Chapter 124: From inside
Breath ragged, axe raised like a sentence, Maggie lunged.
Her muscles, galvanized by burning essence, hardly belonged to her anymore. She didn’t think—she moved, driven by that ancient fire that knew neither doubt nor mercy. A pure warrior’s impulse, born of an instinct forged from all the pain she’d never screamed.
The blade carved an arc through the air—sharp, silent, almost solemn. A perfect decapitation. A release, in itself.
But Dylan... or what he had become... looked up at that precise instant.
And the world slowed.
His black, glassy pupils gleamed with an incandescent light, not quite human. A grin crept across his face—a blasphemous, satisfied grimace. As if he had been waiting for her. As if he knew.
A wave burst from his body—brutal and invisible, a push of essence so dense the air trembled. The ground cracked beneath him. His bulging veins pulsed like rivers of lava beneath his skin. And in a fraction of a second, his core opened. It exploded again, from within, unleashing titanic power.
Maggie felt the impact before she even knew what was happening.
A blast threw her back—an invisible strike that cut off her path, as if space itself had contracted around Dylan. She rolled across the ground, her back scraping the earth. Her axe, torn from her hands, landed farther away, embedded in the mud like a forgotten headstone.
Dylan rose slowly. His body, warped by constant regeneration, throbbed with waves of energy. His movements, once heavy, had become sharp, fast—inhumanly precise.
He charged.