His hand snaps out and catches my wrist. He does it so easily, as if I am moving slowly enough to be plucked from the air.
For one impossible second, our eyes meet. Another smirk. Then he twists my hand. Pain detonates through my arm as he hurls me against the nearest pillar.
I crash through ancient marble in a shower of shattered debris and hit the floor hard enough for the impact to bounce my skull against the ground.
My ears ring. My vision doubles.
But he gives me no time to rebound or even breathe. He’s once more on me.
Fuck.
A boot slams into my ribs before I can rise, launching me across the floor like trash. I skid through dust and broken stone, barely managing to roll aside before a lance of shadow spears through the spot where my head had been.
No. It’s notjusta lance. It’s dozens of them.
So this is the gap between our levels,I think bitterly.
The lances erupt from the ground in a writhing forest of black spikes, tearing through marble with obscene ease.
I wrench my own shadows upward to block, but the moment they meet his they topple like a nail beneath a hammer. Not only can he command more of them, but they are stronger, more resilient, and just…more.
He walks toward me through the wreckage without urgency, just as if he was taking a midnight stroll. His pace is slow and calm. Not only because heknowsI’m no match for him, but because he wants me tofeelthe difference in our levels of strength.
He could crush me so easily, but he doesn’t. That wouldn’t amount to a show, and it’s clear he’s putting one on right now.
By the Seven! And I thought Lis’ training was rough, but now, looking back, she was really holding back.
“You are not just weaker,” the male says, almost conversationally, while I force myself back to my feet. “You are rash.” He gestures lazily as more shadows gather behind him, coiling upward like serpents obeying a master. “Embarrassing, frankly. You do not deserve the praise you have been getting. ”
I bare my teeth and throw myself sideways just as the dark serpents strike.
They smash through pillars, walls, floors. Everything in their path is obliterated in violent bursts of stone and dust. One clips my shoulder and tears my flesh open to the bone. Another catches my thigh hard enough to send me spinning.
I force my bleeding leg to move and hurl three shadow blades from different angles while duplicating the broken spear shadow of a nearby shattered column, sending all of them at him at once.
He glances at them, then flicks his fingers.
Every construct I made freezes midair.
My blood runs cold. My mouth opens in shock as I stare at him.
His smile widens.
The shadows I created peel away from my control. Then, they come back to haunt me.
I barely throw myself behind a collapsed pew before my own weapons obliterate the stone where I stood, blasting it apart in a spray of razor-sharp fragments.
My pulse thunders in my ears.
He stole them. No… I don’t think hestolethem. He overrode my control somehow. His mastery over Shadow Domain eclipses mine so completely that my—recently and hard earned—control means nothing in the face of his.
His boots crunch over rubble as he emerges through the settling dust like death given form. Shadows orbital lazily around him in shifting ribbons.
Then he speaks words that freeze the marrow in my bones.
“Let me show you,” he says softly, “what your domain looks like in capable hands.”
Darkness erupts outward from him like a living storm. The cathedral vanishes beneath it.
