The heavy, custom-engineered Death Chant Revolver slipped from Elias's trembling, leather-gloved fingers, thudding uselessly into the loose red sand.
His entire lethal, unyielding posture completely disintegrated. He stared down at me, his face turning an ash-gray as his eyes scanned my features… the unmistakable, striking heterochromia of my jade-green left eye and crimson right eye, and the tangled strands of my brown hair tipped with silver.
"Eirene...?" his voice cracked, dropping from the cold register of an elite assassin into a raw, breathless whisper of absolute horror.
Despite the massive, undulating crimson blood wings extending from my spine, and despite the terrifying Phase 5 vampiric aura pulsing from my core, he didn't draw a secondary weapon. He didn't treat me like a calamity. He took a staggering, desperate step forward.
I couldn't focus on his reaction yet; my biological systems were actively failing. Gritting my teeth so hard they bled, I raised my sole remaining right hand, channeling a massive, unstable burst of mana into my neural pathways to cast Pain Manipulation over the gaping, ruined chunk of my torso. The screaming, white-hot agony dimmed to a deadpan, manageable numbness. Moving with a cold, detached mechanical instinct, my trembling right fingers touched my exposed, leaking intestines, forcefully pushing the organs back inside my abdominal cavity so my healing enhancement ring could finally begin sealing the outer tissue.
Elias dropped to his knees right beside me in the sand, completely unbothered by the volatile crimson fluid pooling around his boots. His hands shook violently as he reached out, touching my shoulders with a desperate, terrifying grip.
"No... no, no, Eirene... why?" he stammered, his eyes wide with a frantic, suffocating panic as he looked at the smoking stump of my left elbow and the catastrophic wound in my side.
"Why didn't you tell me?! Why were you out here?!"
I looked up at him through blurred vision, my breathing shallow, wet, and ragged.
"Big brother... I'm sorry… I'm... I was hiding this from you... to keep the family safe from the bureau..."
"Shut up! Just shut the hell up!" Elias roared, his tactical composure completely rupturing into pure desperation.
He violently turned his head toward the crest of the dune, his lungs expanding as he screamed for his party's support matrix.
"Catherine! Get up! Catherine, I need you over here right now! CATHERINE!"
But his frantic voice only echoed hollowly across the quiet, moonlit oasis. Fifty meters away, Catherine lay completely motionless in the sand, her mana reserves entirely siphoned dry by my previous lifesteal effect, leaving her in a deep, unresponsive state of exhaustion. Beside her, Patricia remained thoroughly unconscious from the blunt kinetic strike to her helmet. There was no divine healing coming. We were completely alone in the desert night.
Elias's hands shook as he gripped my shoulders tighter, his knuckles turning white against my tattered tunic. The terrifying, calculating Shadow Walker was entirely gone, replaced by a brother consumed by an agonizing realization.
"Eirene, why did you do this? I was hunting you... I was tracking my own little sister this entire time. Forget the 18 gold bounty. Screw the Bureau. I don't care if you're a vampire, I don't care about the wings or the blood… you are my sister. If the Bureau ever tries to lay a hand on you, I will tear them apart piece by piece."
His words, filled with unconditional, fierce protection, should have brought me comfort. Instead, they felt like hot iron pressing into an open wound.
A suffocating wave of realization and guilt crashed over my processing core, completely bypassing my pain manipulation. Look at what I had done. Look at the absolute ruin scattered across this red sand dune. The elite party members Elias viewed as family… Patricia, Catherine… lay broken, bleeding, and entirely unresponsive because of my calculated, ruthless strikes. The purebred vampire's severed head rested heavily in my inventory ring, a gruesome prize paid for in slaughter. I had hunted, I had killed, and I had dropped to my knees to drink the volatile, wretched blood of a demon just to fuel my own dark affinity.
All of this chaos. All of this terror. It wasn't the Bureau, and it wasn't the purebreds. It was me. I was a walking calamity, a deceptive, parasitic burden bringing nothing but violence and lies to the people I swore to protect.
"Big brother... don't touch me!"
With a sudden, frantic burst of my remaining strength, I shoved my right hand against Elias's chest, pushing him violently away from me. I scrambled backward into the stained sand, my massive crimson wings flaring instinctively in a defensive, jagged arc to keep him at a distance.
"Don't touch me!"
I screamed, my voice breaking into a raw, emotional sob that completely shattered my usual deadpan, mechanical composure. Tears finally spilled from my mismatched jade and crimson eyes, mixing with the blood on my pale cheeks.
"Look at me, Elias! Look at what I did to Catherine! Look at what I did to Patricia! I am a monster... a wretched, blood-sucking monster! I belong in the dark! Just stay away from me!"
I collapsed completely onto the loose, crimson sand, my body trembling so violently that I could no longer maintain my balance. My remaining right hand clutched my tattered tunic, and my single massive blood wing wrapped tightly around my frame like a broken, jagged shroud, shielding me from the moonlight. I pulled my knees tightly against my chest, curling into a desperate, fragile fetal position directly in the dirt.
The cold desert earth pressed against the raw, smoking stump of my left arm and the newly sealed tissue of my torso, but the physical numbness was nothing compared to the suffocating weight breaking my chest.
"I'm sorry... I'm so sorry..." I choked out, my forehead pressed hard against the sand as the tears flowed freely, leaving damp tracks through the dust and dried crimson on my face.
For all my tactical calculations, my engineered firearms, and my attempts to control the ledger from the shadows, I was entirely broken. The deadpan, analytical mask I had worn for months had shattered completely along with my blood mask. I couldn't rationalize the blood on my hands anymore. I couldn't quantify the pain I had just caused my own family. I just lay there in the ruins of the dunes, a weeping, monstrous anomaly crying out into the quiet of the midnight sky, wanting nothing more than to disappear into the dark.
The quiet of the desert night was entirely suffocating, broken only by the ragged, trembling gasps slicing out of my throat. The sand beneath my face grew damp with my tears, clumping against my skin, mixing with the ash of the vampire I had drained and the blood of the people I loved. I squeezed my eyes shut, my forehead dug deep into the earth, wishing the ground would simply split open and swallow my 5'5" frame whole.
I felt the soft, rhythmic crunch of sand. Elias was moving.
I flinched, my crimson right eye flying open in absolute terror as I pulled myself even tighter into a ball, my single wing shuddering violently.
"Don't... Elias, please, just look at them, look at Catherine. I drained her. I used her... like a tool. I hurt your family. I am the thing you hunt. I'm the nightmare people tell stories about to keep their children inside at night. If you touch me... if the world sees what I am... I'll drag you down into the dirt with me."
Suddenly, the heavy, reassuring weight of his thick leather trench coat draped over my trembling shoulders, blocking out the freezing midnight wind.
Before I could scramble away, Elias dropped to his knees right into the sand beside me. He didn't care about the grotesque, mutilated stump of my left arm. He didn't care about the volatile, dangerous aura vibrating from my spine. Reaching down, he wrapped his powerful arms completely around my curled-up frame, pulling me tightly against his chest.
"Let go of me… Elias, let go... I'm a monster..."
"You are my little sister,"
Elias growled, his voice breaking, thick with an agonizing, raw emotion I had never heard from the legendary Shadow Walker. He buried his face into my silver-tipped brown hair, holding me so fiercely that the air left my lungs.
"Do you hear me, Eirene? I don't care what you drank. I don't care about the wings. You think Catherine and Patricia are my only family? You are my blood. You are the reason I joined the Bureau. You are the reason I carry these damn guns!"
A heavy, hot tear from my big brother fell onto my cheek, mixing with my own.
"I don't care if the whole world calls you a demon, To me, you're just Eirene. You're my little sister who should have been safe at home. I'm sorry... I'm so sorry I did this to you. I'm the one who failed. I should have known it was you." Elias whispered fiercely, his body shaking as he rocked me back and forth in the ruined sand.
Hearing his unconditional forgiveness, the last of my cold, analytical defenses completely collapsed. I let go of his tunic and wrapped my sole remaining arm around his neck, burying my face into his shoulder as I cried uncontrolably, letting the raw, unfiltered agony of my hidden life pour out into the quiet of the oasis.
The cold desert wind howled through the ruins of the dune, scattering the physical ledger of my failures across the red sand. Scattered in the dirt lay
QMeans of Communication, its violet-sheened mist blade dulled by the dust. Next to it clattered my remaining chemical payloads, and just a few feet away, the grotesque, severed remainder of my left arm lay entirely frozen in the moonlight.
The catastrophic trauma to my body was breaking through my neural grid again. The massive, gaping hole carved into my right flank throbbed with a sickening heat, the tissue struggling to bind around my exposed intestines.
But the physical ruin was nothing compared to the cognitive dissonance tearing through my mind. Elias was holding me, his tears hot against my neck, looking at me and seeing the little sister from his childhood… the small, strange girl with the mismatched heterochromic eyes whom he had sworn to protect from the harsh realities of this world. He saw innocence.
But I knew the truth. I looked at the chaos, the blood, and the unconscious bodies of his comrades, and my internal processing could only reach one baseline conclusion:
I am a burden. I am the catalyst for this destruction.
The emotional weight of the trauma reached its absolute threshold, completely fracturing my stability.
"I'm sorry, big brother... I'm so sorry," I whispered, my voice sounding hollow, wet, and completely detached.
Before he could tighten his grip, I forced a sudden, desperate surge of remaining mana directly into my spine. I violently pushed my right hand against his chest, breaking his hold, and unraveled my massive crimson blood wings with a deafening, concussive snap. The powerful backdraft kicked up a blinding wall of red sand between us.
Without a microsecond of hesitation, I launched my 5'5", mangled frame straight upward into the midnight sky.
"No! Eirene, damn it! Stay down!" Elias's frantic, desperate roar echoed from below, his boots scrambling through the loose grain as he tried to reach for me, but the distance was already too great.
I didn't look back. Clutching the bleeding hole in my right flank with my sole remaining hand, my aerodynamic trajectory violently buckling due to my missing left arm, I flew blindly into the freezing upper atmosphere. I left the weapons, the blood, and my big brother behind in the desert.
The biting, freezing wind of the high upper atmosphere slapped against my bare, tear-stained face, but I barely felt the cold. My massive crimson blood wings beat with a frantic, uneven rhythm, forcing my 5'5" mangled body through the heavy, dark cloud banks.
Every flap of my right wing sent a sickening jolt of agony through my spine, the missing weight of my severed left arm completely ruining my aerodynamic balance. I was listing hard to the side, my right hand desperately clutching the gaping, raw hole in my flank to keep my internal organs from shifting.
But the physical pain was nothing. The tears flew from my mismatched jade-green and crimson eyes, tearing away into the wind behind me as violent, choking sobs broke through my lips.
"Why... why didn't I just run from the start? Look what I did to him... look what I made him do..."
I could still feel the warmth of Elias's leather coat on my shoulders. I could still hear his desperate, breaking voice. I had turned my big brother… the legendary, unyielding Shadow Walker… into a fractured man weeping in the dirt over the mutilated body of his own little sister. I was supposed to be the one protecting the family from the dark. Instead, I had dragged the dark straight to his doorstep.
Down on the ruined red sand dune, the desert had fallen deathly quiet.
Elias remained on his knees, his hands still trembling, suspended in the empty air where he had just been holding me. His trench coat was stained with my volatile crimson fluid. His eyes, usually so cold and calculated, were wide, bloodshot, and fixed on the empty sky where I had vanished into the clouds.
"Eirene..." he whispered, his voice completely hollow, cracking under an unbearable weight of guilt.
He looked down at his right hand. The hand that had trained under the greatest marksmen. The hand that had flawlessly fanned the hammer of his Death Chant Revolver. He looked at the blood on his gloves… my blood.
"I did this, Damn it! I did this to her! I hunted her like an animal... I tore her arm off..."
He looked over at the scattered remnants in the dirt. My shattered blood mask, my discarded payloads, and the smoking, severed limb I had left behind. Every single piece of evidence screamed of his own lethal efficiency. He had prided himself on being the ultimate operative, the one who handled the threats no one else could. And his prize was the mutilation of his little sister.
"You were right here, you were right in front of me, Eirene... and I almost killed you. What have I done?"
The wind offerred no answers, carrying only the faint, distant echo of my sobbing as I flew further and further away into the safety of the lonely, freezing night.