The symphony of shattering shadows reached its crescendo as Sarah carved a path of pure annihilation through the demonic horde. She was a paradox—a blur of motion so precise it seemed choreographed, yet every movement was an unpredictable, lethal improvisation. Bones cracked under the force of her palms. Shadowy forms dissipated from the shockwaves of her kicks. Any weapon a demon dared to wield was turned against its owner in the same fluid motion, a brutal economy of force where a severed arm became a club and a shattered sword became shrapnel.
Half the army—five thousand S-rank entities—lay dissolved into motes of fading darkness behind her. The air reeked of ozone and something fouler, a burnt-sugar scent that was the death-smell of demons. She did not breathe heavily; the cascade of healing magic from the castle saw to that, a constant, tingling warmth that flushed through her veins, stitching together microscopic tears as fast as they formed. She was a perfect, sustained storm, a self-perpetuating engine of destruction.
And the storm had eyes only for the source.
She looked up, white hair whipping in the turbulent air she herself had churned. Her gaze, a cold and furious blue, locked onto the shadowy phoenix that hung in the bruised sky like a malevolent god. Her voice, when it came, was not a scream but a declaration, cutting through the remaining demonic cries like a mono-filament wire through silk.
"YOUR TURN!"
The Controlled Beast—Nox—descended. It was not a dive, but a collapse of space. The air screamed as it was violently displaced, pressure dropping as the vast shadow plunged towards her. Its wings, vast tapestries of woven night, blotted out the last remnants of the barrier's faltering light, casting the battlefield into a premature, suffocating twilight.
Sarah didn't wait. She never did. Pushing off the ground, the flagstones beneath her feet didn't crack—they exploded into fine, powdery dust, leaving a small crater. She became a white streak, a human projectile aimed with terrifying intent straight at the beast's feathered chest, at the heart of its shadowy form.
A single massive wing swept forward—not to block, but to erase. The space it passed through simply ceased to be, a wave of absolute nullity rushing to meet her. There was no heat, no cold, just the horrifying sensation of un-being.
Her Infinity Calculation processed the threat a microsecond before impact. A dozen evasion vectors flickered through her consciousness, discarded. Evasion was not the answer. Adaptation was. Twisting her body into an impossible, physics-defying corkscrew, she rode the very leading edge of the erasing wave. The fabric of her clothes on that side disintegrated, not burning, but vanishing into nonexistence. The skin beneath prickled with a terrifying numbness. She emerged from the spiral, her momentum redirected, her right fist a concentrated sun of condensed mana.
She drove it into the joint where the vast wing met the Beast's shadowy torso.
CRACK!
The sound was less an impact and more a fundamental fracture, like a glacier calving or a mountain splitting its seams. The shadowy limb—a construct of solidified void durable enough to withstand the barrage of a fleet of warships—buckled. A spiderweb of painful light, like cracks in black glass, radiated from the point of impact. The Beast let out a silent roar of rage that vibrated not through the air, but through the soul of every being on the field, a psychic shockwave of pure, unadulterated fury that made lesser demons clutch their heads and whimper.
Inside the cage of shadow and control, Nox's trapped mind surged against the iron walls of Orion's will.
The pain was hers.The rage was hers. The humiliation was hers. And for a glorious, fractured second, the crack in the wing felt like a crack in her prison.
Yes! More! Break it! Shatter this cage!
I cannot speak, cannot weep, but I can feel! I feel every impact, human! I feel your defiance! Make him pay! Make the puppeteer feel a fraction of this agony!
Her thoughts were a silent,desperate scream into the void of her own mind, a spark of hope fanned by Sarah's violence.
The Beast, its programming overriding the damage, ignored the fractured wing. Its masked face swiveled with an eerie, mechanical precision. The single, captive eye visible behind the stylized phoenix mask glowed with a malevolent, baleful light.
A complex,silent command activated.
Authority of Night: Starfall Chains.
The sky above Sarah birthed dozens of lances.These were not mere shadows. They were solidified void, shafts of absolute darkness that drank the light around them, each one capable of pinning a lesser god to the fabric of reality itself. They fell not with gravity, but with malicious intent, homing in on her from every conceivable angle, sealing off escape.
She landed amidst the chaos of the still-unfolding distortion and became a vortex. Her hands and feet moved in a mesmerizing, deadly blur—not blocking the lances, an impossibility given their nature, but deflecting them. A palm-strike at the precise moment of contact altered one lance's course so it slammed into another, both dissolving in a puff of antagonistic energies. A spinning kick delivered not with force, but with perfect angular momentum, sent three lances veering off to impale a cluster of advancing demons who were too slow to scatter. It was a display of kinetic control so absolute it defied physics, a dance performed on a razor's edge over an abyss.
But one lance, faster, smarter than the rest, feinted. It adjusted its trajectory mid-flight. It did not strike to kill. It grazed her left shoulder.
It didn't draw blood. It erased. A perfectly cylindrical chunk of flesh, muscle, and bone simply vanished from her shoulder, leaving a clean, hollow cavity the size of a fist. There was no gore. Just… absence. The sight was somehow more horrifying than any spray of blood.
Agony, white-hot and profound, lanced through her system. From the walls, Alessia's voice, raw with a commander's terror for her champion, cracked like a whip of thunder across the distance:
"FOCUS THE HEALING!NOW! ALL CHANNELS!"
The archmages, faces pale with strain and awe, redoubled their efforts. Their chants rose to a fever pitch. The hollow in Sarah's shoulder sizzled and sparked with furious golden light. Flesh and bone knitted back together at a visible, horrifying rate, tendrils of new matter weaving over the void. The pain of creation rivaled the pain of destruction—a searing, bone-deep itch that was fire and ice. But her expression never wavered. A slight tightening around her eyes, that was all. Infinity Calculation had already factored in the injury, the healing latency, the temporary loss of mobility in that arm. It was just data. Pain was just an input variable.
"Is that all?" she spat, the words gritted out between teeth clenched against the residual burn. The newly formed skin on her shoulder glowed with internal light. She lunged again—this time low to the ground, moving like a serpent, her path unpredictable, using the still-dissipating lances and demonic corpses as cover.
The Beast, learning, adapted. It stomped one colossal foot.
Authority of Space: Fracture.
The earth beneath Sarah didn't crack or crumble.It unfolded. Geometry itself rebelled. A canyon of distorted space and gravitational chaos erupted, where up was down, left pulled with the force of a tidal wave, and matter was stretched into impossible shapes. It was a zone designed not to crush, but to tear a body apart across multiple spatial dimensions.
She didn't fight the distortion. She used it. In a move that would have liquefied the insides of anyone else, she planted a foot on a fragment of ground that was, for a nanosecond, oriented sideways. Harnessing the conflicting gravitational pulls like a surfer catching a wave of broken physics, she launched herself at an impossible speed and from an impossible angle. She was a living bullet fired from a gun of fractured reality. She closed the final distance, the fingers of her good hand rigid and extended like psychic blades, aiming straight for the glowing, hateful eye on the shadowy mask—the eye that was Nox's, the eye that was her tether.
Inside the prison, Nox's thoughts became a single, focused spear of will.
The eye! It's his anchor, his point of control! Not the body—sever the connection! Look at the thread, you furious, brilliant rat! SEE IT! SEVER IT! FREE ME!
The Beast reacted on panicked instinct, a flicker of Orion's distant will sensing a threat to the core linkage. Its massive arms crossed over its chest in a defensive X. And a dome of absolute, light-eating darkness sprang into existence around it with the speed of a thought—the Eventide Labyrinth. The same technique that had unraveled Kenta's mind, that forced a soul to confront its deepest, most personal hell.
Sarah was inside. The psychological assault hit her like a physical tsunami.
Visions assaulted her: Kenta, not just dead, but broken, his spirit extinguished, his body a pale doll at her feet. The castle walls crumbling, Alessia swallowed by shadow. The world outside, her new world, reduced to ash and silence under an eternal night. Her own body, the vessel of her will, crumbling to dust, the System voice fading into static. Despair, thick and cloying, tried to seep into her bones.
But her mind wasn't normal. It wasn't even purely human anymore, not after the System's integration. The Infinity Calculation parsed the illusions as erroneous data streams, identified their emotional signatures as external contaminants, and systematically quarantined and discarded them. The despair evaporated like mist under a spotlight. The visions shattered like glass.
Through the dissolving mental static, through the oppressive dark that pressed on her physical senses, she saw not a monster to defeat, but a mechanism to dismantle. And there it was: a faint, pulsing thread of sickly purple energy, no thicker than a spider's silk, connecting the core of the Beast's shadowy form to a point infinitely far away, vibrating with a familiar, cold arrogance.
Orion.
The fight's paradigm shifted instantly. It was no longer about overpowering the Beast. That was a brute's game, and the Beast had brute force to spare. This was about precision. About severance.
She didn't attack the body. She followed the thread. Her movements became a desperate, brutal dance against the crushing dark of the Labyrinth. She weaved, ducked, and rolled, not to strike the Beast, but to avoid its frantic, increasingly clumsy swipes as it tried to protect its vulnerable tether. A claw caught her side, ripping open a gash that healed in a flare of gold before the blood could hit the ground. A swipe of a tail broke her leg with a sickening crunch; she fell, rolled, and came up sprinting on the newly knitted bone. Her own flesh broke and healed in rapid, gruesome cycles, a testament to the agonizing tug-of-war between the Beast's destructive power and the castle's desperate healing.
All her focus was on that single, pulsing thread. She was a scalpel now, not a hammer. And the surgery was about to begin.
---
Far away, in a palace carved from solidified shadow and the silent screams of conquered worlds, the air was cold and still as a tomb. Emperor Orion lounged on a throne of polished obsidian that seemed to drink the faint, sourceless light, his form a study in elegant menace. Shadows—not demons, but something older and hungrier—writhed around his feet and up the arms of the throne, feeding on the ambient malice he radiated like heat. Before him, the air shimmered, displaying the ongoing battle in the Gelber Kingdom capital as clearly as if he stood on the blood-slicked walls himself. The screams, the cracks of magic, the silent roar of his Beast—it was all a muted symphony for his amusement.
He watched, a faint, bored smile playing on his lips as Sarah deflected the Starfall Chains and endured the spatial fracture. His expression, a mask of perfect porcelain calm, didn't change a whit when she pinpointed the psychic connection within the Eventide Labyrinth. A slight lift of one eyebrow, perhaps. A flicker of academic interest.
"A fascinating little rat," he murmured to the empty, watching dark. His voice was like velvet wrapped around a frozen dagger, smooth and lethally cold. "So tenacious. And that System grafted to her soul... truly unique. A curious specimen."
He showed no concern for the potential loss of his Controlled Beast. No tension in his shoulders, no leaning forward. It was a tool, a sophisticated one, but a tool nonetheless. Tools could be replaced. Or, in the case of interesting failures, retrieved and… upgraded. The data from this conflict was already valuable.
His attention, ever divided across a hundred schemes, shifted slightly. The glow in his pale eyes dimmed from the spectacle of battle to a colder, more calculating light. "Plague."
From the deeper shadows at the foot of the dais, where even the writhing tendrils seemed hesitant to go, a figure stepped forward. It was tall and gaunt, as if stretched thin by centuries of famine, clad in tattered, smoke-gray robes that seemed to drift around its form without touching it. Its face was completely obscured by a smooth, featureless porcelain mask—no mouth, no nose, just two dark, hollow slits for eyes that held a depthless, unsettling emptiness. The Masked Plague—one of his most trusted, most terrifying agents, a being whose presence heralded decay not just of flesh, but of fortune and hope.
"You have been to the edges of the map," Orion stated. It was not a question, but a demand for confirmation. "The report. I grow impatient. What of the last sealed god?"
The Masked Plague bowed its head, a slow, rustling incline. Its voice, when it came, was a dry, papery rasp that seemed to drain the warmth from the very air. "My Lord Orion. The whispers were true. The trail led through the corpse-kingdoms, across the Sea of Whispered Sorrows. To the accursed mists that never lift. To Xue Island."
Orion's lazy smile widened, a slash of genuine, predatory interest finally sparking in his lifeless eyes. "Xue Island... The Bloodwood Isle. The legends say the very trees there drink the ambition of the arrogant and feed on forgotten oaths. A fitting prison for pride made manifest."
"The seal remains," Plague continued, its hollow gaze fixed not on the scrying image, but on the invisible space just above its master's shoulder, as if reading from a scroll only it could see. "Ancient. Powerful. A working of the old elemental lords. But it weakens. It breathes. With each passing season of despair in the mortal realms, its bindings strain. The entity within—the God of Power, the concept given form—it dreams. And its dreams are of conquest, of a universe folded under a single, mighty will. It awaits only the key. The catalyst."
Orion leaned back against his cold throne, steepling his fingers before his chin. The battle in Gelber Kingdom was a diverting spectacle, a test of a new variable. But this… this was the real game. The board upon which empires of gods and demons were played. A sealed God of Power—not a god of war, or magic, or death, but of Power itself, the raw, unadulterated concept of might, waiting to be claimed, controlled, or consumed.
"Excellent," he purred, the word hanging in the silent chamber like a death sentence given with relish. "Then we must ensure we are the ones holding that key when the lock finally turns. The board is set, and the most valuable piece has now been revealed. Let the little rat have her moment. Let her think she fights a war. She merely distracts the guards while we walk into the vault."
His gaze flicked back to the scrying image for a final moment—to the struggling, relentless white-haired girl fighting for her life, for her friends, for a kingdom she barely knew. A flicker of something like pity, cold and sharp as an icicle, touched his mind before being discarded as useless sentiment. She was a temporary distraction, a spark soon to be snuffed out or burned up.
The true prize lay dormant, dreaming of rage and dominion, in a far more ancient and terrible prison, where the trees had roots deep in the blood of forgotten gods.
The shadows around the throne pulsed once, in a slow, hungry rhythm, as if the palace itself, an extension of Orion's will, understood and hungered for the terrible dawn that was coming.