"I... will not... be a subordinate..." Valisera gasped, her eyes rolling in their sockets.
"You accuse of weakness? You slip free because I bled? Because I fell in the street like a human and took a bullet from the Voliders’ insects?"
She began to laugh.
A hysterical, broken laugh—so terrifying it made want to retreat and flee this cursed basent, never to look at her again.
It was the laughter of despair fused with sadism.
Valisera raised her right hand, trembling and covered in her own blood.
"You think you can control through physical pain? You think you can threaten by tearing my body apart from the inside?"
Her crimson eyes ignited with a demonic glow. She no longer looked human.
She looked like the embodint of pure nothingness.
"Then... let us suffer together, you wretched entity."
Crack... whoooosh!
Flas ignited in her palm.
Dark blue flas.
The searing fire that lts titanium and devours Eitra as if it were dry paper.
In that instant—in that fraction of a second when that demonic blue glow reflected off the wet sewer walls and touched my retina—everything collapsed again.
That deep blue... the color of the flas that devoured the Valtier mansion.
The color of hell that scorched my father Morfind as he protected Victor with his crucified body.
The color that turned my brother Victor into a pile of fragile ash before my eyes.
"No..."
My stomach clenched with a savage, crushing force I could not resist.
A cosmic nausea—both physical and psychological—struck my insides.
A surge of burning vomit—acidic bile and crimson blood—rose up my esophagus like an erupting volcano.
But I... knew that making any sound would expose to Valisera.
In a mont of pure instinctive desperation, I raised both hands and slamd them over my mouth behind my shattered mask! I clamped it shut with a force that nearly broke my jaw!
The hot vomit flooded my mouth.
I pressed my lips tightly together.
The taste of tallic bile, rotten blood, and despair burned my throat and tongue, swelling my cheeks as I struggled not to spit it out.
It was a burning, suffocating liquid, clogging my airway.
I wanted to cough, I wanted to empty my insides onto the ground—but I forced myself to swallow part of it again, trapping the rest inside my full mouth, my body convulsing in silent, horrifying spasms of suffocation.
I violently turned my face toward the cold tal wall of the turbine.
I turned my back completely on that cursed blue glow.
I shut my crimson eyes so tightly it felt like my blood vessels would burst.
I pressed my face against the cold tal, and the tears... hot, heavy, cowardly tears stread down my face, mixing with mud and blood, soaking my trembling hands that sealed my mouth.
Morfind... Victor... no... keep the fire away... please...
My mind scread, cried, and sobbed in a dark corner, while my body twisted from the pain of the Forgotten Blade and the choke of suppressed vomit.
Behind , as I faced my inner hell... Valisera’s hell continued.
With a suicidal, insane motion devoid of any human survival instinct... Valisera plunged her burning blue hand directly into her shoulder!
Into the very place where the entity’s spaceti rift had opened!
"BUUUURN!"
Valisera scread, madness bursting from her eyes like hellish sparks.
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!"
It wasn’t her scream alone.
I swear by everything evil, dark, and rotten in this world... even though I was covering my mouth and had my back turned, I heard another voice!
A second voice—deep, rough, utterly inhuman—like the roar of a dying star, erging from within Valisera’s own throat! A double scream of agony!
The entity was screaming from the blue flas that were burning both it and its host at the sa ti!
The sll of roasting human flesh filled the corridor, mixed with a foul ozone scent, as if sothing ancient—so ancient magic—was being burned alive.
The sll intensified the spasms in my stomach, pushing more vomit up my throat, but I clung to my silence like soone clinging to the edge of an abyss, tears blinding my closed eyes.
Valisera was burning her flesh, destroying her nerves, boiling her blood—just to torture the entity inside her! She was applying a "scorched earth" policy to her own body to prove who was master and who was slave!
"I... am... the one... in control!" Valisera roared, as the blue flas lit the dark corridor with a hellish, nightmarish glow.
"If you try to rebel again... if you think you can exploit my wounds... I will burn us both until we beco nothing! Do you understand?! DO YOU UNDERSTAND?!"
Gradually... and noticeably... the black spaceti rift in her shoulder began to fade.
The torn flesh closed in on itself.
The entity’s power receded.
It had surrendered before her suicidal brutality and her defiance that surpassed pain itself.
Valisera extinguished the blue flas with a weak, trembling snap of her fingers.
I heard the heavy thud of her body collapsing into the filthy water.
She was breathing violently, her body shaking in lethal neural shock.
Her shoulder had beco a charred cavity emitting thin, disgusting white smoke.
She had won.
Yes—she had won her internal battle and silenced the entity temporarily, but the price was the destruction of what remained of her physical body.
As for ... I remained pressed against the tal wall, my face buried in my hands, trembling like a terrified child.
When I was certain the blue glow had completely vanished and the tunnel had returned to its comforting darkness, I slowly opened my mouth and silently spat the burning vomit onto the rusted floor beside .
I coughed faintly, gasping, wiping my mouth with the sleeve of my torn coat, tears still burning in my eyes.
She’s insane... I thought, swallowing the remnants of the poisoned taste in my mouth with great difficulty.
A prison for a cosmic entity—and she tortures it with fire inside that prison. What kind of hell does this girl live through every day to reach this level of cruelty toward herself?
In that mont, amid filth, darkness, and fear, I felt a strange, dark, and repulsive connection binding to her.
I am also a prison.
A prison for a shadow ghoul core that imposes animalistic hunger upon , and a prison for a Forgotten Blade that feeds on my life and slowly consus my veins.
Both of us—Valisera and I—are monsters hiding in human form, battling our inner demons and the parasites within us in the suffocating darkness, while pretending control and coldness in the light before others.
We both wear masks.
Mine is made of plastic and feigned fear—as a "weak recruit."
Hers is made of sadistic pride and indifference—as an "invincible commander."
I did not dare to look back.
I did not dare to check whether she had lost consciousness or not.
I did not want her to see my tear-stained, vomit-covered face—and I did not want to see her broken one.
I retreated in complete silence, like a worm crawling through mud, slipping back into the pumping station hall where the squad rested in deep ignorance.
I sat again in my corner, trembling.
Not from the sewer’s cold, nor from the hunger of the Forgotten Blade still pulsing in my black veins.
I was trembling from the realization of one truth:
Saint Hilarius Hospital is filled with monstrosities and Voliders, and a massacre awaits us within a few days.
But the real monster... the catastrophe I must fear and respect more than the end of the world itself... is bleeding right now in the adjacent corridor, fighting the Sovereign of Darkness within her mind, and leading our outcast team toward hell.
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