A Man Like None Other (Jared Chance) novel Chapter 5953

Boom thundered through the field like a stone hammering a vast bell.

Then the blade-light met shield and barrier, not with an explosion but with a sickening hiss, the sound of a hot knife sinking into fat.

In Jared's widened eyes the four-hued arc slid forward as if nothing existed to slow it, parting Morven's black shield and shredding Malcolm's ninefold blood screen.

The shield burst. The screen fractured. Both men vomited blood and were flung hundreds of yards, a bone-deep gash burning across each of them.

Morven’s left arm severed at the shoulder; Malcolm’s right chest blown straight through, the wound crawling with four hostile forces that would not let the blood clot.

The glowing blade-wind died out, spent.

A pulse of backlash punched Jared’s ribs; he coughed up more blood and tasted iron.

Gerald’s borrowed fire was vanishing as quickly as it had come. The human body could not hold that fury for long.

That slash had been the last he could pull from empty lungs and shaking arms.

Morven and Malcolm lay wounded yet unbroken.

Malcolm pressed a trembling hand to the ragged hole in his chest.

“He’s spent—utterly spent! Kill him. Now. This instant!"

Pain twisted their faces, yet both hurled themselves forward again.

They abandoned sorcery; raw muscle and murderous instinct would finish what blood magic could not.

But just then, the air around Jared seemed to pause, waiting.

“Divine Bow!” Jared’s roar tore from a throat already full of blood.

Light flared from his storage ring, and an ancient bow shimmered into his grasp.

He had hoped never to show it; displaying a treasure like this invited storms he could not afford.

Yet no trace of pressure leaked from the weapon; it simply existed, as if as old and natural as the sky itself.

“That... that’s the Divine Bow?!” Morven’s pupils shrank to pinpoints, his voice warping with disbelief.

Jared caught the moment Morven’s pupils narrowed to the size of needle tips, his words twisting under the weight of raw shock.

The roar cracked across the battlefield, 'Forget the damn bow—just kill him!' The words slapped Malcolm’s ears, raw and desperate.

Shock rippled through Malcolm too, but it only drove the blade-edge thirst in his chest harder, until it vibrated against his ribs like a trapped hornet.

Across the ruin, Jared bellowed, 'Fire!' The single syllable punched the air, loud enough to bruise.

Malcolm’s gaze snagged on Jared’s frame. The younger man seemed to empty his entire skeleton into the pull of the cord, shoulders trembling as he dragged the Divine Bow to its full, impossible arc.

Something answered that pull. All around, stray shards of malice, the residue of ten thousand dying breaths, peeled from the air and streamed toward the gold limbs of the weapon.

The field was littered with bodies—Malcolm had long since stopped counting—but now every ounce of hate they had died with lifted like gray steam.

It poured into the bowstring, thickening, hardening, until the miasma knit itself into a single, gleaming bolt.

The string thrummed—an iron-throated hum that rattled Malcolm’s molars.

It wasn’t a sound; it was a storm god shrieking, an ancient thunderhead splitting open inside his skull.

Then time quit. The drip of blood at his elbow, the flutter of ash, even the quake in his lungs—everything halted in mid-fall.

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