A Man Like None Other (Jared Chance) novel Chapter 5954

Malcolm swayed beside him, the same arrow-made emptiness flickering in his chest like a doorway to nowhere.

His reincarnation aura, usually stitching wounds before blood could fall, found no purchase and slid away uselessly.

The anti-magic principle woven into the Divine Arrow pried at his foundation of rebirth, widening the hole by the second.

They were alive, technically, but the fight had been stripped from both of them as cleanly as their flesh.

Breathing stayed possible; thinking already felt extravagant.

The arrow never slowed. It disappeared into the distant horizon, leaving behind a ragged seam in the sky that refused to close.

Silence collapsed over the battlefield.

A terrible, absolute silence.

Every gaze slid toward Jared, toward the Divine Bow cooling in his hands, its gold already fading to plain, ancient wood.

Jared’s gaze snagged on the two High-Immortal cultivators he had just skewered. Both chests gaped, ribs jutting outward, their breaths thin as spider silk.

Only then did he dare focus on the arrow itself—its black shaft still quivered in midair, humming with a power that felt far too large for any mortal hand.

An ache of silence stretched over the field until it tore under a wall of screams from the Malevolent Path ranks.

"Hall Master is down! Pull back—retreat!" The black-robed elder’s shriek rose sharp, fear bending the pitch into something almost childlike.

"Shield the Ancestor! Get the Ancestor out!" dozens of Ninefold Nether voices cracked in panicked unison.

Robes and boots churned mud as disciples trampled toward the crater where Morven’s body still bled shadow.

The coalition’s backbone snapped.

Order dissolved into raw instinct.

Men who had bragged minutes earlier now bolted like feral dogs, clawing and slicing at comrades just to seize open ground.

Blood sprayed because someone chose the wrong direction to run.

Alliance fighters tensed to pursue, but Jared rasped through blood-stiff lips, "Don’t… chase… We withdraw too."

He knew why better than anyone.

The Divine Bow granted miracles and demanded limbs.

His right arm already felt borrowed, cut off from the rest of him, fingers frozen in the shape of the draw.

Inside his core the Origin Star faded to dull ember, fresh cracks mapping its surface.

Worse, the bow had scooped spirit from his skull until thoughts fluttered like torn flags.

Vision kept blacking out at the edges; the ringing in his ears felt permanent.

One wobble, and he would be unconscious.

Their side bled, too.

Gerald had vanished in magma and flame.

Winslow lay cooling beneath shattered talismans.

Three of the Five-Branch Elders breathed through pain; two more could barely stand.

Heavenly Sword Pavilion mourned two sages and a mountain of young blades.

Beasts from Myriad Beast Valley carpeted the dirt, their handlers scattered among them.

If they kept swinging, victory would taste like ruin.

And then who would guard the realm tomorrow?

"Heed Jared—fall back!" Aurelian barked, eyes webbed with blood, voice rasping like bellows scraped by rust.

Hills of bodies glistened under a skim of settling smoke; severed limbs poked from the heaps like driftwood after a storm.

The plains beyond were nothing but scorched mud, stretching red and black for what felt like forever.

The blood of Gerald and Winslow had already drunk its way into the soil, merging with countless other streams until the earth itself looked wounded.

Every footprint Jared left filled with dark red moisture, as though the ground were weeping up at him.

The wind carried a thin, uneven keening—alive voices mourning voices gone silent.

The sound snagged on Jared’s ribs more cruelly than any blade he had met that day.

The air tasted of pennies and charcoal, laced with the copper tang of reincarnation aura and the sulfur rot of Ninefold Nether Demonic Aura.

Together they brewed a sickness that wanted to crawl down his throat and set up a grave inside him.

He wrapped both hands around the Divine Bow. The wood felt dead cold.

Still, beneath that chill he sensed a pulse, hot and furious, begging to be loosed.

That heartbeat was Gerald’s and Winslow’s, the ranks who had fallen beside them, the stubborn blood of everyone too angry to pass on.

It surged through the bow now, looking for a hand willing to draw.

"Morven… Malcolm…" The names scraped out, each syllable grated between clenched teeth.

Every word tasted of rusted iron, of oaths he could never unsay.

He felt them brand the roof of his mouth, glowing with hatred brighter than any spell he knew.

"Today’s debt will return a hundredfold," he whispered to the blood-soaked earth.

"The day I come back will be the day you end." His voice cracked, but the vow did not.