Lewd System: Every Scream and Moan is EXP Chapter 410: Four Guests, Zero Manners

Rashida had let herself believe the nightmare was finished. Then four presences pressed down on her senses all at once, and the night politely informed her it had been saving the worst for last.

She threw up a wall of solid timber across Jax’s path, less to stop an enemy than to stop the idiot from sprinting headfirst into his own grave.

Loki didn’t break stride for any of it. She strolled out of the dark and onto the open field like she was arriving somewhere pleasant, and three more figures came walking out of the shadows behind her.

The moment they cleared into the light Jax placed one of them, the headmaster of the dark academy, though something about the man sat wrong compared to their last meeting.

Beside him stood two women. The first one didn’t require any guesswork, because a figure that tall with black horns twisting up out of her skull tends to announce itself.

Golden slit pupils, jet-black scales running in patches across her arms and throat, wings folded in a heavy sprawl behind her and a sleek tail drawing lazy lines through the dirt at her heels.

A higher dragon. The one race whose name had put a crack in Claude Aleris’s voice, and that man did not crack for anything.

Then there was the last of them, who somehow managed to look more dangerous than the other three stacked on top of each other. She radiated malice the way a furnace radiates heat, and Jax felt it crawling over his skin without needing to sense a single thing.

Magenta hair flowed loose around a face that had no business being that beautiful, and a single obsidian horn curved up from her forehead with the elegance of something designed rather than grown.

Crimson eyes, ebony wings, porcelain skin marked with faint infernal script, all of it arranged into something that looked less like a demon and more like temptation itself.

[Character Art in the paragraph comment.]

Before Jax could move, Loki got there first, and she was clearly enjoying herself. "What, did you honestly think a fragile young woman like me would come all the way out here on her own?"

She gestured behind her the way a hostess presents a spread. "I brought two old friends of yours along for it. Plus my ascendant from this realm."

Jax was still turning that over when the headmaster stepped forward. "You have no idea how long I’ve waited for this. The day you humiliated me, I swore I would stand over you exactly the way you stood over me." His mouth twisted. "And here I am."

Demonic mana boiled up around the cult leader until his cursed ring drank the entire mass down, and then the whole of it came screaming across the field at Jax.

It never arrived. Halfway there the demonic mana simply stopped existing, snuffed out as casually as a candle held up in the rain.

The headmaster whipped around on the demon woman behind him. "Why the hell are you interfering? This is between me and him, so stay out of it!"

She turned a look on him so venomous that his anger died in his own chest before she opened her mouth. "How dare an ant raise its voice at me. Have you forgotten your place, or would you like me to remind you of it?"

His fists closed hard enough to shake, and she watched him do it with something close to amusement. "Besides, why on earth would I stay out of it? Whatever little grudge you’re nursing, mine with him is worth a great deal more."

"...What do you mean by that?"

She raised one hand and the man dropped straight to his knees, both palms clamped around his own throat while something began cooking him from the inside out.

She didn’t so much as glance back, and she was already walking toward Jax when she spoke. "Behave like the dog you are. That strength you strut around with is borrowed, and I am the one who let you hold it. Never forget that the hand which crowned you can put you in the ground just as easily."

Her eyes flicked to the dragon woman on her way past. "And I would truly hate to repeat myself."

The dragon did not care for the attitude and had already shifted her weight to say so, until she caught Loki smiling at her with one hand raised in a lazy little gesture to settle down. Then she dropped onto the dirt like a child at a puppet show, propped her chin in her palm, and got comfortable.

Every instinct the dragon owned was telling her to wipe this entire field off the map. Instead she stood exactly where she was, because a leash stays a leash even when it’s your master’s master holding the other end.

The pact hadn’t been offered by Loki. Her subordinate had been the one to dangle the power, and there had been plenty of it, enough to put her at the head of the top three clans, and all it cost was a promise to answer when her patron’s master eventually called in the mortal realm only.

There had been no trap buried in the wording either. They had even stripped away the curse binding her to the dragon realm, which left her the only one of her kind free to wander anywhere she pleased.

What the contract had somehow failed to mention was tonight. Loki had taken the leash and worked her like a hound, refusing to let her kill so much as one person, parading her around as nothing but a large frightening animal meant to break the nerve of whoever happened to be looking.

And now even a demon rat had started baring their little teeth at her.

Her gaze tracked the demon woman all the way across the field. ’Once this is finished, I am going to pay you back for every second of it.’

The demon woman kept closing on Jax, and she had almost reached arm’s length when the ground between them went black. Hands came clawing their way up out of that void, a dozen at least, and every one of them went straight for her.

She didn’t even slow her walk. "Hell’s Fire."

Black flame took the hands all at once and ate them down to nothing, and then she turned an irritated look on the girl who had just barged into her reunion. Athanasia.

Athanasia had no business standing, let alone fighting. Every time she reached for celestial power her body shut down afterward and left her unconscious for more than a week, and tonight she had pushed herself well past whatever her limit had been to begin with.

So a single look from the demon woman was all it took to fold her onto her knees, throat closing, every muscle in her body shaking at once.

She spat blood into the dirt and couldn’t pull in enough air to cough properly, and Rashida was already down beside her with both hands lit and working.

Jax had his sword up with the point resting against the woman’s throat before it could get any worse. "That’s enough. If I’m the one you came here for, then let’s settle it between us and leave everyone else out of it."

The demon woman looked genuinely delighted about the blade at her neck. "That’s exactly what I want as well. But these pests keep shoving their backsides into a conversation that doesn’t involve them, so I thought a demonstration was in order."

Jax let the sword drop. "Do I know you? Did I do something to you somewhere down the line that’s got you coming after me?"

"Do you know me? Hmm. Yes." She tilted her head like the question deserved careful handling. "You’ve never laid eyes on me in person, that much is true. But the two of us have spoken to one another before, which honestly makes it far ruder that you’re standing there drawing a blank."

"And whether you wronged me at some point?" Her smile spread wide. "Oh, you absolutely did. But I simply stopped caring about it a long time ago, Jax Rayne."

The name landed, and Jax inspected her on reflex.

[CHAMPION STATUS: Zia Forger]

[LEVEL: 100 / 100] [MAX]

[HP: 300,000 / 300,000]

[MP: 550,000 / 600,000]

[EXPERIENCE: 10,004,500 / ∞]