Heena's silk slippers glided over the smooth stones, the soft shhh-shhh of the fabric the only sound disturbing the heavy silence.
She walked past the training grounds, where the scent of old iron and oiled leather lingered in the humid night air. She walked past the ancestral hall, its massive wooden doors shut tight, guarding the tablets of generations of warlords who had bled out on foreign soil.
With every step, the invisible timer ticking down in her chest grew louder.
The Class-S Vitality Booster was tearing through the very last reserves of her life force. The sharp, warning needle of pain in her left temple had blossomed into a steady, rhythmic throb. The god-like clarity of her vision was beginning to fracture at the edges, the world occasionally swimming into a soft, hazy blur before she forced it back into focus.
