In a suffocating atmosphere, the forest was nothing more than a burning brazier. The flaming branches crackled sinisterly, and the leaves, once a vibrant green, fell down as gray ashes. Devastating fireballs, corrupted by a sickening miasma, darted in all directions, piercing the darkness of this wooded graveyard.
--- Who, then, was responsible for this absolute blasphemy against nature?
Without a shadow of a doubt, it was the work of nameless abominations. Creatures with equine bodies, topped by a deformed human torso and a smooth, pearlescent head completely devoid of eyes. These beasts trampled the burning ground. Were they panicked? Excited? Drunk on rage or terror? Clever indeed would be the one who could decipher the emotions of these blind monsters, busy frantically striking the center of the clearing.
A silhouette stood a little further back, idly dodging a sphere of black flames. The stranger observed the creatures with absolute clinical detachment, like a lab technician facing insects, his hands nonchalantly buried in the pockets of his dark robe.
??? : Ah... I'm late... What a pity, I wanted to witness the exact breaking point of her mind.
At the center of the pack lay a macabre sight. A pair of abnormally wide-open eyes stared into the void of the sky, frozen in unbearable suffering. These eyes belonged to a head brutally torn from its torso. A few steps away, two mangled arms and two severed legs completed this terrifying picture.
??? : ...Fascinant.... The pack instinct has completely supplanted the conditioning. The loyalty equation collapsed faster than expected.
The deformed beasts played cruelly with these human remains, charred at temperatures nearing a thousand degrees. The victim's entrails unraveled across the lower part of the mutilated torso, resembling macabre scarlet ribbons. The crushed heart spat its final drops of blood onto the dead leaves, while the liver and pancreas were nothing more than mush under the frantic hooves of the monsters. The charred arms revealed multiple open fractures and missing fingers, reduced to ash. The bones of the legs had been pulverized, mixing with the bloody bone powder of her torn-off toes. The fractured skull revealed brain matter blackened by the fire; the hair, once an azure blue, had been entirely consumed.
??? : A wild beast only respects pure power... Believing that you can tame them with simple maternal authority is an amateur's mistake...
Could this dark silhouette have had a chance to save this poor person from such an abominable end? Without a shadow of a doubt. But his inactivity was a deliberate choice.
??? : In any case... it remains a simply magnificent ending scenario for little Meili.
The victim was named Meili, the young mabeast tamer. Her past crimes were countless and horrifying, but did she deserve to end up like this, devoured and trampled by her own "children"? For the silhouette watching her, the answer was a categorical "yes." It was the raw justice of probabilities.
??? : Sleep in peace, little tamer. You were, after all, nothing but an unstable variable that I had to remove from my equation. I suppose you would appreciate the irony of fate: being destroyed by your own tools.
With a cold smile stretching his lips, before the thick smoke permanently masked the scene, the man disappeared into the shadows of the forest. He left with the satisfaction of having participated in the most beautiful piece of morbid art of his life. A work of which he was the invisible conductor: it was he who had released this deadly concentration of miasma, making the beasts completely uncontrollable so that they would turn with fury against their own mistress.
[ Time skip... ]
In the smoking ruins of the building, bright orange flames licked the fractured walls. Through the gutted partitions, one could glimpse the other rooms of the mansion, littered with sharp glass shards and debris covering the devastated floor.
??? : "EL DONA!!!"
A compact rock wall nearly three meters high brutally erupted from the ground, blocking at the very last second the lightning-fast advance of the adversary hunting him down. The one who had just cast this spell was running desperately toward the exit. His left arm was missing, torn off during the fierce battle against this formidable enemy.
??? : "Fuck... I hate this half-human bastard so damn much..."
Escape was, paradoxically, not that difficult: the building was literally reduced to crumbs by the violence of the clash, offering multiple escape routes through the collapsed walls.
??? : "Elsa, Meili, and... even Lyra, who seemed like the smartest one! They all scattered to satisfy their stupid obsessions that border on suicide. Stupid bitches!"
The man plunged into the darkness of the forest, moving as quickly as possible away from the mansion's blaze. Those inhabitants, who normally seemed so pitiful and weak, were nothing but a camouflage... a grotesque masquerade orchestrated to keep a low profile in the Royal Selection of this damn kingdom.
Suddenly, the man stopped, leaning heavily against the trunk of a massive tree to catch his ragged breath. The hemorrhage pouring from his mutilated shoulder was fatal, not to mention his torso marked by deep scratches and his crushed ribs. Yet, he seemed to completely not give a damn about the severity of his injuries.
??? : "I still have some mana reserves left... But this whole disaster would never have happened if that kid had died right off the bat!"
The very thought of this boy burned his mind like acid poured onto an open wound. The image of that kid with ebony hair, deep crimson eyes, and standing at one meter seventy-eight... An appearance of a child blessed by the gods. And as if that natural arrogance wasn't enough, that little shit had every woman at his feet: from little girls to maids, all the way to future queens.
??? : "Ah... If only I could beat that little bastard's face in with my bare hands!"
But the man's hateful thoughts were interrupted by the light sound of hurried footsteps running in his direction. Widening his eyes, he saw a young woman emerge from the thicket. She possessed long lunar hair, piercing bright red eyes, and porcelain skin. Standing at a modest one meter fifty-nine, she looked incredibly fragile despite the dark black and orange robe of the Witch Cult enveloping her.
??? : "Haa... Leith-sama! I finally found you!"
The crystalline voice that escaped her crimson lips was about the only thing the man, now identified as Leith, could stand to hear at that moment. Someone who actually seemed to worry about him... This young cultist was definitely different from the other brainless fanatics.
Leith : "But you... what the hell are you doing here?! Shouldn't you be leading the assault on that fucking Sanctuary with the rest of the troop?!"
The young cultist crushed a few twigs under her boots and stopped abruptly. She placed her hands on her knees, her face flushed from the effort, desperately catching her breath. It was then that Leith noticed a macabre detail: the young girl's robe was sticky and heavily stained with fresh blood.
Cultist : "Leith-sama... they... they are aaa-aaall..."
Leith (brutally grabbing the trembling young girl's shoulder with his only working arm) : "They are all what?! Spit it out!"
Cultist (raising a terrified face) : "DEAD!..."
The last word struck Leith like a sledgehammer to the skull. The hundreds of cultists of Lust... dead? How was that mathematically possible? And the invasion plan? Where had the other commanders gone? Was he the last survivor? Had he failed once again to protect his own, confirming yet again his reality as a miserable failure?
Fighting against the vertigo of the revelation, Leith forced himself to keep a cool head. He needed to analyze the situation.
Leith : "How?... How can they all be dead at once? Answer me, damn it! How did they get decimated?!"
Cultist (her voice cracking with panic) : "I don't know exactly, Leith-sama... An explosion... All the cultists literally exploded from the inside, as if the magic was turning against them! And the few survivors who tried to flee were slaughtered by mercenaries in white outfits!"
Leith : "Mercenaries... dressed in white, is that right?..."
Cultist (nodding frantically, tears in her eyes) : "Y-yes, that's right... They were ruthless..."
For Leith, the equation was becoming clear. The only person capable of deploying such a strike force was the businesswoman Anastasia Hoshin, surely stepping in to protect her precious prince charming. Clenching his single arm's fist to the point of digging his nails into his flesh, he understood: that damn rich kid had planned everything. He had trapped them all in a giant web.
What to do now? There was no longer any doubt: Meili, Elsa, and even Lyra were probably already dead by now. It was better to flee and regroup rather than persist in this slaughterhouse.
Cultist (tugging his sleeve) : "But Leith-sama... you are mortally wounded! You're losing so much blood, we have to treat you right away! Don't leave me alone with Mama, I beg of you!"
Leith (lightly patting the cultist's head with a weary but confident smile) : "Calm down, kid. Don't worry about that. In any case, I can come back to life... This physical body is nothing more than a disposable tool."
He noticed the expression of utter confusion on the young girl's face. Should he really reveal the nature of his power to her? After all, she was loyal to him, and her weakness made her harmless. Even if she knew his secret, she had neither the strength nor the will to betray him.
Cultist (stepping back, horrified) : "Hmn... c-come back to life...? YOU ARE GOING COMPLETELY CRAZY BECAUSE OF THE BLOOD LOSS! Please, stop talking nonsense and let me treat you!"
Leith : "Calm down... calm down... I promise you I can come back to life. Now, you might be a little scared, but I'm not really human... or at least, not what I think anymore."
Cultist (tilting her head) : "Not human? What do you mean by that, Leith-sama?"
Leith (with a confident smile despite the blood) : "Let's just say I'm a sort of spirit. I come back to life by creating new bodies from the earth. Don't worry, I'm tough! As long as there is dust under my feet, I never truly die."
Cultist (placing a finger on her lips, looking thoughtful) : "Hmm... Let's say that's true. If you can create bodies and come back to life, you must absolutely need a colossal amount of mana. You're so an earth spirit... aren't you? But in that case, there must be a way to kill you permanently, by destroying your spiritual core?"
Leith noticed the cute curiosity of the young cultist. She had already guessed his primary element and vital resource. But destroying him completely? Leith burst into a raspy laugh, spitting out a bit of blood.
Leith : "Kill me? Kid, believe me, I'm immortal. Absolutely nothing can destroy me, even that monster Reinhard van Astrea could only exhaust me. My consciousness always ends up slipping away somewhere else!"
Cultist (her voice suddenly losing all trace of panic) : "I see... So, there's no need to kill you physically. You just have to be wiped out on a spiritual level, Leith. Is that it?"
Leith (raising an eyebrow): "What?..."
Before Leith could understand this icy change of tone, a golden light burst from behind the young woman. In a lightning-fast flash, a pure ray cleanly amputated both of the assassin's legs. Leith collapsed heavily into the mud, instantly bathing in his own blood.
Leith (screaming in pain and incomprehension): "Wh- but what?! WHAT ARE YOU DOING, YOU IDIOT?! STOP!"
Cultist (looking down at him with utter contempt): "So, during all those loops where I killed you physically, the one and only way to stop you from wasting my time was to vaporize your soul?... Astonishing. I should have thought of that sooner."
Leith (spitting mud): "Loops? What the hell are you talking about?!"
But what made Leith's eyes widen, beyond the excruciating pain of his stumps, was the source of the attack. This golden light, as well as another brown light that was now floating near the girl... they were quasi-spirits.
Cultist (sighing slightly): "Forget it. In any case, your file is now closed... you are miserable, Leith. A simple golem who took himself for a predator."
Leith (the veins in his neck bulging with rage): "What are you talking about, you filthy traitress?! Have you gone completely mad, or... are you stabbing me in the back to go lick that damn rich kid's boots?! Do you think that will save your life?!"
Cultist: "..."
Silence was his only answer. Leith then noticed that a mass of stone and dust was beginning to gather in the young girl's hand, compacting under the effect of strong magical pressure to form a long, sharp object.
Leith (vomiting a spray of blood, a predatory smile on his lips): "Gha... Do you really think... that killing me is possible with that? You are even stupider than I thought... I am cursed... I am impossible to kill! Do you hear me?!"
Cultist: "Shut up. The dead don't speak."
The stone finally took its definitive shape: a raw sword, almost smooth and very light. A rudimentary stone blade, the kind of weapon used only once before it shatters. But something abnormal happened. Driven by the cultist's mana, the sword began to give off a suffocating heat. It changed color, turning from dull gray to glowing red, then from red to pale yellow, before finally radiating a dazzling celestial gold.
Cultist (raising the glowing blade, her gaze devoid of any emotion): "So, Echidna... to kill a stubborn earth spirit, it takes an ultra-concentrated Jiwald attack. It's slow to charge, it costs an absurd amount of mana, but... it's absolutely perfect to close this loop."
Leith immediately recognized that name. According to the words of that idiot Archbishop of Greed, his own Factor came from the former Witch of Greed herself: Echidna. It was one of two things: either this miserable cultist was completely insane, or... she was telling the absolute truth. But before Leith could even articulate a single word, the blade of glowing light came crashing down upon him.
[ Time skip... ]
One of the stone walls, already deeply weakened by the ravenous bites of the fire, was sliced clean like a simple sheet of parchment in a fraction of a second. The structure collapsed with a heavy rumble, giving passage to a dark, staggering, and heavily bloodied silhouette.
???: "How annoying... Truly annoying..."
She advanced with an erratic step along a corridor that seemed to stretch into infinity, metamorphosed into a veritable apocalyptic zone. Around her, the building was nothing more than a smoking ruin: the interior partitions had been pulverized by impacts of unheard-of violence, the windows no longer existed, and the gaping rooms opened onto one another in absolute architectural chaos.
???: "It's surely here... He must be hiding behind this rubble."
Yet, the devastation of the place did not disturb the killer. Worse, this doomsday atmosphere seemed to give her an advantage, offering her countless blind spots. The most terrifying sight in this scene did not lie in the decor, but rather in the anatomical state of this silhouette. Her body was streaked with gaping tears. Her abdomen, plowed by monstrous claws, offered a glimpse of her broken ribs through shreds of purplish flesh. It was a vision of horror, evocative of a walking corpse, devoid of the slightest human warmth. Her skin, of a deathly pallor, was ice-cold to the touch.
Suddenly, the friction of her footsteps against the glass debris and ashes stopped dead.
???: "...This smell... No doubt about it, it's him!"
Despite her injuries, which should have brought down a rhinoceros, the silhouette started running again, the sharp clicking of her heels echoing against the charred ground. She suddenly branched off to the left, rushing into the wing leading directly to the office of the man who had initially hired her. Was she acting to honor the terms of her contract, or was she simply giving in to a morbid, obsessive urge?
???: "Such a perfect man... His entrails must be of an equally divine beauty! After all this time tracking you..."
For her, this man embodied a form of absolute superiority. He did not lower himself to mingle with the other candidates of this ridiculous Royal Selection, which she judged to be of nameless hypocrisy and stupidity. In her eyes, these so-called pretenders to the throne did not seek the salvation of the people, but strove solely to mask their own neuroses behind golden finery. Because they wore silky clothes, their follies were applauded by the court.
???: "Disgusting... Pride-sama would never mingle with this vermine."
Although she formally performed duties for the half-elf's camp, the killer remained intimately convinced that the latter was nothing but a vulgar puppet articulated by the invisible fingers of the Archbishop-or rather, the Architect.
None of that mattered. She was finally reaching her goal, stopping in front of the massive doors of the office of that clown of a mage where her high-priority target should be holed up. Yet, a glaring anomaly struck her predatory senses.
???: "Why does this place seem totally spared from the recent fight between that annoying mage and the doll?"
While she exhausted herself fending off the young demi-human, the pink-haired mage named Lyra had quarreled with the guardian of the forbidden library. Even if the killer did not grasp the subtleties of high magic, the fluctuations of mana that had shifted the mansion bore witness to spells of a rare level of intensity.
???: "It doesn't matter if that mage raves over her mechanical doll... As long as I can finally lay eyes on Prid-"
Before her crimson lips could finish the name of her idol, her right heel stepped less than a meter from the threshold. At that exact moment, reality violently distorted before her. The illusionary decor collapsed like a shattered mirror. The intact windows, fragrant flower pots, and peacefully burning candles disappeared to give way to the same desolation as the rest of the building.
But the real surprise lay under her feet.
???: "...."
The surface she had just brushed against was not the polished parquet, but an agglomeration of massive magic crystals, measuring nearly eighty centimeters in diameter. Of a bright and glowing orange, these stones were commonly called "fire crystals" by scholars. But for the assassins and mercenaries who paced the battlefields, they bore a completely different name.
???: "Bombs..."
In place of the winter breeze, a suffocating and oppressive heat emanated from the crystals, saturating the air with a blinding glow. For the killer, the world tilted. The debris was not simply ejected; the ground literally gave way under her feet in a titanic crash. Her vision was instantly submerged by a crimson flood, while a strident, sharp hissing, like a needle driven into the eardrums, annihilated her auditory faculties.
The last thing she could catch through the chaos of the detonation was an icy whisper, breathed into her ear with metronomic regularity:
???: "Curiosity is a sin that comes with a heavy price, Elsa-sama."
The ground was cold, yet with a paradoxical thermal burn. When the silhouette nicknamed Elsa finally began to regain consciousness, the light appeared filtered to her through a uniformly crimson prism. The brain damage caused by the shockwave had clearly severed her optical channels, but the unbelievable pain did not bother her-she had been used to it since childhood.
The real shock lay elsewhere.
She was totally, absolutely paralyzed. She no longer felt the existence of her arms, nor her legs.
???: "Still alive... You will always surprise me, Elsa-sama. The endurance of cockroaches definitely has a way of fascinating the mind."
The crystalline voice resonated like a distant echo inside her fractured skull. Thanks to her sense of smell remaining intact, she immediately understood that the speaker was standing right above her, at a ridiculously short distance. This intonation was unbearably familiar to her.
???: "Is this the effect of your famous curse? Do we owe this to 'Mama's' blood experiments, or is it a trait inherent to your accursed lineage, Elsa-sama?"
Despite the obvious sarcasm tinting these words, Elsa was unable to formulate a coherent answer. The memory of her parents eluded her; every attempt to trace back the thread of her memory returned only a blurry silhouette, a face erased by the blizzard. It was undoubtedly preferable for parents who had abandoned her like a rat in the polar cold of Gusteko.
With every blink, her vision cleared of the debris from the explosion, revealing the silhouette draped in bright orange and dark black towering over her.
Elsa (her throat blocked by sweat and soot): "My... my body... What... did you do to me...?"
She then took full measure of her nightmarish state. Her torso, completely charred by the thermal detonation, left her own entrails exposed to the open air in a state of frightful degradation. Her face was half-carbonized, her upper and lower limbs had been cleanly pulverized by the explosion, leaving in their place nothing but stumps of scorched flesh. One of her purple eyes had been ejected from its socket under the pressure, her skull presented a major fracture, and her beautiful black hair was nothing more than a burned memory. She no longer looked like the Bowel Hunter, that femme fatale who terrorized the slums, but like a porcelain doll broken by a cruel child.
???: "Well, well. Are you worried about the state of your own body now? That is a truly incredible psychological evolution for a personality as dissociated as yours, Elsa-sama. What a pity it took amputating all four of your limbs to reach this sudden and brilliant awakening."
Through the cloudy and sticky prism of her only working eye, the Bowel Hunter stared at the silhouette taking shape in the smoke. Or rather, what was left of her vision tried to make sense of this appearance. The crystalline voice, of an unbearable familiarity, belonged to this young cultist with bright red eyes and thick lunar hair. Elsa remembered having briefly spotted her in the forest, in the midst of the army of Lust. At that time, the killer had judged her too innocent, too frail, insignificant to survive the assault on the Sanctuary. And, to tell the truth, Elsa didn't give a damn whether this kid lived or died.
Yet, there she stood, immaculate in the midst of the blaze.
Elsa (spitting out a clot of blackish blood): "You..."
Cultist (her eyes shining with childish joy, clapping her hands): "Yes, me, Elsa-sama! Oh, I am so happy that you recognized me despite your condition... But first, I must offer you my deepest and most sincere apologies! It is absolutely not my fault that you are in this pitiful situation. It is a very authoritative gentleman, with magnificent crimson eyes, who specifically asked me to eliminate you!"
Elsa (short of breath, her voice broken by the searing pain of her stumps): "Gka... a gentleman... with crimson eyes?"
Cultist (nodding enthusiastically): "Yes, exactly! He explained to me that you had become, and I quote, 'an unstable and harmful variable' in his grand equation. So, he ordered me to infiltrate the ranks of the Witch Cult of Lust specifically to trap you here. But shh! I won't tell you his name, it's classified top secret!"
Elsa (in an incredulous whisper, her mind wavering): "Pri... Pride-sama?..."
Elsa's single pupil dilated under the shock of total confusion. Had she been played? Manipulated from start to finish? So the perfect man with the crimson eyes wasn't in this office? But what hurt the killer's pride the most was the attitude of this cultist, who was skipping around her bloody remains like a little girl on a playground.
Cultist (stopping dead, pointing a theatrical finger at Elsa): "Ding, ding, ding! She guessed it! You are really very, very good, Elsa-sama! To be honest, he had told me that you were nothing but a stray bitch, dirty and stupid, who needed to be used as a common disposable tool. He seriously thought your IQ had sunk to the level of an animal in heat after your pathetic little show in the forest with the little tamer."
The cultist cautiously approached the shreds of flesh that made up Elsa's agonizing body. She tilted her head to the side, placing a black-gloved index finger on her chin, observing her with the morbid fascination of an entomologist studying a crushed insect.
Cultist: "You know, Elsa-sama... your little mental scenario there? Your delicious 'macabre romance' where you and he would be the only superior beings capable of understanding the true beauty of this world through bowels? It's pathetic. Afflictively naive. All of this has only ever existed in your sick head. Please... come back down to earth and return to reality."
A doll insulting her. The words of this insolent girl sank into Elsa's mind with far more cruelty than the crystal shards in her flesh. To Elsa, all of this had to be false. It was impossible. If Pride-sama hated her that much, he would kill her with his own majestic hands; he wouldn't delegate this task to this... thing. And who exactly was this cultist? How could she dare claim to be so close to him?
Cultist (mechanically caressing a strand of her own lunar hair with her black glove, a teasing smile on her lips): "I see that eye glaring at me with so much hatred, Elsa-sama. You must be wondering who I am to him, right? Let's just say... that I am extremely intimate with the kid with the crimson eyes."
Intimate? Pride-sama was intimate with no one! He was superiority incarnate by nature! You obeyed him blindly or you got slaughtered, that was the only rule. He was perfect, devoid of those worldly weaknesses!
Seeing the killer's visceral denial, the cultist let out a small, crystalline laugh. Her smile stretched immeasurably, taking on almost monstrous proportions on her angelic face, like a sly crescent moon.
Cultist: "Come on! Let's play a game, Elsa-sama. I'll give you a hint. Imagine two people intimately discussing their future in the middle of the night... Who could they possibly be?"
Two people discussing their future? Associates? Confidants? Or... no, it was impossible. She was lying to break her. Pride-sama soared far above the carnal and ridiculous desires of this rotting world!
Cultist (feigning disappointment with an exaggerated pout): "Hmn... Still no answer? I'm seriously starting to doubt the famous acuity of the Bowel Hunter. Come on, please, I'll give you a second hint, a much easier one! Two people sharing the same bed, binding their destinies and their genes to sire heirs... Come on, make an effort, you're a sexual predator, you know these things well!"
Was this the real Pride-sama? It had to be a mistake, a hallucination caused by the blood loss! If Elsa accepted for a single second that the words of this demented cultist were the truth, then all her convictions would collapse. She would have been nothing but a blind fanatic, inventing a god for herself in her dark corner. She, Elsa the Great Bowel Hunter, reduced to being nothing more than a cumbersome piece of waste in the marital life of a monster? Never!
Cultist (interlocking her gloved fingers, suddenly adopting the poised demeanor of a professional negotiator): "Still no reaction? Fine, here is your final diagnosis, Elsa-sama: your IQ is dangerously flirting with absolute zero. Frankly, I wonder if that little tamer didn't have more sense?"
Elsa (her vocal cords drowned in blood): "Ta... mer....?"
Cultist (widening her eyes with fake, innocent surprise): "Oh! So you hadn't given your tongue to the mabeasts? Speaking of your little pet, Meili... let's just say she was completely devoured by her own 'children.' What a pity, isn't it? It's really sad that the kid with the crimson eyes couldn't savor the spectacle of that child-killer screaming in pain for an hour, burned alive and torn to pieces by her own creations. He would have loved it."
The tamer? Meili?... No, it was unthinkable. The beasts would never have attacked Meili. Pride-sama knew all of this? He had organized it? And he had deliberately left that poor child to be slaughtered in excruciating pain, just to clear the chessboard? She had believed in him; she thought there was at least some form of morbid respect between them. But this world remained desperately hypocritical and selfish. She had been manipulated from A to Z. The only thing left for her to do... the only action that still gave meaning to her existence...
Elsa (in a beastly rasp, her eyes bloodshot with pure murderous madness): "I... am going to... KILL YOU!"
Cultist (bursting into a laugh of terrifying clarity): "Kill me?! Ah, what a funny turn of events! Two minutes ago, I sincerely thought you wanted to get laid by playing with my fiancé's entrails, and now, it's mine that you desire?... I... I am so honored, Elsa-sama!"
The only obsession now burning in Elsa's fractured mind was to leap, to dig her hands into this cultist's abdomen, and to use her warm guts to redecorate this accursed mansion in ashes. But how could she perform her art when she had neither arms nor legs left? Her physical helplessness proved to her once again the implacable truth of her executioners: she was nothing but a failure. A common rabid dog, pitiful and pinned to the ground.
Cultist (straightening up, suddenly sweeping all traces of cheerfulness from her face to leave room for a deathly coldness): "Well. I had an extremely good time dissecting your pathetic mind, but the show has lasted long enough. The curtains must come down. Sweet nightmares, Elsa-sama."
Elsa: "Huh...?"
Before Elsa's damaged brain could even process this information, a golden glow of blinding purity burst behind the young woman. It was a quasi-spirit with a Yang affinity. Without the slightest incantation, a concentrated wave of radiant heat crashed down upon the killer.
In the blink of an eye, Elsa's head was literally vaporized.
In the glowing ruins of Roswaal's mansion, the life of the legendary Bowel Hunter had just been extinguished in the most ironically dark and cruel way possible.
Cultist (heaving a long sigh of boredom, dusting off her gloves with a sharp gesture): "Whew... Finally, this loop is about to be over. Now only that stupid Lyra is missing..."
The young cultist was about to leave the room to pursue her macabre designs when an insidious twitch caught her attention. She slowly turned her head over her shoulder.
Elsa was dead, undeniably. Her head no longer existed. Yet... the decapitated and mutilated body behind her had just stood up with a sinister cracking of bones. The thing staggered, but advanced inexorably toward her.
??? : "..."
The cultist did not step back. On the contrary, a smile of purely intellectual fascination stretched her lips.
Cultist (tilting her head, her voice now echoing with the icy authority of the Architect): "Oh... So, in the original novel, after your fight against Garfiel, you weren't actually dead. You were... possessed."
Ignoring the creature approaching her, the cultist looked up at the gutted ceiling of the mansion, observing the pale moon piercing through the dark clouds. At that exact moment, the soul of the true Elsa was almost certainly burning in the depths of hell.
Cultist (lowering her gaze back to the walking corpse, her tone becoming purely analytical): "So you are no longer Elsa Granhiert. You are nothing but the manifestation of this vampiric curse possessing this carcass. A simple program executing its very last line of code: kill its high-priority target... Fascinating. But useless."
Around the young girl's slender silhouette, the air began to vibrate with an oppressive power. Three distinct halos of light appeared, floating in orbit around her like destructive satellites: a Yin quasi-spirit, as black as absolute nothingness; a Yang quasi-spirit, radiating a destructive gold; and an Earth quasi-spirit, glowing a dense and heavy brown.
Cultist (slowly raising her hand, pointing her index finger at the abomination): "Let us cut this branch of fate."
[ Time skip... ]
In a completely charred forest, white ashes fell slowly from the sky, perfectly imitating the softness of a snowfall. The landscape was nothing more than a graveyard of blackened wood, the trees having been meticulously sliced and pulverized by the deadly crossing of golden light blades and invisible gusts of wind. Two individuals were engaged in a fight to the death there.
On one side, a teenager narrowly dodged a wind blade that slammed violently into the rock behind him, splitting it in two. Around his silhouette, three quasi-spirits-of Yang, Yin, and Earth nature-gravitated silently. In his hand, he held a raw stone sword, saturated with a mana that made it glow with a golden aura.
??? : "El Jiwald!"
The boy's appearance contrasted singularly with this world: standing at one meter seventy-eight, his deep crimson eyes scanned the enemy, while his jet-black hair seemed to absorb the little light the moon deigned to offer.
Facing him, a young woman urgently invoked a thick wall of ice to protect herself from the golden ray. The mage possessed bright red eyes, strawberry-pink hair, and stood at one meter sixty-three, a relatively tall height for a woman of this kingdom.
??? : "El Fura!"
Pointing an authoritative finger at the teenager, she unleashed a violent gust. Although both forms of magic took the shape of sharp blades, their properties were diametrically opposed. The Yang light ray was lightning-fast: its specialty was absolute burning, capable of melting physical defenses and stopping enemy regeneration. However, its luminous trajectory made it evadable for anyone with excellent reflexes. Wind magic, on the other hand, was invisible and vicious. An experienced mage could duplicate it mid-flight, making parrying almost impossible unless one relied on an extraordinary survival instinct.
??? : "Shamak."
A thick, viscous black fog instantly invaded the area. The mage kept her cool. Unlike her opponent, she shined neither through physical endurance nor evasion capabilities. Within her team of assassins, she was the brain, the one who struck from a distance. But she possessed a major asset...
Abruptly turning her head to the left, her red pupils pierced the darkness: she knew how to read mana flows. Noticing a glaring irregularity in that direction, she invoked a first wall of ice, then a second right behind her back, out of pure anticipation.
??? : "Humal! El Humal!"
Earthen spikes erupted from the ground to shatter her first wall. At the exact second her rear barrier shattered under the blow of the teenager's stone sword, she counterattacked violently.
??? : "El Humal, El Fura!"
Ice lances formed with a sinister crack, pushing the attacker back, while a small, controlled tornado swept the area to dissipate the Yin fog.
But the boy, bathed in a golden aura-the effect of an El Aka physical amplification spell-was already running in a zigzag. He dodged six ice crystals with frightening fluidity, finished his movement with a roll, and erected a compact earth wall to cover himself from a final volley of ice and a wind trap concealed within the tornado.
The mage let out a small, amused laugh and canceled her remaining ice spells with a snap of her fingers. Although she possessed a colossal mana reserve, she preferred optimization over useless expenditure.
??? : "Very fine reflexes. Most Yin users I've faced always get shredded by that little trap in the tornado."
On the other side of the devastated battlefield, the teenager, dressed in a dark cultist robe with bright orange trim, lowered his earth wall. He nonchalantly dusted off his garment, his quasi-spirits still orbiting around him.
??? : "Given the walking stupidity that serves as the norm for this kingdom's mages, it was at least very predictable."
??? : "Come on, I agree with you on that point... But let's take a break for now, if you don't mind."
She turned to fully face him. The dust of the battle was settling, but the tension remained palpable. It was the lull of predators, each searching for a flaw in the other's posture.
??? : "Your name is Trizz, is that right? You are extremely popular right now... or at least, in the worst possible way."
She placed a hand in front of her mouth to stifle a giggle. The Architect was indeed the target of every rumor. Despite his decisive contribution against the White Whale, the annihilation of half of the Witch Cult, and the death of the Archbishop of Sloth, he was hated. His appearance, his aura, and above all, his incredibly brutal duel where he had publicly humiliated and broken Knight Julius Juukulius, had made him public enemy number one to the nobility. Many saw him as a foreign spy or a renegade Archbishop.
??? : "Humiliating the greatest of their knights and publicly trampling the values of their order takes monstrous nerve! You now have an army of heavily equipped men just waiting for an order to slit your throat, all because you dared to break their favorite toy."
Trizz : "Let's just say he shouldn't have stood in my way. Their famous suspicions regarding me are nothing but the panic of corrupt nobles. My simple way of thinking threatens to collapse their pitiful lineage and their completely obsolete chivalric codes."
For Trizz, the hypocrisy of this world was an insult to intelligence. How could anyone qualify Crusch Karsten as a "great strategist"? Her tactics amounted to suicidal frontal charges, and she was applauded once she had sent thousands of men to the slaughterhouse without the slightest optimization.
Trizz : "And you are Lyra. The brain of this team of degenerates. But given the state of your camp, I don't even dare imagine the face of that hysterical Capella when she realizes that her precious 'children' have been annihilated."
Lyra (putting a finger on her lips, looking mischievous): "Oh, let's just say I can very easily fake my own death to dodge her anger. But... since you are here, capturing you alive and delivering you to her as an apology gift would very quickly make her forget this little disappointment, wouldn't it?"
Trizz : "..."
She took two steps in his direction, her red eyes scanning the boy's dark silhouette with terrifying sharpness. Her smile stretched even wider.
Lyra : "Tell me... the little girl with the lunar hair, that cultist so timid and panicked running through the woods earlier... that was you, wasn't it? Really, I hope you had a good time manipulating Elsa, Meili, and breaking that pathetic degenerate Leith?"
Trizz : "..."
Trizz's silence hung heavy. In every loop, through dozens of deadly iterations, this girl never stopped surprising him from A to Z. She was perhaps the only opponent capable of seeing right through his calculations and making him sink into strategic despair.
Lyra : "Come on, let's do the math. Your tactic for poisoning our little army of fanatics... it was finely concealed earth in the food rations, wasn't it? As a mage, I noticed the anomaly. But the stroke of genius was calculating that Leith, with his spirit paranoia, never ate with the troop. If he had, he would have immediately detected the telluric mana and unmasked you."
Trizz knew she was dangerous, but one question gnawed at him. Why hadn't she raised the alarm? In every loop, he reused this same suicidal strategy because he had eventually understood, empirically, that the risk of being denounced by Lyra was absolute zero. She never spoke.
Lyra : "So, in this way, thanks to your mastery over the Earth element, you simply made all your targets who had consumed that rigged meal explode from the inside, while remaining at a safe distance. And you wisely saved your mana reserves to let the fox Hoshin's mercenaries clean up the few survivors. Is that right?"
Trizz (staring at her coldly): "Why say nothing? If you knew, why let them die?"
Lyra (shrugging with indifference): "To put it simply: I have always despised this group of brainless fanatics and egocentric assassins. They all have near-existential and deeply toxic dependencies... Besides, admit that Elsa and Meili's obsession with you is just as toxic for you, especially since your little trip against the Cult of Sloth."
Trizz took the blow. He didn't fully understand this woman, but paradoxically, the only rare feeling of relief he felt in the midst of this temporal bloodbath was discussing things with an enemy endowed with such clinical lucidity.
Trizz (slowly running a gloved hand through his jet-black hair, looking away): "You're not wrong... but you've bound to have heard of this famous 'Pride-sama' or 'Onii-sama,' I imagine. Let's just say they are not devoted to me. They are devoted to the idea they have of me in their own madness."
He buried his fists in the pockets of his robe. It was the same for everyone. To prevent Subaru from sinking into his self-hatred and inferiority complex, Trizz had to play the role of the cold but indispensable monster, with a feigned emotional quotient. For Emilia, he had to embody the unshakeable pillar and the shadow knight who asks for nothing in return. For Petra, the luminous hero, distant but charming. He adapted his mask for everyone, constantly.
Trizz (leting a cracked smile show, his eyes empty): "And do you want to know the worst part of what they think is 'collaboration' or 'loyalty'? It is nothing but absolute parasitism. They all cling to the destiny of a being they judge exceptional, just to have the sweet illusion of being exceptional themselves. But they refuse to carry the slightest burden... It's ironic, Lyra. By dint of manipulating these puppets, I am far more broken inside than any of them."
Lyra frowned, her eternal teasing smile vanishing all at once. A chilling theory was forming in her mind: the Pride Factor hadn't just locked away Trizz's memories before his isekai, it had deliberately severed him from his past, and especially from her. But a darker question persisted... Was this same Factor also the cause of this almost visceral need, this sick obsession with wanting to save everyone? All of it remained desperately blurry.
Lyra : "Then why? Why persist in wanting to save them instead of abandoning them to their own incompetence? It's... it's completely illogical, Trizz."
Trizz did not answer.
Silence fell again, heavy and suffocating amidst the charred trees. Lyra plunged her gaze into the boy's crimson eyes. They were empty, devoid of the slightest human spark. With a slight rustle, Trizz dispelled his stone sword. A shiver ran through the young mage; she remembered that back then, on Earth, his eyes were a deep black, ordinary, not this color of dried blood. She desperately searched for a flaw, a way to bring him back to his senses, even if it meant having to break him by force for his own good.
Trizz : "Since we are reaching the end of this time branch anyway, it no longer matters. I have already accumulated all the necessary cards to succeed in the next iteration. Dying here is merely a negligible variable."
Lyra : "A time branch?..."
Having only watched the first season of the anime, the concept of a "branch" instantly struck Lyra's mind. To avoid a penalty from the world, he was using a coded jargon... A loop. Trizz possessed, or at least was directly linked to, the Return by Death of that buffoon in a tracksuit. A wave of panic overwhelmed her. She had to stop him here and now, no matter the price, even though she was completely ignorant of how many hundreds of deaths this boy had already had to endure.
Trizz : "Do not misunderstand, I am not saving them out of pure altruism. These people have already betrayed and abandoned me in other timelines. Today, I have no more illusions: my own camp just like the others are nothing but actors in a collective madness. They are unstable, dangerous, and deeply insane."
Lyra : "..."
Trizz : "To answer your question... At first, yes, I admit it. It was my misplaced Pride that dictated my actions. I wanted to be their savior, to be the hero acclaimed and loved by all. But after spending three whole months locked up with them in this nightmare... my ego burned away. Today, I no longer want it. I am simply forced to save them."
Forced to save them? For Lyra, this statement was a logical aberration. The fact that he had stepped back and understood that his own ego was blinding him was an excellent thing. But with his analytical genius and his link to the loops, he should have been able to flee this accursed kingdom in a snap of his fingers. What on earth could be holding him back?
Trizz : "The entity that breaks my heart and forces me to restart over and over again to correct every anomaly of the past is the Wit-gka!"
The spectacle that unfolded instantly before Lyra's eyes chilled her blood. She had certainly seen horrors and killed with her own hands since her forced landing in Vollachia, but this defied all understanding. Before her, without any blow being struck, Trizz collapsed to his knees. He vomited a spray of black blood while tears of pure blood began to stream from his eye sockets, his gloved hand clenched over his chest, right where his heart threatened to explode.
Lyra : "... !"
Trizz wiped the blood smearing his lips with the back of a trembling sleeve, a raspy and painful laugh escaping his throat: "Ah... So I cannot even mention her title? Truly paranoid... This thing is sick with paranoia. Even that fool Barusu had the privilege of uttering her name without being punished like this..."
Lyra, her voice trembling: "What... what on earth is this horror?"
Ignoring the suffering, Trizz spread his fingers. With a sharp rustle, the dust and shards of charred rock levitated before clumping together in his palm, reconstituting a new raw stone sword. Around him, his three quasi-spirits flared back to life, spinning like furious electrons.
Trizz : "Thank you for listening to me, Lyra. But the time for confidences is over. Let us end this."
Lyra : "If I cannot reason with you with words, then you leave me no choice."
With a sharp, shrill hissing keen as a blade, the temperature of the forest plunged vertically. A polar wind rose brutally, kicking up the white ashes that began to swirl in a storm. Everywhere in the black sky, dots of azure-blue mana began to converge toward the young mage, forming a veritable river of celestial light.
The ground, once dry and dusty, was instantly covered with a layer of translucent, thick, ink-blue ice. The cold became so intense, so absolute, that thick white smoke escaped the boy's nostrils every time he exhaled.
Trizz : "Reason with me? By capturing me to offer me to Capella? I would rather die in excruciating agony than end up as Lust's toy... Die."
Normally, Trizz was content with activating his Aka reinforcement buff, or its superior variant El Aka. But faced with the critical state of his body and the looming devastating power, he decided to employ a much more unstable spell, a trump card born from hundreds of hours of rigorous training over the course of the loops.
Trizz : "Ul Aka !"
A golden light, dense and almost liquid, erupted from his body and enveloped his silhouette in solar armor. Contrary to appearances, the implacable Ul Aka only very slightly increased raw strength or pure speed compared to the previous stage. Its true value lay elsewhere: an absolute defense, accelerated cellular regeneration capability, multiplied cognitive reflexes, and a massive amplification of the pure light spells cast by his Yang quasi-spirit. The only downside was its astronomical consumption of mana.
Trizz murmured to himself, teeth clenched: "Thank you for the lessons and the data, Master Betty..."
As Beatrice had recorded during their analyses, Trizz possessed about 30% more mana reserves than the average mage. This did not make him a monster of magical endurance with infinite reserves like Emilia or Roswaal, but in this condensed form, it would suffice for one final assault.
The storm of ice and gold raged, erasing the rest of the world. And in the secrecy of her thoughts, as the blizzard masked her face, Lyra made a silent wish, a promise engraved in her soul:
"I promise you that I will save you from this world... so that we can become lovers, just like before, ■■■■■■."