Free Web NovelChapter 334: Sleep command
The man lifted one hand, palm open, and the compressed space blade simply dissolved into motes of silver light. Before either Ivan or Voss could retaliate against the intruder, his dark eyes swept across the room, and he whispered a single, absolute word:
"Sleep."
The world instantly tilted. Felicity watched Voss’s knees buckle first, his massive frame crumpling like a puppet with cut strings. Then Ivan, she felt his grip loosen, his steady heartbeat stutter against her back, and his arms went entirely slack. He fell backward, and Felicity tumbled with him.
Clara collapsed straight across.
Alice fell heavily against the lemon trees, her ragdoll ears splayed flat in the dirt. The darkness rushed in, swallowing Felicity’s vision entirely.
The man stepped forward to secure her, but he had vastly underestimated the sheer, terrifying resilience of a level 98 beast.
Thump.
A massive, scarred hand clamped directly around the man’s ankle.
Through sheer, unadulterated willpower, Voss’s mind violently rejected the sleep command. His wolf ears pinned flat against his skull, blood leaking from his nostrils as he forced his nervous system to fire through the overwhelming wave of forced exhaustion. His dark eyes cracked open, burning with a lethal, hyper-protective madness.
The man’s eyes widened in genuine shock. He tried to pull his foot back, but Voss’s grip was like an iron vice crushing bone.
With a guttural, blood-choked roar, Voss dragged his body off the greenhouse floor. The air around him warped and fractured violently as his hidden power manifested. He didn’t just mould space this time; he summoned a massive, jagged broadsword forged entirely from pressurised, concentrated gravity, the weapon materialising directly into his right fist with a deafening crack.
"Get... away... from her," Voss snarled, his voice a distorted, demonic vibration.
He lunged forward from the ground, driving the gravity blade upward with terrifying, explosive velocity.
The intruder didn’t even have time to lift his hand to parry. The blade tore straight through his chest, the localised gravitational vortex violently imploding inside him. The man didn’t even scream; he simply collapsed backward, his body hitting the dirt path with a dull, heavy thud as his life force vanished instantly.
The sleep spell shattered, but its lingering effects still weighed heavily over the room.
Outside the greenhouse doors, the twenty rogue tiger guards who had been waiting for their signal realised their leader had fallen. With desperate, bloodshot eyes, they drew their weapons and rushed the entrance, determined to salvage the ambush.
"Take them down! Kill the wolf and lion!" the guard captain roared.
Ivan’s golden eyes snapped open, the dissipating sleep spell leaving his veins as pure, unadulterated venom took over. Seeing
Felicity curled on the ground in pain, triggering his absolute feral beast instincts. He didn’t even stand up. He slammed his palms flat into the greenhouse soil, his hidden toxic manipulation activating instantly.
"Die," Ivan roared.
A thick, roiling cloud of localised, neon-purple neurotoxin erupted from the dirt, spreading across the shattered doorway like a tidal wave. The moment the charging tiger guards breathed it in, they choked. One by one, their golden eyes rolled into the backs of their heads as the fast-acting poison violently seized their nervous systems, dropping all twenty of them onto the cobblestones in a twitching, unconscious heap.
Silence fell over the greenhouse, save for the ragged breathing of the two alphas.
"Felicity..." Voss gasped, his gravity blade dissolving as he dragged his battered body over to her.
Felicity was completely passed out, the physical and mental shock spell knocking her into a deep, protective slumber. Her hands were still tightly cradling her large belly. Voss checked her pulse, his trembling fingers tracking the steady, strong beat of her heart and the faint, resilient thrum of the quadruplets inside her. They were safe.
Lifting her with immense, careful tenderness, Voss tucked her securely against his broad chest, his wolf ears twitching as he monitored the area.
Before he and Ivan could step outside to face the rest of the settlement, a sudden roar of heavy, violent footsteps echoed from the marketplace.
The greenhouse doors were thrown open a second time, but it wasn’t enemies.
Clara’s husbands, a massive, heavily badgered beast-man wielding a colossal trench hammer, burst through the wreckage alongside Alice’s husbands,
"Clara!" the badger roared, immediately dropping down to his knees to pick her up.
By then, Voss and Ivan were already halfway back to the manor, Felicity tucked secure against Voss’s broad chest, his wolf ears swivelling for sound.
Ivan never let his eyes leave Felicity. The lion and the wolf moved in tandem, hyperaware, every sense tuned for a second attack. None came. The only thing that met them in the winding garden paths was the distant, echoing alarm calls of the settlement as word spread, something had gone wrong, desperately wrong, in the greenhouse.
Lucan materialised
beside them, black hair clinging wetly to his jaw, eyes molten and swirling with gold. He took in the scene: Voss with Felicity limp in his arms, Ivan bloodied but upright and his lip curled back in a silent snarl. His hands clenched, and for a moment, his teleportation field wavered, warping the edges of reality around them.
Voss looked towards Lucan and said, "She’s alive. The babies, too," he managed, voice torn and hoarse. "Whoever that bastard was, he nearly killed her. Not with force. With a fucking mind trick." He spat the last words like venom, his canines flashing. "Sleep command. Nearly took us all out."
Lucan’s lips curled back in a smile that had nothing to do with amusement. "I’ll find out who sent him." The promise was not a threat, but an economic certainty. "And I’ll turn their skull inside out so the next would-be assassin has to wear it as a hat." Without a word, he snapped his head in the direction of the greenhouse, already calculating the path of maximum carnage.
Hot on Lucan’s heels, Exile crashed through the flower-beds with all the subtlety of a bomb. He clearly hadn’t even tried to cloak himself; his dark black scales shone with a wet, sick sheen, and his eyes were so pale the pupils looked like burning chips of ice. When he saw Felicity’s limp head, his nostrils flared, and his tail smashed a stone urn to dust. He shouldered past both Voss and Lucan, scanning for threats, but neither he nor Lucan demanded the body from Voss. They knew the wolf would tear their arms off without thinking twice.
