"Mivelle...!"
"Oh, my. Vine~" said the woman standing before Aim.
Vine raised her cane.
She did not rush. That was the worst of it — the unhurried way she lifted the catalyst, as though she had all the time the world could offer and meant to spend it cruelly. The cane swept, and a wall of force cracked out of the air and slammed into the barrier of light around Mivelle.
A hairline fracture spidered across it.
She swept again. Crack. The fracture forked.
Again. Crack. And again, each blow landing in its own deliberate beat, each one driving the splinter deeper through the shell of light — patient, methodical, a woman knocking politely on a door she fully intended to tear off its hinges.
"What — what is this, Miss Vine!"
The shockwaves kept coming.
At this rate Sol might get caught in it too—!
The barrier groaned. The cracks ran together into a single fatal web, and on the next blow the whole shell of light shattered like struck glass and rained down into nothing.
"Stop — please!"
Aim threw himself forward. He put his body between the cane and Mivelle on pure animal instinct — and Vine's force took him full in the chest and pinned him to the wall, his ribs creaking, a cry torn out of him.
But she had pulled the blow. Her hand had checked at the last instant. He hung there, crushed but whole.
"Oh, Vine, dear."
Mivelle's voice slid sweet through the dust.
"Your little friends will throw themselves down for me even now~"
"Not my friend."
Something surged through the air toward Mivelle. A longsword — Vine's longsword, flickering into being from nowhere — punched clean through Mivelle's arm and pinned it to the wall.
What welled from the wound was not blood.
It was gas. A thin pale vapor that hissed out of the wound and dissolved into the air, leaving nothing behind.
Ah— ow... that hurts...
Aim blinked, his eyes straining to adjust, the light-threads swimming in front of him through the lens—
—and beneath the lens he saw it: fine threads bleeding upward off Mivelle's body, all of them flowing the same way, all of them streaming up toward some single point in the sky.
"You know it's pointless to kill me, don't you, Vine dear~"
"What do you want."
She closed her hand tighter around Mivelle's throat — without heat, without hurry — until the bone gave with an audible snap.
"My, my. So rough, dear Vine..."
The neck twitched, and began — slowly, wetly — to right itself.
"And what you know about what I done, hm~? Besides stirring up your little Council, and your Sanctuary. What. Else."
A laugh, melancholy and soft all at once.
"How disappointing~ that this is all you've worked out."
Aim's stomach turned. The threads. The gas. The neck. She isn't—she can't be killed—
"Now then. There's ever so much fun to be had~"
Mivelle lifted a finger.
In a single blink Vine severed all four of her limbs clean from her body.
"That won't do you any good~"
New limbs unfolded from Mivelle's back — and the light around her flared, sudden and blinding, white as a struck match.
"Shit—!"
Vine's hand stabbed through the air, reaching for a shard of broken mirror on the floor.
The new limbs were not shaped like a human's. They had not grown to strike. They had grown to hold — and they wrapped around Vine, fast, coiling, locking her in place.
Mivelle smiled. It was the most horrible thing in the room — wide, fond, delighted — and she met Vine's eyes as it spread.
And the composed woman's eyes — the eyes that never widened, never startled, never gave anything away —
— flew open.
A detonation of light. A blast of sound and force so violent that Aim, halfway across the room and near the mirror, was thrown flat before his world guttered out into black.
When it cleared, both of them were gone.
Into the mirror.
The silence dropped all at once.
"...All right. Sol. Sol—"
Aim crawled toward the still green-haired shape on the floor, slow, every joint screaming.
"S-Sol—" He gathered her up and held her against him. "Don't you dare—"
A burst of light, sudden and close. The sound of a body hurled hard enough to crack against stone.
As the glare faded it revealed her — Vine, white hair loose, blood at the corner of her mouth, one hand locked white-knuckled around the longsword before it folded back down into a cane.
Two figures had come out of the mirror.
Pant. Pant.
Aim tightened his arms around Isolde.
"It's going to be fine, it's going to be fine, it's going to be fine—" he was shaking.
"I told you, Vine~" Mivelle breathed, ragged, grinning. "Would have recovered faster if you abandon that pathetic human form."
Her breath came hard and fast. Under the torn sleeve, the skin of her burned-black arm was knitting itself closed, new flesh creeping over the char.
"What. Do. You. Want."
The broken neck of the woman in black ticked, twitched, and slid back into place.
"Mmm~ none of this is what I want, dear—"
Her eyes fixed on Vine.
"Quit your bullshit!"
"Oh, but it's true. It belongs to them."
"...Whose then."
"Terminus."
"What kind of retarded egoistic fourteen years old boy name is that." The words came level — too level, the calm pulled tight over something that had gone very cold underneath. "There hasn't been a new god level in three hundred years. Not one."
There was no shouting in it. Vine did not shout. But the temperature of the room seemed to drop a degree with every word, and that was worse.
Then they were moving again, and there was no more talking.
The cane became a longsword. Vine stepped in.
A thrust — Mivelle threw up a wall of light. The blade did not strike it. It bent around it, the form folding mid-motion into a low cut that opened Mivelle's thigh before the barrier had finished forming.
Stone tore up from the floor at a flick of Vine's hand and hammered into Mivelle's back. She staggered a step. She was already smiling.
Mivelle answered the only way she knew — a raw, flat slab of force, no shape to it, just pressure, the will of a god deciding the air itself should crush. It came fast and it came hard and at a distance it was nearly enough.
Vine did not block it. She was not there. She had expected it the instant before it formed and was already three steps left, threads spilling off her fingers in a fan, each one snapping taut around a limb, a throat, an ankle—
Mivelle broke them with a second wall and shoved out another slab of force, and for a moment, across the room, the two of them were even — crude weight against impossible craft, the god who only knew how to push against the woman who knew a thousand ways to cut.
Then Vine closed the distance, and the evenness ended.
Up close there was no room for Mivelle's blunt pressure to build. Vine was inside it, under it, the longsword a blur of forms too clean to follow — parry, riposte, a throw that put Mivelle through a pillar — and Mivelle took all of it, every cut, every break, with that same fond, unhurried smile, as though none of it touched the thing she had actually come to do.
"Go on, go on!" Mivelle crowed. "I've already sent people to scatter shards all over Thalassia!"
"Ahahaha — ahaha — AHAHAHA!" — still trading blows, light cracking off light—
"Oh, a body-hopper like you," Vine said, "I'll just follow you to Thalassia and kill every single vessel you've got there."
"Be my guest, dear Vine~!"
The barrier broke. Vine closed the distance.
Mivelle struck back — a wild clumsy swing, more flailing than form — and Vine slipped it, flowed past it to the far side, and lunged in again.
"What are you planning! Just to waste my time?! Well?!"
Her hand clamped around Mivelle's throat. The woman's whole bearing stayed loose, easy, unbothered.
"How many times have we fought now, Vine~ You know by now I don't really die."
And Mivelle's halo blazed white again.
"Hahaha — the people close to Flaure, the Eastern District, the Western District — I've made arrangements everywhere. Choose, Vine. Choose—!"
"Flaure—?!"
The longsword stopped.
For the length of a breath Vine was not fighting at all — her head had turned a fraction toward the wall, toward the city, toward the one name in the world that could turn it. Her guard hung open. Half an inch. A door left ajar.
A corrupted Entity came screaming in at Vine, impossibly fast.
She dodged.
And in that half-second Mivelle slipped the grip, dropped free — Vine's gaze stayed locked, fixed, hunting her — and Mivelle smiled, leaned back, and snapped her own neck and folded to the floor.
A second Entity arrived to join the first.
Those things—! Aim's fear was a dry, wordless thing, too large to name.
The two of them presented themselves, aligning in the air before Vine.
Vine raised the cane. She began to cast — something heavy, something meant to crush them flat before they could so much as move—
—but then.
[ Authority of Time ]
What — what is that — no — don't—! Aim's mind scrabbled.
The composed woman went still. Her eyes held, wide and unmoving.
Mm... four hundred years, easy as that... it seems... the grave and quiet woman thought, and her gaze slid down, slow, slow.
[ Sovereignty of Samsara ]
—Ah— / —Ah—
The same word, in two different minds, for the last time.
And both Aim's eyes and Vine's snapped to the source of the current — followed it up, and up, toward where it came from before the light stop moving toward their pupil—
Outside the wall. The Eastern reach of Orenthel.
"Why does it have to be tonight..." A small voice, hitching. "Couldn't we have told them first..."
Sniffling.
"I don't want to kill anyone anymore."
"We can't, Sister Sylvia? Brother Sean?"
A heavy breath. "We have to protect the ones at the House first. You know that."
The words struck Seir across the face like a hand.
"...Please, Brother Sean?"
"We can't—"
A scream. Blood, thrown in a wide arc. Something tore its way out of Sean's body — and then his organs, his limbs, began to twitch on their own.
Seir and Sylvia clung to each other, shaking.
"... L-Lady Mivelle...?"
Organs, bone, the whole architecture of him cracking and reknitting, twisting, restructuring — until in Sean's place stood a young woman, perfect and whole, a halo drifting above her.
Her eyes rolled down to the girl with the autumn-orange hair.
"Seir. Now—"