"..."
There was no sound at the exact moment of contact.
The Master Sword and the Spear of Judgment met in mid-air.
First came the flash, a sphere of mute energy that devoured the color of the world, turning everything absolute white and soon a ringing in their eardrums.
The notion of time dissolved... It could have been a single second or the passage of an entire era.
Slowly, the incandescence receded.
The white gave way to gray spots and then, gradually, the world recovered its chromatic spectrum, although now everything seemed dirty and dull.
A cloud of pulverized debris dominated the top of the castle.
"Cough... cough, cough..."
Carl's bronchial spasms shook his body.
He peeked out with teary eyes from behind Adam's back, who had remained firm like a wall before the shockwave.
A few meters away, Velkan moved among the remains.
His arms surrounded Anna, whom he had covered with his own body to protect her from the blast and with a visible effort, he helped her up.
Anna's legs trembled, seeking stability.
Blinking and trying to clean the grit from her eyelashes, she fixed her stunned gaze on the curtain of smoke that still hid the place of the crash.
"Is it over...?"
The silence persisted.
Suddenly, a sound broke the static.
"Tap... tap... tap..."
They were footsteps.
They were not the hurried footsteps of someone fleeing, nor the dragging of a wounded person.
They were sharp and rhythmic footsteps, coming from the depth of the dust cloud, approaching without haste.
The three tensed up with adrenaline shooting up again. Carl swallowed saliva and Velkan gritted his teeth, straining his sight against the mist.
Who walked with that calm in the middle of the disaster?
Was it Gabriel's final sentence? Or was it... him?
The silhouette began to define itself among the swirls of dust. First it was a diffuse shadow, then a solid shape.
A figure emerged walking slowly from the gray density.
There was no divine radiance. There was no armor nor wings extended at his back.
It was simply a man.
His clothes were torn in several places, with the edges of the fabric scorched.
It was Lief.
He had recovered his original appearance.
But his posture betrayed that it was not over.
His left arm hung stiff at his side and his hand was closed in a fist, gripping a person's neck.
He held him without apparent effort, letting the body drag, swaying with every step he took.
That person was Van Helsing.
"LIEEEEF!"
Upon seeing him, Anna lost the control she had barely maintained. Her legs reacted before her mind and she broke into a run, tripping over the stones.
She arrived in front of Lief and stopped dead, with her chest rising and falling violently.
Her hands rose, trembling, wanting to touch him to ensure his solidity but fearing finding wounds.
Her eyes frantically scanned every centimeter of his face and his body, looking for blood or burns.
"... A-Are you okay?"
Lief's shoulders relaxed and a calm smile, almost out of place, appeared on his face.
"What could happen to me?" He said downplaying the apocalypse he had just caused. "I said it was just a warm up."
Immediately after, he threw Van Helsing's body away.
"Van Helsing!"
Carl rushed onto the body, falling to his knees and his hands trembled uncontrollably while seeking his chest.
He roughly pushed aside the clothes that were destroyed and his fingers touched the skin.
He froze.
The skin was warm and smooth...
Where there should be a hole now there was only intact flesh.
Quickly he pressed his palm against the chest.
"Thump thump... Thump thump..."
A constant rhythm beat against his hand.
"H... He... he is still alive! His wound... his wound healed!"
Anna and Velkan turned their heads sharply toward the ground and both stared at Van Helsing's chest, unable to process the miracle.
"Don't worry about him." Lief looked away from Van Helsing, "There is still one last problem that needs to be resolved."
"Dracula?" Anna turned her head sharply.
"Yes." Lief nodded, "I didn't kill him."
Without saying more, he walked toward the center of the hall.
There, at the epicenter, the earth opened into a huge hole. It was a dark and deep abyss, a throat that seemed to have no end.
Stopping at the edge, Lief looked toward the darkness.
"Come up."
Boom
The ground shook violently. The remains of the castle vibrated, and the dust danced again.
From the depth of the subsoil, something was dragged upward. An invisible force pulled from the darkness, hoisting a black figure with violence to then throw it heavily onto the ground in front of them.
It was Dracula... or what remained of him.
The aura of dark energy that used to surround him had dissipated completely.
Of the majestic wings that once darkened the sky, both had been ripped from the root, leaving a stump.
His body was a map of anatomical devastation.
The thorax was sunken inward, collapsed onto his own lungs. His four limbs presented bends, fractured in so many points that he seemed to lack joints.
He lay on the ground like a puddle of mud and flesh, a shapeless mass that barely resembled a humanoid.
Only the spasmodic and agonized movement of his shattered chest proved that he was still alive.
His monstrous vital force worked frantically, the tissues tried to reconnect, but the damage was so massive that regeneration had become painfully slow.
He had lost...
But it was not an honorable defeat... It was a total annihilation.
"..."
Upon looking at that demon, the architect of four hundred years of pain and curse for her family, reduced now to that miserable state, Anna's heart skipped a beat.
A hundred different feelings clashed in her chest at once.
There was pleasure... but also bewilderment and a trace of immense emptiness.
The hatred that had been the engine of her life suddenly had nowhere to go.
"Go."
Lief's voice sounded at her side, breaking her trance.
She turned her head and in Lief's hand, materialized from nothing, rested a white large-caliber pistol.
Ivory.
"This family's curse will be ended by you... with your own hands." Lief offered her the closure she needed so much.
Anna looked at the weapon and then raised her eyes toward Lief's eyes.
Her lips moved, trying to form a sentence.
Thank you?
That word felt ridiculous.
At this moment, it seemed too weak and insultingly insufficient.
The man in front of her had not only saved her physical life.
He had brought Velkan back from the abyss, had carried the weight of a war that was not his, and had saved the very soul of her entire family.
There was no language capable of articulating even a ten-thousandth part of the gratitude, the relief, and the violent palpitation beating against her ribs.
Logic broke and emotion took control.
She made the boldest decision of her life.
She took a step forward, eliminating any distance.
Her hands, like snakes, coiled around Lief's neck tightly, and she pulled him down with a desperate urgency.
Under her brother's astonished gaze, she rose on her tiptoes and smashed her body against his.
She kissed him wildly!
Anna crushed her lips against his, pressing her chest against Lief's chest until not a single molecule of air remained between them.
It was a kiss that tasted of gunpowder smoke.
It was a chaotic kiss, mixed with desperation, hope, gratitude, and a love born from the fire of survival.
She kissed him with a voracious hunger, using all her strength, as if she wanted to merge with him so as never to have to let him go.
Even Lief stood paralyzed for an instant.
He felt the uncontrollable trembling in her lips and the heat of her body clinging to his.
A good while passed before the need for air won the battle.
Their lips separated with a wet sound.
Anna stepped back, breathing with difficulty.
Her cheeks burned with a red so intense that she looked like a red balloon, and her eyes shone with a new moisture.
Without daring to look Lief in the eyes due to sudden shame, she snatched Ivory from his hand with a quick movement and turned around abruptly, transforming all that emotion into determination.
With firm steps she walked toward the enemy of destiny.
"..."
Velkan opened his mouth but in the end his voice died in his throat.
He understood that this moment did not belong to him.
He only watched her determined back in silence.
Lief ran his tongue over his lips, savoring her taste.
'An intense woman...'
Finally Anna stopped in front of Dracula.
She looked down at him, but not with hatred, but with the coldness of a judge.
With his eyelids weighing tons, Dracula slowly opened his eyes.
In his gaze only remained a kind of absolute calm, the serenity of one who finally sees the curtain fall.
He looked at Anna, but his broken mind no longer saw her.
Through her, the silhouette distorted, superimposing itself with that figure from four hundred years ago that made him renounce Heaven and embrace eternal darkness.
"Elizabeth..."
"I come... to find you..."
Anna's gaze held no compassion.
She slowly raised Ivory, aimed directly at the place where the vampire's heart beat weakly.
"I am not your salvation."
Bang
The shot broke the silence of the world.
But for Dracula the bullet was not painful, the bullet felt like a key turning in a lock.
It was a blow of white heat that expanded through his chest, cutting the link that tied him to this plane.
His body jerked abruptly a single time and then remained completely motionless.
Starting from his feet, his skin dried instantly, cracking like porcelain and with a whisper it crumbled into ashes that were carried away by the wind, dissipating little by little into the air until nothing remained of him.
At the same time, the storm clouds that had enveloped the sky for centuries began to retreat slowly, as if a dark curtain were being lifted by an invisible hand.
With that a ray of sun tore through the dense layers of clouds with force and descended like a sword piercing the remaining darkness and poured directly over Anna's body, enveloping her in a luminous embrace.
Warmth.
A physical sensation of warmth long lost bathed her skin.
Anna and Velkan raised their heads instinctively, squinting their eyes blinded by the radiance.
Up there, in the transition zone where the storm yielded to the calm, the light refracted in a miraculous way.
For an eternal moment, blurred but unmistakable faces seemed to form in the clouds.
They were their father... their grandfather and, forming behind them, the projected shadows of the Valerious family ancestors, generation after generation who died trying to fulfill this promise.
The figures nodded slowly toward Anna and Velkan with a gesture of absolute peace before dissipating completely into the deep blue of the sky, free at last.
The four-hundred-year curse... Had ended.
________
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