Chapter 346: Lord Vine vs The Stormborn

In the blue sky that stood above the capital, the sun shone down brightly.

On other days, the rays would be either weak or especially hot, but today, the sun struck a perfect balance of sunlight that made the market stalls look prosperous and the cobblestones look almost golden.

The people moving through the streets moved with the particular ease and happiness of a city that believed, for the moment, that it was safe.

And high above all of it, hidden inside the belly of one of the clouds that had drifted in from the east, Lord Vine floated.

He looked down at the capital the way a man looks at a map he has already memorized. His hands spread slowly at his sides, palms turned outwards, and from the folds of his dark robes something emerged that was not quite liquid and not quite mist.

It was darker than either, carrying a density that light moved around rather than through. It bled outwards from him in thin tendrils, spreading into the moisture already present in the cloud, mixing with it like it was dye being dropped into water.

Lord Vine couldn’t help but smile at the sight. Upon merging, the substance was invisible, and there was no possibility of it being separated once the process was done.

He waved his hand, and the cloud continued drifting. And when the cluster he had selected was directly above the capital, the rain began to fall.

Down in the streets, people looked up in pleasant surprise.

It was the particular surprise of sun-rain, with the sky still bright and blue in every direction while water came down from a group of drifting clouds overhead.

A few of the passersby held their palms out, feeling the drops. A merchant selling cloth leaned out from under his awning, squinting upwards. He wouldn’t have to pack up, as it seemed the rain wouldn’t last long.

Most of them shrugged and kept moving.

The rain was light. Barely more than a drizzle. It touched skin and hair and the backs of hands and was brushed away without thought, the way minor inconveniences always are when there is somewhere to be and something to sell and the sun is still shining.

The merchant reached up and wiped the drops from his forearm.

Then he doubled over.

The pain hit without warning, dropping people where they stood.

The merchant went to his knees on the cobblestones. A woman carrying a basket folded forward, her purchases scattering across the street. A group of men talking outside a tavern went down together, almost simultaneously, their bodies hitting the ground in a loose cluster.

Beneath the skin of every person the rain had touched, something was moving.

Their veins darkened first, the discoloration spreading outwards from wherever the rain had made contact, and branching through their arms and necks and faces until it reaches every corner of their bodies.

Their eyes filled from the edges inwards, the color draining out and black flooding in to replace it. Their bodies arched against the stone, muscles contracting as their bodies seized from the pain of the transformation.

It was not a comfortable process, and neither did it try to be.

And then power arrived.

It came in a rush that pushed the pain aside through sheer volume, filling the spaces the pain had occupied with something vast, unfamiliar, and completely their own.

For a few seconds, each of them simply felt it, like a loud ringing in their ears that they could never stop nor ignore.

Then the pain faded away, and one by one, they stood.

They looked at their hands. At each other. At the darkened lines still visible beneath their skin, fading slowly as the transformation completed itself.

The screaming started at the edges of the affected area, where people who had been inside or under cover had watched it happen.

The unaffected began running, leaving the newly made demon hybrids standing in the emptying streets, turning in slow circles and examining themselves with expressions caught between terror and something they didn’t have a name for yet.

A feeling they would later identify as ecstasy.

In the cloud above, Lord Vine watched and began to laugh. “Let them point fingers at each other! How can you stay united, when one is a hybrid and the other is not?”

The lightning came out of nowhere.

He moved on instinct, the bolt passing close enough that he felt the charge across his skin, and turned to find the Stormborn already closing the distance, one hand raised and the air around him crackling with lightning.

The Stormborn roared, sending a bolt of lightning and wind blades flying towards him.

Lord Vine chuckled at the sight, before his hands blurred upwards, batting the lightning aside. However, the wind blades found him, cutting through his robes and into the flesh beneath.

He felt the sting of it, hissing through his teeth at the genuine bite of real damage.

The Stormborn seemed to pull the sky towards himself, compressing it as he charged one of his main skills. He didn’t bother with warning strikes. He could already tell that Lord Vine was not an opponent to be trifled with.

He growled as his attack compressed into a small ball of air, lightning, and water, every charge in the surrounding air collapsing inwards to a single point and launching outward at once.

The attack bolted towards Lord Vine and he realized, there was no angle in which he could avoid the attack entirely. So, he took it head on.

The attack slammed into him and he grunted as he felt it in his bones, the current sinking deep within him and causing damage.

The world went briefly white from the impact, and when it cleared, he was gone.

He appeared in his throne room with the sound of displaced her, landing on both feet.

His robes hung from him in scorched strips, the edges still smoking. The burns on his arms and chest were real and would take time to close.

He stood in the silence, took a slow breath, and assessed the damage with the detachment of someone performing maintenance rather than recovering from a loss.

He straightened.

Let the Stormborn have the moment. Let him carry the story of it back to Camelot, and the tale of how he had driven Lord Vine from the sky above the capital.

Let them believe that what they had seen was the full measure of what he was.

When the time came to show them otherwise, the gap between what they expected and what arrived would be the most devastating part.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep