The remaining blood-infused guards collapsed into the snowbanks like hollow armor, their lifeforce utterly snuffed out by the phased spear-strike. The heavy, oppressive silence of the Western District cemetery from months ago seemed to bleed directly into the permafrost of the northern border.
The fallen angel, her torso charred and smoking from the catastrophic impacts of my shotgun shells, stood amidst the fresh carnage. A viscous, dark celestial fluid leaked from her ruined ribs, but her eyes burned with the manic, unyielding survival instinct of an apex predator. She slowly gripped the hilt of the reserve longsword embedded in the frozen earth, tearing it free with a wet, metallic screech. The Mist Blade attribute throbbed a faint, unstable violet along the edge. She turned her gaze entirely toward the rocky recess.
There were no more shields. There was no more vanguard.
Only my eldest sister, Elicia Rynd, remained.
Her hands, still adorned with my Level 8 Mana Pool and Level 5 Healing Enhancement rings, trembled violently against the shaft of her ornate healing staff. Her breath came in ragged, hyperventilating gasps, freezing into thick white plumes in the midnight air. For all her administrative authority at the Sisiphon Magic Academy, for all her ferocious military composure over the logistics ledgers, she was a healer who had just watched her entire thirty-man elite detachment get methodically butchered. Her absolute Divine Regeneration was entirely useless against a blade that left no tissue behind to knit.
The fallen angel closed the distance, her charred black wings dragging across the crimson-stained snow like broken sails. She raised the longsword high above her head, her muscles tensing for the final, downward executioner's stroke that would split Elicia from collarbone to hip.
Looking up at the descending violet steel, the last remnants of Elicia's stoic commander persona shattered into nothingness. A raw, desperate scream of pure, existential terror tore from her throat… a sound that echoed piteously against the unyielding mountain peaks.
The sound of her scream violently collided with my dulled nervous system, shattering the artificial calm of my Pain Manipulation skill.
Time seemed to dilate, slowing to a agonizing, mechanical crawl. Behind my exposed, bleeding eyelids, a torrent of suppressed, domestic memories flashed through my mind in a blinding, chaotic loop. I saw the small, weathered kitchen back in Town Allure. I saw the steam rising from the heavy ceramic bowls of beef stew Elicia used to cook for me after long, grueling days at the market stall. I remembered the fierce, protective warmth of her hands when she was just my big sister, completely unaware of the Bureau's rot or the heretical mutations building inside my flesh. I saw her weeping over my empty, pristine granite gravestone in the rain, her shoulders shaking with a guilt she never deserved to carry.
She had traveled all the way to this frozen hellscape, drowning her grief in service to the kingdom, all because she believed she had failed to save her little sister. I was not going to let her bury another ghost.
FWOOOOOOSH!
The massive, compressed, and predatory demonic wings anchored to my spine erupted with a violent, explosive flex. I didn't care about the Bureau guidelines. I didn't care about the leaderboard rankings or the S-rank paladins who might be watching from the shadows. I didn't care about the heretical life growing inside my womb or the massive, unhealed cavity tearing through my own abdomen.
I kicked off the crimson permafrost with every single ounce of my remaining physical strength, leaving a crater in the ice as my dark, leathery wings propelled my heavily injured body forward like a horizontal missile.
CRASH!
The millisecond before the fallen angel's phased blade could slice through Elicia's robes, I tackled straight into the apex demon's flank. The sheer kinetic velocity of my airborne impact caught her completely off-balance. The violent shockwave sent us both tumbling wildly across the snowdrifts, the angel's reserve sword flying from her grip and burying itself uselessly into a distant ice bank.
We skidded across the frozen earth, my tattered crimson trench coat tearing further against the jagged rocks until I ground to a halt just a few feet away from Elicia's boots. I lay on my side, coughing up a thick spray of dark, mutated blood, my demonic wings twitching weakly against the snow as the Lifeline curse thrummed aggressively through my chest.
Slowly, painfully, I forced my upper body upward, using my remaining right hand to brace my weight against the crimson-stained drifts. My face was completely bare, the jagged fragments of my mask lying scattered in the powder. My tattered hood had fallen away entirely, exposing my silver hair to the biting mountain wind.
And there, looking straight ahead, my gaze locked directly onto Elicia.
With the blinding emerald empowerment light finally fading from the area, the air cleared. Elicia's crimson eyes, wide with absolute shock and lingering terror, dilated behind her spectacles. She looked past the massive, monstrous leathery wings folded tightly against my back. She looked past the empty, mutilated stump of my missing left arm.
Her gaze focused entirely on my face.
She saw the raw, vertical claw scars tearing through my skin. But more than that, she saw my eyes. Without the mask to obscure my features, the absolute, genetic signature of our bloodline was laid bare in the twilight. My left eye burned with a single, desperate jade-green light, while my newly exposed, gouged-and-healed right eye… though lacking its original structure… bore the unmistakable, visceral crimson hue of the Rynd household.
The profound, suffocating silence of the graveyard returned, but this time, it was fractured by a low, trembling gasp.
Elicia's staff slipped from her fingers, clattering uselessly against the ice. She dropped to her knees right into the frozen mud, her hands flying to her mouth as a wave of intense, overwhelming emotion completely washed the fierce commander persona from her face. The hot, cascading tears instantly broke through her frozen composure, tracking down her cheeks as she stared at the heavily injured, wing-clad anomaly bleeding in front of her.
"Little... Ren?" Elicia choked out, her voice breaking into a raw, breathless whisper that carried the entire crushing weight of her months of mourning.
The wet, heavy thud of the fallen angel recovering her footing echoed through the pass. Even with her torso scorched and smoking, the pure, toxic drive of a cornered apex predator kept her moving. With a guttural, blood-curdling shriek, she lunged through the snow drifts, her remaining right hand flexing as her dark celestial claws whipped through the air in a desperate, horizontal trajectory meant to take my head.
I violently twisted my torso to the side, my leathery wings snapping backward to alter my center of gravity. The claws missed my throat by a fraction of an inch… but the tip of the longest talon caught the side of my skull.
SHRED.
A sharp, hot burst of white-hot agony flared as my right ear was cleanly sliced off, tumbling into the red-stained snow.
The fallen angel skidded to a halt, spitting a mixture of her own dark fluid and melting ice onto the permafrost. She looked at my asymmetric, mutilated body… the missing left arm, the shredded ear, the hollow right eye socket, and the monstrous wings anchoring me to the earth… and let out a mocking, distorted laugh.
"Look at you, A genetic failure. A pathetic, piecemeal creature groveling in the dirt for humans who will execute you the moment this blizzard clears. You are an absolute disgrace to the bloodline of the abyss."
Hearing her foul, arrogant tongue mock the survival I had dragged through the mud triggered something primal deep within my core. A cold, blinding rage snapped the last threads of my calculated restraint. My D-rank Battle IQ completely dissolved into pure, unadulterated executioner's intent.
My remaining right hand blurred into the spatial matrix of my storage ring. With a single, violent mental command, I deployed my final five chemical-grade tear gas flasks simultaneously, the heavy glass containers materializing into the air around me. Using the entire kinetic force of my demonic wings, I swept my arm forward, hurling the volatile arsenal in a rapid-fire barrage straight at her face.
CRASH! CRASH! CRASH!
The fallen angel frantically swerved, her pitch-black wings snapping up to deflect the projectiles. Three of the flasks shattered uselessly against the ice, and a fourth whipped past her shoulder, but my mathematical tracking held true on the final payload. The fifth glass flask struck her squarely between her bloodshot, crimson eyes.
EXPLOSION.
A massive, hyper-concentrated cloud of weaponized, military-grade tearing agent detonated directly over her respiratory pathways. She let out a strangled, suffocating shriek, her hands flying to her face as the toxic fog instantly blinded her eyes and scorched her throat, completely disabling her sensory parameters.
Behind me, Elicia remained completely paralyzed in the snowdrifts, her ornate staff lying forgotten in the ice. The prestigious Academy Principal was utterly gone, replaced by a hollow, traumatized girl staring at the horrific reality of what her youngest sibling had become. She watched the little sister she used to cook stew for… now a wing-clad, multi-mutilated demonic anomaly… waging a savage, blood-soaked war in the dark.
I didn't give her time to process the horror.
Channeling every single ounce of raw metabolic strength remaining in my Level 8 Mana Pool, I ignited my leg muscles and sprinted straight toward the blinded, thrashing angel. The permafrost shattered beneath my boots. I raised the heavy iron stock of the Death Chant Shotgun with my right hand, driving the muzzle directly against the joint of her left shoulder.
"DIE!" my mind roared.
BOOM!
The point-blank blast detonated, violently siphoning my own blood to vaporize the muscle and bone of her left arm, sending the severed limb flying into the blizzard.
Sensing her fast-approaching demise, the fallen angel reacted with pure, blind animal reflex. Her remaining right hand swung blindly through the toxic smoke, her claws tracing a lethal, sweeping arc to rip my chest open.
But I was already gone.
Instantly invoking my Illusion of Cariñosa skill, my silhouette fractured into four hyper-realistic afterimages directly in front of her blinded vision. Her dark claws tore through empty air, completely deceived by the flickering illusions, leaving her entire right flank and spine completely exposed to my smoking barrel.
The fallen angel, blinded by the chemical mist and completely disoriented by the shifting shapes in the snow, violently spun around.
"Pitiful creature! You hide in the shadows like a coward! You bleed for humans who view you as nothing more than an execution target! You are a demon… a creature of the abyss… yet you grovel at the feet of the kingdom's rot!"
But her apex senses had completely failed her.
She was wrong. I hadn't slipped behind her flank at all. I was standing directly in front of her the entire time, my jade-green eye cold and unblinking behind the tattered strands of my silver hair. By systematically spamming the Illusion of Cariñosa across every coordinate of the snowy clearing, I had turned the battlefield into a hall of mirrors, shattering her spatial awareness entirely.
While she was busy slashing at the empty air behind her, I stepped into her blind spot from the front. I raised the heavy, blood-slicked barrel of the Death Chant Shotgun, pinning the iron muzzle directly against her remaining right shoulder joint.
BOOM!
The catastrophic point-blank detonation roared through the mountain pass, siphoning my blood to vaporize the muscle and bone. Her right arm was severed completely, spinning through the howling blizzard before slamming heavily into the red-stained permafrost.
Now utterly armless, her chest a smoking, incinerated ruin, the fallen angel let out a terrified, strangled gasp. Her pitch-black wings violently flexed, her legs tensing as she desperately prepared to kick off the ground, take to the sky, and invoke her innate celestial healing matrix to restore her parameters.
I didn't give her a single millisecond to retreat.
Moving with a lightning-fast, predatory reflex, my remaining right hand reached into the snow and snatched up her freshly severed arm, utilizing the active system link to forcefully bypass the ownership locks on her discarded weapon. In the exact same breath, I lunged forward and grabbed the hilt of the Demon Valkyrie Longsword that was still embedded in the nearby ice bank.
STAB!
With a brutal, downward thrust, I drove the legendary violet steel straight through her sternum, pinning her writhing body deeply into the frozen earth.
The moment the blade pierced her core, the absolute, mechanical horror of the Lifeline attribute backfired directly into its creator. The purple-black lines of the anti-heal curse violently spiderwebbed across her chest cavity. Her innate celestial restoration sputtered and died instantly, her parameters hard-capped at that miserable 30% efficiency. Without her arms or her magic to stitch her shredded internal tissues back together, her lifeforce began to violently drain into the permafrost.
She collapsed entirely into the snow, pinned like a butterfly to a display board. Even as dark, cursed fluid spilled from her lips, she glared up at my uncovered face, her expression twisting into a manic, bloodshot sneer of pure malice.
"Go... go ahead, anomaly, pull the trigger. Put an end to this asset. But do not forget what you are. Look at your wings... look at your tattered, mutilated flesh. You can pretend to be their savior, but to that woman sitting behind you, you are nothing but a monster wearing her dead sister's face… "
Tired of her arrogant, administrative lecturing, and utterly finished with the kingdom's rot pouring from her mouth, I stepped over her pinned torso.
I didn't offer a single word or note over my missing tongue. I simply leaned down, pressed the heavy, smoking iron barrel of the shotgun directly against the soft flesh of her neck, and pulled the steel trigger a final time.
BOOM!
The localized blast completely severed her head from her shoulders, sending her skull rolling into the dark drifts as her pitch-black wings instantly dissolved into a shower of harmless, gray ash. The Triangulum-class apex threat was officially dead. The ledger was balanced, leaving only the howling northern blizzard to echo across the graveyard of Branch 1.