Chapter 18: Stormbreak
The air cracked with tension as Volundr stepped into the heart of the shrine's sanctum, lightning dancing across his fingertips.
The ancient stone altar shimmered with cursed light, sigils bleeding holy energy into the air.
Shuri, bound and bruised, lay slumped on the far edge. Akeno, unconscious and marked with purification seals, was chained at the center of the ritual circle.
The exorcists chanted louder, blinded by fanaticism.
Not for long.
Volundr raised his hand.
The ritual's energy twisted—redirected.
A jolt of elemental backlash exploded through the room, shattering stained-glass windows and toppling sacred totems.
Fire roared to life where once stood silence. Lightning crackled from his palm, weaving through the sigils and exploding them from within.
Confusion erupted among the holy warriors. Some stumbled backward, dazed; others reached for weapons, too late.
Claudius charged through the breach behind Volundr, his gauntlets glowing, fists slamming into armored exorcists and sending them sprawling.
Lirien darted between shadows, her daggers singing through flesh and holy wards alike.
Volundr didn't move like a warrior.
He moved like inevitability.
Using the flow of Senjutsu, he bent the environment—collapsed beams to block exits, redirected magical backlash to sever command chains, amplified spiritual echoes to mislead the senses.
He fractured the shrine's barrier system at its keystone, causing cascading failures that trapped the inner sanctum in a dead zone of spiritual inversion.
The enemy commander, a cloaked Himejima elder with eyes of cold fire, tried to reform the sigils.
Volundr appeared behind him.
With a single strike of his palm, infused with precise aura disruption, he short-circuited the man's lifeforce pathways.
The elder crumpled, paralyzed—not dead, but defeated.
Across the ruined chamber, Shuri's vision fluttered open. Through blurred tears and broken pain, she saw him—a boy not yet in his teens, moving like the wind, eyes glowing with stormlight. Not shouting. Not boasting. Only executing.
He was the calm in the storm.
She tried to speak, but her voice failed.
Lirien reached her first, slipping a healing tonic to her lips and severing her bindings. Claudius, with uncharacteristic gentleness, unchained Akeno and wrapped the small girl in a protective cloak before lifting her into his arms.
The shrine burned behind them.
Volundr gave one final glance to the desecrated altar, then traced a runic sigil across the air.
A gateway flickered into being—one laced not with devil magic, but natural leyline resonance, undetectable by holy sensors.
They vanished through it, swallowed by the night and the earth.
In a quiet pocket of an old leyline cavern, safe from pursuit, Volundr stood alone.
His hands trembled—not from fear.
Not from exhaustion.
But from the purity of violence done with purpose.
The weight of justice wielded by one too young to carry it.
He exhaled, steadying himself, and whispered to the sleeping Akeno:
"You're safe now. You won't bleed again."