The Rise of the Unbound Sovereign Sect Chapter 24: Chapter 24

Read chapter 24 of The Rise of the Unbound Sovereign Sect by Magic on NovelPedia.

"The lion who hunts the rabbit often finds the wolf waiting in the brush; never mistake stillness for weakness." "Well," Karg rumbled, his seismic voice shaking the loose leaves from the surrounding branches. "Look at what the Wild Hunt spat back out. The mountain midge." He unhooked his cleaver from his belt, letting the heavy bone blade rest easily against his shoulder. The three giants behind him spread out, effectively cutting off my exits. They were looking past me, scanning the dirt for signs of Vora. "We tracked Grul’s prize’s path," Karg said, taking a slow, earth-shattering step forward. "She came this way. You are going to tell me exactly where the traitorous daughter of the cliff is hiding, little rabbit. And then, I am going to break your legs and wear your scalp on my belt to prove to the Weaver that her obsession was nothing but fragile, useless driftwood." Karg smiled, a jagged display of surprisingly white teeth, and opened his mouth to issue a command to his squad. He never finished the sentence. I had heard enough, and gave a simple few mental commands. The air in the clearing simply ceased to exist. There was no battle cry. There was no clash of weapons. Pendra dropped from the canopy like a guillotine blade. She didn't land on the ground; she landed on the giant closest to my left. Her lower bladed limbs scissored through the Jötnar's thick, iron-hard neck as if it were wet paper. The giant’s head hit the ash before his massive body even realized it was dead. The second giant roared, swinging a massive club. Pendra used the falling, headless corpse as a springboard. She shot forward like a spinning drill—a whirling streak of pale silk hair and dark chitin—and buried her hands directly into the second giant's chest plate. The kinetic force and spin of her strike shattered the massive ribs inward in a fountain of blood. In the next instant, she ripped her hands outward, tearing the giant's heart from its vascular moorings in a spray of arterial mist. The third giant tried to turn to run, but it was already too late. Pendra landed softly on the dirt, her small but powerful, compressed legs coiled. She launched herself horizontally, closing the forty-foot gap in a fraction of a second. She landed on the giant's back, her obsidian claws sinking deep into his spine. With a single, brutal twist of her hips, she severed the Jötnar's spinal cord, making me wince slightly. The massive wall of muscle collapsed into the dirt, entirely paralyzed, choking on his own blood. The entire sequence took less than two seconds. Karg stood absolutely frozen in the center of the clearing. His bone-cleaver slipped from his numb fingers, hitting the ground with a dull, heavy thud. In less than a blink of an eye, Pendra had him pinned to the ground. She had used the momentum of her last kill to rebound across the clearing, knocking the giant down with almost no resistance. Two of her razor-sharp, chitinous forearms were fully extended, hovering exactly a paper's width from the surface of Karg's wide, terrified eyeballs. A single drop of blood from her previous kill ran down the edge of her blade and dripped onto Karg's cheek. Karg did not breathe. He did not blink. The smug wannabe hunter of the Gem Cliff was entirely paralyzed by the sheer, overwhelming proximity of an apex predator he could not comprehend. He should have stayed as a wall guard, but that was not my problem. It would become his problem even more if I didn’t find the answers I wanted. I didn’t really care what Vora had been running from, or why. I meant what I told Pendra, and I was not going to pass up on this chance to test my theory. Vora might not be as bad as the others, but she was still a tool to me just the same as she and the rest of the Jötnar viewed me. Stepping out of my ruminations, I cleared my throat. I stepped over the pooling blood of the first giant, my notebook open, and the stick of charcoal Pendra had found for me to use as a pencil poised in my