A woman lay on the ground.
What remained of her, at least.
The lower half of her body was gone, not destroyed, not torn away by brute force, but erased, cleanly and utterly, as if reality itself had decided that everything below her waist no longer deserved to exist. There was no rubble where her legs should have been.
No shattered armor.
No torn fabric.
Just absence.
Blood flowed freely from the place where existence ended, spilling across the broken earth in slow, glistening streams. It pooled beneath her, dark and thick, steaming faintly as it touched remnants of warped vespera and shattered glass from the collapsed Domains.
Belle Ardent did nothing to stop it.
She could have.
Under normal circumstances, this level of injury would have been meaningless to her. A nuisance at best. Flesh was replaceable. Bodies were temporary. Death, to her, had always been negotiable.
But now.
