Demonic Pornstar System novel Chapter 724

Chapter 724: Futile

A tendril of shadow caught her wrist. She severed it. Another caught her ankle. She severed that too. A third wrapped around her forearm and she cut through it with a crescent that left her fingers bleeding from the mana burn, and when she looked up Vespera was only five meters away and still walking.

"No!"

Selena cried out and threw everything she had. A barrage of crescents, each one a line of white light that carved the air between them, and for one second the ridge was bright with the fury of her Severance cutting the darkness to pieces.

Vespera walked through it.

The crescents hit her shadows and split them. But the shadows reformed around her without slowing her stride. She walked through her daughter’s best attack and the darkness closed behind her like a wake.

Selena’s hands dropped.

Her mana was gone. Her arms hung at her sides, trembling. The shadows pooled around her feet and climbed her legs. They tightened against her chest.

Vespera was right in front of her.

The composure that had held through the entire mountain, through Luna’s arm, through the stampede, through Kaiden’s transformation, through her own brothers being dragged across stone, broke in full.

Selena’s face crumpled. The controlled, satisfied expression that had been her mask for the entire afternoon collapsed inward, and what was underneath was a 24-year-old woman staring at her mother with tears running down her cheeks.

"I’m sorry." Her voice cracked. "Mother, I’m sorry."

Vespera looked at her daughter.

Her expression did not change as she decreed, "You do not get to call me that. Not anymore."

The shadows slammed Selena into the rock.

The impact cratered the ridge beneath her. Then the shadows lifted her and slammed her again, and again, methodical and unhurried. The rhythm of it was the worst part, the steady, measured violence of a woman who had all the time in the world.

The twins screamed from where they were pinned. The shadows bore down harder and the screaming thinned to gasping. The darkness closed over their mouths, and there was only the sound of Selena hitting rock.

Kaiden watched.

He watched his mother beat his siblings with the same expressionless face she wore to dinner. He watched Selena’s body hit the ridge over and over, the shadows lifting and dropping with a patience that was more terrifying than any fury could have been. He watched his sister’s blood on the rock. His brothers’ silent, pinned bodies. His mother’s face.

The beating stopped.

Selena lay motionless. Her body was wrong in several places, limbs bent at angles that said the bones beneath were no longer intact. Blood pooled beneath her, dark against the darker stone, and her breathing came in shallow, wet hitches that meant ribs had given way.

The twins were released. The shadows pulled back from their faces and they gasped, dragging air into lungs that had been compressed flat. Neither of them tried to stand. They lay where they’d been pinned, merely breathing and doing their best not to look at their mother.

Vespera stood over her eldest daughter and decreed,

"You are beyond anything I can correct."

She turned her back on them.

...

The hall was silent.

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