’s voice cracked through it.

"Edmund! Are you—" She stopped, staring at the pile of dead Calfeeths, then at Choez’s headless body, then back at me. "What did you even do up there?"

"Long story," I said, dropping down from the branch and landing harder than I meant to, my legs finally admitted how much they had been through tonight. "I’ll explain. Eventually. Preferably somewhere that isn’t covered in corpses."

Arthur wandered over, nudging one of the fallen Calfeeths with his boot. "You good?"

"Define good."

"Fair enough."

A soft chime settled into the edge of my vision, quiet and almost gentle after everything else tonight.

[You Have Acquired A New Gift]

[Puppet Strings]

[Description: A Ball That Can Be Used To Turn Someone Into A Puppet]

[Rank: Awakened]

I stared at the notification for a long moment, then let out a short, exhausted laugh that had absolutely nothing to do with humor.

"Haha! It did drop a gift!" I said laughing.

"What did? Will these opaque shits do it too?" Theodore asked.

"No, I don’t think so, after all they were marionettes and not alive..."

All of them looked at me before nodding. After all, high ranking unorthodox creatures did have abilities, and they did a little bit knew that I was fighting something stronger than what they were fighting.

"I guess we can still eat them?" Arthur asked.

"No—" Mary said, however, right at that moment, her stomach produced grumbling voices.

We looked at her with narrowed eyes.

She instantly flushed.