A Man Like None Other (Jared Chance) novel Chapter 6046

King Nightbat's pupils shrank.

"What?!" The shout burst from him before sense could catch up.

That Soulshatter Demon Dirge had once crippled a Top Level High Immortal Realm Level Seven foe.

Yet the youngster in front of him, only Ninth Level Celestial by his reckoning, stood untouched as if it were a spring breeze.

Jared gave no answer.

He stepped once, the motion light and silent, then reappeared in front of King Nightbat like a flicker of bad light.

His fist snapped forward.

The punch looked plain, almost informal, but the air around his knuckles darkened.

Chaotic force threaded through the strike, and thin black cracks crawled across the space it traveled.

King Nightbat jerked his wings in front of him.

Lines of obsidian runes flared across the membrane, knitting into a dense shield.

Boom!

The cave shook as the two forces met.

Fist hammered wing.

The impact folded the air inward, popping ears and rattling loose stones from the ceiling.

The rune wall ripped like wet paper.

Jared's fist tore straight through the battered wing and buried itself in King Nightbat's chest.

Bone cracked with a noise like splintering ice.

Spurt!

A sheet of black blood fanned across the pool, hissing where it landed.

King Nightbat spewed another mouthful of tar-thick blood.

His breastbone sank inward; ribs snapped with every staggered breath.

Terror caught up with him.

Gray energy flooded his meridians, eating through flesh and spirit alike, and every technique he tried to muster scattered before he could grip it.

"No… impossible…" he rasped.

"I'm High Immortal Realm Level Seven—how can you…"

The roar tore what remained of his voice.

Hate and disbelief swam in his blood-red eyes, chased by a deeper, crushing fear.

Jared offered silence.

His left hand rose, two fingers aligned like a blade, and he drove the gray edge toward the center of the bat king's brow.

King Nightbat lurched aside, but the broken body lagged behind the order.

The ash-colored lightspear slipped through his forehead and sank into the sea of his awareness.

Darkness closed over him like a door, and it never opened again.

Jared plucked the storage ring from the corpse, then peeled away the pair of black wings that had once looked so imposing.

In skilled hands those membranes could be forged into a fine flight treasure; he stored them without a word.

He spared the cavern no second glance and slipped into the shadowed tunnels.

Within breaths he was gone.

Barely half a stick of incense after he left, the night-watch bats discovered their king lying in the blood-soaked pool.

Panic spread through the Western Front Encampment the way mold spreads through damp grain.

"The king is dead!"

"Enemy attack! Enemy attack!"

Alarms clanged, wings beat the air, and an entire underground city stumbled over itself in chaos.

By then Jared had crossed half the battlefield and stepped onto the Southern Front.

His next mark was King Goldtoad, third of the Five Beast Kings.

King Goldtoad was weaker, sitting at the peak of Top Level High Immortal Realm Level Six, but he made up for it with venom and armor.

His ancient body, a thousand-year poison toad, carried skin thick as bronze and spittle that could dissolve top-grade spirit gear.

Jared shunned subtlety.

He walked straight into the central command tent, gray light wrapped around his boots like a veil of dust.

"Who goes there?!"

King Goldtoad had been bent over a campaign map with several lieutenants.

When the stranger appeared, rage and shock rippled across his wide face.

"The one who has come for your life," Jared replied, voice as still as stone.

Chaotic force gathered in his palm, stretching into a gray longsword that hummed with quiet hunger.

The breath leaking from that blade prickled King Goldtoad's skin, and his heart sank.

The visitor was no friend.

He roared, and his body ballooned outward.

In an instant a house-sized golden toad squatted where the man had been.

Bulbous poison sacs crawled across his back.

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