Noah walked into the hall, both Arlo and Lady in Dark staring at him in shock, not just because of his presence but also his new rank.
He took in the room in a single sweep. The ritual circle was still glowing beneath Cecilia. The scattered bodies of the Reunifiers at the outer ring. The two golden daggers in Arlo's hand.
And of course, Lady in Dark standing at the center of it all with an expression he hadn't seen on her before.
Shock.
His eyes moved to Arlo and he noticed the change in the man's mana signature.
"S-rank," he said. "You've been busy."
Arlo said nothing, but sothing shifted in his expression.
Lady in Dark recovered first. "How did you find ?" The surprise hadn't fully left her voice.
"Tracking spell," Noah said simply. "On Cecilia. I placed it on her when I returned."
He crossed the room towards Cecilia, crouching beside her, checking her breathing.
She was still alive and unchanged, as far as he could tell. He straightened.
He turned to Arlo.
"I spared your life once," he said. "I'm going to do it again as long as you do one thing for ."
He pointed at Cecilia. "Take her and leave."
Arlo looked at him for a long mont. Then he looked at Cecilia. Then back at Noah, sothing unresolved moving behind his eyes that he didn't try to put into words.
He nodded once.
He walked forward, gathered Cecilia carefully, and carried her to the exit without looking back. His footsteps faded down the corridor and then disappeared entirely.
Noah turned.
Lady in Dark stood across the circle from him, her eyes never leaving him.
"It's just the two of us now," he said.
Lady in Dark turned to run.
Noah changed the direction of the gravity in the hall.
The room's orientation shifted in a single instant, and she left the floor horizontally, pulled towards him as by the new pressure.
Her telekinesis fired in the sa motion, seizing her own body and pulling hard in the opposite direction, the two forces eting in the space between them with a tension that made the air around her distort.
Noah increased the pressure.
He watched her strain against it, her cloak spreading behind her, the effort visible even through her cloaked form as she poured more of herself into the resistance.
She was strong. He had always known she was strong. But he was now stronger.
The gravity won.
She ca to him fast, and he caught her by the throat, his hand closing around it with a grip that had no hint of rcy in it.
"Got you."
She struck at him imdiately, her free hand moving towards his face in an attack.
He caught the hand with his other hand and twisted.
The break was clean and the scream that followed it filled the hall completely, echoing off the walls and the ceiling.
Noah listened to it, enjoying her pain like it was a delicious al.
He held her there and let himself feel the satisfaction of it, and when the scream had run its course he spoke in the sa casual tone he might have used if he were telling a story.
"You know, I once had a spell called Soul Pyre," he said. His grip on her throat didn't loosen. "It was S-rank. Unlike other people, I didn't learn it from a spell parchnt. No, a man called Osiris Lawless inscribed it on my very soul."
"The interesting thing about that spell was that it didn't burn the body. It burned the soul, which is a different thing entirely."
"And when you regulate the output carefully, it doesn't kill imdiately. Instead, it locked the victim in a ntal ti bubble, stretching a mont of agony into years."
Her remaining hand ca up, her telekinesis bearing down on him with the full concentrated weight of everything she had left.
He felt it press against him from every direction and registered it the way you register wind on a cold day, shrugging it off easily.
Then he broke her other arm.
The second scream was worse than the first.
He continued talking, as if she hadn't made a sound. "Then one day, I upgraded the spell. A new and improved SSS-rank spell."
"The new version has a different na." He looked at her directly. "Utter Annihilation."
Her psychic energy ca for him then, the last available weapon, pressing against his mind with force, searching for the gap that had always existed in every opponent she had ever faced.
His aura t it at the boundary and held, and she found nothing to enter.
"I think you'd be pleased, or maybe not, to discover that this particular spell survived the Soul Leech." He continued.
"This spell doesn't just burn the body. It doesn't even stop at the soul. It burns down to your very essence. The fundantal fact of what you are."
He chuckled, savoring the words.
"Once it touches you, the very idea of you stops existing. Not just now. Retroactively. Forward and backwards from the mont of contact."
Her hood fell, and as Noah caught sight of her face, he froze.
He knew that face. He'd seen it across a classroom lots of tis. In the palace. And had even received an offer from it in an infirmary bed.
Queen Ines.
One of her eyes was entirely black, while the other was gold, and looking at him with an expression that had nothing of Lady in Dark in it.
"Please," she choked, her voice breaking around the word. "Help ."
The golden eye went black.
Both of them black now, Lady in Dark looking out from behind Ines' face with a particularly vicious expression.
"Interesting," Noah said calmly.
He cast a diagnostic spell without releasing his grip, letting the results form in front of him.
There were two souls occupying the sa body, intertwined at a depth that the spell rendered visually as sothing braided, the strands of each wrapped so thoroughly through the other that the boundaries between them had long since stopped being aningful.
The gold eye ca back.
"Please," Ines said. The word was barely a sound. "Help ."
Noah looked at her for a long mont.
He thought about what the diagnostic had shown him. He thought about what Utter Annihilation did to everything it touched.
He then thought about the braided image and what it ant for anything that tried to separate one soul from the other.
"Your souls are too intertwined," he said. "I'm sorry."
He cast the spell.
The fire enveloped her body imdiately.
Ines went first, or Lady in Dark did, and then it didn't matter which had gone first because the distinction ceased to exist along with everything else.
Noah's grip closed on nothing as her body erupted into ash, which drifted in the wind, before dissolving into sparks of light, removing her presence from the present and the past simultaneously.
A second later, Noah stood in the hall in silence.
He blinked, before looking around, wondering what he was doing here.
He had a feeling of deja vu, but it soon vanished.
He gave the hall one final look before turning away and walking out.
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