My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 744: Stolen Kill

He rose.

The dragon’s might awoke in his limbs like old fire.

Phei felt the power settle along his thighs and calves and the long slope of his back while the cathedral hollow’s beneath his ruined training shoes accept his weight and begin to brace for what was to come.

The Titan was already moving.

He thought fuck it — the small as his savage thought overtook cleverness — and moved.

The first step did not crack the ground much as split it open.

A long jagged wound tore outward from his right boot in a six-foot arc. The moss-veiled stone simply could not hold the weight of three hundred and forty stats of a dragon’s single stride.

The fissure raced up the tree he had been driven through earlier and ran along its trunk like a fresh scar before the stone decided it had voiced its complaint and fell silent.

He did not feel the step but only what came after.

The world folded around Phei and distance bent like a curtain pulled by an unseen hand.

The seventy yards between him and the Titan shrank in his sight, then snapped back as his second stride devoured it in that instant.

His vision streaked green and blue, the Titan, which had stood twelve feet of patient ice across a battlefield, was suddenly upon him — and his body was already rising, turning lateral speed into upward flight akin to walking in the air.

His foot struck the splintered corpse of the first tree he had broken.

He felt the broken heartwood yield beneath his sole and then he was gone, vaulting, his second foot landing on the shattered stump of the next tree with the same brief, brutal intimacy, up in the air, Phei brought his knees to chest on the third stride mimicking a move from the Soul Realm fight.

Daggers reversed in his fists, he cleared the canopy before he cleared the Titan’s shoulders before it could even react.

For one suspended heartbeat he hung eight meters above the faceless skull, the cathedral’s moss-green light painting the scene in the colours of a dying saint’s last vision, his body coiled like a promise about to be kept —

— and he fell.

In the process, his knees struck the Titan’s crystalline chest the instant his perception caught up to his body.

He felt the blow before the hollow heard it.

A vast, world-deep impact that travelled up his thighs, through his hips, and into the pillars of his spine.

The fairy’s cold chain caught the worst of the recoil before it could unmake him, but it left him the rest — the shock, the force, the glorious violence of it.

Beneath his knees the Titan’s chest split in a long diagonal wound that he felt through the soles of his ruined shoes as the construct tried, and failed, to refuse him.

The hollow heard it only a heartbeat later.

A deep, shaking boom that rolled outward through the canopy and sent a flock of unseen birds exploding from the eastern treeline like frightened prayers.

The Titan staggered back four full steps, its massive frame shuddering. The fracture raced across its torso from shoulder to hip with a wet, splintering scream that travelled into Phei’s wrists and elbows.

His body bounced.

Half a foot, the small, honest refusal of two unyielding things meeting.

In that weightless instant he reversed both daggers and drove them, blade-first, into the Titan’s twin shoulder joints.

The crystalline sockets accepted the steel like a body accepting a lover’s teeth.

A low, grinding crack ran down his arms and into his chest. The Titan—

—roared.

The roar was more of a groan of mountains waking in anger, a chord of pure offended winter that rolled through the hollow and made every leaf on every primordial tree tremble.

Phei’s teeth hummed in his jaw like struck bells.

He grinned — a red, savage thing and wrenched the daggers free from its neck.

In that same breathe, he used the Titan’s reflex jerk to launch into a backflip off its chest, blades reversing in mid-air, heels coming down in a double drop-kick that should have sheared the construct in two.

The calculation was perfect.

The universe, however, had invited a second guest.

The fist arrived in his left flank from the southeast like the verdict of an ancient glacier.

He did not see it coming.

He felt it the way the first kick had taught him to feel — the warning that lived in his bones before the blow arrived.

His entire world narrowed to a single, bright point of oh no in the half-heartbeat before impact.

And then the world broke.

Sound tore, his sight went white.

His ribs on the left side folded inward in a hot, wet collapse that he felt as heat before the pain arrived — a blooming warmth beneath his diaphragm that spread upward like liquid fire. H

is lungs emptied in a single involuntary wet rush he could not hear because his hearing had fled again, and he was airborne for the second time in as many minutes.

The second Titan’s fist had not merely struck.

It had folded the left side of his torso the way a careless god might fold a page of forbidden scripture. His ribs caved while something inside kissed his lung in hot, wet intimacy. Blood bloomed immediately.

The impact launched him sideways and upward in a spiralling arc that carried him clear over the first Titan’s cracking chest.

The world became a white-noise smear of moss-green and crystalline blue and his own blood painting the air in a fine crimson mist.

The Vitality Sustaining bond caught the worst of the shock before it could stop his heart, but it left him screaming every inch of the consequence — the wet heat flooding his chest cavity, the taste of copper and broken bone, the helpless tumble of a body that had, for one perfect violent moment, believed it was winning.

And the cathedral hollow watched in ancient, patient silence as the dragon learned, once again, that winning was not the same thing as surviving.

"Oh you bast—"

The second tree stole the rest of the curse from his tongue.

Bark kissed his face like the slap of an ancient hand, a long stinging line opened across his right cheekbone, bright as a fresh-cut oath.

His shoulder met the trunk and his body spun in a long, lazy arc through the green-lit dark, the cathedral hollow smearing into a single bleeding ribbon across his vision.

The third tree took him in the lower back. The fourth bit into his left thigh. The fifth shattered across his face like a green-glass promise broken.

The sixth he did not feel, because his perception had gone — sound, sight, proprioception all collapsing into a single dilated white point at the centre of his consciousness while his body completed the rest of its trajectory through trees seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, the world an undifferentiated blur of green and bark and his own warm wet blood —

— and on the twelfth, his perception came back in a single sudden snap.

He could see and hear again.

Phei could feel everything that had been done to him, all at once, in a single overwhelming flood that the bond was already beginning to muffle and reverse but which had, for the moment, full access to his nervous system.

He cried out a short hard sound, ripped from his chest at the moment the totality of the damage registered, and he twisted his torso in mid-flight and drove both daggers into the cathedral hollow’s mineral-rich earth at thirty-degree angles and anchored —

The blades carved twin furrows again, the earth screamed.

The soles of his already-half-destroyed training shoes finished separating from their uppers in two distinct shredding sounds, and the friction of his deceleration tore through the rubber and met his bare heels and burned a long red line up the back of each ankle before his body finally —

Finally, he managed to stop, and once more, like it was the only thing he came to do, Phei skidded to rest on one knee.

Both daggers still buried, his hands still gripping the handles.

Through swimming concussive double-vision he saw the second Titan — the one that had just gut-punched him through twelve trees — was already running at him with its faceless head lowered in a patient committed forward stride.

Behind it, the first Titan was rolling its crystalline shoulders, the daggers gone from its chest now, the diagonal fracture still bright but the body fully operational.

Click...