Nakime P.O.V.
For over four hundred years, my entire world was a box.
Even though it was an infinitely shifting multidimensional box, it was still a box. The Infinity Castle was my domain, my sanctuary, and my prison. I controlled every single wooden plank, every tatami mat, and every sliding shoji door inside that place, but I could never, ever step outside of it during the day.
The sun had slowly become a myth to me. It was a terrifying executioner that hung in the sky, promising agonising death to anyone unfortunate enough to carry Muzan Kibutsuji's cursed blood.
Even just a few minutes ago, stepping through that dimensional door to grab John had resulted in my skin literally boiling off my bones. The agony had been blinding but I was willing to endure it, I was willing to burn to ash just to make sure the man I loved was still breathing after following a madman through the infinite and incredibly dangerous Multiverse. It was irrational, I know. I just wanted to verify with my own two hands, to feel his heart beating beneath my palms, and take in his scent despite the agony.
But John's incredible powers had done the impossible once again.
John's sphere of shadows slowly began to retract. The liquid darkness pulled back, sinking into the bedrock and sliding back toward his feet like water swirling down a drain.
I held my breath. I couldn't help it. You don't just shake off the trauma of four centuries in a few seconds. My shoulders tensed so hard they physically ached as my muscles braced for that familiar hiss of my flesh turning to ash. I finally squeezed my eye shut, waiting for the burning.
The light hit my face.
It was… warm.
I slowly, hesitantly opened my eyes.
Wait. Eyes. Plural.
I blinked. My depth perception, which had been skewed for centuries ever since I mutated into a cyclops, was suddenly flawless. I brought both of my trembling hands up to my face, tracing the bridge of my nose, feeling the soft skin, and then my fingertips brushed against my eyelashes. Two eyes. I had two perfectly normal eyes.
I looked at my hands in the bright mid-afternoon sunlight.
Nothing happened.
There was no smoke, agonizing pain or desperate, runaway cellular regeneration trying to outpace my own destruction. It just felt like a gentle, comforting blanket of heat wrapping around my shoulders.
I reached up and touched the Green Spider Lily tucked delicately behind my ear. It pulsed softly against my skin, a tiny heartbeat of the impossible. John had really done it!. He had taken the impossible dream of Muzan and achieved it so effortlessly and completely purged the curse that deformed me.
He had made me perfect.
I looked up at him. He was floating a few inches off the pulverized ground, his sharp purple-and-black suit slightly dusted with mountain debris. He was looking down at me with this ridiculously proud grin on his face.
"Not bad, right?" John asked casually, as if he hadn't just performed a miracle. "The vitamin D is great for the skin. Highly recommend it."
I couldn't help but laugh.
It wasn't a polite giggle or a reserved, elegant chuckle. It was a real, genuine laugh that bubbled up from deep within my chest, far from my usual stoic composure. It felt utterly alien, but at the same time, it was the most freeing sensation I had ever experienced.
I remembered our dates. I giggled, remembering how insecure I had felt, and how even after multiple attempts, our dates were always interrupted. I remembered how protective he had been, holding a frilly parasol over my head, terrified that a single stray beam of light would hurt me
But I wasn't fragile anymore.
I stepped forward, walking directly into the brightest patch of sunlight I could find, and stood by his side. I wasn't hiding in his shadow. I wasn't trapped in a pocket dimension waiting for him to call me. I was standing right next to him.
"It's beautiful," I whispered, looking around.
The landscape of Mount Rushmore was an absolute disaster. The mountain's faces were reduced to fine gravel, entire forests were flattened into splinters, and the air smelled like copper, blood, and ozone. But the sky above was a brilliant blue. I hadn't seen a sky like that since I was a human.
"Yeah, well, the view's about to get a little messy again," John said, jerking his thumb toward the massive crater behind us. "We still have a pest control issue."
I turned my attention back to the battlefield. General Kregg and about two dozen elite Viltrumite warriors were still locked in a brutal match with Thokk and the seventeen Evil Invincible variants. The Viltrumites had realized that punching the shadows was pointless since they just reformed, so they were currently using their overwhelming physical strength to pin the immortal teenagers to the dirt, trying to wait out John's mana reserves.
"Allow me," I said softly.
I raised my hand and summoned my biwa. The familiar weight of the wooden instrument grounded me. But as my fingers brushed against the strings, I realized the miraculous effects of the Green Spider Lily had also shattered the ceiling of my demonic lineage.
With Muzan Kibutsuji gone, and my cells perfected beyond any biological limitation…I was stronger, much stronger..
I was a Queen. The Demon Queen.
A surge of absolute, intoxicating confidence washed over me. I held out my free hand toward a group of three Viltrumites who were currently trying to physically tear a shadow Mark's head off his neck while the shadow cursed at them.
Twang.
I struck the biwa with my wooden pick.
The space didn't warp the way I was used it, it fractured violently. A massive, intricately carved wooden pillar erupted horizontally out of the solid bedrock beneath them. It slammed into the three Viltrumites with the force of a speeding bullet train. The impact knocked them completely off the shadow, sending the three pristine, white-suited warriors tumbling through the dirt like bowling pins.
Before they could recover their bearings, plant their feet, or take flight, I tapped into my newly perfected cellular control.
I didn't need the Infinity Castle to fight for me anymore.
My sleeves tore open at the seams. From my forearms, half a dozen thick, jagged whips erupted, lined with barbed bone, and at the end of each whip was a snapping, razor-toothed mouth. It was Muzan's ultimate offensive combat form, but flowing with my own refined, elegant control.
The whips shot across the crater faster than the Viltrumite eye could track.
One of the spine-whips wrapped tightly around a Viltrumite's throat, the barbed bone digging incredibly deep into his nearly impenetrable skin. He grunted in surprise, his hands flying up to grab the fleshy appendage to tear it off. But before he could snap it, the jaw at the end of the whip opened wide and bit down hard directly into his shoulder, its fangs piercing his flesh.
"Let's see how your perfect empire handles a little foreign blood," I murmured, my eyes narrowing.
I pumped a highly concentrated dose of my perfected demon blood directly into his circulatory system through the bite.
Normally, when a human receives a high dose of demon blood, one of two things happens: they either mutate into a powerful, bloodthirsty demon, or their human cells completely collapse under the biological strain, melting them into a puddle of useless, quivering flesh.
I wanted to see what would happen to an alien conqueror.
The Viltrumite froze mid-struggle as his eyes went completely wide, the sclera turning pitch black as the veins in his neck and face bulged outward, glowing with a sickly, violent violet hue.
He let out a bloodcurdling, agonized scream that echoed across the ruined mountain.
From what John had explained to me about this universe, Viltrumites possessed something called 'Smart Atoms'. Their genetic code was so stubbornly resilient and incredibly adaptive that it aggressively, violently rejected any foreign mutation or virus trying to rewrite it.
And it rejected my demon blood with absolute prejudice.
The Viltrumite's body began to physically war with itself on a subatomic level. His skin blistered and cracked, glowing with an intense, blinding internal heat. His own Smart Atoms were essentially waging a runaway thermonuclear war against the demonic cells trying to rewrite his DNA. The friction of the cellular rejection was generating unimaginable temperatures.
"GAAAAAH!" he roared, falling to his knees and clutching his chest as smoke began to pour out of his mouth and eyes.
But my blood was perfect now. It was stubborn and fought back against the Smart Atoms, forcing a partial mutation. For just a brief yet terrible second, the Viltrumite's biology shifted. In that split second, his cells registered as demonic.
And it just so happened to be a clear blue sky above us.
The sun was beating down directly on his skin.
The moment his cells registered the demonic mutation, the sun's curse took effect. The genetic friction had already heated him up, but the UV light was the nail in the coffin..
With a final roar of suffering and confusion, the Viltrumite rather spectacularly combusted. A pillar of dark red, smokeless fire erupted from his skin. He burned to a crisp from the inside out, the intense heat flash-frying his internal organs and stripping the flesh from his bones until nothing was left but a charred skeleton that collapsed into the dirt as a pile of ash.
I blinked, pulling my whip back and letting it seamlessly absorb back into my forearm.
"Well, damn," John commented, floating right next to me and crossing his arms casually. "That's one way to bypass their invulnerability. Doping their own genetics to cook them literally. Good job, babe."
I smiled, feeling a predatory thrill rush through my veins as I looked at the remaining Viltrumites. General Kregg was standing a few dozen yards away, staring at the smoking pile of ash that used to be his elite soldier, his cybernetic eye whirring frantically as he tried to process what had just happened.
I raised my biwa pick again, pointing it directly at the General.
"Let's make some more music," I said.
[A/N]:
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