All Chapters of MAD END'S DECEPTION: Chapter 311 - Chapter 320

361 Chapters

311 - Echo Of His Heartbeat

ARAHDanger prickled the back of her neck a split second before her mind caught up.Her body moved first.The wind tattoo on her forearm peeled away from her skin, snapping into the air like a released whip. In the same breath, her owl sigil burst free from her abdomen, the tiny inked shape stretching and unfolding mid-flight. Wings widened, bones and feathers building themselves out of glowing sigil lines until her female owl was a colossal bird above her, shadows of its wings swallowing the moonlight.She felt the rush of air before she heard the shrieks.The owl beat its wings hard, each powerful stroke throwing knives of wind across the sand. The front line of salamanders jerked back, their flames guttering as the gusts shoved them a few steps away, buying her a heartbeat of space.Arah spun, heart hammering, eyes automatically searching for him.She found Gildeon in the distance, and her stomach dropped.H

312 - As Selfish As Your Father

GILDEONHe’d dropped his guard.He hated admitting it, but there had been plenty of times Old Man had slipped past his defenses over the years—appearing out of nowhere, catching him off balance, reminding him who had trained him in the first place. Usually, Gildeon only realized it when it was already too late.This time was different.Not just because half of his mind was still locked on Arah—on her safety, on her pulse in the distance—but because Commander Haemos felt heavier, meaner, more dangerous than anything Gildeon remembered.Salamanders didn’t bleed aura like other beings. One could only see their true level in battle. But Gildeon carried a dragon spirit. Just standing this close, it could taste Haemos’s threat level like metal on the tongue.This version of Old Man was more formidable than the one he’d sparred with before.“You had me fooled, little bastard,” Haemos rasped, lips peeling back from his beast’

313 - Too Far Gone

GILDEONEverything Drusden’s memory fragments had carved open for him slammed back into place at once.His father, Daego, and his wife, Ragina. The clash with the Greater Beasts. His father stumbling home with an infant in his arms. The Dark Plane yawning open like a wound.“You’re the one who lied to me,” Gildeon growled. “About who my parents were. About how my father—General Daego—died.”Haemos’s salamander eyes narrowed to burning slits. “How did you know about that?” he demanded.Heat flickered harder around the commander’s scaled face as he shook his head. “Kohina wouldn’t dare. She swore a seer’s vow.”“It doesn’t matter how I knew,” Gildeon said. “Tell me why you’re calling my father selfish. He sacrificed himself to save the salamanders.”“He doomed us,” Haemos snarled, “by bringing you back with him after his disappearance.”Gildeon froze.“Your father was given a choice,” Old Man went on, flam

314 - Let Him Rot Here

GILDEONHis senses cut out before the rest of Haemos’s words could register.Everything collapsed into a heavy, smothering silence. Then, feeling bled away from his body, leaving him hanging on the edge of nothing with only one clear sensation: something hooked deep into his core and started dragging his spirit out of him.Was he dying?No. He refused. He hadn’t clawed his way through centuries of war just to let it end like this, pinned on some cursed weapon while Arah was still out there. She needed him. He’d promised himself he wouldn’t give her up to anyone.But wanting to fight and being able to fight were two different things.Seconds slipped by. Pain had flattened into a distant, throbbing awareness somewhere below his ribs, where the three-tined spear had run him through, but it felt far away, like it belonged to someone else.Then a voice cut through the dark.“My Lord?”Roselia.The name

315 - Kill The Rest

GILDEONHis heart hammered harder, faster, every beat slamming power into the walls of whatever cage Haemos’s weapon had built inside him. The siphoning pull of the spear met a rising, furious tide pushing back from the opposite direction.He was not done. He would not let them take her.Heat roared through his veins, different from the usual burn of his fire. This was sharper, heavier, threaded with the same power that had once poured out of Arah and into his core now rose like a storm from within.The metal impaling him began to glow.Scales broke through his skin in jagged lines, black and gold flaring across his shoulders, chest, and arms in a pattern he’d never worn before. Bones shifted, thickening, reinforcing. His silhouette swelled, became something larger, more dangerous, like the outline of a form he hadn’t fully grown into yet finally forcing its way out.With a sound halfway between a growl and

316 - Time To Wake Up Now

GILDEONHis eyes sharpened as the sylph warriors cut through the chaos in a deadly rhythm. Blades flashed in clean arcs, cleaving through salamander flesh as if they were nothing but shadows.Every scream, every spray of blood hit a part of him trained to jump in, to protect his own. Old instincts, carved into him by years of command and war, twitched through his muscles, urging him to lunge into the fray on his people’s side.He almost did.But then his gaze snapped to Arah, still locked in Spior’s spiked black tail, her body wrenched and pinned, jaw clamped shut by bone and scale. Pain burned through her aura like cracks in glass. That sight nailed him in place harder than any weapon.He could stand there and let the sylphs finish what he had started. Let them wipe out the former comrades who had just tried to kill him and take Arah. It would’ve been easy.But watching the sylphs butcher salamanders while he did nothing tw

317 - Is It Still You?

ARAHEENThe world held its breath.Her body went rigid, left hand lifting of its own accord, palm open to meet the incoming blade. She understood, on some deep, buried instinct, that Feviel’s owl-sword was never meant to pierce her body. Its edge was aimed at the sigil branded into her skin.Not to hurt her, but to wake her.Steel kissed the glowing mark, and the sigil flared.A hard breath tore out of her chest, sharp enough to hurt, and then the flood began.Memories crashed through her like a tide swallowing a small, fragile island. Arah’s borrowed life, her human days on Earthland, was shattered and rearranged around something older and colder version of herself.Araheen.Her full name settled into her bones like a returning crown. Sylph power surged through her veins with a rush of euphoria. The wind whispered to her. She could hear noise and order at once—every whimper, every heartbeat,

318 - You're A Prisoner

GILDEON“My Lord, this was all part of their plan. The sylphs.”“It’s time to wake up now, Commander Araheen.”“Thanks to you, the strongest commander of the salamander army is no longer a threat to us.”“Sleep, Gildeon the Dragon. We are taking you back with us to Shamibar.”Those voices circled the dark like a pack of predators, tearing into whatever was left of his consciousness. They hammered the inside of his skull, one line after another, until the last command ripped through the void and snapped something loose in him.One name burst out of his chest.“Arah!” His eyes flew open.Air tore into his lungs in jagged pulls, as if he’d been drowning for hours and someone had dragged him up just long enough to watch him choke.Every muscle burned. Every joint felt like it had been ground against st

319 - Returned To Who I Truly Am

ARAHEEN“Don’t hurt Gildeon…”She tore out of sleep with a sharp gasp, Arah’s voice still echoing in her skull. In the dream, they had hovered together in a void of pure black, face-to-face, weightless, as if the rest of existence had fallen away. Arah’s plea clung to her like cold mist.She pushed herself upright. Her hand was already reaching to the empty stretch of mattress beside her, fingers brushing rumpled silk sheets as though they should have found a warm body there.And the first face that rose in her mind was not Feviel’s.Araheen shut her eyes and drew a long, steady breath, pulling the wind into herself. Sylphic power poured down her spine and through her veins, clearing some of the heaviness pressing on her chest. She had slept for days while her body recovered and struggled to attune itself again to Shamibar’s cosmic magic-soaked atmosphere.Even now, she did no

320 - A Worthy Candidate

ARAHEENShe stood before the High Council, hands at ease behind her back, her gaze fixed on General Lothair seated in the central high chair. She had finished reporting about everything that had happened on Earthland, and though the chamber hummed with the rustle of robes and low voices, her father had not spoken a single word.“You have done excellent work, young Commander,” Lord Erminius declared, satisfaction softening the planes of his weathered face. “My clan is honored that you are espoused to my son, Feviel.”Araheen inclined her head in a measured bow. “Your son was instrumental to this mission’s success, Lord Erminius.” She shifted her gaze just enough to acknowledge Feviel standing a respectful distance behind her. “We wouldn’t have executed our plan so flawlessly without his help… and his protection of me.”Murmurs of assent circled the golden table.&ldq

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