RAT-TAT-TAT-TAT…
The final rounds of the Tommy gun whined into the upper atmosphere as the fallen angel violently folded her black wings and descended from the freezing midnight sky like a falling meteor. Her boots struck the permafrost with a heavy, localized shockwave that sent a spray of jagged ice shards slicing through the air. The moment her feet touched the ground, the Demon Valkyrie Longsword erupted into a blinding, unstable violet glare, gathering an apocalyptic charge of raw, dark celestial mana.
Behind me, Elicia had no choice but to retreat further into a recessed alcove of the mountain pass. She dropped to her knees behind a jagged snowbank, her hands glowing with a desperate, low-frequency holy light as she tried to stabilize the gasping vanguards who were already rotting from the anti-heal curse. Her jaw was clenched in pure frustration; because the Lifeline attribute had brutally capped her healing efficiency at a miserable 30%, she had to manually ration every single drop of her mana pool. Exceeding her standard output would drain her to absolute zero within minutes, leaving the remaining vanguard entirely without a lifeline.
She was forced to play defense. I was the only one left to dictate the pace of the backline.
Sensing the immediate, lethal proximity of the apex demon, I willed the Tommy gun back into the spatial matrix of my storage ring. In the exact same breath, the Death Chant Shotgun materialized into thin air, its heavy, iron-reinforced barrel catching the chaotic glare of the mages' lightning spells. The weapon's dark, symbiotic passive immediately triggered… instead of drawing from my mana pool, the mechanical runes built into the stock began aggressively siphoning the volatile, demonic fluid straight from my own veins. The chamber clicked heavily as it synthesized a massive, high-density shell filled with raw, hyper-compressed blood pellets that hummed with a 500% amplified lifesteal hunger.
But before I could raise the iron sights, the fallen angel moved.
She gripped the hilt of her longsword with both gauntlets, her posture dropping into a terrifying, low-angle stance. With a single, fluid, and horizontal sweep of her arms, she unleashed a devastating, full-circle cleave across the front vanguard.
SHIIING…
The Mist Blade attribute ignited with a blinding, spectral flash. The elite, white-and-scarlet armored Luminous Knights didn't even have time to scream. The violet steel passed effortlessly straight through their towering reinforced shields, through their S-rank steel breastplates, and through their defensive magical barriers as if they were nothing but hot steam. Because the blade's structural sharpness was augmented by Triangulum-class apex parameters, it didn't just injure them… it cleanly, flawlessly sliced more than ten high-ranking knights completely in half at the torso.
The severed upper halves of their bodies slithered off their legs, slamming into the pristine snow as dark, cursed blood erupted onto the permafrost. Ten legendary names from the leaderboard were snuffed out instantly, their lifeforce erased before they could even hit the ground.
Through the curtain of vaporized blood and falling snow, the fallen angel's crimson eyes locked directly onto my hooded silhouette behind the Leech's Hollow Mask.
FWOOSH!
With a violent, predatory flap of her void-black wings, she kicked off the red-stained ice, accelerating straight toward me like a horizontal bullet, her sword raised to split my skull in two.
My D-rank Battle IQ might have failed to compute standard military choreography, but my raw, Earth-born survival reflexes were instantaneous. I didn't try to block the phased blade with the shotgun. Instead, my remaining right hand blurred into my open spatial purse. I didn't pull out a spell or an artifact… I grabbed one of my ten specialized, chemical-grade tear gas flasks (23.8 kg total weight).
As her terrifying face closed the final three feet of distance, her blade already whistling down toward my neck, I violently smashed the glass flask straight into her pristine, angelic face.
CRASH!
The thick glass shattered directly against her nose bridge. A dense, highly volatile, and chemically concentrated cloud of weaponized tearing agent exploded outward in a pressurized spray, completely engulfing her eyes, her throat, and her open mouth in a burning, toxic fog of absolute agony.
The blinding, toxic cloud of weaponized chemical agent exploded directly in the fallen angel's face, forcing a wet, strangled screech of pure agony from her throat. But as she flailed backward from the localized chemical burn, the erratic, sweeping tip of her Demon Valkyrie Longsword sliced through the air.
Nick.
The edge of the blade managed to graze past my defensive stance, leaving a microscopic, shallow scratch across the exposed skin of my pale right cheek. It was a mere surface cut, barely drawing a bead of blood… yet the absolute, mechanical horror of the Lifeline curse ignited instantly. A sharp, burning sensation like liquid nitrogen rippled through my veins as the necrotic, purple-black lines of the anti-heal curse tried to root themselves into my flesh, immediately threatening to choke my recovery systems down to a pathetic 30% efficiency.
But I didn't hesitate. Before she could recover her footing within the toxic smoke, I slammed the heavy steel stock of the Death Chant Shotgun against my shoulder and pulled the trigger at point-blank range.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The heavy firearm roared, violently siphoning my own blood to chamber each catastrophic blast. The massive, high-density blood pellets tore straight into her torso and shoulders. Chunks of her dark angelic skin and black feathers were blasted away into the snow, leaving her body riddled with gaping, crimson-leaking craters.
Sensing her imminent demise on the ground, the fallen angel let out a panicked, wet gasp, violently snapping her massive void-black wings forward to shield her mangled torso from the remaining pellets. With a desperate, powerful flap, she kicked off the blood-stained permafrost and soared back into the stormy midnight sky, completely breaking away from my line of fire.
High above the clouds, a dark, pulsing celestial light began to envelop her hovering form. She possessed her own innate, self-targeted healing matrix. While it wasn't a god-tier absolute power like Elicia's Divine Regeneration, it was more than enough to gradually knit her torn flesh, seal her bullet wounds, and slowly purge the burning chemicals from her eyes. She was hovering just out of arms reach, using the altitude to systematically recover her full strength.
I stood in the red-stained drifts, my single jade-green eye behind the Leech's Hollow Mask rapidly processing the tactical battlefield parameters. My D-rank Battle IQ couldn't formulate a grand army maneuver, but my raw, mathematical understanding of my own item matrix was absolute.
I needed a plan. The Lifeline anti-heal curse on my cheek was actively suppressing my baseline healing by 70%. But my Level 5 Healing Ring… the masterful synthesis of five fused rings resting on my right finger… was still actively pulsing with a massive, baseline 500% healing enhancement multiplier.
Even if the curse aggressively slashed that 500% multiplier down to a fraction of its power, my hyper-analytical mind calculated something far more vital. I didn't need to heal myself. My parasitic lifesteal could wait. What we needed to survive this deployment wasn't a slightly healthier bounty hunter; we needed to restore our primary tactical anchor. We needed to boost Elicia. If I could bridge my artifact's massive enhancement matrix directly into her holy font, we could violently override the angel's curse.
Around me, the battlefield was completely disintegrating. Seeing more than ten of the leaderboard's finest sliced cleanly in half, several of the surviving high-ranking knights completely lost their nerve. Panicked shouts echoed through the blizzard as a few vanguards fled into the dark mountain passes, committing immediate, cowardly desertion in the face of an apex threat.
Ignoring the cowards, I turned on my heel. Sprinting through the deep snowbanks, my tattered crimson trench coat snapping in the wind, I rushed straight toward the recessed rocky alcove where my eldest sister was stationed.
I slid into the snow directly beside Elicia, my Level 8 Mana Pool, Level 6 Magic Enhancement, and Level 5 Healing rings flaring with a blinding, synchronized resonance against the cold iron of my shotgun. She looked up, her spectacles fogged with sweat and ice, her crimson eyes wide with exhaustion as she tried to keep the remaining, dying vanguards stable with her crippled, 30%-capped magic. She saw the silent, hooded 7th-place Bounty Hunter drop beside her, entirely unaware that her "dead" little sister was about to forcefully rewrite the rules of her divine magic.
Elicia's hands were trembling violently as she poured an immense, dangerous amount of her remaining mana into a single, mutilated vanguard. Under the suffocating weight of the 70% anti-heal curse, her holy green light sputtered, barely managing to reduce a massive, fatal torso gash into a raw, closed wound. She was completely burning through her reserves just to keep a single soul from slipping into the void.
Hearing my boots crunch in the snow beside her, she didn't look up from her casting, her voice ragged and breathless as sweat froze on her brow.
"Bounty hunter... are the others alright? Did we contain the perimeter?"
I didn't utter a single sound over my missing tongue. Instead, moving with fluid, mechanical precision, I used my pale right thumb to slide two heavy, pulsing bands off my index and middle fingers.
I grabbed Elicia's trembling, leather-gloved hand and forcefully dropped the artifacts into her palm: my level 5 Healing Enhancement Ring and my Level 8 Mana Pool Ring.
The moment her fingers closed around the metal, the massive, raw architecture of the artifacts anchored to her spirit. Even though my Level 8 Mana Pool had been significantly drained from fueling my rapid-fire blood bullet arrays earlier, its sheer volumetric capacity immediately expanded her hard-capped reservoir like a bursting dam. Simultaneously, the Level 5 Healing Enhancement ring violently collided with the Lifeline curse. Even with the curse aggressively choking her efficiency down, the ring's massive baseline 500% multiplier acted as a brutal, artificial booster, forcing her crippled, 30%-capped Divine Regeneration to suddenly surge with a bright, blinding emerald intensity.
Elicia's eyes widened behind her spectacles as a wave of artificial vigor rushed through her veins.
"This... the mana density... and the amplification matrix! Thank you, Bounty Hunter. This is exactly what we need to balance the ledger!"
But before she could fully channel the newly amplified font, a panicked shout echoed from one of the nearby, retreating knights:
"Lady, watch out! Above you!"
FWOOOOOOSH—
The air behind me didn't just turn cold; the atmospheric pressure completely imploded. Dropping from the stormy midnight sky like a silent shadow, the fallen angel manifested directly behind my blind spot, her Demon Valkyrie Longsword already whistling through the blizzard in a lethal, sweeping trajectory meant to decapitate us both.
My raw, Earth-born survival instincts overrode any tactical calculation. With a violent, single-handed shove, I slammed my right hand against Elicia's shoulder, forcefully throwing my eldest sister across the snowdrifts and out of the blade's fatal path.
In the exact same microsecond, I spun on my heel, bringing the heavy, iron-reinforced barrel of the Death Chant Shotgun directly into the angel's midsection.
BOOM! BOOM!
I squeezed the trigger at point-blank range, the shotgun violently siphoning my own blood to detonate high-density pellets straight into her core. Chunks of her dark celestial flesh vaporized, but her forward kinetic momentum was absolute.
STAB.
The apocalyptic violet steel of her longsword passed straight through my flame-resistant crimson trench coat and pierced completely through my torso. The agonizing, freezing bite of the Mist Blade solidified inside my flesh, the tip protruding straight out of my back. Before I could chamber another round, the fallen angel unleashed a piercing, furious shriek, violently flapping her massive void-black wings and lifting off the permafrost… dragging my impaled body straight up into the freezing, midnight sky along with her.
The wind howled brutally against my Leech's Hollow Mask as we ascended into the clouds. The pain of the sword twisting in my gut was a white-hot, blinding fire, threatening to short-circuit my consciousness. Relying on my raw archive training, I instantly invoked my Pain Manipulation skill, manually dulling my nervous system's receptors, turning the agonizing torture into a distant, manageable thrum.
As she carried me higher into the blizzard, her dark wings beating against the storm, I locked my single jade-green eye onto her bleeding face. I jammed the muzzle of the shotgun directly against her shoulder blade.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
Every single blast tore into her body, siphoning my blood and triggering my innate Lifesteal affinity. Because the Lifeline curse from her sword was actively rotting inside my chest, my dark, parasitic recovery was brutally capped at a miserable 30% efficiency. I couldn't regrow my missing left arm or fully close the massive hole in my torso, but the 500% multiplier from the ring Elicia now wore was no longer protecting me. Still, that raw 30% lifesteal feedback loop acted as a desperate lifeline… mending microscopic portions of my shredded internal tissue and stopping my heart from failing with every bullet I buried into her flesh.
Dangling over the frozen edge of the world, pinned to the blade of an apex demon, I kept firing into the dark, refusing to let the kingdom's rot claim my life before I could see my sister safe.
The wind howled like a chorus of dying spirits as the fallen angel carried me higher into the freezing vault of the midnight sky. Any ordinary human vanguard would have blacked out from the sheer shock of having a broadsword driven through their midsection, but beneath the absolute psychic barrier of my Leech's Hollow Mask my mind remained a cold, calculating machine. Thanks to my Pain Manipulation skill, I completely severed the neural pathways transmitting the agony, allowing me to manually bypass physical fatigue. I kept my grip locked onto the smoking grip of my shotgun, refusing to stop the slaughter even as we hovered nearly forty feet above the jagged, snow-covered rocks below.
The fallen angel's grip tightened on the hilt of the blade pinning my torso. She looked down at me through eyes still red and streaming from the chemical burn, her voice a low, distorted celestial hiss that cut through the roaring blizzard.
"A demon... working directly with the humans, How utterly pitiful."
The moment the words left her mouth, a sharp, violent jolt triggered my senses.
She knew
My sixth-evolution biological strain wasn't a secret to her apex senses. But more importantly, her verbal taunt meant she was treating me like a pinned specimen… and that arrogance was her fatal administrative error.
My single jade-green eye locked onto the Demon Valkyrie Longsword still protruding from my chest. My D-rank Battle IQ couldn't form a military formation, but my raw understanding of inventory mechanics was flawless. The weapon was a massive, high-tier relic, but its physical mass was strictly clocked at exactly 4 kg.
Earlier, I had spent a massive chunk of my weight allowance by carrying ten heavy, chemical-grade tear gas flasks (23.8 kg out of a strict 25 kg threshold), leaving me with a tiny, specialized window of available space. But over the course of the battle, I had already smashed and weaponized multiple flasks against her face. The severe weight reduction meant my spatial matrix suddenly possessed the exact capacity required to overwrite her ownership.
Using my remaining right hand, I didn't reach for the blade… I slammed my spatial inventory ring directly against the crossguard of the sword.
VUUUUM—
I forcefully triggered the inventory's extraction protocol, violently sucking the 4 kg Demon Valkyrie Longsword straight out of my own flesh and directly into the digital void of my storage ring.
The physical blade vanished from my torso in a fraction of a millisecond. The sudden, absolute vacuum where the steel had just been caused the fallen angel's hands to violently slip through empty air. Her eyes widened behind the chemical stains as the absolute feedback loop of the system stripped her of her primary asset.
"No... NO!" she shrieked, a look of profound, dawning horror twisting her features.
Desperate to rid herself of a parasitic anomaly that could steal her very weaponry, she violently flexed her legs and kicked me squarely in the chest, dropping me off into the open air.
The ground rushed up to meet me with a terrifying, terminal velocity. Falling from a height of forty feet with a gaping, unhealed cavity in my abdomen meant a head-on collision with the frozen permafrost would instantly crush my skeletal structure, obliterating my remaining lifeforce before my lifesteal could even register a recovery path.
In that split second of absolute survival, the presence of the thirty knights, the Bureau guidelines, and the fear of exposure vanished. My life… and the heretical life growing inside my womb… mattered more than any cover story.
With a lightning-fast motion of my right hand, I tore open the front buttons of my flame-resistant crimson trench coat.
FWOOOOOOSH!
The massive, compressed, and predatory demonic wings anchored to my spine violently erupted into the freezing midnight air, expanding to their full, terrifying span. The dark, leathery membrane caught the updraft with a loud, snapping crack, generating an instantaneous surge of counter-kinetic lift that halted my fatal descent just inches before I could smash into the jagged rocks.
I hovered silently in a low crouch just above the blood-stained snow, my dark wings beating against the blizzard as the Lifeline curse slowly began to drain away without the sword to sustain it. I raised my masked face back toward the sky, my single jade-green eye locking onto the disarmed apex demon with an absolute, monstrous intent to kill.