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Aelfric scoffed—a low, sharp rasp that slithered from his throat. There was no mirth in the sound, only contempt. And that bitter sneer carved into the lines of his face.
His right arm—severed moments prior—twitched as it began to reform. It started at the exposed jag of bone, white piercing out from the bloody stump. Then came the muscle around the bone, twitching as if alive, nerves snaked their way up the new flesh and at last, skin slithered over it all—pale and flawless.
His robes sleeve mended itself around it in the same breath, as though reality simply remembered what he was supposed to be.
There was no pain, there never was.
And that, somehow, was worse.
Across the barren land stood Lyra, her hair whipped about her and her eyes—those deep red furnaces—locked onto him with a seething malice that transcended hatred.
Aelfric tilted his head, just slightly, as if regarding a particularly stubborn stain that refused to fade from memory.
"I must admit," he began, his voice straining with false calm, "you've piqued my curiosity with this act, Lyra." He rolled his new fingers—perfect replicas of the ones destroyed, born anew without a scar to speak of. "You posture like some righteous martyr…but I wonder—do you truly believe yourself above it all simply because you denied yourself the opportunity to destroy me permanently?"
He took a step forward, the ground cracking faintly beneath his boots.
"Tell me," he asked, "just what exactly do you think you're proving by holding back now, of all times?"
Lyra's lips curled into a humorless smile. She didn't speak at first—she let the question linger. When she did answer, her voice was cold.
"Of course those would be your first thoughts," she said, tone thick with disgust. "You were always like this. Small. Diseased by your own bitterness. You can't even fathom a reason for restraint that isn't soaked in self-righteousness, can you? That's how limited your vision is. That's what you've become."
Aelfric narrowed his eyes, but said nothing.
Lyra's expression hardened.
"Do you remember, Aelfric?" she asked softly. "When you were all sealed away by Vagnir? I was spared. I remained in the world," Lyra continued. "I wandered. I watched it change. I watched the stars shift and burn out. I watched cities rise and fall. I've lived through empires, through betrayals, through the whispers of eras you can't begin to imagine."
Her voice deepened.
"I've loved, Aelfric," she whispered. "Truly. I've loved with every beat of a heart I didn't believe I still had. I've held hands beneath falling stars. I've broken bread with humans, danced in foreign courts, wept at graves that time forgot."
She paused—her face unreadable. Then her eyes darkened.
"And I've killed. Innocents. Monsters. Beasts and men alike. I've stained rivers red. I've scorched entire plains to ash when I lost control. I've tasted what it means to be consumed by wrath."
Aelfric's brow twitched.
"I know what I am. What I've become. But I also know this—"
She raised her hand, slowly, and pointed a single pale finger toward him.
"You are not worth it."
His expression didn't break, but something in the air cracked.
"What?" he asked.
"You're not worth the final blow," Lyra repeated. "Not because I've become some higher being or because mercy guides me. But because I've seen the truth of you, Aelfric. I know what you are now. And what you are…is pathetic."
The word hit him harder than any blade ever could.
Her voice sharpened.
"Your hatred for Alyssia—your obsession—was never about justice. It was grief, rotting into vengeance. It was the crumbling of a man too terrified to mourn, too prideful to admit his pain."
Aelfric flinched—but only slightly.
"I see now what I didn't before. When you emerged from that prison, you weren't hunting a villain. You were screaming for something to blame. You needed someone to bleed for the silence that followed the Deaths of Calliope and Aviva."
The names struck him. She saw it and she didn't stop.
"You buried your grief in anger, in cruelty. You wore your suffering like a crown and demanded the world bow to it. But when I look at you now, I don't see power, Aelfric."
Her eyes held an emotion—not rage this time, but pity.
"I see a man screaming into the abyss, hoping it screams back."
A long, pregnant silence stretched between them. The wind died entirely. The world around them seemed to dim.
Aelfric's mouth opened slightly. But no words came.
"When Alyssia returns to me…when her soul is restored and she walks once more… our story will not begin with vengeance. It will begin with healing."
"Hah...well said." A third voice cut through the tension suddenly.
Lyra's gaze snapped toward it first, then Aelfric's followed, both turning to see the origin of the intrusion.
Mikoto approached. His steps seemed unnaturally quiet, the wind that tore at Lyra's hair didn't touch him.
He approached slowly, carrying no urgency. At his side, Sabre hung lazily from his fingers until, with a flourish, he drew it forth and drove the weapon down into the ground in front of him, he placed both of his gauntleted hands atop the pommel. And stood silently at Lyra's side.
Aelfric stiffened. Subtle. But they noticed it instantly.
"So," she said without looking at Mikoto, "your magic's returned."
Mikoto offered a small nod. "That's right," he answered. "And now...I'd like you to sit back. Watch. Don't interrupt."
His gaze never left Aelfric.
"I'm going to kill this bastard." There was no grandeur in his tone, no explosive fury—just a simple truth.
Lyra gave no resistance. Her red eyes lingered on Mikoto a moment longer—then she slowly nodded and stepped back, saying nothing more. She trusted him.
Aelfric's lip curled, baring teeth not in confidence, but in agitation. He tried to laugh—tried to cling to that scoffing disdain that had served him so well—but it came out ragged.
"So," he spat, eyes narrowing at the small figure before him, "you're content to play lapdog now? First for Lyra, then the Gods, now The Keepers? Do you even know who you are anymore, boy?"
The insult dangled there—pathetic in the face of what stood before him.
But Mikoto didn't flinch. He didn't scowl or sneer. He smiled. It was the kind of smile that could've come from a porcelain doll—soft, slightly sweet, but deeply empty.
"I don't really care what labels you try to cling to," Mikoto said quietly. "None of that matters to me." He tilted his head slightly, in that unnerving way a curious animal might before it tore something apart. "All I know is I don't like you. And that's really all there is to it."
Aelfric's jaw tightened.
"Is that so?" he murmured. A long silence followed. Then Aelfric exhaled—a sharp, resigned hiss. "Fine then. I won't die here today. I forfeit," he declared. "From this farce of a festival. I am leaving this battlefield."
He waited.
The ambient magic, designed to whisk away any participant who yielded or fell too injured, should have activated immediately. The laws of the festival had been carved into it from the start. A simple utterance was all it should have taken.
But nothing happened.
There was no glow. No shift in the wind. No glyphs forming beneath his body.
Only silence.
Aelfric's brows furrowed slightly.
Mikoto's smile widened, baring just a hint of dainty pearl teeth behind those rosy lips.
"Yeah...that's not gonna work."
Aelfric blinked, slowly.
Mikoto continued, resting his chin on his interlaced fingers atop his blade. "I spent the last few minutes while you two were bickering analyzing every festival-linked mana tether. Each participant is connected by a set of low-tier trigger spells—fail-safes meant to remove anyone fatally wounded or forcibly ejected from combat."
He tilted his head the other way now, still smiling.
"But yours?" His voice dipped into cadence. "I studied it. Disassembled it. Rewrote it. Then re-bound it. You're no longer eligible for teleportation, displacement, evacuation, or anything even close to escape."
Aelfric's face darkened. "You what—?"
"Oh, and the wards." Mikoto tapped a dainty finger against the side of his temple. "I layered a dozen of them in every direction while we were talking. Most of them are spatial locks, designed to stop anything from being able to enter or exit this little arena of ours. You might not have noticed it with your tunnel vision, but you've been playing inside my cage for a while now."
He grinned.
"I did warn you, didn't I?"
Aelfric's mouth opened. But for the first time…for the first time in what may have been centuries, perhaps even longer…
He said nothing.
Because he felt it.
That horrible, alien sensation spreading across his spine, crawling under his skin.
Fear.
True fear.
The kind of fear that couldn't be fought, reasoned with, or buried beneath bluster. The kind that reminded one that no matter how many times one cheated Death…there would always come a moment, a soul, a force—
—that simply wouldn't care.
And in front of him, smiling with those small hands folded neatly on his sword, stood something that looked far too delicate, far too pretty and far too quiet to be real.
And yet Aelfric had never felt closer to dying than he did now.
And so his silence did not last, it couldn't. Because he couldn't. A growl tore from his throat—a sound that no longer belonged to anything that walked or breathed.
"You think you've won?" Aelfric hissed, voice splintering between syllables, body hunched forward.
Mikoto tilted his head slightly—eyes almost bored. Aelfric's teeth ground together audibly. His hands snapped open—and the earth cracked beneath him.
From the ruined ground, hundreds of pitch-black tendrils exploded upward, each one as thick as a tree trunk and writhing. They erupted in concentric waves, screaming across the area like a nest of snakes let loose—splitting the ground, tearing apart air, howling toward Mikoto.
Everything they touched—rock, dust, debri—ceased to exist. There was no scorch, no ash, no wound left behind.
Even so, Mikoto didn't run.
He walked. One step at a time, his sabatons brushing gently against the ground, his expression blank like a dolls. His armors tail coat fluttered softly behind him as the tendrils screamed toward him.
And he cut through them.
Sabre sliced effortlessly through the tendrils of pure, annihilating Death. The severed limbs didn't fall—they simply vanished, cleaved out of reality before they could even react.
Again.
And again.
And again.
Each one reaching for him—desperate.
Each one turned to nothing by Sabre.
"You're unraveling, old man," Mikoto murmured softly, still walking, still slicing through them. "Is this all you have left? Rage and spite? Screaming and clawing toward something you can't comprehend? Pointless."
"You mock what you can't touch," Aelfric snarled, voice distorting, skin along his arms twitching as more tendrils began to pour from his back, his shoulders, his spine and the ground. "You think you're clever? You think this changes anything?"
Mikoto let out a breathy chuckle. It was delicate, almost musical. And it cut deeper than any of his screams ever could.
"I don't think it changes anything."
He vanished, one blink, that's all it took. One blink—and Mikoto was gone. Aelfric's eyes widened—too late.
The next moment—
A thunderclap screamed through the air.
Mikoto reappeared directly in front of him—less than an inch away—there was no roar, no war cry. Just motion—a flash of red. Sabre—swung in a heartbeat—cut in a vertical arc, and Aelfric's left arm was gone.
Not cut, not severed, gone. The arm, from shoulder to fingertips, didn't fall. It didn't bleed. It ceased, before Aelfric could register the pain, Mikoto's knee slammed into his stomach.
Hard.
The impact made the air implode around them. A sickening crunch echoed as Aelfric's body bent around the blow—ribs cracking beneath the armor's pressure—and he was launched backward like a projectile through the air.
He crashed into a ridge of black rock, shattering it upon impact, skidding through layers of pulverized rock until his body bounced once—twice—before coming to a wheezing, gasping stop.
Silence fell again. For a long moment, nothing stirred. Then Aelfric slowly lifted his head. His face twisted in pain, the pain never lingered with his immortality...but now. He grit his teeth as he glared ahead.
"Still…no satisfaction, huh?" The voice rang out. Mikoto's sabatons clicked faintly against the shattered stone as he stepped forward.
Before him, slumped against the fractured remnants of a collapsed rock, lay Aelfric. The pain must have been to much for him, now he was just…a man. A pathetic one.
Mikoto stopped mere inches away from him, looking down with the faintest tilt of his head. The tip of Sabre hovered just above the ground beside him.
"So… this is it, then?" he whispered. "This is where your story ends. Brought low in the dust like any other scumbag."
Aelfric spat blood to the side, the thick red liquid seeping into the cracked dirt. His face twisted with loathing, but it lacked the strength it once carried. His glare wavered, trembling not just from pain—but fear. Real, suffocating fear.
"Damn you…" he growled, voice hoarse. "You're not a victor. You're not justice. You're just a dog. A chained, sniveling little slave…groveling beneath the boots of fate. That's all you'll ever be."
Mikoto didn't flinch.
The wind carried strands of his long hair across his cheek, and he reached up slowly—absently—to tuck it behind one delicate ear. A subtle movement. A strange, almost mundane moment in the middle of an execution.
Then he hummed—a sound faint and melodic, like a lullaby. It lingered as he lowered his hand and stared at Aelfric again.
"You don't understand," Mikoto murmured. "You think that by calling me a slave…you can hurt me? Belittle me?"
He lowered his blade slightly, the surface reflecting Aelfric's expression.
"I know I am not free. I never was."
A long pause.
His lips parted again, but the tone changed.
"I'm not like you. I never had the illusion of believing something so stupid." He took a single step forward—closer now. "But I have something I want to achieve, grander than something this pathetic. And I have my beliefs, far more...important than this. And you should know this choice was mine. Even if fate tries to snatch it away from me."
Aelfric's breath hitched, eyes trembling as he looked up into the soft, porcelain face above him. And for the briefest moment…he didn't see a child.
He saw something terrifying.
Mikoto tilted his head again.
"So call me a slave if it makes you feel better. But I was the one who decided you were going to die today. Not the Gods. Not The Keepers. Not Lyra. Me."
His hand gripped Sabre's hilt a little tighter.
"And rest assured," he added, voice dropping as he leaned forward just slightly, hair falling over his eye, "after this…there's no coming back."
Aelfric opened his mouth—maybe to scream, maybe to beg, maybe to curse one last time.
But the blade was already rising. Mikoto's small frame shifted with the motion, weight balancing lightly between his sabatons, and then it fell. A red arc, the air split with a clean, high-pitched sound.
And Aelfric's head was gone. No blood, no scream, no resistance. Just a clean, surgical parting of soul from vessel.
His body slumped forward, headless, onto the ground. His severed head rolled across the stone and came to rest against an outcrop, face frozen in a final expression—neither horror, nor peace.
Just…ending.
Mikoto stared down at it in silence, Sabre now resting once more at his side.
The wind moved.
The earth trembled.
And Mikoto, with his long lashes casting shadows beneath his red eyes, whispered softly—barely audible:
"I thought it would feel like justice."
He looked at his hand, then at the body.
"…But it just feels like another grave."
Maybe it was because he saw something within Aelfric's eyes.
Something familiar.