The Almighty Dominance novel Chapter 720

The pitchfork caught Alex square in the ribs and didn't so much as wrinkle his shirt.

Dorian's face went through confusion before it reached fear. He wrenched the tines back and drove them in again, harder, both hands behind it this time — and again, nothing. No give. No blood. Not even the small satisfaction of a man staggering back a step.

“Trying to scratch me?” Alex asked. “Funny. I’ve been feeling itchy. Stab a little harder on my back.”

“What—”

Bram’s iron pipe smashed into Alex’s shoulder and rang out like it had struck a bell instead of flesh.

“Decent massage,” Alex said. “But nowhere near enough. Put some real strength into it.”

All three of them stared as if they had just faced a monster. Then they attacked with everything they could—hitting, stabbing, and striking harder than before.

Alex didn't bother stepping out of range. His whole body ran thick with inner force, layered so deep under the skin that a blunt weapon might as well have been swung at a mountain. Kass, scrambling for something sharper, pulled a knife from his belt and drove it toward Alex's neck with everything he had.

The blade skated off, useless.

At their level — barely past Qi Gathering, all three of them, strength drawn entirely from fear and adrenaline rather than any real cultivation — they could have swung a sword instead of a kitchen knife and the result would have been the same. A thousand years of trying wouldn't have gotten them close enough to matter.

Across the clearing, Grim was having the same conversation without words. The Rime Lynx raked at him; the badger-digger sank its jaws in and found nothing worth holding onto; the viper struck twice and got nothing for it but a mouthful of fur.

Grim stood through all of it with the mild, faintly bored patience of something that had eaten a pill built for grown men twice already this week and felt, if anything, a little disappointed.

Then the ground stopped being solid.

It went out from under all of them at once — a low, rolling shudder that traveled through the field like something enormous had turned over in its sleep. The pitchfork fell out of Dorian's hands. Kass staggered against a fence post that was no longer where he'd braced for it to be.

The soil at the field's eastern edge tore open.

One shape came up first, then a second, then a third — not moles, not anything the quota had prepared anyone for. Segmented, easily the length of three men laid end to end, jaws ringed with teeth that didn't belong on anything that lived underground. The last time something like this had surfaced, two decades back, it had taken a town with it and left nothing anyone bothered rebuilding.

There were supposed to be one of them, if the old stories were even half right.

There were three.

Screaming reached them from the direction of the village a heartbeat later — real screaming, not the startled kind. Somewhere a roof came down. A lantern post snapped and went dark, and then another, until the only light left over the whole field was moon and starlight, thin and cold and doing nothing to make the shapes moving under it any less enormous.

Grim was already moving, barking at the nearest wyrm in short, furious bursts before he closed and bit down hard on its flank.

The wyrm didn't even flinch. Whatever the pill had done for him, it hadn't done that.

The village didn't fall quietly.

The first Trench Wyrm hit White Field's outer row of houses like something dropped from a great height rather than something that had crawled up out of the ground — a whole roofline caved inward in a single collapse, beams snapping, thatch and tile going up in a cloud that caught the light of a knocked-over lantern and started to smolder.

A second house folded a breath later, one wall at a time, the way a thing gives up rather than the way a thing breaks.

Livestock scattered in every direction at once — goats screaming in a register too human for comfort, a cart-horse tearing its tether clean out of the post and bolting through a fence, chickens exploding upward in a panic that went nowhere useful.

Somewhere close a dog was barking itself hoarse, and underneath that, worse, a woman was screaming a child's name over and over into a collapsed doorway that wasn't answering back.

An old man had gone down hard in the open dirt path, one leg bent wrong, dragging himself by his elbows toward a ditch while a Trench Wyrm's tail swept the ground twenty feet behind him, close enough that the dust off it settled in his hair.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify