Chapter 62: Hold

The air collapsed inward.

For a fraction of a second, there was no sound. No rain. No battlefield. No roaring Troll King. No screaming hunters.

Only pressure.

And in that crushing stillness, something inside Jagger answered.

“Corrupted Surge.”

The words did not leave his mouth as a shout. They left him as a decision.

It ignited, not as heat, but as corruption.

A violent pulse detonated from somewhere deep in his spine, racing through nerve pathways and muscle fibers like black lightning. His heart slammed once, twice, then began beating with brutal force. His vision sharpened to razor clarity. Every raindrop suspended in the air became visible. Every tremor in Yuki’s fingers, every micro-adjustment in her shoulders, every subtle gathering of compression at her palm burned into his awareness.

Pain dulled at the edges.

Not gone.

Just distant.

Time stretched.

Then it detonated.

Jagger moved at the exact instant the compression peaked. His left hand shot up and locked around Yuki’s wrist, fingers forcing themselves between hers, interlocking, anchoring. Skin met skin. Bone pressed against bone.

The blast erupted.

But instead of launching him backward again, instead of turning his chest into a crater, the force folded inward along the point of contact.

It imploded into his arm.

There was no scream. The compression robbed him of air before his lungs could form one. A violent rush emptied his chest, a silent convulsion that crushed breath from him. The sound that escaped was a wet, muffled impact swallowed by rain.

His left arm ceased to be an arm.

From fingertips to shoulder, the structure vanished. Bones shattered into powder. Muscle liquefied. Tendons snapped like overstretched cables. Flesh ruptured beneath skin that split and ballooned grotesquely. The limb collapsed inward under catastrophic pressure, becoming a grotesque slurry of blood, fragmented bone, and destroyed tissue barely held together by torn skin.

He felt every second of it.

Corrupted Surge amplified everything.

The sensation was not muted. It was magnified. Each fracture registered like glass breaking inside his skull. Each rupture flashed white across his nerves.

But so did his clarity.

But he did not let go.

’Hold her. Don’t let her reset. Don’t let her hit again.’

He screamed it at himself through a haze of pure agony.

His ruined fingers locked tighter around her hand, nails digging in, tendons no longer functioning but clenched by sheer reflex and stubborn will. If he released her now, he would die.

Yuki’s eyes widened.

The precision in them cracked.

He moved.

His right arm came wide, not clean, not trained, not elegant. It was a desperate haymaker thrown with every fragment of strength he possessed. There was no stance. No balance. Only rage, pain, and the raw need to hurt her before his body gave out.

Corrupted essence flooded the motion.

His fist connected.

The impact was brutal. Bone met bone with a dull, sickening crack. Her head snapped sideways, jaw jolting violently as blood sprayed into the rain in a thin red arc. The sound carried through the storm, a sharp fracture beneath the thunder of battle.

She staggered.

He surged forward.

There was no technique left in him now. No measured breathing. No calculation. His world had narrowed to red and motion. He swung again. And again. Sloppy arcs powered by agony and desperation. Each punch tore through the rain, smashing into her cheek, her temple, her mouth. His knuckles split. Blood from both of them mixed across his skin.

Corrupted Surge sharpened his reflexes. He saw her eyes attempt to refocus. He saw her shoulder begin to rotate.

He hit her before it finished.

He drove her backward step by step, boots slipping on wet asphalt. The mangled stump of his left arm trailed a dripping curtain of crimson, nerves screaming, exposed bone grinding within ruined flesh. Pain no longer felt sharp. It was total. Blinding. White.

Yuki stumbled.

For the first time, she looked unbalanced.

Her focus fractured.

’Don’t stop. If you stop, you die.’

He saw it.

He lunged.

Not with another punch.

He slammed his forehead forward with everything he had left. Skull to face. A savage collision.

Cartilage crunched beneath the impact. Her nose flattened with a wet crack. Blood burst outward across his brow and into his eyes. She cried out, a raw, involuntary sound torn from her throat.

He did not hesitate.

His leg snapped out, driven by instinct more than coordination. His boot collided with the side of her knee.

There was a sharp, twisting crack.

Her balance collapsed.

She fell hard to the side, her shoulder hitting the rain-slick asphalt. The side of her head struck with a hollow, violent snap that echoed beneath the storm. Water splashed outward around her skull in a dark halo.

Corrupted Surge burned hotter.

He did not let the distance open.

He saw the dagger.

It lay a few feet away, half-submerged in rainwater, its blade coated in blood.

He stumbled toward it, vision swimming, knees buckling beneath him. His left arm hung uselessly at his side, a grotesque ruin of shattered anatomy. Every movement sent fresh waves of nausea through him as exposed nerves flared like live wires.

He dropped to one knee and seized the dagger with his right hand.

The grip felt foreign. Slippery. Alive.

He pushed himself up and staggered toward her.

Yuki lay on her back, stunned, rain washing blood from her nose and lips in thin pink streams. Her eyes fluttered, trying to refocus as rain fell directly onto her pupils. Her right arm twitched as she brought it up to cover her face.

Jagger did not give her the chance.

He loomed over her, pushing her arm away before raising the dagger high, his shoulder trembling under the weight of exhaustion and shock.

“I lied!” he roared, voice cracking through blood and rain. “Brock died with a look of shock and disbelief. He died a worthless death!”

The words tore from him as he saw her expression change. Her eyes widened in stunned disbelief, mirroring the description he had just thrown at her.

“I’m sorry.” He whispered before he brought the blade down.

Steel pierced flesh.

The dagger drove straight into her throat, slicing through skin, muscle, and artery in one brutal plunge, and he twisted. Blood erupted in a violent crimson spray, hot against his hand despite the cold rain. Her body jerked once, fingers clawing weakly at his sleeve.

Then the strength left her. He ripped the dagger free, and this time he dropped it into the water with a clatter.

She gurgled once. Twice.

Then silence.

Rain continued to fall.

Corrupted Surge flickered.

The amplification began to fade.

The pain returned in full.

Her body went slack.

Her head lolled to the side, eyes still wide, unblinking as rainwater pooled in the hollows. Steam rose faintly from the wound at her neck, mixing with the storm in a brief, ghostly plume before vanishing.

Jagger remained over her for a heartbeat longer, chest heaving, before leaning backward and collapsing onto the asphalt, landing hard on his right side. The world tilted violently. The battlefield sounds receded into a distant, muffled roar as if heard from underwater.

He lay there, chest heaving, staring up at the fractured skyline. Firelight flickered in his peripheral vision. The Troll King roared somewhere far away. Hunters screamed. Steel rang.

His gaze drifted to his left arm.

It was a nightmare.

The limb hung at an unnatural angle, swollen and misshapen. Bone fragments pressed visibly beneath torn flesh. Skin bulged in grotesque pockets where muscle had liquefied. Blood streamed continuously, diluted by rain but never fully washed away. The arm no longer resembled a human arm.

It twitched once.

Then again.

Pain flared again as Regeneration struggled to assert itself over catastrophic damage. Flesh began knitting with grotesque insistence. Bone shards shifted, grinding against one another as they sought alignment. Muscle fibers reconnected in twitching strands.

He swallowed thickly, copper coating his tongue.

For a moment, he wondered if this was the limit. If this was where his body would fail before it could mend.

Rain struck his face steadily.

Somewhere in the chaos beyond, the war for the Troll King continued.

And Jagger lay in the middle of it, soaked in blood, staring at what remained of his arm, breathing through the aftermath of something he barely understood he had survived.

The rain fell.

And somewhere deep inside him, within the void, Ophilia smiled. “Remarkable. Utterly, brutally remarkable.”

Her voice echoed, not reaching Jagger and only existing as a whisper in the void of her own mind. “You are turning out to be more than I had anticipated, little Jagger. Much, much more.”

Her chains rattled softly, a sound of metal in an endless, lightless space. “This one… this one might be strong enough to bear my weight after all.”

The system’s panel flickered into existence before Jagger’s eyes.

–

[Quest: Kill five Bloodclaw hunters]

[Progress: 3/5]

–

[You have levelled up! lvl 6 ↑]

[You have levelled up! lvl 7 ↑]

[+10 Stat Points Available]

[All Core Attributes +2]

[Pain resistance has leveled up to 5]

[Regeneration has leveled up to 3]

[Corrupted Surge has leveled up to 3]

[New skill acquired: Second Wind]

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