— A Crimson Farewell —
slicked courtyard, a sound of pure, undiluted anguish.
He crashed to his knees beside her, the impact jarring up his bones. The world narrowed to the terrifying stillness of her form, the rainwater stained her pristine white wedding gown a dark color. and the deeper, ominous stain spreading beneath her.
His hands, usually so steady, trembled violently as he gathered her against him. Torrents of spiritual power—the very essence of his life force—poured into her cooling vessel, a frantic, golden flood seeking to repair the irreparable.
But the spark in her beautiful eyes was guttering, a candle drowned by a dark sea. His power washed against a void that was growing larger, colder.
"Eren... you came." Seraphine's voice was the faintest whisper, a wisp of smoke on the wind. Her eyes found his, and in their fading depths, he saw not fear, but a profound, weary sadness.
"Tell me... was I ever beautiful to you?"
The question shattered him. It spoke of every doubt he had ever forced her to carry, every wound his silence had inflicted.
"You are the most beautiful soul this world has ever known," he choked out, the words thick and broken. He gripped her limp hand, pressing it to his cheek, as if the heat of his own agony could seep into her and spark life anew.
"You are its only light. Don't you dare leave it dark."
Her lashes fluttered—a feeble, wounded butterfly's wing—against her cheek.
Then they stilled. The subtle tension that was her left her body, leaving only cold, empty weight in his arms.
"No! Seraphine—look at me! Please, look at me!" His voice climbed into a scream.
He poured more energy into her, a reckless, suicidal cascade that made his own vision swim with black spots. But her life was not a thread to be re-knit; it was sand through an hourglass, and the final grains had fallen.
Silent. Irreversible.
BOOM.
The sound was internal, cataclysmic.
He hated Damien with the heat of a forge meant to melt worlds.
He hated Vivienne with the cold of the deepest space, for her vanity and blindness.
He hated every sycophant, every tradition, every hand that had nudged Seraphine toward this precipice.
But most of all, with a venom that turned his own blood to acid, he hated himself.
If I had trusted. If I had spoken. If I had been there.
The thoughts were scorpions in his mind. His pride had been a prison, and he had let her walk to her death alone outside its walls.
A hot, searing pressure built behind his eyes. Then, twin trails of crimson streaked down his rain-washed cheeks—not tears, but tears of blood.
"Seraphine! My child—!" The wail was a physical force. Vivienne stumbled forward, her perfect composure, her calculated grace, obliterated. She fell to the mud beside them, her jeweled hands hovering over her daughter's form, afraid to touch the finality of it.
"I was wrong... so terribly, catastrophically wrong..."
The understanding was a plague, and it infected her utterly.
The glittering salons, the generational wealth, the whispered power—it was all ash, meaningless and cold. It could not warm this chill, could not lift this weight.
The still, silent form of her daughter was the only truth left, and it condemned her utterly.
— Ocean of Wrath —
"You! You! This is your doing!" Damien's voice sliced through the mournful rain, venomous and utterly unhinged. The spectacle of grief seemed to energize his own twisted rage.
He pointed a shaking finger at Eren, his face a mask of spite.
"If her foolish heart hadn't clung to a peasant, she would be standing beside me now! I'll carve you apart! And her—that traitorous—!"
His words died, strangled in his throat.
"Damien..."
Eren's voice, when it came, was not human.
He laid Seraphine down with a tenderness that was itself a horrifying contrast to what followed.
As he rose, the very air changed. It grew heavy, charged with a predatory stillness. One palm swept outward, a casual, brutal gesture aimed solely at the source of the voice.
"Insolence! This is Vale territory!" A Grandmaster-warrior, a mountain of muscle and legacy, flashed forward on instinct. His palms glowed with decades-honed defensive energy, a barrier that had turned aside siege spells.
—CRACK-THOOM!
There was no contest. The Grandmaster's body exploded into a fine, crimson mist. One moment, a pillar of the Vale's strength; the next, a pink stain on the rain and stones.
Silence fell, thick, suffocating, and absolute.
Damien felt ice water flood his veins. But the arrogance bred into his bones lifted his chin. Fear metastasized into bravado.
"You're strong, Eren. Nearing Grandmaster-level, I see," he spat, the compliment a poisoned dart. "But do you have any idea what two centuries of Vale strength looks like? Show him! Kill him!"
Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh.
Twenty figures landed as one, their impacts synchronized, shaking the ground. They were Grandmasters all, men and women whose auras radiated lethal competence. They formed a perfect, suffocating circle around Eren, a wall of solidified killing intent.
Eren did not even glance at them. His gaze remained locked on Damien—a gaze that held no anger, only a flat, infinite promise of obliteration.
"You took Seraphine from this world," he said, his voice almost conversational.
"I will bury your entire bloodline in the dirt with her."
"Madman!" Damien's laugh was high, frantic, the sound of nerves snapping. "Open your eyes! Twenty Grandmasters!Crushing you will be simpler than stepping on a bug!"
"Die."
—Swish.
There was no flash, no roar. A Grandmaster at the three o'clock position simply stiffened. Then his head toppled cleanly from his shoulders, hitting the wet flagstones with a sickening, final thud. A jet of blood painted the man beside him.
The crowd of onlookers—nobles, guards, servants—froze. This wasn't battle; it was witchcraft.
"He's using demonic arts!" Damien shrieked, backing up a step.
"No—it's a wire! A nearly invisible thread!" another Grandmaster barked, his sharp eyes catching a fleeting gleam in the murky light.
"Die." Eren flicked his wrist. The Silkthread, now tinged with red, became a spectral serpent. It darted toward its next target with malevolent intelligence.
This warrior was ready. His energy flared outward in a shimmering, hemispheric dome—a perfected technique for repelling projectile weapons and energy blades. The deadly filament struck the dome and skittered, deflected.
"Hah! Seen your trick now!" the Grandmaster growled, a hint of triumphant relief in his voice. "You can't—"
Thud.
A streak of silver light—different, faster—pierced the center of his forehead from above. He crumpled mid-sentence, the protective dome winking out.
The remaining eighteen closed ranks, their focus merging. Energies interwove, creating a formidable, layered barrier that hummed in the air. They would not be picked off individually.
"Flying Blades," Eren murmured, as if naming a common garden tool. "Harvest."
Whoosh-whoosh-whoosh!
Nine streaks of silver light erupted. They did not fly; they flowed, a storm of lethal silver water.
The Grandmasters' barrier was designed for frontal assaults, for known quantities. This was chaos given form. The blades banked, curved, dove, and rose in impossible arcs.
They fell like wheat before an invisible scythe. A throat opened on a silent gasp. A heart was pierced through reinforced armor. A spine was severed at the lumbar. There was no grand clash, only the efficient, terrible sounds of ending.
In less than ten seconds, eleven of the twenty lay dead or dying.
"Fall back! Reform!" The remaining nine scrambled backward, discipline warring with primal terror. But the flying blades pursued like vengeful, silver spirits, harrying them, cutting off retreat.
"Flying Sword Art! By the ancestors, that's the lost Flying Sword Art!" one veteran shouted, recognizing the archaic, terrible style from ancient scrolls. He deflected a blade with his gauntleted fist, a heroic effort. The impact shattered his radius and ulna with a sound like snapping branches.
"Is that all you—?" he tried to rally the others, teeth gritted against the pain.
Thump.
A second blade, which had looped behind him, buried itself to the hilt in his chest. He looked down, bewildered, then collapsed.
He died with eyes wide open, finally understanding—Eren was controlling ten blades simultaneously, his mind a godless orchestra conducting a symphony of slaughter.
Boom. Boom. BOOM.
The air became a lethal ballet. Silver danced, blood misted, screams were cut short. Grandmasters—heroes of a hundred stories, pillars of the Vale—fell one after another. Their blood mixed with the relentless rain, creating rivulets of pink that snaked toward the drains.
In under a minute, it was over.
All twenty of House Vale's summoned Grandmasters were gone.
Damien broke. He stared at the carnage, at the once-pristine courtyard now a charnel house. His mouth hung open, his mind unable to process the scale of the reversal. His sanity, tightly wound around the axis of his own superiority, unraveled thread by thread.
His father, Lord Wilhelm, stood rigid at the top of the manor steps. His face was like carved stone, but a muscle ticked wildly in his jaw. His heart bled invisible gold. Twenty Grandmasters. Not just soldiers, but institutions, tutors, deterrents.
"Eren must die tonight," Wilhelm whispered hoarsely to the steward beside him, his voice carrying on the dead air. "If he walks away from this... the Vale name becomes a joke for all eternity. A ghost haunted by a commoner's shadow.