SSS Awakening: All My Clones Have Divine Bloodlines!-Chapter 35: [Corruption Chain]

Two quick strikes, barely visible in the dark, and his arms ended up several feet away from the rest of him.

Blood soaked into the grass.

He was still alive. Still conscious.

Luna approached without hurrying, each step quiet on the wet ground. She stopped beside him and looked down with the mild, unhurried attention of someone examining something that had already been decided.

Nicolas looked up at her.

In the moonlight, her eyes were worse than he’d realized, violet deep as bruises, cut through by burning crimson slits that had no business existing in any living thing’s face.

"Plea—"

She crouched and placed her hand against his chest. But he didn’t have time to react to that, not because he didn’t want to, but because he felt something else.

Something stir behind her.

A presence, like a door that hadn’t existed moments before, shimmered into being just behind Luna. Its edges were faint, almost intangible, like a mirage, but he could feel it. 𝐟𝕣𝗲𝕖𝕨𝗲𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝗲𝚕.𝗰𝚘𝐦

"Corruption Chain."

Luna’s voice rang out like a command, and as if answering it, the door opened.

From the darkness inside, thin black tendrils shot out, curling and twisting through the air. At first they looked like delicate threads, fragile, almost ornamental. But as they struck, their purpose became horrifyingly clear.

They pierced Nicolas’s body, but not to wound him. They passed through flesh and bone, reaching deeper, aiming for something far beyond the physical.

His soul.

Each strike was precise, penetrating at multiple points simultaneously. Nicolas gasped and thrashed, the pain elastic and unbearable, stretching across him in ways that made him feel like he was being pulled inside out.

Slowly. Deliberately.

His soul came loose from him piece by piece, the process drawn out in a way that left no room for mercy or unconsciousness, until what finally emerged was a pale trembling sphere of grey-white light, already darkening at its edges, already being eaten away by the energy surrounding it.

Alive. Aware. Trapped.

His soul was dragged toward the door, and swallowed by it.

He wasn’t dead. Far from it. He had simply become part of something no one in the world would have chosen, something that would keep him alive while being the opposite of living. Something that would torment him without end, that would remind him every single day of every crime he had committed, and make him pay the price for them. Eternally.

Emily had suffered slowly, without a voice, without a choice. Now so would he.

Luna stood.

She looked at what remained of Nicolas for a moment, her expression holding nothing, not satisfaction, not relief. Just a stillness that had finished with something.

Evan watched from the side but said nothing. No words of comfort, no comment. There was no need.

Then Luna looked up, and so did he, as his Death Sense hit him like a wall.

Something was incoming. Fast. Heavy. Coming from above.

Luna didn’t move from her place. Didn’t dodge.

She just raised her sword.

BOOM.

The impact shook the ground. Dust and debris exploded outward in every direction, and for a moment the clearing was completely obscured.

When it cleared,

A fist.

Covered by an iron gauntlet that showed no sign of stress, no sign of having just struck something hard enough to shake the earth, stopped cold by her blade.

The dust settled completely.

Edmund stood before her.

The Magistrate of Lirath looked at the girl in front of him, her blade against his fist, her violet eyes meeting his without flinching, and for the first time since he had arrived, his expression shifted.

Not anger.

Not recognition.

Something closer to uncertainty, from a man who had very little practice with the feeling.

"I see," he said, less a question than a statement. "So you’re the one behind the disappearance of that fool."

He had been at the manor when the distress signal came through, sent by the escort team he had assigned to his son. He had known something like this was possible. Nicolas was directly tied to that gang and to the person they had been sent after, and Edmund was not a man who left things to chance. He had taken precautions, the distress signal being one of them.

His son was a disappointment in almost every sense of the word. But he was still his only son, and whether Edmund liked it or not, he needed him alive, if nothing else, to carry out his duties as his heir.

The chances of something bad happening today hadn’t been high, but they weren’t zero either, a reason more than enough to prepare. And it seemed he had been right, only he hadn’t expected the situation to degenerate so quickly before he could arrive.

Only a few minutes had passed, and yet it was already too late. The one responsible for all of it was the girl standing in front of him.

One look was enough to understand what had happened. The realization didn’t sit well with him.

A clear brown energy coiled around his free hand, and without hesitation he drove it forward, full force, aimed directly at her.

Dang!

His fist was knocked back by Luna’s free hand. Not blocked. Knocked back. Hard enough that a sharp vibration ran up through the bones of his arm and sent him back several steps.

’How is she this strong?’

If he had been surprised before, now he was genuinely thrown. And why wouldn’t he be? he was a peak D-rank, one of the most powerful individuals in the city. As far as he knew, aside from the commander of the guard, no one else in Lirath had reached D-rank. No one he was aware of, at least.

So who in the world was this girl? Was it possible the reports had been wrong?

He had looked into Luna’s situation thoroughly, her conflict with his son, her background, everything. The reports said F-rank. And yet here she was, holding her ground against him without so much as blinking.

’Tch. That useless boy actually went and provoked someone like her,’ he thought, cursing his son internally, his son who, as far as he could tell, was already dead, leaving this problem entirely in his hands.

He studied her, reassessing, then spoke.

"You’re strong. Much stronger than you look. But if you think that’s going to save you from the consequences of what you’ve done here, you’re wrong," he said, as the mana in his body began circulating furiously, a layer of clear brown energy rising around him.

He raised both gauntleted hands and brought them together with a sharp crack.

"As a father, I should avenge my son. But honestly, I don’t care enough for that."

He paused.

"As Magistrate, however, I am bound to uphold the law. And right now, you have broken it, by attacking someone of higher standing than yourself."

The gauntlets began to glow, strange symbols rising across their surface.

"And for that... I condemn you to death."

In the next instant, every reserve of mana in his body surged into his right fist at once.

He drew back, coiling the force behind it, fixed his gaze on Luna,

And threw the punch.

The air between them ceased to exist.

The force hit like the world had decided to end from that single point outward, a detonation that swallowed the clearing whole, violent tremors ripping through the ground, the trees, everything in its path.