Lewd System: Every Scream and Moan is EXP Chapter 391: The Grove Burns

With every step Ashrah took toward him, Jax was frantically running the numbers on his next move. ’Damn it. What do I do here? She looks half-dead, sure, but I still can’t fight a monster like her. She’d tear me into ribbons the second she figured out the man she’s this obsessed with is the same one after her life.’

’And if I don’t fight her? Then I still die, just in a far worse way. My only real play is to stall ten more minutes until I can call Malice back and tilt the odds a little. The problem is, will this woman even listen to a word I say?’

He caught the raw possessiveness swimming in her eyes and felt his stomach drop. ’Why does she look like she wants a reward for this? A little head-pat for butchering everyone in the whole grove? Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. I am completely screwed.’

And right there, mid-panic, his gaze fell on the invisibility cloak still balled up in his hand, the one Sianna had given him.

’No choice. I go with her plan after all,’ he thought. ’But what if I get sold out again?’ His mind helpfully painted the picture: himself sprinting along like an absolute clown, dead certain he was invisible when he wasn’t. Or, worse, actually slipping away, praying the spell held, only for Sianna to pull the rug at the exact worst moment.

But no other option was adding up, so he threw the cloak on over his bare body, bracing himself for the inevitable fight if the thing flopped.

The instant he fed it his mana, the cloak shimmered.

His whole body winked out of sight, and he took off running, leaving Ashrah standing there utterly dumbfounded.

She had no idea what had become of her Jax, and it very nearly gave her a heart attack. She was so wrung out, so deep in her own daze, that she didn’t even catch the wet

Of his bare feet slapping through the blood as he ran for his precious life.

Thirty seconds later the cloak’s effect fizzled out, and the moment it did, Ashrah’s frantically scanning eyes snapped right onto him.

Jax realized he’d been made before he’d even cleared the ritual’s kill-zone. And knowing the kind of speed she’d shown in that fight, he was dead certain she’d run him down long before he finished the half-mile ahead.

But then he spotted her legs. Ashrah was fighting with everything she had to give chase, and all her ruined body would grant her was a slow, staggering drag of one foot after the other.

Jax let out a breath and bolted. He tore across the bridge spanning the lake, its waters home to a family of deeply unsettling turtles, their shells wrapped in jagged razorback ridges.

One snapped at nothing as he passed.

The second his feet hit solid ground on the far side, he looked around for Sianna. Nothing was happening. He’d reached the checkpoint, and not a single thing had triggered. All he could see was Ashrah, still doggedly limping her way toward him.

So he hissed and ripped both swords out of the ring. ’Fine. Let’s make the rest of your journey a whole lot worse, you horny bitch.’

He was winding up to destroy the bridge itself when Sianna’s voice stopped him cold.

A griffin dropped out of the air beside him, and she descended from its back.

She walked toward him with unhurried elegance, Delphine trailing at her heels. "If you destroy the bridge, my entire order gets stranded on the far side. It would take a great deal of time to bring them all the way around."

Jax laughed. "So you finally decide to show your face. But isn’t it just a little foolish of you to think I still trust you? After you broke this exact same thing on me once already?"

"Those were decisions I had to make in order to save everyone," Sianna said. "If you had been standing in my shoes, you would have—"

Jax cut clean across her. "Stop right there. There’s no version of your precious ’decision’ that leaves me breathing after you left me behind. You have no clue—"

He caught himself, and a grin crawled across his face instead. "No. Actually. You did have the clue, didn’t you? You wanted me to suffer the exact way you suffered. You wanted to watch me get broken. Raped and Ruined. Sorry to spoil all that fun, my queen. And now I’m just sitting here wondering how long it’ll take me to return the favor."

Sianna went silent for a long, cold stretch. And seeing her mother struck quiet like that, Delphine stepped up, temper flaring, and got right in Jax’s face to lecture him.

"You have absolutely no idea how worried mother was over you. Do you have any clue how hard it was to hold her back from charging that entire orc horde head-on the moment she saw you get dragged off by the leg?" Delphine jabbed a finger at his chest. "She was ready to march in completely alone, saying she’d do everything she could to buy the rest of us time to finish the spell. Thank god you somehow managed to stall exactly as long as we needed otherwise she would have definitely stepped in."

Sianna’s cold voice cut in. "That is quite enough, Delphine. And mind your tone."

Delphine turned to her mother, who simply ignored her, gaze fixed instead on the orc queen off in the distance. Delphine huffed, turned back, and kept right on hissing at Jax.

Meanwhile Sianna spoke low into the runic stone. "Nadia. Begin the ritual."

The words had barely left her when Ashrah felt the ground beneath her start to bake, as though hell itself was about to split the earth open. And then it did.

Fire erupted from the soil, but not the ordinary kind. Dark flames, black as pitch, crept outward and slowly wrapped the entire picnic ground before swallowing it whole.

Fifty feet of black fire devoured everything in an enormous radius, and Jax caught the mingled smell of scorched trees, burning greenery, and the blood of the fallen going up with it all.

The flames carried one last sound out of the grove with them.

Ashrah’s scream, as the fire took her too.

"RRAAAAGHHHH!!"

And then the grove had nothing left to say.

When the screaming stopped, Sianna turned to face him. "You may rest until the flames die down and my corps rejoins us."

Relief washed over Jax. He peeled off the invisibility cloak and started tugging fresh clothes out of the ring, pulling them on.

Delphine, catching an unplanned eyeful of him mid-change, went scarlet to the ears.

And that single glimpse was all it took to drop her straight back down the well she’d been trying to climb out of all evening, replaying everything she’d been unlucky enough to witness earlier between him and that orc queen.

It had thoroughly rattled her, and no amount of blinking would scrub the memory out. Which naturally spiraled her into fretting over poor Astrid, the woman actually dating this beast, the one presumably signing up for a lifetime of nights with an animal like him.

But then last night surfaced in her memory and made everything infinitely worse.

Because whatever had gone on inside that domain between Astrid and the professor, the detail that broke Delphine’s brain was the aftermath.

The professor had come out looking utterly wrecked and exhausted. Astrid had come out wearing the bright, satisfied face of a conqueror.

Delphine’s imagination promptly reassembled sweet Senior Astrid into some grinning, sex-crazed mascot of doom, an entity somehow more terrifying than the ferally lusty orc queen currently being cremated a bridge away.

’Why me? Why did I have to be the one who saw all of this?’ she wailed internally. ’I never asked for this. Now I have to walk around for the rest of my life knowing my professor is a straight-up beast and my senior is apparently the scarier one of the pair. I think I’m going to be sick. Someone, anyone, please just wipe my memory clean.’

Then she twitched as she was yanked out of the freefall by Jax’s voice. "What’s with that face? Are you sick or something?"