ShadowBound: The Need For Power-Chapter 390: Fall Of The Green Calamity (8)

The moment shattered like glass under tension.

Morenelle lunged.

Despite her massive size, her speed defied logic. Her claws dug deep into the cracked earth, launching her forward with enough force to tear the ground apart in a spiral of upheaved rock and soil. Her serpentine roots snapped forward like spears—all ten—twisting through the air in an intricate dance of destruction, each one aiming for a vital point: throat, heart, knees, shoulders.

But Liam didn’t move.

Not until the last second.

His eyes, one violet, one red, narrowed. The storm of myst surrounding him coiled inward, then burst from beneath his feet in a shockwave that didn’t make a sound—but sent dust and pebbles floating like they’d been caught in orbit.

He vanished from her sight.

A single blink later, he reappeared mid-air above her, his body rotating in a tight spiral. With one hand extended, he crashed his palm against one of the incoming roots. Instead of blocking it, he phased through it, his body half-transparent, swathed in flickering strands of space-bending myst. As he passed through the vine, his other hand glowed with golden sigils, which he slammed down onto her shoulder.

Morenelle reeled as a foreign energy invaded her. The vines lashed wildly in disarray as the sigil pulsed and caused part of her bark armor to splinter.

She snarled and twisted her torso, bringing both clawed arms up in a scissor-motion toward Liam.

He dropped instantly.

Letting gravity pull him, he tucked into a somersault just before hitting the ground, and when he landed, he slid low, hand tracing the soil, leaving trails of gold and violet as he carved arcane symbols into the dirt mid-slide. The markings glowed, then ignited—sending up a curtain of myst-charged particles.

Morenelle stomped through the veil, her footfalls pounding like war drums—but Liam was already moving. He pivoted, letting his body sway as a root whipped past his ear. The second came for his back, and he twisted into a backward handspring, pushing off one of the roots mid-air, flipping above her.

He didn’t land.

Instead, he hovered—myst holding him aloft like a deity surveying a lesser creature.

Morenelle launched three more roots at once. They curved mid-air, turning sharply, spiraling up in a tri-pronged strike meant to pierce him from three angles.

He raised a single hand. A violet circle spun into existence—thin, elegant, but brimming with power. The roots hit it—and froze midair.

Time around them had stopped, arrested by the spell’s exact calibration. Liam moved his fingers, and the roots unraveled like paper strips caught in the wind.

Morenelle’s eyes widened.

She lunged again, this time using her full body. Claws slashing downward with both hands, her weight behind the strike.

Liam met her mid-swing.

His right arm shimmered—Aesmirius’s influence bleeding fully into it. A golden blade of light erupted from his forearm, jagged and wild. Their claws and blade clashed, sending a ripple of force across the field.

Neither gave an inch.

She pushed harder and he grinned wider.

Then Liam sidestepped—his body bending unnaturally, spine folding like a ribbon as he spun and brought his left leg upward in a reverse crescent kick. His heel connected with the side of her head, and though her bark armor took most of the hit, the force sent her stumbling three steps back.

Before she could react, Liam followed, his steps a blur. Every movement calculated and efficient. He slammed his palm into her abdomen—twice, three times. Each strike left glowing runes behind, which exploded moments later, destabilizing her stance.

Morenelle snarled. Her roots dug into the ground behind her, anchoring her. Her chest expanded, and with a sickening lurch, she vomited a swarm of razorleaf spores—shimmering green and purple flecks swirling like a toxic mist.

Liam crossed his arms in front of him, and a barrier formed—half-circle, flat and see-through, like a glass dome etched with ancient writing. The spores hit it and sizzled violently.

He stepped forward through his own shield, eyes gleaming.

Then Morenelle vanished.

She reemerged behind him—roots tearing out of the earth in a wide arc meant to form a cage around him. The second she struck, Liam pivoted his heel, turning mid-spin, catching one of the roots with his arm and pushing himself off it.

He skidded backwards. One hand flicked upward.

Chains of golden light erupted from the earth, wrapping around her left leg, then her right arm, then three of the ten roots behind her.

She roared and yanked hard. The chains shattered—but it slowed her.

Liam used that moment.

He sprinted in, his form blinking in and out of view, like a strobe-light distortion of reality. Each blink, he was closer. Then he was at her chest. He launched a full-force uppercut imbued with fire and space myst—his fist igniting as it struck.

Morenelle flew upward.

Before she could land, Liam leapt above her and clasped both palms together. A circle of rotating myst symbols formed beneath his feet as he drove both fists down into her chest. A concussive burst followed, smashing her straight down into the earth.

The crater was massive.

Morenelle’s body lay in the center, vines twitching, claws scraping at the shattered ground.

But she wasn’t done.

With one mighty scream, all ten of her roots surged back to life—twisting, spinning, and expanding in size. She lashed them upward like a sea of hydra heads, and Liam was caught in the storm.

Or so she thought.

As they struck, his form flickered again and appeared behind her.

He raised both hands—and all around him, dozens of violet and gold spears of myst materialized mid-air.

They hovered in silence.

Then he dropped both arms.

The spears launched in unison.

Each one struck with pinpoint precision. Each one piercing bark, root, limb, armor, and stone. Morenelle’s body twisted under the impacts, slammed in place by the divine hail.

As she gasped—barely breathing, eyes wide—Liam descended slowly, lowering to the ground just in front of her broken form.

Her claws twitched as she tried to lift herself.

He simply placed a foot on her chest.

And leaned forward.

Violet and red eyes burning like twin infernos, he spoke quietly.

"You thought this was a game. You thought I was prey."

His voice had changed again. It was both Liam’s and Aesmirius’s, in perfect unison. A god and a mortal, speaking through one mouth.

"But now you see it, don’t you? I am the end you never saw coming."

Morenelle coughed blood, her lips twitching. "This... isn’t... over..."

"No, no, no, no," Liam said, his voice low and amused. "Of course not. It’s only just begun."

He stood over her body like a shadow given flesh and wrath, with his foot pressed into her chest, and for a long, slow moment.

He simply stared—violet and red eyes burning holes into her as the wind swept across the ruins, heavy with the scent of scorched bark and blood-soaked soil.

Then something cracked.

Not bone, and surely not the ground.

But his mind.

A slow, crooked grin carved itself across Liam’s face. And then he moved.

Without a word, he crouched low, straddling Morenelle’s bruised torso. She raised a clawed hand in some feeble attempt to defend herself, but Liam caught her wrist mid-air and twisted. The bones in her arm shattered audibly, and he wrenched her limb free from her shoulder with a violent jerk, muscle and sinew snapping like stretched rope.

Blood spurted in a long, rhythmic arc.

Morenelle screamed, her body twitching beneath him as her root-tendrils flailed.

"You screamed louder than Mabel did," Liam muttered, voice eerily calm, his tone closer to a whisper in a nursery than the voice of a killer. "But that was only one snap."

Morenelle’s body tried to heal—the skin on her torn shoulder already bubbling, tendrils of flesh crawling outward.

Liam saw it and he smiled wider.

"Ah. That’s good," he said, eyes widening in admiration. "Keep healing. Please. I want this to last."

He reached down and drove his fingers into her side—not punching, not clawing—digging. Digging with bare fingers until he gripped her second arm by the inside of her armpit and ripped upward, tearing the entire limb from her socket. Bits of green muscle and bark-studded skin clung to his fingers.

Her scream shook the very trees back in the sanctuary.

"That’s it!" he roared, now completely overtaken, voice soaked in madness. "You remember what you did to her? You drove a root straight through her chest. Split her open like a melon and smiled while doing it."

He grabbed her leg. freёnovelkiss-com

"I wonder," Liam said, blood running down his arms like gloves of crimson and green, "if you’ll still smile after this."

He yanked the leg the wrong way. A sharp crack echoed as her knee snapped backward, her heel almost touching her back. Then, with both hands, he began twisting the limb—slowly—pulling until flesh unraveled, ligaments shredded, and bone tore from the joint like wet paper.

Morenelle shrieked again, but the sound was ragged now. Hollow. Like she was beginning to break.

And again, her body tried to knit itself back together.

Liam’s eyes rolled upward in delight. "Yessss," he hissed, licking a smear of blood from his fingers. "You’re trying so hard. So very hard. I love that about you."

He drove a hand into her scalp and ripped a handful of her vine-like hair from the roots, the strands writhing in his grip like dying snakes. Blood oozed from her scalp as he shoved the vines into her mouth and forced her to bite down.

"Chew on that," he whispered.

He leaned in, face inches from hers, and plunged his thumbs into her eyes. The wet, sickening sound of rupture was drowned only by her ragged wail. He didn’t stop. He dug, knuckles deep, until both orbs burst and trickled down her cheeks in rivers of black-green ichor.

"Now you can’t see her, can you?" Liam asked sweetly. "You can’t see the beautiful woman you tried to murder. You don’t deserve to see her."

He grabbed her horns next. With both hands, he wrenched them sideways until they cracked and splintered, and with a scream of effort, tore them from her skull one by one.

Blood poured from the open sockets. Her face was no longer regal, no longer demonic. Just a broken, twisted husk writhing beneath a storm of sadism.

"Is this what you wanted?" Liam asked, tilting his head, eyes wide and twitching. "To see the boy who bled trying to survive become a demon worse than you?"

He slammed her shattered horn down into her own chest, puncturing her bark-armor and sending chunks of flesh splattering across the dirt.

Morenelle was healing. Always healing.

And Liam kept ripping. Ripping everything he could reach. Her roots—yanked from her back, one by one, each severing like tendon-snapped ropes. Her claws—broken at the knuckle, ripped clean. Her ears—sliced free with the edge of a myst blade conjured mid-motion.

"Do you know what she sounded like when she screamed?" Liam hissed. "Do you? It echoed in my chest. It didn’t stop. It kept echoing."

He leaned down, voice like cold steel in a child’s whisper.

"You gave her that pain. So now I’ll give it back. A hundred times."

Morenelle no longer screamed.

She sobbed.

Her breath came in shallow, gargling hiccups. Her body was in a constant state of healing and mutilation, flesh reforming only to be torn again. Her regenerative myst was doing all it could to keep her alive—and Liam was doing everything to ruin its work.

A hand tore into her stomach. He scooped something out. She didn’t know what. She didn’t want to.

Her thoughts spun.

Who was this boy?

No. Not a boy. Not a human. Not even a vessel.

This... this was a creature far more cruel than anything she had ever encountered.

Had she been wrong?

Was she the monster—or had she provoked a god of cruelty in mortal skin?

Liam’s fingers slid across her jaw, lifting her ruined face to meet his.

And through the blood, broken bone, and blindness...

She feared him.

"You’re lucky she’s not awake," he said. "Because if she saw this... she wouldn’t recognize me."

Then his expression twitched. For just a flicker.

And he smiled again.

"But I like this me... I like this a lot."