The thought had barely formed when Steve felt a sudden, full-body chill. His limbs went rigid. His eyes glazed over — and in both pupils, an identical reflection appeared: Sharron, in her black Gothic court gown.
Beyond his own control, Steve's bleached hands rose to his own throat and slowly tightened, crushing his neck out of shape.
Then a burst of crimson moonlight erupted from Steve's body. Sharron was immediately expelled from the possession — launched back out, plunging instantly into a state of severe weakness.
Maric, who had been sprinting across the cobblestones, suddenly had his legs give out beneath him. He collapsed, breathing in ragged heaves, his chest burning as if something inside had been set alight. Even drawing breath felt like a luxury. It was the toxin vial Steve had been deploying in secret — finally doing its work.
If not for that damned traitor, Steve thought bitterly, he could have finished Sharron and Maric with just those two items — the Scarlet Lunar Corona and the toxin vial — without breaking a sweat.
But instead here he was, running for his life.
At least he'd caught on in time, switching from offence to defence. Otherwise he'd have been the first one down.
Just then, the area behind him shifted and thickened with deep, unnatural colour — Kreuch arriving through a teleport. But for Kreuch, who had once given himself to the Indulgence, the Scarlet Lunar Corona's effect was far worse than what it did to Sharron. Sharron would simply weaken and lose her Wraith form; Kreuch was in danger of having the crimson moonlight drag up every old craving buried inside him. One slip, and he'd be a puppet of desire again.
Steve immediately triggered the Scarlet Lunar Corona again, doubling its output — a crimson glow swelling outward like a shrunken full moon hanging in the air between them.
Kreuch, just stepping out of the Spirit World, locked up immediately. Veins rose across his face. His eyes flashed — feral, unhinged, bloodthirsty.
And then something far worse: a voice, faint but insistent, began threading through his mind. It pulled at his nerves, scraped at the inside of his skull. The voice of the Rose School's corrupted deity.
Kreuch had two options. Force through the Scarlet Lunar Corona's influence and kill Steve at the risk of falling back into depravity — or step outside the corona's range and use the Unshadowed item to break free of the corrupted deity's hold.
He wasn't going back to what he'd been. So there was only the second option.
A few hoarse breaths, and he reached for the Spirit World again, tearing a rift open, ready to step back through.
In that same moment, the palm-sized circular ornament gripped tightly in Steve's hand — without any warning — simply slipped free and fell.
Steve froze. His expression went blank with disbelief: he, a Sequence 5 Beyonder, had just fumbled his grip?
No time to think. He lunged for the Scarlet Lunar Corona as it dropped — and Sharron's husky, steady voice cut through the air:
"You are a murderer."
"You are guilty."
In an instant, a surge of crisis flooded Steve's spirituality from within.
A bolt of silver-white lightning crashed down from above, aimed straight at his skull.
Steve rolled across the ground, dodging the strike. Both hands slammed the cobblestones as he pushed himself upright, converting into his Corpse form, and made one more lunge for the fallen Scarlet Lunar Corona.
But just before his fingers made contact, a slender pale hand reached out from the circular ornament's shadow and closed around it.
"!!!"
Steve's heart clenched. Without hesitation, he turned and bolted — and tried to use a nearby gas lamp's glass shade for a mirror jump.
But the moment his body began to shift into Wraith form, something pulled him back into reality. In his eyes, Sharron's image returned.
This time, there was no Scarlet Lunar Corona.
Crack.
Accumulated lightning sliced through the night sky like a silver-white spear and drove itself into the top of Steve's skull. Sharron vacated him at the last instant, her expression cold as she watched Steve's body char and collapse into a smoking, scorched human silhouette.
She stepped forward without pause, pulled the black glove from her right hand, and let the palm beneath it blaze to life with dense, ethereal light — a weaving brilliance that formed a massive bronze door before her, covered in intricate patterns and carrying a scent that had no name.
The door shuddered. With a long creak, it cracked open.
Through the gap, a forest of arms reached out — some deathly white, some transparent, some lined with teeth, some raw and skinless, bloody — stretching across empty space to grasp Steve's lightning-ravaged body, and drag him through with almost contemptuous ease.
There was a sound of grinding and tearing.
The Sequence 5 Wraith was reduced to pieces.
After a moment, the bronze door cracked open one more time and expelled its leavings: scraps of cloth, slivers of bone, the Beyonder characteristic, and a few Beyonder items including the toxin vial.
Maric walked over, face still flushed, chest still heaving. Without the Scarlet Lunar Corona pressing down on him, the toxin's illness would still take time to work through — but at least it was over.
"We did it."
His voice came out like stone grinding stone.
"AAAAH!!!"
A howl tore through the dark. Kreuch had pressed the Unshadowed item against himself, letting it pour searing light over him in continuous waves. As the light scorched him, the wildness and hunger in his eyes gradually faded, and reason returned.
Even with his extraordinary regenerative ability, damage from something specifically devastating to creatures of darkness wasn't light.
"Move now!"
Kreuch rushed forward, ripping a rift into the Spirit World. "Steve got a signal off. The Indulgence Faction's demigod might already be on the way."
The tiny flicker of relief that had just begun to warm Maric's chest went instantly cold. He didn't hesitate — he followed Kreuch and Sharron through the rift into the Spirit World, and they were gone.
The deep crimson moon hung behind clouds, washing the docks in pale bloodlight. The noise was gone. The silence came back all at once.
"Looks like we don't need to get involved after all."
Vincent dropped his invisibility, tilted his head back, and yawned.
"You seem a little disappointed," Bernadette said.
"Not really. It's just — by Murphy's Law, the thing you dread most is what always shows up. And the Indulgence Faction demigod Sharron was so worried about never actually appeared. A bit of a surprise."
"Which also explains why you could inflict bad luck on everyone from the Indulgence Faction in Backlund with a single Sequence 6 characteristic."
"But why did Steve signal for the demigod's help in the first place?"
"There's another possibility."
Something strange entered Bernadette's tone. "The reason the demigod took so long to arrive — maybe that was the bad luck you inflicted already doing its job."
...
At that moment, Rose School of Thought demigod Satzven was thoroughly terrified.
This man, who went about in his black clerical robes looking like a walking cadaver, cold and malevolent in the way of someone utterly accustomed to looking down on everything — was standing in the middle of a dark street, eyes darting in every direction, looking for all the world like a helpless child who didn't know what to do.
A few minutes ago, he'd received Steve's distress signal and immediately set off for the docks. He'd barely covered half the distance when his consciousness briefly, without warning, went blank.
When it cleared, he was standing uselessly in the middle of a pitch-dark street with no idea what had happened.
He immediately registered that he'd been attacked, and reached to deploy his abilities and Sealed Artifacts in defence — only to look down at his left hand and find the black glove was gone.
To be continued…
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