A single drop of dew slid down the tip of a dark leaf and collided with the damp earth.
The sound of the impact felt deafening.
There was no rustling of leaves. No natural creaking of old wood in the forest, nor the sharp cry of the mountain crows. All the beasts and magical creatures of the Black Forest had fled or hidden in their burrows long before the sun even tried to tear through the clouds.
Nature was not at peace.
Hidden beneath the cloak of a thick, freezing mist that crawled at knee-height, more than a thousand warriors marched in absolute, synchronized silence.
The forest air was so saturated with killing intent, fear, and repressed energy that it left a bitter, metallic taste of copper at the base of the tongue.
The silence in the valley was so heavy that one could hear the sharp creak of leather when a sweaty hand gripped a sword hilt too tightly. You could hear the accelerated beating of hearts beneath light armor, and the sound of rookie soldiers forcing trembling breaths through gritted teeth.
About a kilometer away, tearing through the sea of gray mist, the colossal silhouette of their target was finally revealed.
Elfhing Castle was not just a tactical fortress.
It was an unshakeable monument to arrogance and tyranny. Its gigantic walls, carved from impeccably white marble, emerged from the thick fog like the colossal fangs of a dead god—sharp, untouchable, piercing a leaden sky that brought no light, only the promise of carnage.
In the dozens of watchtowers, the Queen's golden banners hung inert.
There was no wind to move them.
The air itself had died, suffocated by the gravitational tension between the two armies.
In the twisting shadows of the ancient trees, the elven ranks flowed over the terrain like a black tide, invisible and relentless within the mist.
The siege took shape in total, absolute silence.
On the left flank, deeply embedded in the treacherous vegetation of the forest, the **Vanguard** took its position.
Kanzo, the lower half of his face hidden by a dark leather scarf, raised a clenched fist.
Like a single organism, three hundred light-armored warriors froze almost simultaneously upon thick branches and damp moss. Short blades were drawn without producing a single clink of metal.
Beside Kanzo, Laura flexed her knees, her crimson eyes locked onto the castle's lateral towers.
She didn't need tactics or speeches. She only needed the signal to release the hounds.
In the center of the tactical formation, slightly pulled back and entrenched behind suspended roots, the **Middle Guard** consolidated itself with crushing weight.
Odássio and Arthur walked slowly at the front of a massive wall of steel and runic oak shields.
Odássio didn't need to shout commands; the rhythm of their advance was dictated by the subtle pulsing of the emerald energy interlinking his soldiers' shields.
They were an unbreakable anvil.
Behind them, the healers readied their bandages and potions, trusting their lives entirely to that impassive wall that Odássio and Arthur had sworn to keep standing against any spell that might fall from the sky.
And exactly at the epicenter of the collision, covering the open field that led straight to the colossal gates, the **Central Spear** dug their boots into the ground.
Sillys, Vandashi, and I walked shoulder to shoulder on the elite front line.
Cold sweat trickled down Vandashi's temple, but his hands gripping the three-meter spear didn't tremble a single millimeter.
I gripped the shaft of my own spear, sweeping the main walls with an analytical gaze, calculating the slope of the terrain and the blind spots of Elfhing's crossbowmen.
Positioned right behind Sillys and me, the elite infantry would be the first to feel the shockwave.
The first to test whether the accumulated fury of an exiled people was stronger than the Queen's enchanted marble.
An orchestra of obliteration, with all its instruments perfectly tuned and pointed at the castle's throat.
High on the marble battlements of Elfhing Castle, the mist was nothing but a gray carpet covering the valley below.
The battalions of royal conjurers and archers stood ready, bowstrings drawn and staffs humming with energy.
But their hands were shaking.
Their eyes darted nervously from side to side, trying to pierce the thick white curtain swallowing the forest.
"There is nothing out there," one of the elven lieutenants whispered, cold sweat dripping beneath his helm. "The mist is too dense. How could the Princess attack today? It's suicide. We don't even have a target."
They didn't.
But Lucas did.
The half-breed elf stood at the edge of the main wall, arms crossed over his chest.
He didn't need eyes to see through the fog. He felt it.
Lucas felt the beating of more than a thousand hearts in unison down in the valley. He felt the microscopic displacement of wind tracing drawn blades. He felt the killing intent rising up the castle stones like steam in a hot forge.
He waited.
He let the army advance a few more meters, let them step blindly, perfectly aligning themselves into the kill zone he had calculated in his own mind.
When the invisible vanguard crossed the line, Lucas uncrossed his arms and raised his right hand.
"Fire."
His voice wasn't a shout.
It was a deep, calm, and absolute rumble that extinguished any remaining trace of doubt in the soldiers around him.
The leaden sky ignited.
Hundreds of magic circles—crimson, glacial blue, and gold—tore through the gloom above the walls.
A monsoon of roaring fireballs, massive ice spears, and hundreds of enchanted arrows plummeted toward the forest like the judgment of an angry god.
The deadly rain pierced the mist before any order to defend could be shouted down below.
The first explosions shook the bedrock.
The wall of mist, once our perfect shield, was obliterated from the top down.
The front line didn't even have time to raise their weapons. Spheres of fire the size of carriages tore through the air with a shrill whistle, crashing into the damp earth in cataclysmic explosions.
The thermal wave vaporized the dew instantly, launching entire rows of warriors into the air in a tangle of flaming black cloaks before they could even scream.
The impeccable tactical formation shattered into pure instinctive panic.
Elves dove desperately to the sides, slipping in the mud and rolling frantically behind suspended roots while the ground they had been standing on a millisecond ago melted, turning into craters of glowing slag.
"Scatter! Cover your heads!" Bigster's voice tried to cut through the pandemonium but was instantly swallowed by the deafening thunder of the continuous bombardment.
Massive spears of blue ice shredded the tree canopy, dropping like sharp meteors.
A vanguard soldier tried to raise his oak shield in an act of pure desperation, but the kinetic impact of the ice spear shattered the runic wood, piercing his leather armor and brutally pinning the elf against the trunk of an ancient tree with a wet, terrifying thud.
The air became unbreathable.
The smell of magical ozone and burning fresh pine quickly and nauseatingly mixed with the acrid stench of boiled blood and scorched flesh.
Enchanted arrows rained down like a swarm of furious golden wasps, buzzing lethally through the thick smoke, ricocheting off rocks, and stitching the earth around us.
The chaos was absolute. The mist, once an ally, now blinded Sillys's warriors as they were massacred like insects in a trap, unable to even see the enemy.
The charge threatened to crumble in its first five seconds.
That was when Arthur moved.
He marched into the center of the impact zone, his green eyes glowing with a predatory, inhuman intensity.
Arthur flexed his knees, sinking his boots into the churned earth, and pulled his right arm back.
The air around him seemed to be drained.
A thick, green aura leaked from his pores, coiling up his arm and swallowing his clenched fist.
The space around him began to distort brutally, vibrating with such force that pebbles and chunks of dirt started to float around his legs, defying the weight of the world.
In the backline, Odássio's eyes widened, raising his oak shield out of pure survival instinct.
"What is he doing?!" one of the Middle Guard soldiers screamed, stumbling backward as he felt the crushing pressure squeeze his lungs. "Is he trying to punch a rain of fire?!"
Odássio gritted his teeth, digging his boots into the ground. "Get away from him! Now!"
The muscles in Arthur's arm tightened like steel cables about to snap, bearing the weight of a gravity he was about to tear in half.
With a guttural, deafening roar—a sound of pure fury that the entire forest had never heard the monolith emit—Arthur drove his heels into the dirt and launched his fist toward the sky.
*BOOOM!*
A titanic shockwave detonated upward. The wall of mist covering the army was brutally sucked in and ejected into the sky in a violent white pillar, carrying with it an absurdly freezing wind that forced the ancient trees to bend backward.
Gravity simply inverted.
Dozens of fireballs that were about to explode against the infantry, deadly ice spears, and clouds of arrows locked in mid-air, just meters from the ground, frozen by pure kinetic force.
And then, they went up.
The lethal torrent was hurled back against the top of the castle, propelled by twice the speed and the burden of an inverted hurricane.
The conjurers on the walls didn't have time to blink, much less scream.
Their own rain of fire collided with them.
Elfhing's upper marble battlements exploded in a spectacle of flames, shrapnel, and blood.
Elven guards were launched into the air like flaming ragdolls, their armor crushed by the very spells they had just cast.
Enormous blocks of the ancient white stone cracked and crumbled with seismic thunders, plummeting toward the base of the castle.
A thick cloud of black smoke and dust swallowed the castle's defenses.
On the battlefield, Arthur lowered his smoking fist.
His breathing was heavy, steam escaping from his lips while the allied ranks watched, in absolute, reverent silence, the cataclysmic destruction he had just returned to the heavens.
A guttural roar, born from pure relief and a newly ignited bloodlust, erupted from the throats of the thousands of surviving warriors.
They beat their swords against their ancient shields, the rhythmic metallic sound echoing through the valley like the heartbeat of an awakening titan.
They screamed Arthur's name.
But Arthur didn't crack a single smile.
Hot steam continued to escape through his gritted teeth as he resumed his march.
Every heavy step he took crushed the embers and broken ice beneath his boots. The enemy defense line on the walls didn't just retreat; it evaporated in his presence.
Beside him, the earth trembled with equally heavy footsteps.
Odássio caught up with him.
The Middle Guard captain's massive oak shield pulsed with a blinding emerald light, the runic energy humming so loudly it made the teeth of anyone nearby vibrate.
Elfhing's wall was blackened and fractured by the very bombardment Arthur had reflected, but the gigantic enchanted marble blocks still resisted, standing as a proud barrier blocking the inner courtyard.
Arthur didn't stop walking; he merely glanced at the elven captain.
Odássio returned the look. He understood the brutal math of the situation.
"With me!" Odássio roared, advancing two steps ahead of Arthur.
The captain lowered his shoulder, flexed his legs like springs under tension, and hurled the entire weight of his armor and runic shield directly against the base of the ancient wall.
The impact rang out like the tolling of a lead bell.
The emerald energy of the shield detonated against the marble. Brilliant lines of green mana branched through the white stone like the frantic roots of a furious tree, injecting pure destructive power into the fissures and weakening the structural integrity of the castle's defense.
The wall groaned, creaking under the runic pressure.
It was the perfect target.
Without slowing his pace, Arthur used the recoil of Odássio's impact.
He drove his boot into the ground, anchoring his own weight, and twisted his torso with mechanical violence. His right arm whipped forward, the green kinetic aura coiled around his fist glowing like the core of an unstable reactor.
He buried his punch exactly into the epicenter of the glowing roots Odássio had created.
Silence reigned for a millisecond.
And then, the entire wall imploded.
It sounded like a mountain being cleaved in two.
A massive shockwave exploded inward, and a fifteen-meter-wide section of solid stone, iron, and protective magic simply shattered.
Marble blocks the size of carriages were ejected into the castle's inner courtyard as if they were pebbles kicked by a child, crushing ballistae and burying the guard formations trying to regroup on the other side.
An asphyxiating cloud of black smoke and white gypsum dust swallowed everyone's vision. The ground shook for long seconds while the last pieces of rubble finished falling.
Slowly, the thick dust began to settle, carried away by the cold morning wind.
In the middle of the vast, jagged crater that now replaced the northern gates, two colossal silhouettes stepped over the crushed stones.
Arthur cracked his neck to the side, his eyes glowing through the dusty gloom.
Odássio raised his smoking runic shield, standing shoulder to shoulder with the monolith.
The northern flank of Elfhing Castle was wide open.
While the northern flank imploded under Arthur's strength, the eastern flank did not announce its arrival with explosions.
The advance there was silent, vertical, and deadly.
Laura and the Vanguard didn't march against the wall; they scaled it.
Elfhing's white marble was perfectly smooth, designed to deter invaders, but Laura's silver claws dug into the hard stone as if they were knives in soft meat.
She climbed with a terrifying, arachnid agility.
Behind her, dozens of nimble elves dressed in dark leather followed, using enchanted ropes and the grooves left by the assassin's claws.
Up above, the guards and archers scoured the mist below, bowstrings drawn, completely blind to the death creeping just beneath their feet.
When the first silver hand grabbed the edge of the battlement, it was already too late.
Laura vaulted over the parapet, her dark silhouette blocking the scarce morning light.
An elven archer didn't even have time to open his mouth to shout the alarm. In the blink of an eye, Laura was a blur of crimson and silver.
Her claws crossed the air in a perfect arc, slicing the tendons of the first line of defense before they could conjure a single energy shield.
Hot blood painted the immaculate marble. The elves arriving from the climb went straight for the guards Laura had disabled, silencing the towers in a swift and surgical sweep.
"Keep moving!" Laura barked, kicking a guard's body out of the way, a sadistic smile already stretching her blood-smeared face.
She ran to the inner edge of the wall and looked down. There was the main gate, closed and locked by four black iron chains as thick as tree trunks.
Outside that gate, the Central Spear awaited the signal.
Laura didn't look for the crank. She licked the blood trickling near her lip and simply leaped into the abyss.
She plummeted from a height of sixty-five meters in freefall.
Gravity pulled her body at a breakneck speed. At the last second before impact, Laura twisted her body in the air and drove her silver claws directly into the gigantic links of the main chains, using the entire weight of her descent as leverage.
The screech of tearing metal overcame the sound of the battle.
Laura's claws penetrated the black iron.
With a deafening crash, the four links snapped at the same time, shooting orange sparks all across the inner hall.
Without support, the colossal entrance gates had nothing to hold them. They groaned and collapsed outward with a seismic impact that made the earth shake, kicking up a wall of dust.
Through that curtain of smoke, the Central Spear finally invaded.
Vandashi was the first to cross the fallen gates, his three-meter spear spinning like a bloody windmill, instantly repelling the royal guards who rushed to plug the breach.
The elite infantry's war cry tore through the mist as dozens of soldiers poured through the doors, colliding head-on with the castle's internal battalion.
Laura was already standing in the middle of the courtyard, spinning like a lethal top.
Her claws shredded armor and disarmed mages before they could finish their chants. Her Vanguard began to rain from the walls, using ropes to descend and attack the castle troops from behind.
The enemy formation broke in a matter of seconds.
The direct path to the inner castle was open, but the courtyard was still a sea of spinning blades and chaos.
Sillys and I stopped right behind Vandashi's line, assessing the pandemonium.
Vandashi didn't back down a millimeter. He crushed a guard's chest with the base of his spear and looked back, his face covered in sweat and soot, eyes burning with adrenaline.
"Go!" Vandashi roared over the sound of metal against metal. "We'll hold the courtyard! The path is yours!"
Laura, a few meters away, sliced an elven captain's sword in half and shot a wicked smile in our direction.
"The real fun is up at the top, Princess!"
Sillys nodded, her eyes brimming with gratitude for her troops' raw loyalty. She turned her face to me.
"With me, Suki," she said, her voice cutting through the wind.
We didn't hesitate.
Taking advantage of the corridor of chaos that Laura and Vandashi violently carved with blood and steel, Sillys and I sprinted through the courtyard, crossing the shattered defense line and running straight for the grand doors of the inner castle.
Twenty meters high, forged in black iron and enchanted wood.
The wind roared around them, carrying the scent of ozone and ashes from the nearby battles.
Sillys spun her silver spear.
The air around the blade began to scream, compressing into a violent white vortex.
"Ready?" she asked, her pale eyes fixed on the barricade.
I let the white marks ignite my skin, feeling the ethereal energy pulse in my veins.
I mirrored her stance, channeling the storm into the tip of my black wooden spear.
"Always."
We struck the air simultaneously.
Two compressed hurricanes intertwined, forming a colossal drill of pure wind that slammed into the front gate.
The impact was deafening.
The ancient doors didn't just open; they exploded inward.
Splinters of black iron and chunks of enchanted wood rained through the main hall like shrapnel from a massive grenade, destroying pillars and sweeping away the dozens of royal guards forming the final barricade on the other side.
The dust rose in a thick, asphyxiating cloud, obscuring the grandeur of the place.
Elfhing's main hall was a colossal testament to arrogance.
It was the size of a cathedral. Enormous white marble columns supported a vaulted ceiling painted with frescoes of elven gods. Massive crystal chandeliers swung violently from the ceiling with our wind, scattering fractured light over the polished floor now covered in debris.
The sound of the exploding doors didn't just bring silence; it brought absolute panic.
Shrill screams tore through the smoke. Dozens of elves dressed in the simple gray garments of servants ran desperately through the corners of the colossal hall, slipping on the dusty marble, trying to flee the rubble and the dead guards.
Some cowered behind the cracked pillars, covering their ears and waiting for the final blow.
But then, the smoke began to clear, revealing the two of us at the threshold of the door.
One of the older elves, her face covered in soot, froze mid-step.
The pure terror in her features melted almost instantly when she saw Sillys's white hair whipping in the wind and the silver spear in her hands.
"The Princess..." the servant whispered, her voice choking up as she fell to her knees on the shattered marble. "It's the Princess... she's returned!"
The murmur spread like fire on dry grass.
The panic of several servants turned into a mutual shock of relief. Some began to cry openly, looking at Sillys not as the exiled daughter who came to destroy the castle, but as the savior who came to free them from the Queen's nightmare.
Sillys didn't smile, but the ferocity in her pale eyes softened for a fraction of a second. She lowered the tip of her spear.
"To the dungeons!" Sillys ordered, her voice echoing through the hall with absolute authority, yet entirely devoid of cruelty. "Go down the service stairs! Lock yourselves in the cells on the lower levels and do not come out until the walls stop shaking! Go! Now!"
As if given a breath of life, the dozens of elves nodded frantically and ran in a flock toward the dark staircases at the back of the west hall, fleeing the impending battlefield.
We waited until the echo of their last hurried footstep faded.
And then, when the hall was finally emptied of the innocent... the wind around me suddenly died.
My lungs locked.
The atmospheric pressure in the colossal hall skyrocketed out of nowhere, forcing my knees to buckle for a fraction of a second before I forced myself, trembling, to stand up.
It was like trying to breathe at the bottom of a frozen ocean. The very light of the chandeliers seemed to dim.
He was there.
Untouched in the center of the destruction. In the middle of that gigantic white marble hall.
Lucas.
He hadn't fled with the servants, nor had he advanced with the guards. He had merely stood there, motionless after the wall's destruction, letting the panic pass around him like a reef ignoring the tide.
His dark, complex armor—forged from overlapping plates of dark leather and matte steel—seemed to devour the light in the ruined hall. Heavy belts and straps contoured his broad torso, while a tattered cape hung over his left shoulder, fastened by a sharp, dark star-shaped metal brooch.
His skin was brown and rough, deeply marked by a scar on his left cheek. His long, pitch-black hair fell messily over his face, revealing pointed ears pierced by small silver hoops.
His presence was a black hole in the middle of the hall. Dense. Silent. Absolute.
The shrapnel from our explosion had fallen in a perfect circle around his heavy boots and dark gauntlets, as if physics itself refused to strike him.
Slowly, Lucas lifted his face.
His eyes met ours. Deep, half-closed, carrying an unwavering, judgmental apathy. Amidst all that chaos, dust, and blood, he seemed to be the only element of reality perfectly in place.
Sillys tensed beside me, her knuckles white around her spear.
"The Queen is yours," I said.
My voice came out hoarser than I wanted, scraping my dry throat, but it didn't waver.
I forced my feet to stay planted on the shattered marble, ignoring the primitive alarms screaming at the base of my skull, demanding I run as far away from this man as possible.
Sillys didn't look at me. She kept her pale eyes fixed on the darkness of the corridors far beyond the black monolith, her jaw so clenched I could hear the faint grinding of her teeth.
She knew the monster beneath that armor better than anyone.
"Don't die, Suki," she murmured. A commander's order disguised as a plea. "Take care of him."
With a sonic detonation of compressed air that blew a crater in the stone beneath her boots, Sillys launched herself forward.
She became a silver dart of pure speed, cutting through the ruined hall and passing right by, less than a meter from the giant's shoulder.
Lucas didn't blink. He didn't move a single millimeter of his dark armor.
The violent wind of Sillys's passing merely stirred his heavy black cape and the dark hair falling over his face. He let her pass toward the bowels of the castle, as if the Crown Princess of Elfhing were nothing more than a harmless, irrelevant breeze.
His lack of reaction was more terrifying than any spell of destruction. His cruel, ancient, and entirely apathetic eyes remained locked exclusively on me.
The sound of the carnage outside seemed to be sucked into a vacuum. The silence between the two of us was a physical weight, crushing the air around us.
And then, the half-breed broke the stillness.
"I was there."
Lucas's rough baritone reverberated through the marble pillars. It was low, almost a whisper, but it carried a resonance capable of making the bones in my chest vibrate.
It wasn't the voice of someone who needed to shout to be heard; it was the voice of someone accustomed to commanding silence in graveyards.
I frowned, keeping my black spear steady at chest height, the wind swirling slowly around my legs.
"There where?" I asked, feeling a drop of cold sweat trickle down my temple.
"In the arena," Lucas replied, slowly resting his heavy matte steel gauntlet on the pommel of the spear strapped to his back. "In the shadows of the royal box, watching the tournament qualifiers. I watched the human boy play gladiator."
The blood ran cold in my veins.
"I saw you bathe in Kimiko's blood," he continued, his tone clinical and empty, dissecting my past like a surgeon opening a corpse on a stone table. "I saw you destroy Kaichin's pride and body. And I saw, above all, the exact moment you overpowered Sallys. One of my most lethal and precious students."
Lucas took the first step toward me.
The simple sound of his steel-plated leather boot colliding with the stone made the suspended dust push away from his body. The atmospheric pressure in the hall doubled instantly.
"You were in pieces that day," his voice took on a somber cadence. "Broken. Breathing by a mere whim of chance... and yet, you refused to fall, and you survived."
I gritted my teeth.
"If you saw all that," I shot back, forcing a stiff smile and lifting my chin, "then you know I don't usually lie down and die just because the enemy is bigger. I've already buried your prodigies, Lucas."
An almost imperceptible gleam of morbid interest crossed the warrior's half-closed eyes.
"Surviving the arrogance of undisciplined children is one thing, boy," he murmured, his cape rustling heavily as his dark presence swallowed the remaining light from the shattered chandeliers. "But today... you are not fighting against proud prodigies. You are fighting against the very military foundation of this realm."
He pulled his gauntlet away from his weapon's hilt and relaxed his arms at his sides, leaving himself completely open.
An opening that screamed any attack I made would be useless.
"Show me," Lucas demanded, the air around him beginning to distort with an invisible, black aura of pure, contained violence. "Show me how a breeze tries to match a storm."
Meanwhile, at the apex of the world.
The Throne Room was not a mere tactical military chamber; it was a sanctuary of vanity and megalomania carved at the top of the clouds.
The white marble floor was so polished it reflected the vaulted ceiling like a mirror of calm waters. Colossal pillars, adorned with pure gold filigree, supported crystal chandeliers that burned with perpetual magical flames.
The air inside smelled of crushed lilies and ozone—a repulsive contrast to the steel and mud swallowing the gates below.
In the exact center of the room, upon a circular dais with three silver steps, Elfhing, the Queen of the Elves, waited.
She was magnificent and terrible.
But what was most terrifying was not her inhuman beauty; it was her absolute disdain.
The Queen did not wear chainmail. She wore no war breastplates, greaves, or any armor at all. Insulted by the mere idea of dressing up for what she considered a childish and doomed rebellion, Elfhing wore a dress of diaphanous emerald silk.
The fabric, embroidered with gleaming gold threads, molded perfectly to her figure. Her golden hair fell like a cascade of liquid light over her shoulders, and her divine eyes observed the enormous double mahogany doors in front of her.
There was only an aura of glacial boredom around her. The war wasn't a dangerous siege; it was an inconvenience in her routine.
Outside, dozens of meters above the ground, the wind whipping her soot-stained face, Laura wore a smile that showed all her teeth.
She was clinging to the smooth masonry of the east tower.
Her muscles burned from the frantic, vertical climb, but the adrenaline anesthetized any pain. As she peered through the gigantic stained glass window that separated the balcony from the throne room, the assassin's mind briefly drifted to the previous night.
*In the dead of night, under the pale starlight, Sillys had pulled her into the shadows, far from Arthur and Suki's ears.*
*"The Vanguard will open the main path, but I don't want you stuck in the courtyard carnage next to Vandashi," Sillys had said, her pale eyes gleaming with frigid precision.*
*Laura had arched an eyebrow, wiping her silver claws on a dirty rag. "Taking me off the front line, Princess? Afraid I'll steal the show?"*
*"I'm saving you for the best meat," Sillys countered, her voice sharp. "My mother won't fall to my strength alone. She is the storm itself. When I walk through those doors, her attention must be divided. I need your insanity, Laura. I want you to abandon the Vanguard in the courtyard, scale the towers from the outside, and break in through the east flank. Be the irrational chaos her war calculations cannot predict."*
The memory dissolved in the freezing morning wind.
Laura flexed her legs against the exterior stone.
Her muscles tensed like the springs of a heavy ballista.
And then, she leaped.
*CRAAASH!*
The colossal sacred stained glass—depicting Queen Elfhing herself receiving the crown from the queen of the gods—exploded into the room in a deafening cacophony.
A tempest of thousands of shards of colored glass rained over the immaculate rug, glittering like fractured gemstones under the light of the magical chandeliers.
Laura landed heavily in the exact center of the room.
Her posture was purely animalistic, crouching on three points of contact. Her left hand kept her silver claws deeply embedded in the gleaming white marble, planting roots to absorb the absurd impact of the landing.
She bled profusely from a cut above her eyebrow, her dark clothes were torn in multiple places, and drops of fresh blood from wounded guards dripped from her chin.
Despite her physical ruin, a maniacal, lethal, and savage smile stretched the scars on her face from ear to ear.
The Queen's expression on the dais didn't change a millimeter.
She merely lowered her gaze to Laura's blood-soaked boots ruining her gleaming floor. Her face twisted in pure aristocratic disgust.
"You dare bring the filth of your sewers into my sanctuary, creature?" Elfhing's voice was poison dripped over silver.
Perfectly melodic, but fatal. The very air pressure in the room seemed to condense, turning sharp like a minefield of invisible razors brushing against the assassin's skin.
Laura slowly raised her torso, a deep growl reverberating in her chest.
She rolled her neck, heard the bones pop, and then spat a dark, glistening clot of blood directly onto the untouched marble.
She laughed.
"I'm terrible at using the front door, Your Majesty."
And, as if the word were the absolute trigger, hell answered from the hallway.
*BAAAM!*
The colossal double mahogany doors, weighing tons, were not opened.
They were kicked off their heavy black iron hinges with the violence of a seismic shock.
The reinforced wood shattered in the air, crashing onto the hall floor with a monumental thunder that sent the golden dust from the ceiling cascading down like snow.
A swirling gust of air, dense and pierced with pure lethal intent, swept through the room in a violent breath.
All the flames in the chandeliers and pillars were extinguished instantly, plunging the edges of the immense room into a gray gloom.
Sillys emerged from the destroyed threshold.
She walked over the wooden debris, her snow-white hair whipping wildly around a face now smeared with soot and stained with the dust of war.
The wind spear in her hands wasn't just humming; the air around the blade roared and distorted the light.
Laura glanced over her shoulder toward the settling dust, her sadistic smile widening even further.
"I thought you were going to leave all the fun to me."
"I promised I'd give you the best prey," Sillys replied, her voice as cold as the abyss, devoid of any hesitation or filial emotion.
The goddess's pale storm eyes ignored the luxury, ignored the crown, and locked directly onto the figure of her mother.
"But the final blow... is mine."