[Emakimonos] flashed along the beams and floor, suddenly appearing as long, flowing streaks of light that twisted together, forming stylized scrolls that unrolled from the walls and the floor, reaching Harun and Rana mid-lunge.

  The two werewolves jerked as the cords of crimson mana shot out of the sigils, wrapping around their arms, legs, torsos, and throats. Harun’s half-shifted body slammed to a stop just a step from the table, his muscles bulging as he strained and failed to break free. Rana froze near the doorway, caught mid-spring, with her lips pulled back to reveal her lengthening fangs.

  “Bind and purify,” Nick murmured, more out of completionism than any real need, as the Shard channeled his will perfectly well.

  Outside, the first wave of howls reached them.

  Mana wrapped around Raphael’s hands as he turned to face the pack, trusting Nick to keep the two leaders restrained.

  “[Spatial Shear: Local Bubble],” he said, and reality twisted.

  Nick felt a thinning in the air around the house, followed by a thickening, as if the world had been pinched and pulled. For a hundred feet in every direction, space became distorted, as distances stretched and compressed in strange ways that made his mind ache when he tried to follow them.

  The first werewolves to arrive at the house learned that the hard way. They leapt from fences, roofs, and porches, claws out and jaws open, only to collide mid-air as their trajectories warped, and howls turned into yelps and curses.

  “Go,” Raphael snapped, not looking back, and the others didn’t need to be told twice.

  Yvonne flipped the table right through the nearest window with a grunt, the wood shattering outward in a shower of splinters that hit two unlucky werewolves in the path. Malik lunged after it, shield first, turning the broken frame into a deadly trap, while Monte and the other adventurers split toward opposite walls, ready to handle any attempt to break in.

  Willow’s hands flashed with golden mana, reinforcing the walls with translucent plates just long enough for the apprentices to blast through their chosen exit points.

  Nick, on the other hand, stayed exactly where he was, as he had business with Harun and Rana.

  The pack leader roared, his voice rising above the growing chaos outside. His body swelled further, and his bones cracked as they reformed, yet the cords of light cut into his flesh like strangling vines, forcing the curse inside him to surge in answer, wild and furious, trying to push them out.

  Rana snarled, her nails digging furrows in the floor as she strained toward Willow, whose eyes narrowed but whose stance never broke.

  “Nasty fuckers,” Nick muttered. The [Emakimonos] were doing their job, but they weren’t meant to hold indefinitely.

  Fortunately, he didn’t need that much time. He lifted the Shard, and it hummed, resonating with his will, causing the air to thicken around the two werewolves and forming an invisible shield that reinforced the spiritual cords, transforming them into something more as spiritual mana strengthened them.

  “Stay,” Nick said, as if they were misbehaving dogs, leaning closer to examine them.

  Harun’s gaze snapped to him, but all he could do was growl.

  Up close, the curse’s presence in him was undeniable, as silver hooks sank deep into muscle and soul alike, woven so tightly that Nick could barely tell where the man ended and the curse began.

  Both werewolves were strong enough that if they got close, they’d tear him apart. He moved forward anyway, confident in his magic.

  The Shard’s orb pushed into Harun’s chest as Nick extended his senses, allowing [Empyrean Intuition] to penetrate past fur and flesh, through the cords of light, into the tangle of malign power wrapped around what passed for the man’s soul.

  His spiritual vision was filled with jagged silver hooks everywhere. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands, braided into chains and lattices, forming a cage whose bars were also blades. While the soldier-victims back in Long Reach had only borne a few initial piercings, Harun was clad in full armor.

  Nick’s lips thinned. Maybe…

  He pressed further, looking for weak spots, areas where the curse intersected at odd angles and could be loosened. On the soldiers, those had been common, but here, they were nearly absent.

  Eventually, he found one, but as soon as he touched it, the curse struck back.

  A wave of feral force slammed into his senses, pushed by memories of teeth and claws driven by raw bloodlust, the ecstasy of leading a pack, and the thrill of the hunt. It sought to pull him in, to make him join, blurring the line between self and beast.

  [Blasphemy] surged up an instant, a cold, absolute negation that slammed into the oncoming tide and canceled it right then and there.

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  Even so, Nick staggered as heat seared through his skull, and for a second, he tasted iron on his tongue. Lesson learned.

  “It’s too deep,” he muttered, shaking his head to clear his thoughts of the foreign memories.

  Harun thrashed harder, muscles bulging grotesquely under fur, and the cords creaked.

  “You know,” Nick said, undaunted by the rising noise, “I did try.”

  He lowered his staff, his expression eerily calm. “[Call of the Void].”

  The Shard’s orb turned black, consuming all nearby light. A hollow pressure erupted in his chest and spread outward, through his hands, along the Emakimonos’ cords, reaching Harun and Rana.

  The curse surged as it began suffering the spell’s effects, desperately fighting back.

  But this wasn’t [Spirit Crunch], which shattered and tore apart. No, [Call of the Void] was a completely different weapon, an eraser of reality. In a way, it was a merciful death.

  For someone like Harun, whose soul was deeply entwined with a ravenous, feral nature, death was the only way out. Werewolves weren't beastmen, whose minds were free from their ancestral instincts despite their looks; they couldn't be reasoned with, at least at this stage.

  Nick felt the first strands of identity begin to unravel. Harun’s aura flickered as the clear sense of personhood in it faded into static, and Rana’s followed, her fear and anger breaking into formless noise.

  The curse itself trembled violently, struggling against dissolution, as the entity on the other end of the link noticed what he was doing and tried to prevent his success.

  “Nicholas!” Raphael’s voice cut through the chaos as his mana flared brightly, bending space around the two bound werewolves’ necks to form invisible blades aligned along impossibly thin planes.

  He snapped his fingers, and both heads came off their necks.

  The severed heads hit the floor with heavy thumps, the mouths still mid-snarl, while the bodies spasmed once, then slumped in their bindings.

  Harun and Rana’s souls, already fraying, flickered and went out like candles in the wind.

  Nick released the spell and looked up, noticing Raphael watching him. The older apprentice’s face was unreadable, but his eyes fixated on the still-dim orb of the Shard, then met Nick’s gaze, signaling that they would need to talk soon.

  Nick gave the tiniest shrug that wasn’t quite an apology.

  “Let’s handle the rest first,” Raphael sighed, his aura flaring again as he turned away.

  Nick grabbed the Shard properly and followed, sidestepping the broken remains of the house walls.

  Outside, werewolves swarmed like ants around a kicked nest. Some had fully shifted into hulking lupine forms with matted fur and slobbering jaws, while others were halfway there, their skin splitting as fur pushed through, their bones distorting as they ran, probably having been turned too recently to shift during the day.

  None of them could take a straight path to the house.

  One leapt from a roof toward Malik, only to twist ninety degrees in midair and crash into another leaping from the opposite side. Two more tried to circle around, but found themselves suddenly face-to-face and slammed into each other chest-first instead of flanking.

  The bubble of warped space made distances elastic, ensuring that a werewolf that seemed just a leap away would suddenly find itself twenty feet farther, claws swiping at empty air.

  “End it!” Raphael shouted, raising both hands.

  Thin, invisible planes snapped into existence in the air, then swept outward like guillotine blades. Wherever they passed, limbs separated from bodies, and heads from shoulders.

  A lunging werewolf’s arm disappeared at the elbow. Another’s leg was cut off at the mid-thigh. A third lost half its face in a clean diagonal slice.

  They didn’t die just from that, not with lycanthropy coursing in their veins, but it slowed them down, staggered them, and made them easy targets for the others.

  “[Lightning Bolt],” Nick intoned, and the Shard vibrated with excitement, as golden mana condensed around the orb and shot outward in a series of fierce spears.

  The first one struck a lunging werewolf directly in the chest, stopping its heart, while the second pierced through an open maw and exited the back of a skull.

  Where lightning left them twitching instead of still, Nick followed with [Spirit Crunch], shattering their bodies and souls beyond the curse’s ability to repair.

  Ahead of him, Yvonne swung her axe through the crowd with a grim expression. Each strike targeted necks, knees, and hips, all places even a regenerating monster found hard to ignore, as their blood vessels released their lifeblood into the packed earth.

  Malik took hits on his shield that would have shattered bone, letting the enchanted metal absorb the force before replying with short thrusts aimed where Raphael’s cuts had already weakened flesh.

  The apprentices were just as impressive, demonstrating they had learned their lesson about fighting regenerating enemies.

  Lina’s clay constructs swelled and hardened around werewolf legs, tripping them up and pinning them. Joran’s green flames clung to wounds, waiting for the moment regeneration kicked in to ignite anew, and feeding on the curse’s own attempts to heal. Mikel’s implosions crushed skulls and ribcages whenever Raphael’s spatial blades created openings, ending the monsters caught by his friends.

  Willow’s wards flared repeatedly, blocking the few claws and fangs that broke through the warped space and keeping them away from softer targets.

  Even Terence jumped into the fight, his rapier darting like a silver sting, following Nick and Raphael’s spells to pierce eyes and throats. He looked vaguely unwell the entire time, but he didn’t falter, standing beside Monte, who, as a hunter, was handling the massacre much better.

  The werewolves were stronger and faster than they were, but they were also totally unprepared to handle this level of sustained, coordinated magical assault, meaning they all eventually fell.

  Yet more howls echoed from further out as new shapes darted between houses and barns, joining the chaos.

  “Gods,” Monte muttered between strikes. “How many were living here?”

  Nick’s senses told him it was well over a hundred when the last hidden signatures flooded into the killing ground.

  They died, too.

  One by one, they fell to spatial blades, crushing implosions, burning with green fire, with lightning, and with good old steel. The air was filled with the stink of blood and singed fur, the ground churned into a mess of dirt, ash, and bodies.

  And then, finally, there were no more.

  The spatial bubble cracked like thin ice, and Raphael exhaled slowly, releasing it, allowing space to snap back into position with a disorienting lurch.

  Nick leaned against the Shard for a moment, catching his breath. Sweat dripped down his back, and mana hummed softly in his veins, not empty but definitely in the lower range.

  Willow lowered her hands, and the wards disappeared as her fingers trembled from exertion. Yvonne wiped her axe on a ruined tunic. Malik rolled his shoulders, grimacing as bruises became known now that adrenaline was fading.

  Willow was the first to speak, her voice thin in the aftermath. “Is that all of them?”

  Nick closed his eyes, allowing [Empyrean Intuition] to expand and wash over the hamlet. He brushed away the fading embers of dead souls and looked for any living ones, and it wasn’t long before he found a cluster.

  Twelve bright flares crowded into a single house on the far side of the hamlet. Small and light enough to be children, with one larger guarding them, threaded with the curse in a strange, incomplete way.

  45+ chapters: