Chapter 268: Devour Them

The sudden rift in the sky sealed itself shut with a sharp, thunderous crack, leaving behind a silence so absolute it felt heavy.

Then came the smell of iron and scorched flesh.

Chloe was the first to react. Her hands were still trembling from the residual mana feedback of breaking through the domain’s outer boundary, her breath ragged as she sat on the dirt. But the second Silas’s broken form hit the earth, rolling to an agonizing, motionless stop right in the center of their circle, every drop of blood in her veins ran cold.

"Silas...?" Her voice was a breath, a faint whisper that barely carried in the open air. He didn’t answer as he couldn’t.

His condition was a nightmare carved into reality. The magnificent, pink-feathered wing that had always flared with such defiant elegance was gone, reduced to a gory, smoking wound across his back. His left arm ended at the wrist in a charred, ruinous mess where his hand had been vaporized.

Most horrifying of all was his chest- his sternum was completely caved in, a jagged, gaping crater of torn muscle and exposed, cracked bone where his heart feebly beat against the odds.

"Silas!"

Chloe scrambled forward on her hands and knees, ignoring the sharp rocks digging into her skin, ignoring the exhaustion weighing down her limbs. For as long as any of them had known her, Chloe was the unshakeable pillar- stoic, calculated, and emotionless under the worst pressures.

But as she reached out and pulled Silas’s head into her lap, the icy mask she wore shattered into a million unrecoverable pieces. Unbridled, visceral terror tore through her chest.

Tears burst from her eyes, hot and blinding, spilling over her pale cheeks and falling onto Silas’s blood-smeared face.

"No, no, no! Silas, look at me! Open your eyes! Please, Silas!"

She grabbed his right wrist, her fingers frantically searching for a pulse. It was so faint, so impossibly weak, like a whisper hanging by a thread. The sheer volume of blood pooling beneath him was turning the soil into a dark crimson mire.

"I have to stop it... I have to stop the bleeding," she sobbed, her voice breaking into frantic, desperate hitches.

She pressed her trembling palms against his ruined chest and forced every remaining drop of her mana outward. Frost bloomed across her skin, creeping down her arms and onto Silas’s body. She wasn’t trying to heal him; she was trying to cryo-freeze his flesh, to seal the ruptured arteries and lock his body in absolute stasis before his life completely drained away.

White frost rapidly spread across his torn chest, attempting to form a protective layer of crystal ice over the crater. For a fraction of a second, hope flared in her chest. Then, it died a horrific death.

Crack.

The moment her ice touched the wound, an oily, suffocating dark energy reacted inside Silas’s flesh. Swef’s residual, necrotic power- an ancient, festering corruption born from centuries of cannibalism- surged against Chloe’s mana. The frost turned a sickly, bruised purple, hissed violently, and shattered into harmless vapor.

Chloe gasped, pushing more mana into her hands until her own skin seemed to crack from the extreme cold.

"Freeze! Why won’t you freeze?!"

She tried again, driving her ice deeper into the wound, but the ancient SS-Rank aura lingering in Silas’s flesh burned through her magic like boiling water over snow. Her frost couldn’t even take hold for a single second before it melted away into black mist.

Despair, thick and suffocating, slammed into her soul.

She was powerless. Her magic, her control, her strength- everything she had built was completely useless against the lingering malice of the monster that had done this.

"Help him!" Chloe screamed, her head snapping up toward the rest of the team, her face twisted in an agony none of them had ever seen on her before. "Someone help him! I can’t stop the bleeding! Please!"

The rest of the team froze in collective horror, paralyzed by the sight of their leader broken on the ground and Chloe weeping hysterically over his body.

Neil took a jagged step forward, his hand flying to the hilt of his weapon, his face drained of all color. "Silas... how could-"

Alpha dropped his sword, his hands flying to his mouth as tears welled in his eyes.

"His hand... his wing... Silas!"

"Move!" Neil roared, snapping out of his trance. "Natalia, get your healing salves! We need to stabilize his core right now, or he’s going to-"

Neil’s words were violently cut short as the sky above them suddenly rotted.

A suffocating, heavy pressure slammed down from above, crushing the grass flat and forcing the entire team to their knees. The air turned foul, thick with the stench of copper, stagnant water, and decaying flesh.

Twenty yards in front of them, the space tore open like an infected wound, and out stepped Swef Ashi.

He was no longer in his suppressed form. Swef had fully assumed his monstrous, true cannibalistic state. He loomed at nearly ten feet tall, his black skin covered in pulsing crimson tattoos that burned with an oily light.

His jaw was fully unhinged, revealing concentric rows of razor-sharp, lamprey-like teeth dripping with thick black bile. His chest bore the brutal marks of his fight with Silas, but his eyes- burning like twin pools of molten blood- were fixed on the group with absolute, ravenous dominance.

He held a massive, jagged bone cleaver in his right hand, the metal dripping with blood.

"Insects," Swef rumbled, his voice sounding like two grinding tectonic plates layered with the shrieks of a thousand devoured souls.

"Did you truly think you could run from my domain? You only escaped because I allowed the boy to entertain me before I broke him."

Alpha gritted his teeth, his body shaking violently under the crushing weight of the SS-Rank aura, but he forced himself to stand in front of Chloe and Silas.

"You bastard..."

Swef didn’t even look at Alpha. He looked down at Silas’s limp body in Chloe’s arms, a sickening, grotesque grin curling his split lips.

"He fought well for a pig awaiting the slaughter," Swef growled, raising his massive arm. "His flesh tasted exquisite. But his soul is incomplete. I will consume the rest of him in front of you, and then I will pick your bones clean."

Swef slammed the butt of his bone cleaver into the earth.

BOOM!

A wave of black energy erupted into the ground. A second later, dozens of dark, dripping portals tore open around the clearing. From the void emerged a horrifying tide of Astoria warriors- grotesque, pale, cannibalistic beasts with elongated limbs and hollow, hungry eyes.

Hundreds of them poured into the clearing, snarling and snapping their jaws as they formed a tight, inescapable ring around the exhausted, battered team.

"Devour them," Swef commanded, turning his crimson gaze back to Chloe and Silas. "Leave the boy’s head for last."

The Astoria horde shrieked in unison, a deafening wave of bloodlust crashing over the clearing as they lunged forward to feast.

Surrounded by a horde of nightmares, with the ancient cannibal lord stepping toward them and Silas dying in her arms, Chloe pulled Silas’s blood-soaked head tighter against her chest.

She looked up at Swef through her tears, her eyes cold, broken, and filled with a terrifying, hopeless rage.