Chapter 114: The Fool

’And the Reaper... the great fool of the North... he is trying to play father to it! He is trying to hide an apex predator in a child’s dress!’

The Trickster pushed off the tree, his mind completely intoxicated by the delusions of his impending grandeur.

He didn’t need to fight her.

He didn’t need to risk his own life.

All he needed to do was... run.

He would return to the deepest, most lightless subterranean courts of the Southern continent. He would kneel before his Lord, the Archdemon who ruled the hidden, and he would deliver this information.

’My Lord will mobilize the entire hidden legion,’ the Trickster fantasized, his sharp, pearlescent teeth bared in a wicked, slavering grin. ’We will wait until the North is vulnerable, strike down the Bastion and slaughter the Reaper, and we will take the child. We will place her on a throne of black iron, break her human mind, and use her core to swallow the Emperor’s palace whole. And I... I will be the one who delivered her. I will be elevated to the right hand of the Sovereign!’

The fantasy was so vivid, so deliciously intoxicating, that he temporarily forgot the pain of his burned wrist. He took a step forward, preparing to begin the long, arduous trek through the jungle toward the hidden sanctuaries of his kind.

He took one step.

And took a second step.

He prepared to take a third step, his boot lifting from the muddy jungle floor.

He never completed the motion.

THWIP!

A sensation, silent and impossibly fast, brushed against the back of the Trickster’s neck. It felt like a cool, gentle breeze, except the air in the deep jungle was completely stagnant.

The demon froze mid-stride, his boot hovering an inch above the mud.

His demonic survival instincts, honed over centuries of evasion and slaughter, suddenly screamed with a volume that threatened to shatter his own skull. The euphoric delusions of grandeur evaporated instantly, replaced by a cold, paralyzing spike of pure dread.

He didn’t turn around.

He didn’t move.

Slowly, the Trickster lowered his eyes, looking down at his own shadow cast upon the muddy ground by the faint moonlight filtering through the canopy.

His shadow was moving.

It was not mimicking his frozen posture. The dark silhouette cast upon the mud was actively stretching, elongating, twisting into jagged, impossible shapes that defied the light source above.

"No," the Trickster whispered, his voice trembling, a pathetic, wavering sound that lacked all theatrical resonance. "No, the portal... the portal severed the connection. I escaped."

He didn’t know that he hadn’t escaped.

When Seraphina’s Supreme Dark Core had flooded the floor of the grand hall with heavy, liquid shadows to pin him down, it hadn’t just been a physical trap. It was a metaphysical infection, since the dark mana had touched his boots; it had seeped into his aura, branding his soul with the unmistakable, inescapable signature of her wrath.

When he had thrown himself into the spatial tear, he thought he had left the shadows behind.

He was wrong.

The shadows had simply attached themselves to his dimensional wake, hitching a ride through the fabric of reality, waiting for him to stop moving.

From the corners of his peripheral vision, the Trickster saw it.

The darkness of the jungle, the mundane, natural shadows cast by the massive banyan trees and the thick ferns, was actively detaching itself from the physical objects. The shadows were peeling off the trees like ribbons of black silk, slithering across the damp soil, moving with the terrifying, synchronized purpose of a pack of starving wolves.

They converged on his location.

Before the Trickster could even open his mouth to scream, before he could channel a single spark of emerald fire to defend himself, the shadows struck.

A thick, roiling rope of concentrated, pitch-black mist whipped up from the ground. It moved with the speed of a striking cobra, lashing around the demon’s pale throat.

SNAP!

The dark mana pulled taut, acting as a noose. The Trickster was brutally jerked backward, his feet flying out from under him. He hit the ground with bone-shattering force, the breath exploding from his lungs.

He grabbed frantically at his throat with his one functional hand, his long, pale fingers desperately trying to claw away the rope of mist.

His fingers passed right through it. The mist was intangible to his physical touch, yet it clamped around his windpipe with the crushing, unyielding density of solid mythril. It was choking him, cutting off his oxygen, but more terrifyingly, it was cutting off his connection to the ambient mana of the world.

He was being spiritually strangled.

"G-GAAK!" the Trickster gurgled, his slit, blood-red eyes bulging from their sockets. His legs kicked wildly against the mud, his polished boots scraping uselessly against the roots of the banyan tree.

The rope of mist around his throat was only the beginning.

From the surrounding jungle, the gathered shadows lunged forward. They did not attack him with blades or spears. They acted as living, parasitic vines.

Ribbons of freezing darkness wrapped around his ankles, locking his legs together. The mist spiraled up his calves, wrapping tightly around his thighs, immobilizing his lower body.

Another tendril of shadow lashed out, wrapping around his right arm, pinning it violently against his side. The dark mana seeped into the charred, exposed bones of his left wrist, driving a spike of agony into his nervous system so that his vision went completely white.

He was pinned to the jungle floor, unable to move a single muscle, bound by chains forged from the disgust of a six-year-old girl sitting miles away.

’She isn’t even here!’ the Trickster’s mind screamed, a hysterical, soundless wail of absolute, incomprehensible terror. ’This is residual mana! This is a remote construct! How is this possible?! How can a child control a localized singularity across a dimensional jump?!’

The answer was simple, though his arrogant mind could not comprehend it.