"What is your name? I heard you call her Mother — are you truly mother and daughter?"
Soft toes pressed lightly into the ground as sandals crunched over fallen leaves and snapped twigs.
Solitär retreated in graceful, fluid steps. The invisible mana barrier surrounding her body expanded outward, deflecting the crimson needles that lanced in from either side — its presence only betraying itself in the brief flicker of each impact.
The petite demon with her pair of small horns wore a gentle smile that never left her face, not even for a moment. That smile, so perfectly innocent and harmless — yet the massive pillar of mana radiating from Solitär and saturating the air around her announced, without ambiguity, that she was a Great Demon.
Jane gave no answer. She beat her blood-wings and sent a torrent of crimson barbs screaming downward, chasing after Solitär as she appeared to flee. Every tree in their path was sliced and smashed apart like tofu under the sweep of those wings, carving a wide road through the forest in the wake of their pursuit.
"Wouldn't it be nicer to just stop and talk for a moment? Your only task is to hold me here and keep me from interfering in their fight — there's no need to push yourself this hard."
Solitär genuinely did want to avoid Jane. From even their brief exchange of blows, she could already tell: this was an existence whose mana was no less than her own.
Despite that deceptively childlike appearance, the other was almost certainly a Great Demon of over a thousand years.
Solitär's words carried real sincerity — and paired with her completely non-retaliating, utterly harmless demeanor, she was confident she could talk the other demon around.
There was no point in the two of them fighting to a conclusion. The real battle was between Macht and the other Great Demon.
And because of Jane, Solitär now had her own reason to avoid crossing blades with that broken-horned demon — the one whose very presence made her heart seize with dread.
Unlike their last encounter, she couldn't explain why, but even though Macht and herself should have been a combination capable of sweeping all before them, facing that broken-horned demon two-on-one, she had never felt like the odds were in their favor.
"Kill you. Then go help Mother."
Jane paid no mind to Solitär's running commentary. Her face was blank, utterly expressionless.
The opponent's mana barrier was sturdier than any human's Defensive Magic — a conventional assault couldn't break through it at all.
Several more fissures split open across Jane's back, and two new pairs of blood-wings forced their way out. The mana spilling from her body surged once more, climbing until it subtly eclipsed Solitär's own.
"Do you enjoy studying humans? I happen to be quite the expert on the subject myself. As for whatever's happening on their end — let them settle it themselves. I think we should sit down and have a proper talk."
Solitär kept her smile and her composure. She had never particularly liked conflict between members of her own kind.
She had never considered herself a warrior. Her self-image was always that of a scholar — one who devoted herself to the study of humans.
The magic she used reflected that: nothing more than a plain defensive barrier and a handful of rudimentary offensive tricks. For her purposes, it had always been enough.
"Jane only likes to read."
Jane's tone was flat, her killing intent undimmed. The four new wings began to ripple and crack open, mana cycling through them — building toward something.
"Oh, what a bother…"
Unlike ordinary demons, Great Demons rarely fought each other to the death. There was an unspoken understanding among them — a mutual, tacit avoidance; a policy of non-interference.
Solitär only wanted to study humans, to exchange words with the world. She had no desire to duel a fellow Great Demon whose power matched her own.
That one moment of hesitation was all it took — Solitär felt the mana across her entire body seize, and an enormous sense of crisis crashed over her.
"How about this — shall we analyze which side is more likely to win over there?" She was still hunting for something to talk about.
The four blood-wings on Jane's back swelled and bloated. The mana that had been building in their maws detonated — erupting outward in thick columns of blood infused with something that felt disturbingly like Killing Magic, blasting out in all directions.
Four blood pillars swept from different angles, raking across the sky toward Solitär.
Soil, fallen leaves, trees, flowers, even the layers of cloud — everything the pillars swept across was scorched through with deep, searing brands, coated in crimson. Great billowing clouds of white smoke rose up. The destructive force was like laser beams, flattening everything around Solitär into a red wasteland.
Solitär poured her mana into her barrier without restraint, and for the first time, the smile on her face stiffened ever so slightly.
The four blood pillars swept over Solitär in succession, carving vicious red scars across the broad stretch of forest near Weise, leaving nothing alive in their wake.
"Ugh…"
Solitär let out a muffled grunt and plummeted toward the clearing that had been blasted open below her.
Jane beat her blood-wings and dove in rapid pursuit, giving Solitär no time to catch her breath.
"I mean this sincerely — look, I haven't struck back even once. Let's just calm down and talk."
The moment before she reached the ground, her mana barrier buckled under the strain and shattered into nothing. What answered Solitär was a sky full of crimson barbs raining down.
"Then stop getting in my way." Jane's voice carried down from above. "Let me go help Mother."
"That I simply cannot allow. If I disrupt their fair little 'duel,' Macht will never let me hear the end of it."
Solitär shook her head, a picture of pure innocence.
"You talk far too much."
Jane remained unmoved. Blood gathered once more on her wings, forming another blood cannon — aimed to deliver the final blow to Solitär, now stripped of her barrier.
"You know — over all these long years, I've come to believe that conversation, at any time, in any place, is something that can ease tension. For humans especially. That's why I love talking with humans, or with any other kind of being, more than almost anything else."
Even as her words fell, those crimson barbs were already right before Solitär's eyes.
And in that very instant — the void above Solitär's head twisted. The flow of mana all around her shifted.
A blade forged entirely from condensed mana materialized out of the distorted air and thrust itself between Solitär and the oncoming barbs. The crimson needles rang and clattered against it like hail on steel — and beneath the blade's cover, Solitär was left completely unharmed.
Then more rifts tore open in the void — aimed at Jane, hovering in the air above. Blade after blade emerged from them: sword after sword of identical make, silver-white and gleaming with a cold, keen light.
Solitär had laid the groundwork without anyone ever noticing.
"Conversation dissolves tension. It redirects attention.
"I'm sorry to say — everything I said up until just now was, in fact, aimed at preventing any real fighting between us. But from this point on, I will no longer hold back."
Unlike conversing with the comparatively weak human mages she was accustomed to, Solitär applied the same careful, unhurried patience she always had — while being, if anything, even more thorough.
The probing and the talking were over. She launched her counterattack.
Boom.
The four blood pillars converged into a single, far thicker cannon-blast and fired — a massive red column visible from far above, pouring down from the sky.
Against it, Solitär had flung open something that looked very much like the treasury of a certain generous young man from a certain city in Japan — an endless armory of blades made real.
The mana swords she had forged poured ceaselessly from the rifts in the distorted void, massing together into their own pillar — a torrent of silver-white blades bristling with razor edges, surging upward to meet the descending blood cannon head-on.
The blood pillar ate into the silver swords, dissolving them — but the seemingly inexhaustible flood of blades pushed the blood column back in turn.
Two titanic forces shoved against each other, and for the moment, neither could claim the upper hand.
In the midst of the clash, Jane's four blood-wings were visibly shrinking — withering at a speed the naked eye could follow.
Solitär tilted her head back, narrowed her eyes, and smiled — watching as Jane's mana drained away at an accelerating pace.
____
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