The flames surrounded the children.
Their screams had long since swallowed the night.
Lina was still crying — silently now, because she had no air left for sound. Only her mother's face in her memory, and the fire drawing closer, and the ropes at her wrists that would not give.
She looked up at the sky. One last time. Not hoping. Just looking.
And saw her. Her mother, Alice.
A shape tearing through the smoke — wings spread wide, gold burning at their edges, dropping from the darkness with the velocity of something that had decided, completely and finally, that nothing was going to stop it.
In her awakened form.
She saw everything in a single sweep. The children were tied to pillars. The fire. The circle. The Order members at its edge are already turning toward her.
SNAP!
"Wiatr."
The wind came — not a gust, not a breeze. A wall of compressed air, moving outward from her palm in every direction at once. It hit the fire like a sentence hitting its period. Every tongue of flame around every pillar extinguished in a single rolling wave. The smoke was driven upward. The heat ripped away and was replaced, instantly, with cold night air.
Silence.
The kind that happens after too much sound, when the ears don't know what to do with the absence of it.
Every child looked up.
Through the clearing smoke, Alice descended into the marketplace — wings burning gold, chains orbiting her like living things, her burned hand healed, her eyes open.
"MAMA!"
Lina's voice. Everywhere.
It hit Alice in the chest like a hand reaching in. She was already moving — chains summoned, swinging, cutting toward the Order members at speed — when she felt it, the relief so sharp it almost broke her stride.
She's alive. She's alive.
Jezebel watched from across the circle. Cold face. Still eyes. She raised one finger.
Barnabas moved.
He appeared in mid-air directly in Alice's path — no warning, no sound — and his hand closed around her throat before she could read what was happening. The grip was absolute. She couldn't breathe. Her wings stuttered. The chains began to dissolve.
Her hands found his wrist. She pulled. She drove a needle, burst point-blank into his forearm with her free hand.
He didn't release.
His red eyes looked down at her — not angry, not excited. The expression of a man completing a task.
He drove her into the stone with his full force.
The crater opened beneath her. Dust and debris exploded outward. The children screamed.
Lina stared at her mother's body in the rubble.
The ropes at her wrists. The pillar at her back. Twenty feet of distance that might as well have been twenty miles.
Mama!
The word didn't come out. It existed somewhere behind her sternum — pressing upward, finding nothing, unable to get through the shock that had sealed her throat. She had screamed it seconds ago, and now she couldn't even form it into sound.
Mama?
Barnabas rose from the crater and dusted himself off.
"Our ritual will continue."
The Order members repositioned. Nina still hung from the pillar beside her, barely breathing. The little girl whose father had died tonight was crying without making any sound at all.
The mages snapped their fingers. A fireball formed.
But at the time, Lina's lips moved.
"Death Crow."
She raised her eyes.
At the centre of the circle, Jezebel was watching her. Had been watching her. Something shifted in her expression — not much, barely anything. A flicker.
Then Jezebel's legs gave out.
She hit the ground on both knees, her sword arm dropping to catch her balance, her body doing something it had absolutely no explanation for. It moved through her like cold water — not pain, not injury — something older than both. Something that lived in the part of her that existed before her training, before her lord, before everything she had been built into.
Fear.
She was afraid.
She, who had watched a village burn and felt only satisfaction. She, who had stood in the ruins of things she had made and recited doctrine over them and meant every word. She was kneeling in the dirt of a burning marketplace, and her hands were shaking, and she could not understand why.
What is this?
Her eyes found Lina — small, twelve years old, and something around her that the firelight couldn't explain and didn't belong to.
It must be a mana effect. A technique. Something she's channelling—
The ropes burned away in black flame.
Lina's irises turned dark red.
Dark mana rose from her body like smoke rising from embers. Particles gathered in her hands — slowly, deliberately — and took shape. A scythe formed in her grip.
She screamed.
The sound was not human. It tore through the marketplace — through smoke and fire and chaos — and the blood came first from the Order members' ears, then from Jezebel's nose and eyes. It crossed the distance between the eastern and western quarters and struck the residential side like a wave.
In the far residential part, Oliver grabbed the nearest wall to stop himself from falling.
"We have to go there," he said. "Now."
The scream was so loud that it echoed across the valley. At that moment, a traveller was passing through, and he wondered, "What is that noise?"
The traveller was riding a white horse with wings. Suddenly, a green light illuminated from his old pouch nearby.
"How?" he was shocked.
He opened the pouch, revealing a glowing artefact resembling the green glassy piece. It was similar to the green artefact in Amilia's house—a part of the globe. The traveller looked closely at it, surprised. "I didn't expect to find the vesal is here."
It indicates something.
In the western part.
Lina's body changed. She grew. The twelve-year-old girl was gone. The person standing in the circle of dead fires looked twenty years old — dark mana swirling around her, scythe in hand, dark red eyes open and seeing everything.
The Order members attacked all at once.
One slash. Four of them are dead.
A member cast "Zartz." Lina stopped — completely, mid-motion, as something had simply removed the command to move from her body. He walked toward her slowly, drew his knife, and reached forward to finish it.
She moved.
A vertical slash. The sharp edge of the scythe caught his chin. His head came off with the spinal cord still attached.
Lina stood covered in blood.
The remaining Order members looked at each other.
Then they ran.
One of them, fleeing, threw a fireball back at the children.
It struck an invisible barrier and died.
Jezebel couldn't breathe. The pain in her skull was unbearable. Blood dripped steadily from her ear, her nose, onto the stone. She looked up at the portal hanging over the marketplace — looked at it for a long moment — and then faded out and was gone.
One Order member circled behind her while she was facing the others.
He raised his blade and drove it into her back.
Lina didn't react.
No flinch. No stumble. No sound.
The member stood behind her, blade still in his grip, waiting for something to happen.
Lina turned her head and looked at him over her shoulder.
The fear that rose inside him in that moment was not something he had felt before. Not in any raid. Not in any battle. His body understood something his mind hadn't caught up to yet.
In a fraction of a second, his hand was gone.
He didn't see how. He looked at where it had been, and it simply wasn't there anymore. Then the pain arrived.
Lina turned fully and gave him one slash.
He stopped making noise.
The others didn't run yet. They came at her together — four of them, from different angles, blades and mana both.
She moved through them.
One slash took two across the chest. A second slash caught the third at the neck. The fourth got his shield up in time, and it held for exactly one moment before the scythe went through it and through him.
She was completely calm.
One member tried to flee, got three steps, and didn't make the fourth.
Another cast something — a binding spell, threads of mana wrapping her legs. She looked down at it. She took one step forward, and the threads snapped.
He ran.
She closed the distance before he reached the edge of the marketplace.
One by one, she moved through the rest of them. No rush. No expression. Dark mana trailing behind her scythe in the air like smoke, the blood on her face and arms catching the firelight.
When it was over, the marketplace was very quiet.
Lina stood in the centre of it, scythe at her side, and she was breathing slowly.
Lina killed the last of them.
The marketplace went silent.
Then Barnabas arrived.
He stepped into the zone and felt it immediately — the barrier. He scanned the ground. Found the body of his Order member, cut cleanly in half at the waist, the eyes sliced out of the head with surgical precision. He looked at it for a moment.
His face stayed calm.
He cast "Telesper." His claws came forward and cut through the barrier, opening a seam. He stepped through.
He found Lina.
She was standing in the centre of the bodies, covered head to foot in blood, the scythe hanging at her side. She turned and looked at him.
Her anger rose in revenge.
She moved first.
Barnabas stepped aside, reading every swing without hurry. She was fast — genuinely fast — and he gave her that without condescension. He simply moved around it. She drove the scythe at his chest, and he stepped out of its arc like a man who had already seen this particular motion ten thousand times.
From above, through the portal, silver spears rained down — a cascade of light striking Lina from every angle.
Everyone of them stopped.
Like they had hit a stone, she didn't flinch. Didn't even look up.
They fought across the eastern part — through the ruins of stalls, around the pillars, over cracked stone. She swung, and he read it. He struck, and her dark mana shield absorbed it. Neither of them slowed. The scythe left grooves in the stone where it missed him. His strikes left burns where they landed. The fight was long and brutal, and neither of them was done.
Then something changed in Barnabas.
He stopped moving. His body began to shift — cracking at the joints, expanding, the beginning of something larger. His eyes went up to the portal.
The portal looked back.
Something came out of it — not a person, not a weapon — and wrapped around him. He didn't resist. He looked down at Lina one final time.
Then the portal pulled him through and closed.
Oliver and the hunters arrived at the marketplace's edge.
They stopped.
The hunters raised their bows in a single motion — mana arrows already formed, aimed at the figure in the centre of the carnage. Covered in blood. Scythe in hand.
"Stop."
Oliver stepped in front of them.
He walked forward alone, slowly, through the ruined marketplace. He catalogued it as he moved: the Order member bodies, the marks on the stone, the barrier patterns, the children still tied to their pillars — alive, unhurt, every single one.
He stopped in front of her.
Lina looked up at him. The dark red was still in her eyes, but her voice, when it came, was small. Very small.
"Where is Mama?"
Her voice was trembling.