I struggled, kicking my legs with all the strength I had left, but without giving myself ti to react.
The enormous beast, reminiscent of a tiger, lunged at like a flash of living darkness. Its claws descended with a brutality that tore through the air, a hiss that seed to split reality.
A thunderclap of raw force.
I couldn’t just stand by and wait for death.
Frying with a silent howl, I managed to swing my sword at the last mont. The blade, coated in my mana, received the impact with a piercing screech that shook my entire body.
But it was useless.
The force of the blow was overwhelming, beyond what my battered body could bear.
My knees lost their strength and buckled under the violent impact, cracking like dry branches. I felt my bones creak, my tendons tense with pain as I collapsed face first onto the ground.
As I fell, so of the shadow snakes still binding my ankles were torn apart by the violent movent, releasing an unnatural scream before dissipating into black smoke.
A muffled moan escaped my lips. The tallic taste of blood mingled with the dust and sweat drenching my face.
The world spun. Everything seed confusing and hopeless.
But I didn’t give up.
Despite the trembling in my muscles, despite the painful cry in my bones as they broke, I forced my heavy body to move. I scread in my mind, like a cornered animal, demanding obedience.
I tried to get up.
I leaned on the sword, digging it into the ground like a precarious cane, panting, feeling how every ti it beat, my heart could feel it for the last ti.
Then, another shadow descended upon .
A second slash, just as relentless, just as deadly.
I had no chance to block it.
The tiger’s claw almost struck ; fortunately, it hadn’t intended to kill . I had barely managed to avoid a blow by hunching my body, yet the impact knocked the wind out of , a spasm of pure pain that set my chest on fire.
My vision blurred. Everything seed to vibrate, recede, dissolve...
And, as if responding to their mistress’s command, the shadow snakes reford from the mist.
They grew. They writhed in a slimy whisper.
And before I could free myself, they launched themselves at again.
Their cold bodies coiled around my legs, my torso, my wrists, holding with relentless strength.
I felt them squeezing , stealing my breath, squeezing the life from my spent muscles.
There was no escape.
And yet, I refused to give up the fight.
Even as my body buckled, even as my arms trembled like delicate branches in a blizzard, I gripped the blade of my sword still clutched in my bloody fingers.
A reflex. A final act of will.
It wasn’t hope. It wasn’t faith that I could win.
It was instinct. The blind, primal need to keep fighting, even though every fiber of my being knew there was no salvation in sight.
Amid the shreds of my bloody, sweat-stained vision, I saw the darkness part, opening a path.
Her movents weren’t violent or abrupt, but sothing worse: deliberate, almost reverent.
The purple mist that saturates the domain like a gentle breeze parted in a raspy whisper. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see a silhouette glide like a ghost among the remains of my resistance.
The witch.
Each step echoed dully on the cracked ground, and where her fingertips touched, the shadows seed to shudder, as if recognizing their true owner.
The mist caressed her pale skin, coiling around her silhouette like lovers. The already heavy mist acquired a new level of density, saturated with a nauseating aroma: withered flowers mingled with my blood and a putrid sweetness that clung to my throat like rancid oil.
She moved forward slowly.
Not because she needed to.
But because she enjoyed every mont.
In her eyes, those lifeless pools, primally alight with madness, a spark of loneliness vibrated, an unhealthy obsession she couldn’t hide.
It was the gaze of a depraved woman who, after a long ga of hunting, had finally caught her favorite prey.
She stopped in front of .
Her figure seed to absorb the little opaque light that filtered through her domain.
It was impossible to ignore the aura of intoxication emanating from her body: a sticky mixture of desire, death, and perversion that insinuated itself beneath the skin, burned the senses, and clouded the mind.
With a grace that seed unworthy of her, she crouched down slowly, like a child examining a toy that was about to break.
Her hand lowered.
I felt it before I saw it: an icy, repulsive touch, from long, bony fingers crowned by nails as sharp as black needles.
She caressed the back of my neck, slowly and deliciously, as if not to miss a mont.
The touch was soft, almost tender... but it held an air of violence impossible to hide, a promise of total possession that chilled to the core and froze my body.
The cold touch left a trail of her energy through my body, my skin and my bones, sowing shivers that nestled in my very core.
Almost instinctively, I rolled my eyes to try to confront her, to show so semblance of resistance... but what I saw finally broke what little strength remained of .
Her smile.
Wide, crooked, like a crack in a porcelain face.
A grimace of impure, almost intoxicated pleasure, where desire and sadism intertwined in a single, uncontrollable impulse to devour .
It was the smile of soone who didn’t simply seek to kill, but to crush the will and desire of his victim.
"Go to sleep," he whispered, his voice caressing my ear like a rotten kiss.
The phrase barely touched the air before the darkness responded to its queen’s command. A torrent of viscous energy rushed into my body like a river of boiling oil.
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