A Man Like None Other (Jared Chance) novel Chapter 5995

As expected, an independent warning array ringed the courtyard, finer than the outer barrier.

Linked to key nodes inside, it would not only scream an alarm but likely strike back or lock down any intruder.

Jared held his breath, eyes brushing over faint sigils scorched into the threshold stones and the low wall.

It was a layered Groundbinding Spirit Net Array—sensing, snaring, and stabbing in one spiteful weave.

The heart of it had to be buried beneath the courtyard’s center.

Force it or crack it loud, and Miles would hear; the whole quarter might wake.

So Jared let the depth of his array-craft unfold again.

He lifted his right hand, index finger forward; at the tip, a fleck of grey chaos gathered, tiny enough to hide in dust.

He aimed a fingertip at open air. Gray light sharpened into threads finer than hair and sank, without a sound, into the earth’s key runes.

Chaotic force—origin of every art, solvent of every art—hummed along those threads, eager to remake whatever it touched.

Each filament slipped into the formation’s meridians, not tearing but numbing, coaxing the flow to forget its own shape.

Where a current should report intruders, he pinched it into blind alleyways—tiny loops that talked only to themselves.

The silence felt surgical, the kind that belongs to a master physician holding his breath over a nerve.

Three heartbeats later the ward still glimmered at the gate, harmless as ever, yet under his touch it was now both blind and deaf.

Jared’s figure blurred, sliding over the courtyard wall like a curl of smoke, landing without a whisper.

The yard was modest: three black-stone rooms in line, a training plinth to the left, a weapon rack to the right where cleavers and chains dripped a stinging, iron scent.

From the middle house a yellowish lamp leaked through the window; inside, a hulking shape sat cross-legged on a mat, breath uneven, brow knotted.

Miles, the butcher of Soulfall Slope.

His face echoed Garth’s but darker, a jagged scar raking his left cheek, carving malice into every angle.

Even at rest his chest lifted too fast, and a bead of sweat collected at his temple—signs of a mind that could not settle.

A moment earlier he had flinched, hand jerking to his heart as though something cold and unseen had threaded his spine.

The tremor passed, but the unease stayed, circling him like a silent hound.

Jared remembered the rumors: Miles and Garth were twins who could taste each other’s trouble.

If that bond had just gone slack, the butcher would feel the void in his bones.

"What in blazes…? Did that brat Garth stir up trouble again, or—" He snapped his eyes open, a feral glint sharpening the question.

His stare drifted, snagging on ghosts Jared could not see—perhaps the condemned man and woman from Soulfall Slope, the nightmares the rumors mentioned.

Miles shook himself, snarling, “Dead is dead. Their souls were boiled clean. They can’t claw their way back—must be my training wearing thin.”

He still pushed to his feet, intent on a round through the quarters to taste the night air and his own nerves.

He moved toward the door, shoulders rolling, hand lifting for the latch.

Just as his fingers grazed the wood…

A jolt split the moment.

Behind him the air rippled, faint as a sigh, as if an invisible stone had kissed a still pond.

Later, he would realize that in that instant the air three feet behind him had folded open, as if someone had stepped straight out of nothing.

Too slow. The thought hit just as the world tilted.

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