At the computer, Slady typed without stopping. He watched Elisa and Shaphira get ready. the younger one adjusted the sword in her hands before fastening it to her waist, while the older one stretched, her eyes briefly meeting his. On a tab of a scientific organization's website, he deleted what he had written and closed the computer. He straightened his coat and walked over to them.
Were they excited for their first mission in an Inferius? Shaphira nodded repeatedly. Elisa shrugged. He offered to help, but they refused, insisting they could handle it. So he told them to go to a low ranked Inferius, to search for Renkata and destroy the core, and above all, to search for Renkata. They agreed. He told them to be careful.
Once they left, Slady clasped his hands behind his back and paced back and forth inside the library. His instincts told him something was wrong. Even trusting the training he had given them, some part of him warned that he would need to step in.
***
Elisa walked with her chest raised. Shaphira had taken her Renkai Creature form. Both kept glancing around in every direction, their heartbeats rising and falling now and then.
Stepping into the shadow of the trees, they found a portal. There were no demons around. They went in.
Their vision blurred for a few seconds before revealing an Infernal Inferius. Elisa let out a gasp, eyes wide, pressing her forearm to her brow, startled by the heat. Shaphira only shook out the fur along her body.
Walking forward, the two took stock of the demons scattered through the dimension. Elisa fused her sword with blood. Shaphira crouched, Renkai Energy radiating from her body, her muscles going rigid, her claws growing longer and sharper. Without hesitation, she charged. Elisa followed.
There were countless cuts. Elisa formed small blades that dissolved as they struck the demons, blood seeping into their flesh, and with a sweeping motion of her free hand, dozens of spikes pierced them from the inside out. Shaphira leapt onto them, tearing into their flesh. Renkai Creatures rushed toward her, but her tail lashed out, reducing them to nothing more than heaps of meat.
Within minutes, though, both of them had already fallen. Elisa spotted the pulsing core and suggested they ignore the demons entirely. Shaphira agreed, pulling her up by the teeth and settling Elisa's arm across her own back. Elisa climbed on, gripping the fur tightly, and told her to run.
The speed forced her to hold on harder, hair whipping in the wind. She swung her sword, taunting the monsters. They gave chase, getting cut down or trampled along the way. Shaphira leapt across wide chasms of lava, climbed a rocky rise, jumped, and swallowed a demonic bird whole.
As if fate found it fitting, the dimension shook. From the magma, a centipede emerged, countless teeth filling a mouth that looked capable of swallowing whole mountains. Elisa's sword slipped from her hand at the same moment the creature slipped from Shaphira's jaws.
That same centipede, however, was cut clean in half. Its mouth nearly closed on Shaphira's legs, sending her crashing to the ground. Elisa was thrown from her back, tumbling across the floor until she reached another chasm covered in lava, and fell.
Something caught her. The figure landed against a wall of rock, drove her sword into it, and climbed slowly to the top, her body heavy with armor letting out brief grunts as her long red hair caught on the jagged points of stone. Reaching the top, the woman laid Elisa on a stone slab and, slowly, turned her neck to face Shaphira.
In the blink of an eye, she was already before her. She spun her blade with skill, catching it against flames, and with it sliced a round of ammunition in half.
At the top of a lifeless tree, Slady lowered his pistol. He thanked her honestly for saving Elisa's life, since he would have hated to have to end the expedition so soon. But watching the one who had saved her also try to kill his daughter was both contradictory and unforgivable.
The woman said she meant no harm, that she was simply carrying out a task, and added that he would be next.
Standing across from her, Slady began circling. She did the same, her red eyes locked on his single grey one. He asked her reasons. Even she didn't know. She went so far as to apologize, but said she wouldn't waste any more time talking, and lunged. He did too. The woman braced against her blade and kicked. Slady blocked with his mechanical arm, and the impact sent Shaphira's body skidding back.
He caught her leg and slammed it against the ground. She yanked her arm free, her feet locking around his neck, hurling him toward the chasm. In the same instant, he ran to the edge. There was nothing there.
Suddenly, an explosion at his back singed the heavy armor. A mechanical claw latched onto her waist, and Slady reached her, driving a punch into her chest and sending her plunging into the orange liquid below. Without hesitation, he climbed back up the chasm using his mechanical arm, caught Elisa with the iron limb, and that same claw wrapped around Shaphira. In one burst, he sprinted at full speed, crossing the entire Inferius in seconds.
Facing the portal, he prepared to leave. But the ground beneath his feet split open, a crack revealing fire below. With that, he threw the girls toward the portal. Both vanished, and the portal sliced itself in half just as he dodged aside.
He only had time to mutter about how strange that attack had been before he was seized by the throat. The woman was there, unharmed. Her voice came out colder than before. there was something about him that interested whoever had sent her, some technology he wasn't letting anyone see.
She tore off his eyepatch and forced the eyelid open with her nails. A mechanical eye. A reddish glow in the darkness.
Her eyes widened. That was it? She murmured to herself about how useful it might be, she'd seen stranger things. But she fell silent when she felt something cold at her own neck. not one or two, but five of those same claws. Two points aimed at her eyes, one at her back, one at her chest, and another against her temple.
Slady apologized too. But she needed to die with that secret.
Everything closed in. In a motion too fast even for the iron eye to catch, she cut him clean in half with her blade. But she was pierced as well. She managed to partially dodge the ones aimed at her eyes and temple, but her midsection was run through.
Both fell to the ground, paralyzed. The woman tried to breathe, but nothing came. Slady tried to move, but nothing obeyed. There was, however, one thing the same in both of them. their vision. Hers darkened gradually, while his, flooded with countless streams of information from the mechanical eye, made him see reality in its most exposed form, revealing to him even the atoms themselves. His mind boiled over, everything lost its color and broke down before going dark entirely.
And the first thing he heard, in the nothing he now saw, was a welcome greeting.
After two centuries, Slady had finally returned to his true home.
***
The image of a room formed in his mind. A weight seemed missing from his face. He touched his eyelid and one of them sank inward, his heart giving a harder beat. He looked around. The red haired woman sat against a wall, wrists and legs bound in chains.
He tried to move and stood, but fell. A tearing sensation ran from his hips up to the top of his back, a groan escaping him. He tried to move his mechanical arm. There was none, only a stump. He then moved his human arm to his own back, and the feel of stitched skin made his eyes go wide.
Her voice echoed out. she hadn't wanted to cause any of that, but they had forced her. Slady didn't return the look. It was too late for apologies, she was the one who had put him there, the fault was hers. She didn't defend herself, but argued she hadn't meant to kill Shaphira, only to place her there. To hurt her, then? Then let her kill her.
The red haired woman only lowered her head.
Slady sat cross legged, feeling the cold air make his skin shiver. Seconds passed without a word, until he asked what would happen next. According to her, they would be used until they wore out and placed in a simulation where they would be pushed to their limits, until the next time they were called upon.
How right she turned out to be.
In the days that followed, Slady was taken to rooms where the cold eyes of men and women watched him. Naked, he was touched and injected with substances that made him vomit, lose consciousness, lose his strength. Impressive, they said. His blood had been so altered over the years that not even the most intense Renkai Energy could push him into the Sin Test.
Afterward, he was dumped back into the room. Alone this time. The air grew colder little by little. He curled in on himself, shivering, feeling tears run from his one eye. He stayed like that until everything went dark.
More tests. More pain. More praise.
How could they have imagined the "failure" would turn into something so unique, so perfect.
Everything repeated. No hours to count, no days to orient himself by. It felt like years there, even if it was probably only a matter of days.
At another point, he found himself in the room where the red haired woman was kept. She was crouched in the corner, gripping her own hair, sobbing. Slady dragged himself over and asked what had happened. She turned toward him, eyes full of tears. they had put her back in that place again, with more monsters, as punishment for not winning the fight, for forcing them to burn themselves alive to rescue her.
He let out a sigh. Maybe it was routine by now. She agreed, but this time they had really hurt her. He said he was sorry. She said she didn't want his apology, that she deserved it, that it was the punishment she deserved. And she lay down on the floor, red hair spreading out around her, her sobs growing louder.
Slady moved closer and tried to touch her shoulder. She spun around and, in the blink of an eye, was on top of him, her eyes unfocused, her fists clenched.
And blood sprayed across the whole room.
The scientists murmured among themselves. What they had done to him was ugly. his face covered in purple bruises, a tooth missing, his nose nearly caved into his own face. One of them, a woman in a tight skirt, crossed her arms in front of Slady and said he had probably made the mistake of touching her. And, with a laugh, admitted she couldn't blame him. After all, the simulators had made her that way. Efficient.
Later, in the red haired woman's room, wearing hardly any clothes, he found her quiet, watching him with her eyes shining. She spoke to herself under her breath, saying she hated all of it, that she was sorry, that there had been no malice in what she'd done. In the end, Slady's cracked lips moved. he wanted peace, asked her to stop talking.
And that was what she did.
One day, a woman entered the room calling out the name Ferinish, and also "failure". When she turned on the light, there was no one in front of her. Then she felt her own neck seized by hands with sharp nails. From the scientist's throat came only a broken voice. how had she done that?
It was a wish, Ferinish said. She had seen that, because of them, she had hurt someone who didn't deserve it.
Her eyes were red, not the natural color they always were, but the red of someone who had forced herself to stay awake when the gas that always came at midnight arrived to put her to sleep. She was already tired of it. And seeing someone else suffer the same made her see, too fast and too far, exactly who she truly wanted to see dead.
Silence followed. She looked at Slady, unconscious, and reached out her hand, hesitating, but slowly wrapped him in her arms. Instinct told her to crush him right there, but she clenched her teeth and held back.
She began running through the corridors, her heart pounding faster. When she struck down those who had held her captive, they looked like worms beneath her feet. Weak. Human. For the first time, she felt a real urge to run, not out of stubbornness, but because she truly wanted freedom.
Even so, the further she went, the more the laboratory revealed itself as a maze. Countless traps. Finding her sword among them, she leapt so high that the endless blades couldn't reach her. From that point on, what had once seemed unbreakable began to melt before the flames of her sword.
But when a massive corridor opened before her, a voice system announced self destruction.
Nine.
She ran as fast as she could, hot trails forming beneath her feet on the floor, yet the exit seemed to keep getting farther away.
Eight. Seven. Six.
Several wires wrapped around her body, unbearably rigid. She began cutting through them without pause.
Five. Four. Three.
She destroyed them and reached the door.
Two.
But something slipped from her arms. Slady had been dragged away by the wires.
One.
Zero.
The last thing she saw was her vision turning white, a sound ringing through her ears as her body was hurled meters away, buried under a layer of snow.
***
When she woke before the flames, Ferinish began to shake. Her fingers dug into the white layers around her, her eyes filling with tears in dry sockets. She whispered that it was a lie, that it couldn't be true. But the flames only grew hotter the longer she stayed nearby.
She screamed Slady's name. Nothing answered. Only the sound of everything melting echoed in her ears.
Then she pulled back, curling her legs against her chest. At some point, she was no longer there.
Walking among trees whose leaves let white flakes fall onto her reddish hair, Ferinish leaned against one of them. The images of the man she had once attacked, and who was now the reason for everything, wouldn't leave her mind. Why had she done that? Why had it taken her so long to want to run? Why had that man made her start thinking about freedom in the first place?
She crouched down, rubbed her eyes, wiped the tears from her face. Why think about it now, it was already too late. In the end, she rested her head against the snow, staring up at the trees. There was no sun in the clouded sky. The only sound was the rustling of leaves. She closed her eyes for a moment, and there wasn't even a chance to picture anything. she simply fell asleep.
A reality took shape in her mind. She was back in that capsule. A faceless man closed the glass around her. She tried to say something, but nothing came out. She tried to move, nothing obeyed. Her bare skin exposed before the man, who pressed a few buttons and said his goodbyes to her.
Wishing her a good night.
The straps connected to her head, and once more, she fell asleep. In the very next instant, she opened her eyes and was inside an Inferius, submerged in a sea that made her muscles seize, that made her scream, water flooding her throat and, finally, her lungs.
Her vision darkened once more. Enormous creatures sank alongside her, their icy limbs dissolving in the water. Once again. A thought echoed through her mind. she couldn't die, she wasn't allowed to. And her body began to move on instinct, as if it belonged to someone else.
She emerged, vomiting water onto the icy ground. She rose, Renkata's armor clanging against it. And before her lay a furry creature, standing between five and six meters tall, smiling down at her, claws growing slowly out from its thick paws.
What followed, she was destroyed in countless ways. She cut, she leveled entire mountains, she destroyed cores. Only more monsters kept appearing, always the same, making her scream, roll her eyes back, cry out for help.
How much time passed through all that. She wasn't sure. Days, weeks, months, years, perhaps.
All that was certain was that, waking again, different faces greeted her. The ones who had once held her captive already had wrinkled skin, or were no longer there at all. They gave her no time to think. They fitted her into the armor, gave the command, and her numbed mind obeyed. Whenever she tried to fight back, somehow they put her back in there again, even if it cost a few of them their lives in the process. She always came back, always worse than the last time.
When she noticed, small stretches of time whispered during her rare moments of awareness carried, in the voice of whoever spoke them, something like dread. Ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred years. The last time she heard a number, it was two hundred.
And, perhaps only a few years after that, the mission to capture a man and his daughter landed in her hands. She didn't hesitate. The fight had been harder than she ever imagined. And, when she returned to the laboratory, the man wore the same look she did whenever she caught her own reflection, on the rare occasions she saw it. empty. Only empty.
Now, suddenly, warmth pulled her awake. Beneath her lay a wooden floor free of dust. She sat up slowly, taking in the room. Food covered in flies and larvae, dark greenish liquid staining the bathroom toilet. But there was a body beside her.
A body dark as charcoal, lying chest down against the floor. A stitched back, short dark hair, and only a familiar pair of short pants.
When recognition hit her, her eyes went wide, and she whispered his name.
Slady.
***
In a kingdom, a woman walked through the palace, her hair a mix of white and pale blue swaying against her back. A spear of ice steadied in her hand until she opened the door with a gentle touch.
On the throne sat another woman, an icy crown resting on her head. Her eyes looked like a fragment, the pupil resembling an asterisk with sharp points at its center.
The woman with the spear knelt, her voice leaving her mouth in smoke. Her majesty needed to know that, near the kingdom, she had spotted two figures. One of them, strangely dark, as though charred, was dragging the other by the feet. The last place they had been seen was a cabin. With that, she asked what should be done.
The queen didn't hesitate. It didn't matter who they were. investigate them. If there was any refusal or complaint, kill them.