Chapter 977: Too Late
“You are late… There are no prisoners here.”
Silence.
“The Duke decided to… auction them off at the king’s birthday party…”
“Is this some final defense mechanism of some sort?” Kitsara asked with uncertainty.
“Damn it!” Vex cursed under her breath. One look at Sareth was enough to let the Hexwitch know she wasn’t lying.
“We were too late…?” Feng asked after finally managing to get to her feet.
“Let’s check to make sure,” Quinlan’s voice came, grim. If Sareth was telling the truth, then their situation became a lot more troublesome. Selling off his own prisoners as slaves sounded quite a bit contradictory, but as no criminals would be able to gain access to such a secure event, the duke must’ve decided there was no harm in backstabbing the finance department to sell off their prisoners. They could use the funds to fuel their war machine while sowing devastation in the ranks of their enemies all at once.
“Where are the keys to the prison?”
Every eye turned toward the gate.
Smoke still drifted from the battlefield; the stench of blood, scorched steel, and ruptured mana filled the air. But the doors, the immense prison gates behind which their goal lay, stood untouched.
Sareth tilted her head back and looked toward the looming entrance with half-lidded eyes, one cracked with pain and blood.
“Go on… The doors are not closed.”
Quinlan’s gaze narrowed.
Sareth coughed, blood spilling from her lips, but still… she smiled.
“I may be a mass cruel mass-murderer who should’ve been put down centuries ago just like your beloved Black Fang… but I have honor. The gate had been unlocked before our battle began. I opened it on purpose. If you were strong enough to defeat me… Then you deserve to enter. The victors of this grand battle shouldn’t look around for keys like lost dogs.”
A moment of silence fell over them.
“Blossom. Kitsara. If you would,” Quinlan said quietly.
The fox and the shadow gave no reply, for none was needed.
With twitching ears and glowing eyes, they darted ahead.
Blossom’s Void Sight peeled through illusions, sensing the dimensional rips behind fake walls and silent death traps along the corridor.
Kitsara began tracing illusion-breaker sigils, her nails flicking across ancient glyphs, analyzing their layers for signs of secondary activation triggers or embedded seals.
The air became more troublesome as they moved further in, their figures gradually fading into the darkness ahead.
Quinlan exhaled.
His body ached.
He was still missing an arm. His vision swam. He was dangerously low on blood, and Vex looked no better, holding a palm over her ruined eye socket, blood streaming through her torn kendo attire, body leaning against a fractured column for support.
They had minutes at best before they collapsed.
And that meant no more time to waste.
Quinlan turned.
His remaining hand gripped the hilt of the Soul Reaper.
He stepped toward Sareth, who remained still, watching him.
“You fought well. If it were a duel, I’d have stood no chance.”
There was no malice in his eyes as he decreed.
He raised the curved blade, one built to sever the soul from its tether.
And as the weapon descended, aiming for her throat…
Sareth’s eyes lit up.
Twin emerald flames burst forth from her irises like the ignition of an engine.
A ripple of impossible energy surged out from her body, distorting the air, bending everything around her. The stone beneath her cracked. The blood that spilled from her wounds shimmered, as if reacting to some internal ignition. It wasn’t a spell. It wasn’t skill. It was a legacy. Something ancient, woven not into her mana… but her lineage.
Quinlan’s blade halted mid-arc, shivering from the sudden burst of opposing force.
Her voice, a whisper laced with finality, cut through the charge in the air:
“I might’ve admitted defeat… But I’m not going to die just yet.”
And her eyes flared again with ancestral might.
The emerald light grew brighter.
Sareth’s entire broken form was suddenly engulfed in a thick glow, emerald and radiant. Tendrils of that light materialized from her wounds, drawing inward, curling around her frame like vines in reverse bloom.
And then it hardened.
The green light compressed into a cocoon, a semi-translucent sphere.
Quinlan stepped forward instantly, slashing down with the Soul Reaper again.
*CLANG!*
It rebounded. The curved blade screeched off the cocoon as if it had struck armor it had no business getting through.
Vex dove in from the other side, her one good eye shining red as her cursed blade aimed for the core of the seal.
*CRACK!*
A bolt of backlash mana threw her halfway across the ruined chamber.
“These damned Greenvale cockroaches!” she spat, coughing as she pushed herself upright again.
Quinlan didn’t answer.
He simply inhaled, and the world responded.
All four elements surged toward the cocoon. Fire to burn, water to erode, earth to grind, wind to slice.
He unleashed everything.
A screaming maelstrom of pure elemental fury lashed against the green dome. The chamber buckled under the weight of it. Support beams cracked. Walls sagged. Even the chains embedded in the structure began to melt.
The cocoon didn’t so much as flinch.
Quinlan’s breathing grew heavy quickly thanks to his life energies draining rapidly. The Soul Reaper found itself hovering in the air near his hands as it was let go so that Quinlan could raise his remaining arm. Elemental energy condensed around Sareth. Not to destroy her, but to lift her.
The plan was simple: drag her with them through the [Warp Gate]. Restrain her. Wait out whatever this post-mortem safeguard was. Finish the job properly.
But the moment the spell attempted to make contact with her…
*SNAP!*
Quinlan’s own magic was forcefully ejected from the space around her. His arms jolted back, stung by the backlash of resistance.
It was like trying to lift a mountain that was not only immensely heavy but also had the capability to oppose being lifted.
A long, ragged sigh broke through the silence behind him.
Vex leaned against a fallen pillar once again, wiping more blood from her eye. “We need to go.”
She didn’t have to explain why.
Even if this cocoon hadn’t triggered an alert, the sheer destruction of the battle, the ruptured ground, the dead guards, the obliterated wards… had undoubtedly done so.
Reinforcements would come.
And they were in no shape to face them.
“…” Quinlan growled low in his throat, eyes never leaving Sareth.
Just then, Kitsara and Blossom emerged from the shadows.
“Found nothing,” Kitsara revealed grimly.
“Blossom didn’t sense any foul play either!” Blossom added. “Nothing is hidden. Blossom feels confident that the place is empty.”
Quinlan’s jaw clenched. He gave the cocoon one final, intense glare, committing every aspect of it to memory: the shape, the syllables, the frequency of the energy it emitted.
Then he turned away.
The [Warp Gate] shimmered to life beside them, and one by one, they stepped through.
Bleeding. Scarred.
No one spoke as the warped light consumed them.
They had failed to kill the Warden.
But they had defeated her.
That, in itself, was a feat of legend, arguably the greatest achievement of the Ascendants.
They had faced a living executioner, one of the Duke’s strongest, and not only lived to tell the tale, but cracked her skull, shattered her pride, and forced her to retreat into a bloodstained chrysalis.
Not to mention the intelligence they’d gathered… and the XP they’d reaped.
Thus, it was far from a total failure. And for now, that was enough.
The battlefield beyond the [Warp Gate] welcomed them with the clamor of steel and the shriek of combat, but that shriek was fading fast.
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