Chapter 196: Where is She?
There was no flash of light. No sound of a teleport. The Jackal had reached into the space Damien was holding and simply plucked her out of existence.
"Felicity?" Damien whispered through a cracked, raw throat. His hands trembled as he turned, Nerve Dominion flaring in panicked desperation to feel even the faintest trace of her pulse.
Nothing.
Victor surged to his feet. The gravity pylons shattered into dust under the sheer, unadulterated pressure of his escalating rage. He looked at his empty hands. Then, he looked at the grinning Krux. The golden glow in his eyes faded into a terrifying, hollow white. "Where is she?"
Exile skidded to a halt. His tongue flicked out to catch the air. His pupils dilated until his eyes were solid black. He couldn’t smell her—not a trace. It was as if she had never existed.
The carnage of the battlefield ground to a stuttering halt. The Feral Convoy members backed away, Krux chuckling as he watched the teams begin to unravel. Without Felicity’s light to buffer them, the husbands were no longer just dangerous; they were becoming unanchored. She was the only thing that kept their monstrous instincts in check, the only thing that kept them sane.
"She’s with the Jackal now," Krux laughed, sounding like a landslide. "Heading straight to the Boss. You want her back? You’ll have to crawl through the whole valley to find her."
Dimitri’s Silence Domain flickered as he drew a ragged breath. Peace was obliterated. The goddess was gone; the monsters she had gentled now threatened to bear their true, dreadful nature.
The void Felicity left was a wound in every man’s soul, a screaming rupture in reality. For eleven months, the world decayed, and only she seemed untouched by death. She was the heartbeat. The light. In the blink of an eye, when the Jackal swept her away, every chain holding back the monsters shattered utterly.
Victor didn’t scream. A scream was too human. Instead, the air around him ignited. His Selective Annihilation was on cooldown, but his raw fury manifested as a twin-storm of fire and ice that spiralled out from his feet, melting the asphalt and flash-freezing the ivy on the colonial walls in the same breath. His Level 100 presence expanded like a physical weight, cracking the ribs of the nearest Feral Convoy members before he even moved.
"Where,"
Victor rumbled, his voice no longer sounding like a man’s, but like the grinding of tectonic plates.
"Is
She."
Beside him, the other beast husbands were losing their minds.
Damien was the first to truly lose the plot. His onyx eyes didn’t just go black; they seemed to leak shadows. His Nerve Dominion exploded outward, not as a tactical web this time, but as a violent, psychic lash. The three Hyena beastmen who had been laughing a second ago suddenly stopped. Their eyes rolled back, their bodies twitching in horrific, unnatural angles as Damien took hold of their nervous systems. He didn’t just kill them—he made them tear their own throats out with their own claws.
"I can’t feel her pulse," Damien hissed, voice splintered with anguish. His fangs dripped venom that burned holes in the concrete. "If I can’t feel her heart, everyone in this valley forfeits theirs."
Exile was worse. The massive anaconda beastman had reverted to a state of pure, primal psychosis. He wasn’t even standing anymore; he was a coil of pure, crushing muscle, moving with a speed that blurred the senses. He slammed into a group of five Convoy members, his Pressure Control ramping up until the air around them became as dense as the bottom of the ocean. Bones snapped like dry twigs. He didn’t use a weapon; he used the gravity of his own grief to flatten them into the dirt. His mind was a fractured kaleidoscope of the way she had looked in the white dress, the scent of her jasmine skin, and the terrifying, hollow nothingness that remained.
"Exile, stand down! Damien, stay in the circle!" Dimitri shouted, his Silence Domain flaring to its absolute limit. The albino snow leopard leader was trying to hold the line, his nullification field pulsing to dampen the spiralling powers of the husbands. He was Level 95, a god of the battlefield, but even his domain was buckling under the sheer, unhinged weight of Victor’s rage.
"They’ve taken the anchor, Dimitri!" Sarge roared, his massive black rhino frame wreathed in violent arcs of Electrical Conduction. He slammed a fist into the ground, sending a wave of blue lightning through the square that fried three more attackers where they stood. "There is no circle without her!"
The Feral Convoy realised too late that they hadn’t just stolen a girl; they had invited a hurricane into their home. Krux, the grizzly bear beastman leader, tried to roar a command, but the sound was cut short as Lucan teleported directly behind him. The black panther didn’t hesitate, his claws glowing with Predatory Acceleration as he carved a jagged ’X’ into the leader’s back.
"Give her back," Lucan growled, his voice a vibrating hum of teleportation energy.
"Kill them all!" Krux screamed, clutching his bleeding back. "The Jackal is long gone! You’ll never find..."
He never finished the sentence. Victor moved. It wasn’t a walk or a run; it was a displacement of reality. The eagle beastman appeared in front of Krux, his hand wreathed in frost so cold it burned. He gripped the grizzly’s throat, the ice spreading instantly, turning the bear’s fur into jagged crystal.
"Dimitri, keep the teenagers back!" Victor commanded, his eyes glowing a terrifying, hollow white. "The rest of you... Raze it. Raze the whole valley."
What followed was nothing short of unrelenting, all-consuming carnage.
Ash, the jaguar beastman and one of the self-appointed pillars of the "Church of the light," was a blur of black hair and silver wire. He moved like a weaver of death, his trip-wire traps snapping shut around the necks of the Feral Convoy. His emo-tinged stoicism had vanished, replaced by a frantic, religious fervour. "You touched the light," Ash whispered as he tightened a wire around a boar-beastman’s throat. "Now you get the dark."
Marx, the young panther, was a streak of lightning, his paws hitting the ground with thunderous force as he cleared the rooftops.
Dawn, the bull shark, used his Territorial Saturation to turn the very air into a suffocating, watery tomb for anyone trying to flee toward the bridge.