The dying forest had transformed into a grotesque circus arena, a stage lit by nauseating fungal light and filled with an absurd three-part symphony. In the foreground, the high-pitched, unmanly screams of Kaelen the Brave, a hero whose facade shattered as quickly as his fallen sword. In the middle, the perfectly staged giggles and affected squeals of Devon, an actress relishing her new role as a distressingly annoying damsel. And in the background, a horrifying chorus of frustrated growls and hungry hisses from a vampire horde that had finally lost all patience, their pride trampled by the most humiliating charade in their long and bloody history.
The chase was a black comedy performed on a hellish stage. Kaelen, tears and snot streaming down his face, ran with the blind panic of a rabbit pursued by wolves and, worse, by another, even more irritating rabbit. Every time he glanced back, hoping the blasted woman had been caught, he saw Devon gracefully jogging behind him, her heavy ponytail swinging with a rhythm that was anything but panicked.
"WAIT FOR ME, KAELEN-SAMA!" Devon shrieked, her melodious voice cutting through the night air. "YOU PROMISED YOU'D PROTECT ME!"
"I NEVER PROMISED ANYTHING!" Kaelen screamed, his voice cracking with panic as he leaped over a fallen tree. "I'M JUST A FRAUD! I HAVEN'T EVEN GRADUATED FROM THE BRONZE-LEVEL ADVENTURERS GUILD! LEAVE ME ALONE!"
"But a hero never abandons a maiden!" Devon replied cheerfully. "It's written in all the storybooks!"
"THIS ISN'T A STORYBOOK, IT'S A PAINFUL DEATH!"
Behind them, Lord Valerius led the pursuit with cold, controlled rage. The humiliation of being made a fool had burned away all traces of his aristocratic arrogance, leaving him with pure, unadulterated hatred. He no longer desired the woman's blood as sustenance. He wanted her soul as a trophy.
"SURROUND THEM!" he roared at his followers. "DON'T LET THEM ESCAPE! I WANT HER HEAD!"
The chase didn't last long. In a forest teeming with predators that had lived for centuries, a panicked bronze-level adventurer was no challenge. Suddenly, just as Kaelen was about to make a sharp turn between two skeletal trees, a shadowy figure darted from the darkness ahead. It was one of the more bestial vampires, moving on all fours like an undead wolf, its eyes burning red with impatient hunger.
Kaelen didn't even have time to scream.
With terrifying speed, the vampire pounced. Not with a bite or a claw. Its gaunt but steel-strong hand clamped directly onto Kaelen's neck, instantly halting his panicked flight. With one brutal, effortless motion, the vampire lifted Kaelen's struggling body into the air, his feet kicking uselessly inches above the damp ground.
Devon stopped running, standing a few meters away, a front-row spectator to the final act of Kaelen's little tragedy. She tilted her head slightly, observing the scene with the interest of a theater critic.
Kaelen stared at Devon, his eyes wide with terror now filled with an unspoken plea. Help me. But Devon merely stared back, the expression on her partially obscured face now calm and unreadable.
The vampire grinned, revealing rows of teeth that looked more like shards of glass than teeth. It savored the moment, feeling the life fading from its grasp. Then, with a wet, sickening CRACK that echoed so loudly in the silent forest, it crushed Kaelen's trachea and neck bones.
For one horrifying moment, Kaelen's head lolled at an unnatural angle. Then, with one final, brutal jerk, the vampire ripped it clean off his neck. Blood gushed from the gaping neck in a hot arterial spray, drenching the vampire's face in a gruesome crimson mask. Kaelen's headless body fell to the ground with a dull, wet thud, twitching for a few seconds before finally becoming still forever. The hero had met a swift, unheroic, and very messy end.
The vampire, with Kaelen's head still in its hand, licked the blood from its lips with a long, gray tongue before tossing the head aside as if it were garbage. Its red eyes now fixed on Devon.
Devon stood in the middle of the small clearing, now completely surrounded. The vampires stepped out of the shadows, forming a tight, impenetrable circle. They were no longer in a hurry. Their prey was cornered. The charade was over.
Lord Valerius glided forward with his restored predatory grace, passing through his followers until he stood directly in front of Devon. A cruel, hateful smile of triumph spread across his pale lips, revealing his perfect fangs.
"Caught you, my little night flower," he hissed, savoring each word. "Your little game is over. No more handsome knights coming to your rescue. Nowhere left to run."
He stared at Devon, expecting to see fear. Despair. Regret. But he saw none of it.
Devon merely smiled.
Not the mocking smile from before. Not the staged, panicked smile. It was a calm, ancient smile filled with such deep, such total amusement that it felt more terrifying than any rage. As if everything that had happened so far—the chase, Kaelen's death, this encirclement—was exactly as she had wanted it.
"You're right," Devon said, her melodious voice now devoid of all traces of panic, replaced by an unnatural, absolute calm. "There's nowhere left to run."
She leaned back slightly, an odd, casual movement in the middle of a circle of death. "Because I've arrived exactly where I wanted to be."
And then, the world changed.
The first thing the vampires felt was the cold. Not the cold of the forest night. This was a fundamental chill, an absolute negation of warmth. The temperature in the small clearing plummeted so rapidly that the vampires' breath—which they didn't need but still exhaled out of habit—began to crystallize in the air. A thin layer of ice began to creep across the damp ground, spreading out from Devon's feet in intricate, beautiful geometric patterns, like a giant frost flower blooming in an instant.
The nauseating fungal light around them began to flicker, as if the light itself was being frozen. Valerius recoiled a step, confusion and a sudden premonition warring with his arrogance.
Then, Devon's eyes changed. The strands of black hair that usually obscured her eyes were parted slightly by an unseen, spectral wind, and for the first time, Valerius saw her eyes clearly. They were no longer dark. They now burned with an icy blue light so bright, so pure, that it seemed to contain the core of a polar star. These were not the eyes of a human. They were the eyes of eternal winter.
"The game is indeed over," Devon whispered, and her voice now resonated with the power of a thousand blizzards. "But you're mistaken about who the players are... and who the toys are."
She raised her slender, pale hand. The air around her hand began to shimmer and condense. Tiny ice crystals began to form from the moisture in the air, swirling in an ever-accelerating vortex, coalescing into one. With a sharp cracking sound like a glacier calving, something began to take shape in her hand. First, the hilt, made of black ice that looked harder than steel. Then, the head—a massive war axe blade made of the same translucent blue ice as her eyes, so clear that Valerius could see the reflection of his horrified face in it. Ancient, unknown runes glowed faintly from within the ice, pulsing with a cold blue light. Frost billowed from the axe, freezing the air around it.
Devon held the axe as if it were an extension of her own arm, its impossible weight not affecting her in the slightest. She shifted her stance, her athletic body now radiating an aura of such immense power that the surrounding vampires unconsciously took a step back. This was no longer a woman. This was no longer a human. This was the embodiment of cold death itself.
"My turn," she said with a smile that was now truly terrifying.
With one movement so fluid and swift that it was almost imperceptible, she swung the axe forward. She wasn't aiming at a single vampire. She swung it at the ground in front of her.
When the axe head touched the frozen earth, there was no sound of impact. Instead, there was a deep FWOOSH, the sound of a shockwave being unleashed. A wave of blinding, icy blue energy shot out from the point of impact, skimming across the ground, no higher than the knees.
The vampires standing in its path had no time to react. They didn't even have time to scream.
As the blue wave passed over them, their fate was sealed in an instant. Their bodies, from the feet to the waist, froze solid, encased in thick ice. The momentum of their still-moving upper bodies caused them to buckle forward, and with a sickening cracking sound, their bodies split in half at the waist.
It was a scene taken from a surrealist artist's nightmare. A dozen vampire torsos crashed to the ground with dull thuds, while a dozen pairs of legs remained standing, frozen in place. The entrails spilling from the severed waists didn't spurt blood; instead, they had frozen into grotesque crystal sculptures of red and purple, glistening beautifully in the blue light of Devon's eyes.
The silence that followed the instantaneous slaughter was more terrifying than any scream. Valerius stared at the scene, his mouth slightly agape in horror and disbelief. The remaining vampires, those who had been out of range of the initial wave, were frozen in place by sheer terror.
But their terror didn't last long. For creatures driven by instinct and hunger, fear quickly turned into desperate aggression. With a roar that was a mixture of rage and fear, they all lunged at Devon simultaneously. Claws, fangs, and pulsating blobs of dark magic flew at her from all directions.
What followed was not a fight. It was a choreography of annihilation.
Devon became the center of her own ice storm. She spun, her massive axe a blur of deadly blue. As the first vampire lunged with outstretched claws, Devon didn't parry. She merely twisted her body slightly, letting the vampire pass, and with a casual backswing, the axe head cleaved the vampire from shoulder to hip. Both halves of the body froze even before they had a chance to separate and crashed to the ground with a clatter like two shattered ice sculptures.
An older vampire behind him unleashed a projectile of blood magic. Devon didn't even turn her head. She simply slammed her boot into the ground. A thick, intricately carved wall of ice instantly erupted from the earth, swallowing the magic without a trace. Then, from the wall, dozens of ice spears shot out, impaling the old vampire and several of his comrades behind him, turning them into giant ice sieves.
She leaped into the air, her lithe body spinning with the grace of a ballerina. She landed in the middle of a group of bestial vampires, swinging her axe in a 360-degree arc. A ring of blue ice spread out from her, bisecting everything in its path. The vampires' bodies collapsed into piles of instantly frozen minced meat, creating a gruesome tableau of abstract death sculptures.
Every movement was efficient. Every swing was lethal. There was no wasted motion. No rage. No hatred. There was only the cold calm of an artist cleaning up her messy canvas.
In less than a minute, the forest that had been teeming with dozens of immortal predators was silent. All that remained were the grotesque ice sculptures and one single vampire still standing.
Lord Valerius.
He stood alone in the middle of his frozen graveyard, the ice sword in his hand shattered, his body trembling uncontrollably. Arrogance, rage, hatred—all of it was gone, replaced by one pure emotion he had not felt in eight hundred years of existence: absolute terror.
Devon walked slowly toward him, her massive ice axe dragging casually behind her, leaving a frozen trail across the ground. She stopped directly in front of Valerius, gazing at him from behind the blue light of her eyes.
"So," Devon said, her voice now calm again, the voice of a critic delivering her final review. "A lengthy monologue, a cliché approach, and a thoroughly unsatisfying ending. You really are a poorly written, one-dimensional villain."
Valerius couldn't answer. He could only stare, his immortal mind shattered by the horror of what he faced.
"Allow me to rewrite your ending," Devon whispered.
She didn't swing her axe. That would be too quick, too merciful. Instead, she simply reached out her free hand and gently touched Valerius's forehead with the tip of her finger.
Ice began to creep from the point of contact. Valerius screamed, a high-pitched, agonizing shriek as unimaginable cold froze his brain, then spread throughout his body. The ice was transparent, preserving his final expression—a mask of eternal horror—forever. Within seconds, Lord Valerius had become a perfect, terrifying ice sculpture, a monument to his own arrogance.
Devon withdrew her hand. She stared at the statue for a moment, then snorted with slight disappointment.
"Still a bit too dramatic for my tastes," she muttered to herself.
With a mental flick, the ice axe in her hand dissolved into millions of shards of blue light that hovered for a moment before vanishing. The light in her eyes dimmed, returning to hidden darkness. The temperature in the forest returned to normal.
She glanced at her clothes, now restored to pristine condition, then at Kaelen's headless corpse nearby. With a blink, the corpse and all the frozen remains of the vampires turned to black dust and were swept away by the night wind, cleansing the stage until there was not a single trace left.
"Much better," she said to the now utterly silent forest. "A clean ending is everything."
She turned and began to walk away, leaving the dying forest behind her, seeking the next chapter in need of a little editing. The Actress had finished her performance. Now it was time for the Critic to find a new story.