Chapter 26

It wasn’t the first time Myanna had done battle with a psychic of the Crimson Light, but it was the first time she had battled a Judge. Standing atop the hierarchy of psychic warriors in the order, Judges had much more power and discipline at their disposal than the masses beneath them competing for advancement opportunities. Some of the tactics of Judge Havoc were familiar, albeit more powerful, while others were wholly new to her.

Her encounters with psychic warriors revolved around varying degrees of physical enhancements through psychic focus. They could jump farther, lift more, move faster, and react to blows as if knowing where they would be placed before they were thrown. Other tricks were common as well, using telekinetic bursts to throw someone off balance or hurl heavy objects at them. There had always been a relatively low ceiling on the number of these that could be employed simultaneously. Focus on bolstering the physical body demanded the majority of their power to keep up in a fight.

Myanna’s strategy in handling such scenarios had evolved over time. Much of the reason she had constructed her whip the way she had was aimed at enhancing her efficacy in a fight with such challenging foes. She supplemented her considerable physical skill in the weapon’s discipline with phyllomagic, bringing it to supernatural levels. The result was that Havoc was nearly as surprised with her as she was with him.

The two exploded toward one another with powerful openings. Anticipating a storm of hurled debris so the Judge could close the distance between them, Myanna led with a flurry of lashes that batted the most dangerous of the debris aside to leave her mostly unharmed. He mistook the long reach of the whip as a weakness and limitation of her fighting style, which would be true in the hands of many other whip-wielders. Snapping the whip back, over her shoulder, and around her torso while taking control of it magically with her off-hand allowed her to choke up on the length of the whip considerably with a vicious snap. Despite its sturdy construction, a deep gouge was carved down the center of his armor. The magic within the whip synching with that of the wielder provided it a level of power the judge had not anticipated.

The roundabout strikes of the weapon made it difficult to anticipate, even with precognition, but Havoc rose to the challenge as he switched immediately into a defensive stance. He wasn’t stupid, electing to avoid the follow-up strikes from the cuirizu rather than assume he could destroy her weapon with a stroke of his own. He’d felt the power of the magic coursing through it and knew that sundering attempts wouldn’t go the way he wanted. Pressing the attack with the Bristling Advance technique, Myanna rained a series of light and medium strikes down upon Havoc, forcing his continued evasion and creating space for herself. Whatever advantage he might have possessed while close to her had been lost.

Havoc wasn’t without options, of course, shunting her whip to one side telekinetically and pinning it briefly before releasing a powerfully concussive scream at the cuirizu.

“Abafad!” Myanna shouted as she thrust her tattooed arm out in front of her. She’d battled Brenna as Prosecutor Shriek enough times to know what such an attack would look like before it came, as well as a potential counter. Though the mark amplified the spell considerably, as Myanna expected, it wasn’t enough to negate the power of the psychic scream entirely.

The collision of magical and psychic power created a discordant blast between them, causing each to stumble backward. Myanna’s whip came free, no longer under the judge’s psychic influence. Myanna struggled to get her bearings with the ringing in her ears, leading Havoc to be the first to recover and go on the attack. As the judge closed the distance between them with astonishing speed, the red glow of his weapon allowed Myanna to present a defense almost by reflex. Holding a length of the whip taut between both hands, she intercepted the downward strike, showering them in sparks as the psychic and magical energies collided again.

“Your weapon’s solid construction is commendable,” Havoc said, smiling sadistically as he pressed down upon her, changing the angle so that the crackling red blade began to bite into her shoulder. The whip started to glow, heating up where the weapons met. “But ultimately, still inferior.”

Relaxing the tension of the whip before snapping it taut again, Myanna bounced the blade off the whip briefly enough to move back. Seizing the opportunity, Havoc slammed her with a telekinetic blast with one hand, catching her mid-step and taking her off her feet. Tumbling over the bodies of the fallen, Myanna brought her whip up to focus her phyllomagic into it with two hands, winding it tightly into a rigid spike and driving it down into the ground. Havoc’s advance was cut short as the whip shot through the ground beneath the corpses before erupting as a deadly spike. The weapon caught him across the waist as he barely managed to twist out of the whip’s direct path.

With the judge occupied deflecting the bodies with telekinetic force, Myanna had bought herself enough time to recall the whip and settle into the Cross Nettle stance with her weapon held relaxed at her hip farthest from Havoc. Regaining his footing with surprising alacrity, Havoc pressed forward toward the cuirizu. With a quick flick of her wrist behind her back, Myanna snapped the whip deceptively toward Havoc’s head. Weaving an inch out of the whip’s path at the last moment, Havoc brought the crackling crimson blade out in a broad sweep. Myanna pivoted, spinning away from the strike as she brought the whip in a high swirling snap, forcing him to retreat a step.

Within the span of a breath, the cuirizu wrapped the whip across her back in the Briar Repose stance. Anticipating her intent to unleash a powerful arcane strike, Havoc lunged forward in an unorthodox hopping lunge. Abandoning the setup for the Death Blossom attack, Myanna wrapped the charged whip around her marked arm as an improvised buckler to knock the blade of energy to the side in a shower of eldritch sparks.

Without warning, Myanna felt the breath go out of her body as the corset belts suddenly tightened around her torso like constrictor snakes. Havoc had seized them psychically with his open hand, forcing the sturdy leather to squeeze the life out of her.

“Such a slow, plodding attack has no chance against me, fiend,” Havoc sneered as he slowly closed his hand. The force of the tightening corset grew, prompting a swift reaction from the cuirizu in the form of a fist across the judge’s face. Still wrapped with the whip, the thorned fist gouged a few strips of flesh from his face.

Moving with the force of the punch, Havoc brought his blade around in a reverse grip and drove it into the cuirizu, arresting any follow-up attack she might have intended. Impaled on the crackling red blade, Myanna stared at the judge wide-eyed before slowly looking down upon the intensity of the red energy skewering her.

“Despite all your bravado, this outcome was inevitable,” Havoc remarked menacingly as he twisted the blade. “Such minuscule talent as yours will be forgotten before your corpse has finished rotting.”

Myanna placed her hand on the wrist of the judge fixed firmly in place, unable to move its position despite her fiendish strength. His grin widened, which she met with a grin of her own. “For all your mental prowess, your vision is still limited. Your aversion to pain makes you immutably human, regardless of the power you wield.”

The judge’s brows furrowed as Myanna leaned closer, sliding along the blade to the hilt, whispering intimately. “Jitolaje Zensaosil.”

Though the judge had hurled her away with an immense burst of telekinetic power, it was too late. The spell had taken effect through her touch on his wrist. As the cuirizu hit the ground and slid across the rocky terrain, the judge let out a cry of pain and doubled over to one side. With the spell in effect, everything that Myanna felt would be felt by the judge as well. Bonds of Sensation wasn’t something she usually employed in such a manner. It was reserved for bestowing her sensory point of view upon women she fucked in her dual aspect. The result was an experience of penetrating while being penetrated, among many other sensations during intercourse. In this case, the sensation of penetration was drastically different.

“What did you---?” Havoc coughed, unable to shake the feeling that he’d just been impaled and hurled through the air.

Climbing slowly to her feet, Myanna unraveled the whip from around her arm. Sharing her pain with the judge did not negate her experience with it. “Cuirizu come from an existence where we felt nothing. We remember a time when there was neither pleasure nor pain. As a result, most have come to embrace both as viable experiences throughout our very long lives.”

“You...let me run you through just to harm me?” Havoc asked with pained incredulity. He was struggling not just with the idea but that she had managed to conceal it from him. “You’re demented.”

Myanna removed the hand holding the gaping wound, her amber blood soaking the palm of her glove. “Trusting in my higher tolerance for pain wasn’t nearly as unhinged as my gamble that your specific form of precognition was inextricably tied to your sense of malice.”

As the cuirizu began to approach him slowly, the judge backed away. The arm he wielded his sword with hung limply at his side as his blade crackled idly. Myanna brandished her thorn-covered arm, offering him a silent explanation as to why it hurt so much to move his own. “Your ability to sense danger only extends a short distance into the future. This much I knew. But it being so closely linked to your aggression and malice that it would fail to anticipate non-traditional sources of harm was a gamble.”

Myanna spared a moment to strike down a soldier that had ventured too close to their duel, opening his throat with a snap of her whip before leaving him to die. “Your training and ambition have led you to tie everything to that unquenchable malice. As a result, that which was meant to protect you has become so narrowly focused that it has blind spots to be exploited. An unconventional use of an eromagic spell fails to register until it’s too late.”

“A mistake I will not make twice,” Havoc snarled as he struggled against the pain to bring his sword to a ready position.

“Foolish of you to assume there is anything for you after this. What awaits you now is oblivion, with the only choice available to you being whether you meet it swiftly or agonizingly slow,” Myanna retorted.

“This will pass,” the judge snapped dismissively. “And it is you who bears the real wound. Mine is but a phantom copy of it.”

Myanna chuckled wickedly. “True, but even a human could survive for hours with a gut wound such as this. I’m considerably more durable than that. When the sun comes up, the wound will be but a memory. Like yourself.”

Havoc hadn’t lost his spine for the battle, but she could see uncertainty in his eyes. He wasn’t sure how to proceed. He winced as she tightened the thorns around her arm, and his uncertainty grew. “Tell me what you’ve done with Prosecutor Shriek, and I will grant you a swift death.”

The judge’s head quirked to the side, his confusion growing. “That would be a question for your ritual master. She died at his hands.”

Myanna shook her head, despising her defense of Belias. “No, she wasn’t here when he arrived. I was here first. We worked together to free ourselves from the cult of Liderce. As a result, she swore herself to me.”

“Nonsense,” Havoc spat. “She’s no traitor. She would never dare.”

“I think you vastly overestimate your influence over Brenna,” Myanna countered. A look of horrified realization crossed the judge’s face when she used the prosecutor’s true name. Names of that nature were kept secret within the Order due to the power names had in divination.

Rage boiled up in Havoc, allowing him to power through some of the pain to offer a more effective defense with his stance. “You’ll pay for defiling my prosecutor. Then, once I’ve located her, so will she.”

“No,” Myanna scoffed, unraveling the whip from her arm to hold it in a coiled state in her other hand. “I don’t think I will.”

Havoc launched himself at the cuirizu with assistance from his telekinesis. Myanna met his incoming attack with one of her own. With an underhanded swing of her arm, the whip uncoiled, building momentum as it did before snapping viciously at its full extension. A burst of green magic erupted from the weapon, along with a sharp snap. Usually, the Caustic Wheel technique was not an arcane strike, but it became one with the magic infused within the weapon.

The pain still running through the man’s body left him slow to react to the strike. His parry failed to shunt the whip far enough to the side to avoid the damage from it entirely. The small burst of magic flayed the leather armor, cloth, and skin from the man’s shoulder. His follow-up strike was sloppy and easily avoided as Myanna stepped back, allowing the red blade to carve a groove in the ground where she’d stood a moment before.

However, the judge had arrived at a point in his mind where killing her was worth any amount of pain he experienced. With a gripping motion of his off-hand, Myanna felt pressure in her wound a split second before pain exploded in her torso and across her vision. The judge also doubled over in agony, using it to fuel the psychic scream that came after. Myanna heard only a second or two of the sound before losing all sense of hearing. Hurled through the air by the concussive force of the sonic attack, Myanna crashed through a group of soldiers involved in a skirmish amid the greater battle.

The cuirizu caught a glimpse of one of the men trying to speak to her as they struggled to their feet, but she couldn’t hear him. As enemy soldiers advanced, she spared an attack to fend them off. It worked, despite how badly placed the strike was with her balance impaired. The approaching glow of red behind her forced her to dive forward in desperation to avoid the inevitable attack from the judge. Instead, one of the Abyssal soldiers was cut down, cleaved easily from shoulder to hip like a hot knife through butter.

Myanna stumbled away in the confusion, retrieving a potion from the small pouch hanging from her corset. Though cracked and leaking from the sonic blast, it had been spared enough to hold most of its contents. The cuirizu popped the stopper from the vial and swallowed the contents in a single gulp, letting the soothing healing magic infusing the fluid do its work within her. Though she’d brewed it originally to be more potent than the potions she supplied the infantry with, the slight leak kept it from being completely effective.

Even in its damaged state, the potion restored her hearing. She heard a wet pop as the damage in her ears was undone while the pain throughout her body ebbed drastically. The hole in her torso resembled a shallow scrape with the scab picked off, while the internal damage from the sonic blast being undone was more difficult to quantify. Unfortunately, relieving herself of her wounds and the accompanying pain provided the judge with relief from it as well.

With another devastating psychic scream, Havoc tore through every soldier in his immediate vicinity, regardless of what banner they fought under. Reduced to little more than pulped meat in armor, Havoc stepped over the soldiers toward Myanna, completely unchecked. Taking another breath, the judge let loose another, more focused, psychic scream that carved a ditch out of the earth between him and the cuirizu. Seeing the physical effect on the environment before her was all that allowed Myanna to avoid the attack with a desperate dive to one side, where she tumbled behind a large overturned wagon.

Myanna glanced around frantically, searching for any existing vegetation she could turn to her advantage. With the intensity of the battle, and the destructive spells that had been exchanged, much of the landscape had become dead and barren of all but the most tenacious patches of grass. Knowing that the wagon would not stand up to the judge’s sonic attacks, Myanna grabbed a discarded helmet with a cloak tangled up in it and pitched it to one side of the wagon while she went to the other.

The judge didn’t unleash a scream in the direction of Myanna’s distraction, but there was a moment of hesitation that Myanna exploited. Extending her marked hand, Myanna loosed a volley of thorn javelins at the man. “Ezpenyadardu!”

Myanna was surprised that the spell was not amplified the way many of her others had been by the mark, but she didn’t have time to puzzle over it. Unfettered by the overwhelming pain from before, the judge reacted quickly, cutting the deadly javelins down mid-flight. Smoldering pieces of the javelins scattered around Havoc’s feet as he stalked toward the cuirizu. Before Myanna could utter the words for another spell, the judge seized her throat with a telekinetic vice grip.

“No more magic, cuirizu. It’s time to accept your fate,” Havoc snarled. Myanna stared coldly back at the man, knowing he would be in range to behead her with the psyblade within seconds. Held firmly in place, the cuirizu could not evade him any longer. With few options left, she snatched the small cracked white bottle from the pouch on her hip and hurled it at him.

Sensing the danger the bottle presented, Havoc released his grip on her throat to suspend it just a few inches from the ground at his feet, preventing it from breaking open. “Such desperation---.”

“Esplozeva Vejatazil!” Myanna rasped, forcing as much of her will into the spell as she could. The bottle’s contents erupted violently, serving as the plant material Myanna needed to make the spell work. The milky, white mazadamorchi sap expanded to the typical area of effect for the spell though it didn’t retain its syrupy consistency.

Anticipating the danger once more, the judge focused his power on an uncharacteristically defensive maneuver. Myanna couldn’t see the hemispherical shield of telekinetic force, but the thin white spray of sap splashing across it revealed it indirectly. Dismissing the barrier with a flick of his wrist to recenter his mental focus, Havoc took a deep breath for his psychic scream, sealing his fate.

It only took a few drops of the sap to cause immense pain on contact with bare skin. A little inhaled was enough to cause swelling in the throat and lungs. Eyes would puff up and swell shut in those standing a few feet from exposed sap. Judge Havoc suffered all this exposure and more in that moment, all at once. The man’s breath caught in his throat before he broke into a coughing fit.

“W-wha---?” Havoc stammered, dabbing his fingers at his face as the burning sensation set in. Though he could make out little more than his sweat, the burning spread from his skin to his eyes and tongue. Then, he began to feel it deep in his chest, causing his breath to come in ragged rasps.

Nearby, soldiers that had attempted to rally to the judge’s aid began to grasp at their throats and rub at their eyes. A smile spread slowly across Myanna’s face. “As much as I would like to remain and see which aspect of the sap kills you, I must be going.”

“Y-you!” Havoc gasped accusingly. “I’ll kill you.”

Myanna stared back at the judge coldly, shaking her head only once. “No, Havoc. This fight ended the moment you took that breath. I told you before that the only choice remaining for you was a swift death or a slow, agonizing one. You’ve opted for the latter.”

The hateful eyes of the judge swelled almost entirely shut and were unable to make out the cuirizu. His attempts at further threats caught in his throat, becoming screams of pain as his hands shot up to his face. Desperately trying to wipe off whatever she had sprayed him with, the Havoc fell to the ground and writhed about alongside his newly arrived subordinates. Heaving a beleaguered sigh, Myanna turned her back to the battle and walked away, holding one hand over the tender wound across her midsection.

The potion had done a great deal in preventing her from bleeding out, but its effects had been spread thinly over the various internal wounds inflicted upon her by the psychic scream. She would live. Indeed, she would likely fully recover by the next sunset, but it would be an unpleasant recovery. The ache and fatigue nearly forced her to a shuffle as she ventured further from the battle. Any soldiers attempting to follow her were cut short by the scene of tormented men she’d left behind. The cuirizu needed only to reach an intact tree large enough to accommodate her to forestwalk back to Willowridge. She would be well ahead of Belias, allowing her to prepare for his return to the castle.

A sudden impact to the back of her skull sent her face-first into the rocky ground before her. Stunned and disoriented, Myanna could not recover before a bare foot pushed her head back to the ground, pinning it there.

“Such a shame,” the sultry, smoky voice of Vylshiya cooed from above Myanna. “I was certain that a judge would be enough to put you in the ground, but it seems the task falls to me.”

Groaning an intelligible reply, Myanna tried to crawl out from under the succubus before the demon leaned down to grab a handful of the cuirizu’s short green hair. “Serendipity, I suppose. It’ll be more much fun this way.”