Chapter 135
Under the eye of an Innate Ancestor Technique, there was nowhere in this vault to fade to.
Wherever she hid, he found the coordinates and dragged her back out.
Inside a single incense stick, she’d been caught and slammed into the ground seventeen or eighteen times.
Soren was all smiles now, the blank, cold face was gone.
He was enjoying this.
Enjoying it was more or less the whole point.
He could have crushed her with a wave of his hand at any moment. He turned her loose every single time instead.
Cecilia knew she wasn’t getting out of his palm.
She refused to stop trying.
Soren folded his arms, and that easy, unbothered posture pressed down on her harder than the beating.
His gaze tracked her hidden figure as she tore across the vault, then he lifted a single finger and pointed it at her, less than a thousandth of his strength went into the flick.
The demonic energy took the shape of an arrow, it crossed the room, it burst against her shoulder.
A small gasp of pain, her figure flickered out of the void. she dropped, put her back against a stone wall, and breathed hard.
Then she turned her head and swore inwardly.
Where the demonic energy hit, the shoulder strap of her black dress had been cut clean through, leaving a red welt across snow-white skin.
Cecilia faded out again and bolted for the exit.
Soren didn’t stand on ceremony, he flicked several more pulses after her.
Same as before, he kept 99.9% in reserve.
Against one thousandth of one finger, she didn’t dodge a single one.
She couldn’t, there was no version of this where she dodged.
After a string of sharp little gasps, she was forced into the open again, and this time she stood there stunned.
Shame and outrage sat on her face in equal measure. every pulse he’d flicked had gone around her vitals with care, and every one left her worse off than a killing blow would have, her dress had been taken apart piece by piece.
The man was insulting on a level that took effort, he went for shoulder straps, or the waistband of her skirt.
He hadn’t even left her shoes alone, which left her disheveled.
And a great deal more than disheveled.
She was standing there in expensive undergarments and nothing else, her face went hot and rosy as she glared at him.
No time to stand and be humiliated, she moved again.
She saw an opening and flicked both wrists, sending a flood of steel needles at him.
The swarm blotted out the space between them and came down like heavy rain.
Soren smiled and blew a breath of air at it.
Demonic breath wrapped the needles, every one stopped dead exactly one meter short of him.
He narrowed his eyes, and something profound came off his gaze.
It hit the frozen swarm, then threw the whole barrage back.
Wave after wave of her own needles came home.
Cecilia threw a second volley to intercept the first, the vault rang with metal on metal.
Soren twitched one finger, several spent needles leapt off the floor.
Guided by his aura, they came at her from an angle she had no way to cover.
She panicked, neutralizing the ones he’d bounced back was already at her ceiling, and he was still playing.
If he put lethal intent behind a single needle, she’d be dead where she stood.
However exquisite the technique, against absolute strength it counted for nothing.
The gap between a Middle-Tier Demon Ancestor and an Upper-Tier Demon Emperor ran a thousandfold at least.
Cecilia turned and ran, a needle came from behind and went through her right ankle.
She went down hard, more needles came down like nails under his control, into her wrists, elbows, ankles, the backs of her knees.
These were being moved by his own intent.
A thin, concentrated layer of his demonic energy sat on them, it sealed her major meridians on contact, her own demonic energy stopped reaching her limbs, it carried a heavy numbing effect on top, her body locked down completely.
She fought it and couldn’t move a muscle, with circulation broken she couldn’t trigger escape techniques either.
She lay sprawled across the floor in an undignified spread of limbs.
Waiting.
Soren waved a hand. Ink-black demonic energy converged from all sides and formed an formation space, sealing them off from the world.
She watched him walk toward her, nothing about the feeling in her chest was good.
Roughly two days later, the formation space thinned and faded, inch by inch.
Soren looked refreshed, there was a clarity coming off him.
Cecilia sat without saying anything, resentment still in her eyes.
Both had changed clothes.
The pale pink dress she wore now didn’t suit her the way the black one had, but it brought out something else entirely.
On the panel, Soren looked at two updated values and smiled.
[1]
[6]
"And you call yourself a dignified Demon Ancestor."
"You villain."
Cecilia pushed her lip out, a trace of grievance lingered in her eyes, though most of the burning had gone out.
"Don’t tell me you aren’t going to take responsibility."
"I kept myself untouched for hundreds of years!"
"If you won’t take responsibility, I won’t let you off even as a ghost!"
"Hmph, responsibility or not, I’m sticking to you from now on."
"I feel completely broken, there’s no rule anywhere that says you can break something and throw it away!"
"Unless you can put me back exactly how I was, don’t dream about getting rid of me."
She got up and walked over, watching him with a tight kind of intensity.
Soren reached out and lifted her chin.
"If I don’t take you with me, your plan can’t go anywhere, can it?"
Her heart went sideways.
"Plan?"
"What plan?"
"What are you talking about?"
"I don’t understand a word of that."
She shook her head, innocence itself.
Soren didn’t bother with the approach. "You want my trust so you can assassinate me, correct?"
"First you fake cooperation with the Falling Cherry Spirit Emperor, so you have a reason to be anywhere near this business."