Cassandra Island had never looked so wrong.
That early in the morning, before the sun had properly climbed into the sky, massive Passageways ripped open across the horizon. One after another, they bloomed in the air above the sea and from them came the Krepsunas in endless waves. There were hundreds of thousands of them, maybe more. The sky itself seemed to darken under their arrival. The whole ocean of Cassandra had frozen solid because Asenane had already unleashed her Frost Divinity, locking the sea into a vast white grave so the enemy would not have free movement across the waters.
The ice stretched for dozens kilometers in every direction but even that did not make the scene feel any less hopeless. It just made the battlefield larger.
Asenane walked across that frozen ocean with a halberd in her hand.
She scraped the blade against the ice as she moved. Her tears were freezing as they fell before they could even reach her chin. The hologram message was still floating right in front of her.
[Vastarael Richinaria is dead.]
She had not disabled it.
She did not even have the strength to blink it away. Every time she looked up, the message was still there. She could not feel his Sapphire Bond. The marriage bond was gone too. That was what made her know, in the deepest part of her, that this was not a trick, not a delay or even one of his cruel little half-lies where he vanished for a while and came back after making everyone suffer for dramatic effect.
He was actually gone.
And she had known this would happen. She had known, or at least suspected it somewhere deep in the back of her mind, because his plan had always sounded too neat when he said it out loud.
He said he was going to separate the Hidden Citadel from Spheraphase using the Orchestral Violex and trap all the Krepsunas inside it. He said he would be stuck in a timeless realm for a few decades and return later. He had made it sound like an exile. That was how he had sold it to everyone who knew about the plan, including her. She had believed him because she wanted to believe him.
But he lied. He lied to her. He sacrificed himself and died.
The frozen sea stretched beneath her feet while the Krepsunas kept pouring through the Passageways. All of them were Scavenger Rank at the very least, with enough numbers to turn the battlefield into a butcher's dream and a sane person's nightmare. They came crawling, leaping, sprinting, screeching over the ice and through the air, all of them moving to Cassandra Island.
Her grip tightened on the halberd so hard her fingers hurt.
"Liar."
She took another step forward.
"Liar."
This time it was louder.
The first Krepsuna lunged toward her from the ice. It had too many joints and a mouth built like it had been designed to tear flesh instead of speak. She turned and split it open with one swing of her halberd. The top half slid off before the bottom half had finished moving. Blood sprayed across the frozen surface and steamed faintly in the cold air. She did not stop. She did not even watch it fall properly. She moved into the next one and tore its throat open with a brutal backhanded slash, then drove the halberd's haft into the face of another that tried to rush her from the side.
"Liar."
More Krepsunas flooded in. She killed one by crushing its skull with the butt of her weapon. She impaled another and dragged across the ice before kicking it away. Another she froze in place and shattered into pieces with a violent sweep of her Frost Divinity, sending glittering fragments of blackened flesh and ice into the air.
"He said he'd come back. He said it would be a timeless realm. He said he'd be trapped for decades and then come back. He said it was simple."
She slammed her halberd through the chest of a Scavenger Rank Krepsuna so hard it lifted off the ice before collapsing into a heap.
"You liar. He lied to me."
Another creature came from the side. She did not even turn fully before she swung and split its head open. The ice was already slick with blood. Bodies were piling up around her but still they came. The Passageways were still spitting them out. The ocean of Cassandra had become a frozen war zone littered with pieces of dead monsters and the ruins of whatever sanity the morning had once promised.
She could hear herself breathing and hated that it sounded so broken. She hated that she could not stop shaking. She hated that her tears kept freezing on her skin because even her body was trying to preserve the pain instead of letting it go.
He took Valeria with him. He told her she would be safe with him. He told her she would be protected and he made her believe it too.
And now Valeria was gone from her reach, gone into whatever future he had stolen from them, gone into a plan that was supposed to keep her alive but had instead left Asenane standing on a frozen ocean with the death message of her husband still floating in front of her like an insult.
Her daughter was supposed to be safe. That was the whole point. That was the whole reason she had let go. That was why she had accepted the long decades, the distance, the separation and the wound of not being there every day. He had said it was necessary. He would come back and now he was dead.
She could not even feel her daughter anymore the way she used to feel her through that bond of family and shared existence. Everything had gone silent. He had planned the goodbye so thoroughly that by the time she understood what it really was, there was nothing left to grab.
A Krepsuna lunged at her with its mouth open and she split it down the middle from jaw to stomach.
"You lied. You said you'd come back!"
Another one was already on her before the first body hit the ice. She turned, drove the halberd through its ribs and lifted it off the ground before ripping it apart in a hard sideways jerk. Blood sprayed across her face. She did not wipe it away.
"He said it would be easy. He said it was simple. Simple. He called that simple?"
Her bitter laughter came out.
"Liar!
Bodies fell around her.
The ice cracked under the weight of the battle but Asenane kept freezing it back into place, turning the ocean into a slaughterhouse. Every swing of the halberd was fueled by the fact that she had lost her husband, her daughter and the future she thought he had already secured. The man she loved had vanished and left behind a message that said he was dead.
"You coward. You fucking coward!"
She killed another.
"You could've told me!"
She decapitated another.
"You could've trusted me!"
Another was dead.
"You made me believe you were coming back!"
She had believed him because he was the one person in the world who could make impossible things sound reasonable. He had always done that. He had always taken the most brutal decision in the room and dressed it up as necessity so that everybody else could keep living through it. But this time he had crossed the line by leaving her with hope her daughter would live and he would return.
Instead, he was gone. She did not know which part hurt more.
Maybe it was that he had been so incredibly good at being cruel without meaning to be. Maybe it was that he had really believed this was kindness. Maybe it was that she still loved him enough to hate him for dying.
Her halberd came down again and again,
"Liar. Liar. Liar. Liar."
The Krepsunas kept coming but she kept killing them.
"YOU LIED TO ME!"
That was the morning Cassandra Island learned what it meant to lose Vastarael Richinaria.