Cecilia's body fell backward.
Her knees hit the ice first. Then her hips. Then her back. She sprawled flat across the Northland Galaxy that Leon had spread out. The blood gushing from the hole in her chest spread along the patterns of the ice, tracing a dark red map of veins across the transparent surface.
The green light died out.
The points of light flashing frantically beneath her skin extinguished one by one. From the limbs to the torso, from the torso to the neck. The order of the lights fading perfectly matched the direction of blood backflow after a heart stops beating.
Tia's right arm reverted from its rapier form back to a human hand. Mithril coated in blood, she flicked her wrist, sending droplets of blood flying from her fingertips to splatter against the stone walls of the secret chamber.
There were no wasted movements.
Leon's ice field was still being maintained. He looked down at Cecilia lying on the ice, confirming that the rise and fall of her chest had stopped. The pain in his right knee was still there, but adrenaline had pushed the sensation to the back of his mind.
Lilian stood three paces away, dagger in hand. A small scrap of fabric, torn from Cecilia's defenses when she cut through earlier, still clung to the blade. She looked away from the corpse and toward the depths of the secret chamber.
The humming of the stone pillar was almost piercing her eardrums.
The battlefield in the depths of the chamber... dark red light and gray folds collided violently within a space of less than ten meters. With every collision, stone tiles fell from the ceiling. Rubble bounced off the ground, spinning in the air currents thick with the scent of blood and decay.
Valentine's Desolate End had already advanced to within half a meter of Dracula.
The gray folds were no longer a steady, crushing expansion. They were layered one upon another, each more dense, more dry, and more absolute than the last. The air within the space turned directly into powdery fine grains the moment the folds rolled over it, stinging the skin upon contact.
Dracula's red robes were mostly eaten away by the desolate aura. From his right shoulder to his lower back, the coarse fabric aged rapidly, its fibers snapping, carbonizing, and falling away to reveal the withered ribs and charred skin beneath.
His right hand was still embedded in the cracks of the stone pillar, his finger bones locked with the stone structure. Dark red streams of light surged from the point of contact into his arm, climbing up toward his shoulder along his blood vessels.
But the light of the Bloodline Aria was fading.
The red light within the rose patterns was no longer a steady pulse. It flickered in bursts, growing dimmer with every beat. A faint sound of metal fatigue came from the staff. The blood source mana accumulated over three thousand years was being stripped away layer by layer by the absolute decay field of Desolate End.
Valentine's short black hair clung to her temples, sweat trickling down her cheekbones. The burns on her chest were still seeping blood, staining the edges of her torn clothes a dark brown.
But she did not stop.
Desolate End pushed forward another two inches.
In Dracula's single eye, the burning light was rapidly dimming. The overdraft of his residual soul had reached its limit. For every second he maintained the connection with the stone pillar, a piece of his soul's edge was burned away. His left hand trembled slightly in the air, the weight of the scepter exceeding the limit his withered muscles could bear.
He was no match for her.
He never had been.
The Three Pillars of Moon Phase from three thousand years ago—a totem, a brain, and a blade. Dracula was the totem. Leila was the brain. Valentine was the blade.
A totem never needed to be sharper than the blade.
Now the brain was gone. The blade was pointed at the totem.
Leon's ice field maintained a semicircular defensive formation on the right side of the secret chamber. His gaze rose from Cecilia's "corpse," sweeping over the battlefield of gray and dark red in the depths.
Tia had already completed her combat damage assessment.
Valentine held the absolute advantage. There was no possibility of a reversal when a world-class skill crushed a non-world-class skill through dimensional superiority. Dracula's only support was the feedback from the inheritance stone pillar itself—the pillar was responding to its former master, providing him with a weak supply of mana.
But that supply was far from enough.
The decay rate of Desolate End was exponential.
“Lilian,” Tia whispered.
Lilian tilted her head.
“I will cut in from the left to sever the physical contact between Dracula and the stone pillar. Leon's ice field will block his retreat. You—”
Tia didn't finish her sentence.
“Block the face on his abdomen,” Lilian finished for her.
Tia paused for a beat.
It wasn't because Lilian's judgment was wrong. Quite the opposite. That golden thread was still pulling between the "Leila face" on Dracula's abdomen and the stone pillar. The front end of the thread had already sunk into the pillar's surface, only an inch away from the core. Even if the hand's contact was severed, as long as that thread remained—the infusion would not stop.
Lilian's judgment was precise to a degree that exceeded her current level of knowledge.
Tia nodded.
The three exchanged a very brief look. Leon withdrew the excess Ice Spirit from his right fist, lowering his center of gravity. Tia's right arm had already begun to liquefy, the Mithril flowing over her forearm and restructuring into a blade.
Lilian adjusted her grip on the dagger, switching from a forward to a reverse grip. The tip pointed downward, suited for precise, close-range stabs.
The three stepped forward simultaneously.
“Where do you think you're going?”
The ice.
The voice came from the direction of the ice. Not from the depths of the secret chamber. Not from the stone entrance. It came from behind them. From the direction where they had just confirmed a death.
It was accompanied by a wet sound, like the squelch of flesh re-adhering to itself.
Leon's feet nailed themselves to the spot. The temperature of the blood in his spine dropped by three degrees. It wasn't feedback from his Ice Spirit. It was instinct.
Tia turned around 0.2 seconds faster than the other two.
Cecilia sat up from the ice.
Her movements were slow. First, she raised her upper body, hands propped on the ice, her palms pressing into her own spilled blood. Then one leg bent, knee bracing against the ground. Then she stood straight.
Her chest.
That fatal wound—where the long Mithril blade had entered through the left chest, rotated ninety degrees inside the ventricle, and shredded the heart valves and major blood vessel clusters—was closing.
Green light surged from the edges of the wound. It wasn't the weak flicker from before. It was a materialized mass of light, so thick it was almost liquid, crawling into the gaps of the torn flesh in strands, re-weaving the shredded muscle fibers together. The heart tissue throbbed once inside the light. Twice. It returned to a normal frequency.
The skin grew from the sides toward the center. New epidermis covered the flesh. A flash of pink passed quickly, replaced by normal skin tone.
Three seconds.
The wound on her chest vanished.
Not even a scar remained. There was still a hole in her clothes, the edges of the fabric soaked in blood that stained outward in deep brown. But the skin beneath the hole was intact, as smooth as if that sword strike had never happened.
Ice shards from the previous fierce battle still hung in Leon's short platinum hair. A shard slid an inch down the back of his neck, the chill slipping into his collar. He ignored it. His entire attention was fixed on that perfectly intact chest.
He had smashed through three composite elemental storms.
He had forced this woman back while at his limit.
And then he discovered she didn't care about being injured at all.
This wasn't healing. Healing had speed limits. It had mana costs. It had a ceiling.
This was denial.
A denial of the very concept of "death."
Cecilia tilted her head.
Her cervical vertebrae made a faint clicking sound, as if she were stretching her joints, or perhaps admiring the expressions on the three faces before her.
The corners of her mouth curled upward. Dark red residue from the blood she had coughed up still remained between her teeth. The smile and the bloodstains overlapped.
Then she opened her arms.
Both arms extended to her sides. Fingers splayed. Palms forward. Her chest, abdomen, neck—all were exposed within the range of the three's attacks.
No defensive posture.
No signs of a magic circuit activation.
Not even a basic mana shield.
“Come.”
A single word.
Leon did not hesitate. Hesitation was a luxury for those with a way out. Ice Spirit condensed to the limit on his right fist, white frost exploding from the gaps in his knuckles. His fist slammed into Cecilia's left shoulder.
The sound of a shattering scapula exploded in the chamber. Fragments of bone pushed out three sharp ridges from beneath the skin on her back. Her entire left arm dangled at an unnatural angle, hanging from her torso by only a layer of unsevered tendons.
Cecilia did not retreat. She did not block. She didn't even lose her balance.
The green light flared. The fragments of the scapula crunched inside her flesh, reassembling. The tendons tightened, and the joint snapped back into place. In three seconds, her left arm regained its mobility.
Lilian cut in from the right. Her Mithril dagger slashed across the side of Cecilia's neck. The blade sank more than half an inch into the skin, severing the external carotid artery. Blood sprayed out, the warm liquid splashing onto Lilian's wrist.
The green light flared. The severed ends of the blood vessel re-adhered. The bleeding stopped. The wound closed. No scar.
Tia's Final Strike fell from the front.
The long Mithril blade slashed from Cecilia's right shoulder to her left abdomen. A diagonal line. It pierced through the collarbone, the pectoralis major, three ribs, and the external oblique muscle. The cut was over sixty centimeters long, deep enough to expose the organs within the abdominal cavity.
Cecilia's body was pushed back half a step by the force of the long blade. The wound in her abdomen gaped open, and a section of her intestines slid out half an inch from the rift.
The green light flared.
The intestines retracted. The abdominal muscles closed. The ribs reconnected. The pectoralis major was restored. The collarbone was whole. The skin grew back.
Cecilia looked down at her own body. Three more tears and large patches of bloodstains had been added to her clothes. The body beneath was perfectly intact.
She looked up.
Her arms were still open. Palms forward.
She tilted her head again.
“Enough?”
“Or should we go a few more rounds?”
The air in the secret chamber grew heavy.
Leon's right fist hung at his side. Ice Spirit still flickered between his fingers, but the blood attached to his fist—Cecilia's blood—had frozen into a thin layer of red ice. The rhythm of his breathing began to show irregular gaps. It wasn't a matter of stamina.
His logic had collapsed.
His entire combat strength—those countless nights crushed at the training grounds, the explosive limit of that punch that shattered three composite storms—amounted to zero against this thing.
It wasn't a gap in strength.
Cecilia withdrew her arms, clasping her hands behind her back. She stood on her tiptoes, a movement that carried a sickening ease.
“That hurt quite a bit.”
She turned her head to look at Lilian.
Lilian's Crown of Thorns was crooked, two of her fingernails were broken, and her thigh bore a burn mark. The dagger in her hand was still dripping blood.
Cecilia's blood.
“Little mouse.” Cecilia's voice was lazy, carrying a relaxation that only came after seeing through a prey's hidden cards. “Have you counted—how many times that knife in your hand has cut me?”
Lilian's lips pressed into a thin line. The hilt of her dagger creaked under the grip of her palm.
“Every cut was quite precise. Did Bell teach you that?”
Cecilia took a step forward. Her boots stepped onto the ice, crushing the pool of her own blood she had just spilled. The blood had frozen, and the shattered ice shards crunched under her feet.
“A pity.”
“It wouldn't matter if you cut me ten thousand times.”
She took a second step. Leon's ice field began to crack beneath her feet. It wasn't being crushed by mana. Green light seeped from her soles into the ice, dismantling the crystal structure of the ice at a molecular level.
Tia stepped in front of Lilian, her long Mithril blade held across her chest. Her etheric conduction lines were operating at full capacity, and a white mana-conducting film covered her entire body.
Cecilia stopped and looked at Tia.
The curve of her lips widened.
“You really can't kill me.” Her hand reached out from behind her back, her index finger tapping her own chest. The spot that had just been pierced. “But—”
Her index finger shifted to point in a different direction.
Deep in the secret chamber.
The battlefield of Valentine and Dracula.
“She's about to win, isn't she?”
Tia did not look back, but her perception circuits validated the data behind that statement in the background. Valentine's Desolate End had advanced to within twenty centimeters of Dracula. Dracula's residual soul depletion rate exceeded eighty-seven percent. The flow of light on the surface of the stone pillar was almost completely disordered. In less than two minutes, Valentine would be able to completely sever the connection between Dracula and the stone pillar.
Cecilia's smile vanished.
It was replaced by something cold to the bone.
“Then I won't stop you anymore.”
She stepped aside, making way for the path to the depths of the chamber.
“Go help her.”
No one moved.
“Why aren't you going?” Cecilia tilted her head five degrees to the right. Her cervical vertebrae clicked again. “Afraid I'll sneak up from behind?”
She opened her hands, her ten fingers wiggling in the air.
“I swear, I won't touch a single hair on your heads.”
A low growl came from Valentine in the depths of the chamber. The gray folds of Desolate End crushed through Dracula's final layer of defense.
That golden thread trembled on the surface of the stone pillar. It was only half an inch away from the core.
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