The Hunter's Od Chapter 90: Permitted

Chapter 90: Permitted

Jagger’s body moved before thought caught up. Corrupted Surge roared through him in one savage pulse as he threw himself sideways and intercepted her mid-lunge. He caught her around the waist and drove her off course, both of them smashing through the side of the couch in a splintering crash. Cushions burst. Wood snapped. The whole fra overturned beneath them.

"Get away from them!" Jagger roared.

She snarled in his face and clawed at him again, wild now, feral.

Jagger caught her wrist with one hand, cocked the other back, and scread, "FRENZY!"

The skill detonated through him.

Heat flooded his limbs in a violent spike. The world constricted to motion, blood, impact, and kill. Every wound, every scream behind him, every hiss from Ophilia blurred into a single red thread pulling him forward. His crimson eyes seed to burn brighter as Frenzy stacked over Corrupted Surge, feeding his speed, feeding his fury, feeding the savage rhythm taking over his body.

’YES!’ Ophilia scread with him, no longer cold, no longer distant. ’Rip her apart! Don’t stop! Don’t stop until she is RIPED APART!’

Bone Rattlers crashed into Soo-min’s chin as an upper cut, snapping her head back so hard it almost tore from her neck. Before she could recover, he seized her by the hair and drove her face-first into the broken floor.

He did not let go.

He got on top of her, straddling her back, and brought both fists down in an alternating hamring rhythm onto the back of her head.

"ARGH!"

Soo-min’s hands shot up to protect her skull, as she covered them in a desperate attempt to block the endless onslaught. "Wait!" Soo-min rasped, choking on blood. "Wait, stop! I can help you!"

He didn’t stop. "ARGH!" Bone Rattlers slamd down again.

"I know what you are," she gasped, words spilling out between impacts, panic shredding whatever control she had left. "I felt it. The mont I touched you. You’re like . More than . We don’t have to do this!"

"ARGH!" He roared with every punch. Blood and her hand that was once covering the back of her head splattered across the floorboards.

"We can work together," she choked out, faster now, desperation overtaking pain. "I’ll make a contract. I’ll be your slave. I can still be useful, I can still serve, I can still..."

"ARGH!" Jagger raised his fist, knuckles split, fingers swollen, dripping with blood. He was screaming, face twisted in pure, uncontrolled rage.

"I’ll be yours," she sobbed, finally, completely. "Please. Please don’t kill ."

He brought his fist down, blood splattered, and fragnts of skull slicked the floor beneath them.

Her body convulsed under the next blow. Blood spilled from her mouth, stringing down her face and onto the floor.

"Jagger, stop!" Nico’s voice cut through the haze. High. Panicked.

Jagger looked up, eyes blazing, the system’s panel flashing at the corner of his vision.

[Warning: Host’s ntal clarity is compromised.]

Then it vanished.

His breathing changed first. The raw, ragged rhythm of battle steadied into sothing colder. Slower. Deliberate. His shoulders relaxed, but not from calm. It was the terrible looseness of sothing that no longer needed to pretend restraint. The crimson in his eyes deepened, swallowing what little humanity remained in them.

"Jagger...?" Nico whispered.

No answer ca.

Soo-min tried to move beneath him, broken and bloodied, one last desperate twitch of survival. Jagger’s hand closed around Jane’s Bowie knife. The grip was smooth. Familiar. Possessive.

But the presence behind it was not his.

When he spoke, the voice that left his mouth was layered. Jagger’s tone was there, buried underneath, but Ophilia rode over it like silk drawn across a blade.

"You should have stayed still."

For the first ti since the mask had fallen, fear truly showed on Soo-min’s face.

Her lips parted. Blood clung to her teeth. Her breath ca short and uneven as she tried to push herself up on shaking arms, only to fail. Her eyes darted past him, toward Nico, toward Abdul, toward Jung, then snapped back to the thing looking down at her through Jagger’s face.

"No..." she whispered.

Her voice was smaller now. Broken. Nothing like the sharp, manipulative tone she had worn before.

Her blood-slick hand lifted weakly, not toward Ophilia, but toward Jagger. Trembling. Reaching.

"Jagger... wait..." she rasped, each word uneven, chopped apart by pain and failing breath. "Please... listen... I can still..."

She swallowed, coughed, and more blood spilled over her lips.

"I don’t... want... to die..."

Her fingers twitched helplessly in the air.

"Not like... this..."

Ophilia smiled.

It was small. Beautiful. rciless.

The knife flashed once, and the head was severed from the body.

The room went silent.

Soo-min’s body collapsed fully, the last of its strength draining out of it. Ophilia raised Soo-min’s severed head and a small, red, no bigger than a marble, slipped free from her throat and struck the floorboards with a faint tap before rolling through the blood.

Jagger’s hand moved faster than thought.

He caught it.

For a single second, the room froze. Nico, Abdul, and the barely-conscious Jung could only stare as Jagger lifted the tiny orb to his lips.

And swallowed it.

A shudder passed through him imdiately.

Not pain.

Pleasure.

His head tilted back slightly, throat working once, and a faint smile touched his mouth. It was wrong on his face. Too elegant. Too satisfied. Too cruel.

Then he rose.

Soo-min’s severed head slipped from his grasp and hit the floor beside the body with a heavy, sickening thud.

Nico recoiled so hard he nearly fell backward. Abdul tightened both blood-slick hands over Jung’s wound, but his stare remained fixed on Jagger, horror hollowing out his face. Even Jung, barely clinging to consciousness, managed the faintest shift of his eyes toward him.

Toward her.

Ophilia smiled through Jagger’s face and turned to them.

Step.

Step.

Step.

Each footfall was unhurried. Controlled. Her body now, for however brief a mont, belonged entirely to her. Jagger’s fra seed different under her command, less tense, more fluid, like a puppet finally moving the way its strings had intended.

She stopped in front of them and crouched.

Close.

Too close.

Her smile widened, crimson eyes glimring in the lantern light.

"I would so like to kill you," she said softly, almost fondly. "But you are beneath the effort, and he would be insufferable about it later."

Nico’s chest hitched.

Abdul said nothing. Could say nothing.

Ophilia’s gaze drifted lazily between them, savoring every flinch, every tremor, every desperate attempt not to break under the weight of her attention.

"You should feel fortunate," she continued. "You are alive only because he still clings to his little human convictions. Duty. rcy. Protection. Such fragile, ugly things." Her smile sharpened as she waved her hand in dismissiveness. "And yet... useful. For now."

She leaned forward slightly, resting an elbow on one knee.

"If you are smart, you will rember this mont for the rest of your short lives. You will rember that your survival was not earned. It was permitted."

Nico swallowed hard, unable to look away.

Abdul finally found his voice, though it ca out raw. "What... what are you?"

Ophilia’s expression turned amused.

"Um...? I am the reason you are still drawing breath."

Her eyes flicked to Jung, to the blood pouring between Abdul’s fingers, and her smile shifted into sothing stranger. Older. Thoughtful.

"Move your hands," she said.

Abdul froze. "What?"

"I will not repeat myself."

There was no room to refuse. Abdul pulled his hands back at once, blood stringing between his palms and Jung’s torn chest. Jung let out a weak, broken sound, his body twitching as fresh blood welled up from the wound.

Ophilia rose as she stood over him, bringing both hands together in a silent prayer.

The air in the room changed.

The lantern dimd, not extinguished, but subdued, as though sothing heavier had stepped into the space and bent the light around itself. Shadows stretched unnaturally along the walls. Behind Ophilia, just above her shoulder blades, a shape began to form in the air, thin black lines sketching themselves into existence like cracks spreading across glass.

An upside-down cross.

It hung there, suspended in the dimness, vast and silent, its edges pulsing with a dull crimson-black glow.

"Eclipsed Sanctum."

Nico made a strangled noise in the back of his throat.

Abdul could not move.

Ophilia puts out her left hand, palm facing down and fingers drawing inward as though she were gripping sothing invisible.

"Malignant Grace."

From her palm, black venom-like energy spilled downward in slow streams.

It did not move like light.

It moved like liquid malice.

Thick. Glossy. Alive.

The energy coiled through the air and sank into Jung’s wound. At first, he convulsed violently, a ragged scream tearing out of him as his back arched off the floor. The blackness threaded into the torn flesh, crawling beneath the skin in branching lines. His veins stood out in stark relief for a mont, darkening, spreading from the wound across his chest and shoulder like ink dropped into water.

"Hold him," Ophilia said mildly.

Abdul moved on instinct, grabbing Jung’s shoulders as Nico, shaking uncontrollably, scrambled to pin his legs.

Jung thrashed once. Twice.

Then the wound began to close.

Not gently.

The torn flesh pulled itself together in sharp, unnatural incrents, as though invisible hooks were dragging the edges back into place. Blood flow slowed. The jagged opening sealed over, layer by layer, leaving behind raw pink tissue veined faintly with black before even that began to fade.

Jung’s scream broke into gasping sobs.

The upside-down cross behind Ophilia pulsed once more.

Then vanished.

The last strands of black energy withdrew from Jung’s body and recoiled back into her hand before dissolving into nothing.

Silence crashed down over the room.

Jung lay there trembling, drenched in sweat, his breathing ragged but alive. The wound was gone. Not even a scar remained. Only torn cloth, blood, and the mory of pain.

Abdul stared at Jung’s chest as though his mind could not make sense of what his eyes were showing him.

Nico looked like he might be sick.

Ophilia lowered her hand.

"He will live," she said. "For now."

That landed.

Hard.

Nico’s hands shook even more violently as he fumbled with the d-kit. Abdul pressed a hand lightly to Jung’s chest as if testing whether the flesh would split open again.

For a long second, Ophilia simply watched them work.

Then her smile faded into sothing quieter. Colder.

"When he wakes up, do not tell him anything I said. I would rather not listen to his whining when I have used so much of my focus keeping him alive." She paused, staring at Nico. "You, however, I will rember. You made a choice even in terror. That’s interesting."

She turned around and sat on the armchair. "Monsters are coming." She smiled before Jagger’s body went limp. His head slumped forward onto his chest, and the crimson in his eyes bled away, leaving them dull and half-lidded. The Bowie knife slipped from his fingers and de-materialized before it even hit the floor.

The room remained silent except for Jung’s weak breathing and Nico’s trembling breathing.