To ruin an Omega - Chapter 438: He Who Plays Last

Chapter 438: He Who Plays Last

FIA

The shields held for three seconds.

That was all the time Valentine needed to move.

He bolted toward the back wall where a door stood half-hidden in shadow. His hand hit it hard, shoving it open before I could close the distance between us. The passage beyond stretched dark and narrow, leading deeper into whatever maze he had built beneath his house.

I followed.

The force lifted me forward, carrying me through the doorway fast enough that my feet barely touched the ground. The corridor blurred past, stone walls pressing close on either side, but I kept my focus on his back, on the space between his shoulders where I wanted to strike.

He moved faster than I expected for someone running.

Magic rippled around him in waves, propelling him forward in bursts that ate up the distance. He rounded a corner without slowing, and I caught a glimpse of stairs ahead, leading up.

He was heading for the surface. For the main house.

The thought settled cold in my chest.

He wanted out. He wanted escape.

I reached for him again.

The attack tore through the space between us, wild and uncontrolled. It clipped his shoulder hard enough to send him spinning, his body slamming into the wall before he caught himself. He stumbled but didn’t fall. Neither did he stop moving.

He hit the stairs running.

I didn’t give him room to breathe.

The next strike came harder and meaner as I aimed low at his legs. I wanted to shatter bone, to bring him down in a way he couldn’t magic his way out of quickly enough. The force connected just as he reached the top step, and I heard the crack before I saw the damage.

His knee gave out.

He dropped, catching himself on his hands, but his right leg twisted at an angle that didn’t look natural. Blood seeped through his pants, dark and spreading fast.

He dragged himself forward anyway.

His hand found the door at the top of the stairs, and he threw it open, crawling through before I could finish him. I surged after him, clearing the doorway just in time to see him pulling himself upright against a wall.

We were in the house now. A sitting room that had dark wood and heavy furniture, lit only by sunlight streaming through the tall windows.

He lurched toward another door.

I didn’t let him reach it.

The force hit him square in the back, lifting him off his feet and sending him crashing through the doorframe. Wood splintered around him, the door ripping off its hinges as his body smashed through it. He landed hard on the other side, rolling twice before he stopped.

He was slower getting up this time.

Blood ran down his face from a gash above his eye, and his breathing came ragged, loud enough that I could hear it from where I hovered in the doorway.

He stumbled deeper into the room, putting a long table between us.

Then he turned.

Both hands came up, fingers moving in patterns I recognized but didn’t understand. His magic gathered fast, pulling from somewhere deep, and the air temperature dropped so sharply I could see my own breath.

Blue fire sparked to life in his palms.

It did not look or feel like a normal flame born of magic. It moved wrong, twisting in on itself, eating light instead of giving it. The color burned too bright, too cold, like something that didn’t belong in this world.

He shaped it into a sphere.

Then he threw it.

The fireball crossed the distance faster than I could track. I tried to move, tried to dodge, but it followed me, bending mid-flight to chase the motion.

It hit me full in the chest.

The cold came first.

It burned deeper than heat ever could, sinking through skin and muscle and bone like it wanted to reach something vital. I felt my flesh freeze, watched ice crystals form across my ribs, spreading outward in jagged patterns.

Then the fire caught.

My skin split open where the cold had made it brittle. Blood froze in the wounds before it could spill, turning black and hard. The pain was immediate and total, swallowing every other sensation until there was nothing but the feeling of my body trying to tear itself apart from the inside.

I hit the ground.

The impact jarred something loose in my chest, and I tasted blood again, thick and metallic.

But the humming answered.

It surged up from somewhere deep, just like before; it pulsed with a different rhythm. It was still my baby doing this. By some impossible odds… My baby was protecting me when it was supposed to be the other way around.

The healing spread fast and aggressively, knitting frozen flesh back together before the damage could set. Skin regrew over exposed muscle. Blood thawed and started flowing again. The burns faded as if they had never existed.

I pushed myself up.

Across the room, Valentine stared.

His hands were already moving again, pulling more magic, shaping two more spheres of blue fire.

“I do not want to hurt you,” he said, and there was something almost genuine in it.

I smiled through the blood still coating my teeth.

“I would like to see you try.”

He threw both at once.

I moved left, and the first one screamed past my shoulder, close enough that I felt the cold radiating off it. The second came straight for my face, and I threw up a barrier on instinct, the same psychic shield that had turned his lightning.

The fireball hit and exploded.

The force of it drove me back three steps, but the makeshift shield held. Blue flame scattered across the room, eating into the walls, the floor, everywhere it touched.

I didn’t wait for the smoke to clear.

I launched myself at him, closing the distance in a single leap. My fist pulled back, already gathering force behind it, enough to cave in his skull if it connected.

He split.

Right down the middle.

One Valentine stepped left, the other right, and the space where my fist should have gone through became empty air. My momentum carried me forward between them, off balance, and exposed me.

They both struck at once.

The one on the left hit me in the ribs with something sharp and crackling with energy. The one on the right swept my legs out from under me. I went down hard, the air punching out of my lungs, and before I could recover, they were on me.

Hands closed around my throat. A knee drove into my spine. Something hot and painful pressed against my side, burning through the already burned and ruined fabric and skin.

I threw them off with a wild burst of force that sent both bodies flying.

But when I looked up, there were more.

Four Valentines now. Then six. Then eight.

They spread out around me in a circle, each one identical, each one watching with the same cold calculation.

I lifted myself off the floor.

The force pulled me up slowly, deliberately, until I hovered at eye level with all of them.

“You are not attacking,” I said, keeping my voice steady despite the blood still dripping from my nose. “Now, you seem to be hiding. Has your mana dwindled already?”

All twelve of them spoke at once.

“This is quite different. You will come to find out.”

The sound of it, their voices layered over each other in perfect sync, made something crawl up my spine.

I picked the nearest one.

The force gathered in my palm condensed down to a single point, and I released it straight into his head.

His skull exploded.

Blood and bone and brain matter sprayed outward in a fan, painting the wall behind him red. Chunks of something wet hit my face, my chest, sliding down in thick rivulets.

The other eleven didn’t vanish.

They didn’t even flinch.

A laugh burst out of me, sharp and uncontrolled.

“Wow. That is quite interesting.”

He had taken the time to make them real. Or real enough. Solid enough to bleed, to die, to stay standing even when one of them lost his head.

I started moving through them.

The next one lost his chest, ribs caving inward under the pressure, before his body folded and dropped. The third took it in the stomach, his midsection simply ceasing to exist as the force punched clean through. Blood sprayed with each kill, coating me, the floor, the walls, until the whole room smelled like copper and death.

I was reaching for the fourth when I felt it.

Cian.

The bond flared to life so suddenly it stole my breath. His presence flooded through me, sharp and immediate and so close I almost believed he was in the room.

I stopped.

Just for a second. Just long enough to process what I was feeling.

He was close… This was bad.

While I was distracted, the real Valentine struck.

He came from behind, from somewhere among the copies I hadn’t killed yet. Blue lightning erupted from his hand, brighter than the white one and even hotter, and it hit me square in the back.

Every nerve in my body lit up at once.

The pain was instant and absolute, turning my muscles to water, my vision to white. I couldn’t scream. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t do anything but feel it, the electricity tearing through me in waves that wouldn’t stop.

I fell.

The floor met me hard, and somewhere far away, through the ringing in my ears and the white haze covering everything, I heard him.

Cian.

He screamed my name.

“Fia!!!!!”

Not through the bond. Out loud. Close enough that the sound carried.

He was truly here.

Valentine’s footsteps approached slowly.

I tried to move. My body refused.

He stopped beside me, crouching down so I could see his face even through my failing vision. Blood ran from the cut on his temple, and his breathing was labored and uneven.

“You are right,” he said, and his voice sounded far away, distorted. “I am out of mana. But I have enough to put you down and keep that Alpha away.”

He glanced toward the door, toward where Cian’s voice had come from.

“How the fuck he figured this out so quickly is beyond me.”

The humming started again. My baby was about to perform another miracle.

Faint at first, but building, as it helped my body to repair what the lightning had broken.

Valentine saw it.

His expression shifted, something close to panic cutting through the exhaustion.

“No no no.”

His hand came up, lightning gathering again in his palm. It sparked weak and thin, barely holding together because of his dwindling mana, but it was enough.

He struck me again.

The world went white.

Pain consumed everything, every thought, every sensation, until there was nothing left but the feeling of being unmade. My vision didn’t just blur. It disappeared entirely, swallowed by light so bright it burned even with my eyes closed.

And somewhere in the back of my mind, through the bond that connected us, I felt Cian.

He was feeling this too. All of it.

Every strike, every burn, every second of pain I couldn’t escape.

He was feeling it with me.