Arturia stood there with Serdolica, watching the infected child who was fussing around the bloody whirlpool.
Then she sighed.
"He's even more restless than Mordred. How can we trust this? Is he mad, or just too trusting? Sometimes his actions baffle me. He acts completely out of character with the persona he puts on. It's as if he's forcing himself to do certain things."
Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed the warriors she and her master had recently fought. They rushed towards this "child."
She had to intervene.
When the warrior was almost stepping into the infected zone to kill the "child," she struck him with the blunt side of her spear, sending him tumbling back towards his allies.
"Do you know what this is? It needs to be destroyed before the infection spreads," one of them said, stepping slightly ahead of his group.
She simply nodded.
"Not now. My master is in that whirlpool right now, and he will decide the child's fate."
"In the whirlpool? That means he's already dead. No living creature that stepped into those whirlpools ever came back."
She didn't even move from her spot. The warrior clearly wanted to say something else, but suddenly the whirlpool behind her began to churn.
Turning around, she saw her master, holding a skeleton under each arm, being flung out of the whirlpool.
Or rather, he was thrown out by a huge fist that launched him into the air. The fist immediately pulled back, sealing the bloody whirlpool once more.
He hit the ground with a dull thud. Immediately, the master straightened up, flinging the two skeletons aside, and spoke indignantly.
"That was rude! I was just having a little massacre! Why did you have to throw me out so roughly? And who the hell are you anyway?!"
Silence was his only answer, but that didn't stop the master—he kept on ranting.
"Good grief, he's more talkative than my teacher Merlin."
She shifted her gaze to the two skeletons, who, as soon as they got up, rushed towards the "child" and began to embrace him. Their jaws opened as if they were speaking.
Suddenly, the master fell silent and turned in their direction. Seeing this, the two skeletons turned the child so his back was to the master and kept opening and closing their jaws.
As the master stepped right up to them, a scythe appeared in his hands. He raised it to strike, but then he flinched—and she heard the master's voice.
"Please."
A swing, and the heads of the three figures fell to the ground. After that, the child's body began to dissolve, while the skeletons started to regenerate. But she heard the master's voice again, and the skeletons stopped regenerating.
"Release."
After watching this for a moment, the master turned to the infected ground and raised his hand.
"Chaos Volley," he said—and the infected ground began to be consumed by violet flames.
From the third person.
Even the footsteps of the vampire…
No.
Not anymore.
Even though the Man's steps were unhurried, even though he did it unintentionally, he changed many fates.
The archosaur tribe, which was supposed to unleash a massacre in the jungle and then vanish into oblivion, was laid to rest. The tribe that was meant to be forgotten is still remembered by other archosaur clans. For their graves bore names, and at the edge of the burial ground stood a small plaque with archosaur symbols scratched into it.
Clumsy, rather crooked—just like the names on the markers—but still legible.
"To the archosaurs who shared a drink with the monster. Nomat."
Right at the border between the desert and the lush forest, two graves stood tall.
Stood—and that word matters here more than any other. In this cursed world, death means nothing. It's dust on your teeth, street noise, an everyday trifle no one bothers to turn their head for anymore. To bury someone is a privilege. A luxury only a few can afford.
And yet, there were those two graves.
Travelers, themselves long accustomed to death like to the weather, would slow their pace. Not out of pity—but out of surprise. There were two graves. Only one cross. And into the first grave, a knife blade without a hilt had been driven, as if it were the final word in a tragedy no one had ever heard. The steel, having tasted vengeance, became its own headstone.
On the cross, in the language of the Sarkaz, carved crudely and deeply:
"For the warrior who was too small to protect others, and the child who could not be protected. I avenged you. Nomat."
Read these words carefully—and you'll understand why, even in a world where death has lost all value, this plaque strikes like an open-handed blow. For how many people can truly avenge another? How many would not just walk past, turning away from someone else's tragedy?
These two small mounds are not just burials. They're a slap in the face to the very foundations of this world—the world they live in. An act of vengeance and mercy in a place where neither has existed for a long time. And every passerby feels the cold of the blade not sinking into the earth—but into their own soul. Because amidst the universal indifference, one person still did not look away. And that is scarier than any death.
Deep in the thick forest, surrounded by dense vegetation, lay a village. A village that should never have existed, inhabited by people who should have been dead.
But this village was different from the rest.
Every villager was equally skilled with both blade and bow. In the morning, they tilled the meager, stony soil; by day, they drew their bowstrings until their ears rang; and in the evening, by torchlight, they spun in deadly training dances with their blades.
Their weapons bore no ornamentation—no gilding, no carvings—just plain iron and wood. Simple tools at first glance, but each had once left the "Forge of the Soul" of the Vampire who founded this settlement.
If an ordinary inhabitant of Terra were to witness this combat from afar, their sanity would likely waver. The villagers' fighting style was alien to everything taught in military academies or passed down in the noble fencing schools of the mobile cities. Their fury was not blind—it was cold, calculated, and utterly uncontrollable from an outsider's perspective. It seemed as though each of them had been robbed of something infinitely precious, and now they took that loss out on anyone daring to encroach upon the little they still had.
Bandits who occasionally wandered into these lands in search of easy profit quickly realized their mistake. They were met with no warnings, no ultimatums, and no chance to retreat. The villagers did not negotiate with those who came with ill intent—they simply killed.
They did not listen to pleas for mercy. Wounded bandits, choking on their own blood and begging for their lives, found not a shred of compassion in the defenders' eyes. The attackers vanished without a trace—no bodies, no weapons, not even a memory of them remained in the world of the living. The forest silently accepted the remains, fertilizing the soil from which new trees would grow.
This small village was home to warriors defending their home.
Soon, a young girl would leave this village. A young girl whose name the wind had not yet carried beyond the forest's edge was preparing to leave her homeland. Her path led to the lands of Kazdel—a gloomy region with exhausted earth, where the land itself seemed to breathe hopelessness. She was heading there not for glory, nor for riches. She was driven by a noble, yet almost childlike conviction that the madness tormenting the vampire could be studied, understood, and—perhaps—reversed. She believed there was a cure for the curse devouring their savior.
There, in Kazdel, among the wastelands and plundered villages, she encountered one of the rulers of the Sarkaz people—Theresa. The one who was trying to save her people.
Theresa was a tragic figure: a ruler whose nation was slowly sinking into the abyss, a people who did not want peace, and she, despite her power, was helpless against the disease eating away at her kin's minds, against their thirst for vengeance. Her motives were noble—sincere to her last breath—but in that sincerity, they remained fatally naive. So naive that even the village girl, raised in the wilderness under the vampire's protection, could see it.
Yet the girl did not try to dissuade Theresa. Perhaps because she understood the value of hope—she had once clung to it herself. Perhaps because she saw in the ruler's eyes the same stubbornness that burned in the vampire's single eye—the one who had once reached out to help them. Or maybe she simply hoped that Theresa's ideals could still come true.
So she decided to lend her the sword. A simple village girl's sword—no ornaments, no name, no magical seals—but a blade forged by the Vampire.
At least for now, while she searches for a cure for her savior's madness.
A cure that doesn't exist.
The snowy lands of Ursus remembered him as a bloodthirsty monster. At the mere mention of his name, the aristocrats grew uneasy.
But was he a monster to everyone?
Did he bring only death and destruction to these lands?
The "old aristocracy" successfully painted him as a monster for the ordinary residents of the mobile cities.
But what about the small settlements beyond their walls? The witnesses to his brutality who knew the reason behind it? The infected whom he, against his will, had saved?
Even among the high officials of Ursus?
The Emperor's Blades reported what he had done, where he had emerged from, and who he was hunting.
But most of all, he changed the fate of a maid who left the estate after the nobleman's death.
A soul that should have perished under the weight of violence blossomed into a blood-red flower.
That very night, she awakened her "art," which allowed her to merge with the shadows.
From that point on, she began to kill the "old nobility" and their henchmen.
She became so skilled at it that the Emperor's Blades were sent to hunt her down.
It nearly cost her her life.
But the stubborn will to live, once granted to her by the vampire, allowed her to survive.
On that day, she was saved for the second time. By a little girl of the Kautos race who introduced herself as Elena.
To the young woman consumed by the flames of hatred, Elena's ideals were like a bucket of cold water.
Elena told her about how she had been arrested, sent to the mines to extract originium, about the atrocities committed by the overseers that led to the deaths of all the adults, how they decided to execute all the surviving children to cover up their crimes, and how she was saved by the "Patriot."
She said that when she grew up, she would fight for the infected—for children like herself and her new family.
After hearing this, the woman spent a long time reflecting on her own life. Then she went to the "Patriot" and joined him.
She erased her old name from her memory.
Now she is called Vreydena.
"A blood-red flower that bloomed in the darkness, yet found the light."