Novel Full Chapter 1735: Not Yet
Chapter 1735: Not Yet
"But I, Black Fang, Disgrace to my Ancestors, thank you for your words."
The confusion hit Chizuru harder than any blow she’d taken on this field.
She had hurled every ugly word she possessed at the woman and the answer was gratitude.
The blade ignited in a blaze so dense the air around it went dark, and the Venomborne Terror closed the remaining distance.
"I’ll put you out of your misery, child!" Chizuru attacked first because standing still was worse.
Her sword came in an arc and Black Fang parried with one hand, the impact singing up Chizuru’s arms hard enough to rattle her teeth, and the woman in front of her hadn’t shifted her weight.
Tomoe hit from the right a heartbeat later and the two elders fell into the synchronized rhythm, attacks alternating in patterns designed to leave no window for recovery.
Black Fang found windows anyway, stepping through their coordination as if she could see the movements before the blades committed, turning one elder’s attack into a hazard for the other until Chizuru was parrying her own ally’s redirected strikes as often as the enemy’s.
"[Crescent Light]!" Golden arcs ripped from Chizuru’s blade and Tomoe struck through the opening with [Guardian’s Edge] blazing, a barrier-laced thrust aimed at Black Fang’s unprotected flank.
The katana split both.
Golden light parted down the center and the edge continued into Tomoe’s thrust without slowing, batting it aside so hard the grey-haired elder’s wrist cracked.
"HOW?!" Tomoe screamed through the pain, and the word carried everything burning through both elders because they were casting spells, burning mana, executing techniques refined across centuries, and the woman before them was dismantling all of it without casting a single spell.
"Her left!" Tomoe shouted, catching through the eyes of a true combat expert the way Black Fang’s body favored one side. "Elvardia did a lot of damage to her body, she isn’t fighting fully healthy! Drive her left, I’ll take the opening!"
Chizuru swept a feint that forced Black Fang to guard high and Tomoe punched through the gap, her blade scoring across the Venomborne Terror’s ribs in a cut that sprayed blood across the frozen ground.
The riposte came, but the parry before it arrived a fraction late, and Chizuru saw the truth behind the delay: a body that hadn’t slept in days and had spent dozens of hours under torturers’ hands was trying to quit on her.
"You’re right! Do it again!" Chizuru roared, and the two elders surged into a pincer that Chizuru led high and Tomoe drove low.
Black Fang couldn’t redirect both. Chizuru’s [Crescent Light] clipped her thigh and Tomoe’s edge split her forearm, and the Venomborne Terror stepped backward.
The elders pressed and she gave another step, blood running from four wounds while her body finally betrayed what the torture and sleeplessness had cost her. For three desperate exchanges the fight looked won.
"She’s weakening!" Tomoe cried, blade blazing with [Guardian’s Edge]. "Don’t stop!"
They didn’t. Chizuru cast [Radiant Cleave] point-blank and Tomoe sent a barrier-laced thrust at Black Fang’s center, and the combined force rocked the Venomborne Terror back on her heels.
Then Black Fang stepped forward.
Tomoe’s next strike carved across her shoulder and Black Fang walked through it, closing the distance instead of parrying, and the return cut was so fast the grey-haired elder barely got her sword up.
The impact launched Tomoe sideways off her feet.
"Elder Tomoe!" A samurai broke from the nearest rank and charged, katana raised, and a purple-eyed corpse that had been his squadmate a minute ago stepped into his path and forced him back with three savage cuts.
Two more soldiers tried to flank around and the puppets closed the gap, a wall of dead Fujimori holding the living ones at bay while their elders bled.
"Get out of my way!" The samurai hacked through the corpse’s sword arm and it kept swinging with the other, buying the seconds its master needed.
Every step of Black Fang carried the same unhurried inevitability as the walk that had brought her across the battlefield except now the katana was moving, cutting into them with a ferocity that made every exchange before it look like she’d been warming up.
Chizuru’s guard buckled and the katana carved her ribs, dropping the old woman to one knee.
Tomoe found an opening and raked a gash across Black Fang’s arm above the elbow.
Blood hit the frozen earth, but Black Fang’s arm continued as if the wound belonged to someone else, and the counter caught Tomoe across the stomach in a cut shallow enough to survive and deep enough to drop her howling.
Chizuru understood.
Black Fang was taking their hits on purpose because the openings she created were worth every drop of blood.
"Taking damage to strike back like a wild beast!" she screamed. "This is not how the Fujimori fight!"
Chizuru threw everything she had left into the next sequence. [Crescent Light], [Radiant Cleave], [Last Bloom] left her lips as screams, each technique grander than the last, golden arcs shattering against the katana one after another until her arms shook from the effort.
"USE YOUR WRETCHED, EVIL POWERS!" The words tore from Chizuru’s throat before she understood she was saying them, because the Venomborne Terror had not cast a single spell since the fight began. "YOUR VENOM! YOUR NECROMANCY! FIGHT LIKE THE MONSTER YOU ARE!"
She was pleading.
Black Fang said nothing.
The katana carved through Chizuru’s failing guard and opened her sword arm in a red line that sprayed across the frost, and two more cuts followed in the same breath, precise and devastating.
Through the haze Chizuru saw what should have given her hope and instead drove the terror deeper: the Venomborne Terror was wounded.
Blood ran from half a dozen wounds: the gash across her ribs where Tomoe had scored first, the cut on her thigh from Chizuru’s [Crescent Light], the split forearm, the opened arm above the elbow, the carved shoulder she’d walked through without flinching.
Bruises darkened her ribs where techniques had connected.
Her body carried the stiffness of someone who hadn’t slept in days and bore the marks of many hours spent being tortured.
And she was winning, through nothing but sheer will and hatred.
Chizuru’s guard broke and the flat of the katana caught her temple, sending the old woman into the ground with a crash.
"Chizuru!" Tomoe’s scream reached her through the ringing.
The grey-haired elder had dragged herself upright despite the wound across her stomach, sword shaking so badly it stuttered in the light, and when Black Fang stepped toward the fallen woman to finish it Tomoe threw herself between them.
"I won’t let..."
The blade went through her chest before the sentence finished, a thrust so clean the grey-haired woman’s voice died with it.
She looked down at the steel beneath her collarbone, then up at Black Fang, and grief broke across her face so raw it stripped away everything else.
"You were... one of us..."
Black Fang pulled free and Tomoe folded to the dirt beside Chizuru with her eyes already dimming.
"I was, yes," Black Fang spoke with a cold serenity.
The old woman’s fingers found Tomoe’s hand and locked tight as the warmth left it, and the last thing Tomoe saw was Chizuru’s face inches from her own, weeping into the frozen ground.
"I never denied that."
Black Fang kicked Tomoe’s side so the woman turned toward the skies, then looked down into her eyes.
"I don’t understand why you people keep repeating it."
Black Fang drove her katana into Tomoe’s chest, and serpent marks seared across the dead woman’s forehead while Chizuru watched from inches away, still clutching the hand that had stopped holding back.
Tomoe’s fingers twitched in her grip, then squeezed, and purple light bloomed behind the eyes Chizuru had just watched go dark.
The puppet rose and pulled free of Chizuru’s grasp, settling into the serpentine stance.
"Go," Black Fang ordered, and the thing that had been Tomoe walked toward the front without looking back.
Chizuru lay in the dirt with blood running from her temple, her sword arm, the gash across her ribs. The woman above her blotted out the sky.
"Will I..." The words barely left her. "Will I become... one of those things?"
Black Fang looked down at the Fujimori elder who had gotten on her nerves through the centuries the most, and the cold in those violet eyes could have frozen the sun.
"No."
She tilted her head.
"Not yet."
Confusion cut through the terror on Chizuru’s face, and the faintest curl appeared at the corner of Black Fang’s mouth.
"If I turn you into a loyal puppet, how can I derive satisfaction from the things I’ll do to you?"
A shriek tore from the sky before the words finished settling, Ragnar’s voice, raw and inhuman, the sound of a king broken past everything a body could endure while the breaking refused to stop.
Chizuru’s eyes climbed to the armored figure above the battlefield and the limbless ruin dangling from his grip.
’Is that what awaits me?’
The old woman curled into the frozen ground with her knees against her chest and her hands over her face, shaking so violently her armor rattled against the earth.