Chapter 1588: Gluttonous Resistance

One stream wasn’t enough. The Hunger had a thousand mouths.

Flow by flow, she gathered the venom. Each redirection was its own private agony, a white-hot flare that spiked and faded as the stream found its new path. Her liver. Her calves. The cluster of eroded pathways behind her sternum where the Hunger had been nesting deepest. She pulled them all, one at a time, toward the collar, compressing the venom into a dense ring of consumption that circled her throat and waited for the binding magic to pulse.

"!!" To Black Fang’s surprise, the binding spell didn’t come from her throat. It shot downward through her left hip, a lance of foreign mana that bypassed the concentrated ring of venom entirely and drove into the channels along her pelvis.

"You can do this, Black Fang." Myrasyn’s voice had shifted. "Fight it. The Terror of Humanity cannot let herself be enslaved."

A hiss escaped through Black Fang’s teeth as the collar pulsed again. Right shoulder. She dragged the venom across her chest and caught the binding in the joint, dissolving it with a half-second to spare.

"In my own way." Myrasyn settled against the wall, eyes half-closed, breathing measured. "I cast [Sanctified Radiance] in the moment before my dear sister clasped this lovely gift around my neck. The light fills my channels and purifies the binding magic as it enters."

Ten seconds passed. Left knee. Black Fang wrenched the venom down and caught it.

She grinned and chirped, "I’m glad you’re awake. Now we get to fight against this cruel fate together."

But she also knew that such a method was unsustainable. Without directing the Hunger, she’d be consumed from the inside within a day at best.

Each pulse came at a cruel ten-second interval, each one targeting a different section of her body, and each one required her to drag the venom through her own flesh to meet it. The collar was learning. Testing her response time, mapping where her venom was thickest, and striking where it was thinnest.

Black Fang knew within seconds: this was not a battle she could win, but a battle she could survive, one pulse at a time, until something changed.

"Clap," she said. "Clap, clap, clap."

"You did it." Myrasyn beamed. "You found the rhythm. Very impressive." Her ears perked straight up. "Now you simply have to keep that up for every moment of every day until we get to shed our collars." The smile didn’t waver. "If you stop, you become a slave. So try not to lose concentration."

The cheerfulness with which she delivered this was deeply wrong.

...

Not true silence. There was the hum of two collars working in tandem, a low droning vibration that lived in the walls and the floor and the teeth. Beneath that, two women breathing. And beneath that, the wars being fought inside their bodies where no one could see.

Her eyes were closed. A faint luminescence traced the veins beneath the skin of her throat and chest, pale gold, barely visible in the dim light. The radiance moved in slow, steady circuits through her body, sweeping her channels in rhythmic waves that matched her breathing. Inhale, the light advanced. Exhale, the binding magic retreated. She made it look effortless, the way four thousand years of elven discipline could make anything look effortless. Her face was composed, her breathing even, her ears still.

The venom in her channels moved in violent surges, lurching from one part of her body to another every ten seconds as the collar struck. There was no grace to it. Each redirection tore through her tissue and left damaged pathways in its wake, and the cost showed on her skin in burst capillaries and bruising that spread like ink beneath the surface. Blood seeped from her gums. A vein in her neck had swollen visibly, purple-black against the pale skin, and the flesh directly beneath the collar was already raw.

Two slave collars humming against two throats, and neither one taking hold.

But then, to Myrasyn’s surprise, it was Black Fang’s lips that parted first.