I woke like someone had yanked me out of a dream that wasn't mine.
My body jerked upright before my mind caught up, breath sharp and shallow. The shack slowly came back into focus — the cracked walls, the broken hearth, the smell of damp wood and cold air. But it was the light that made me freeze.
The crimson moon — the Second Sun's doing — had risen fully.
Its red glow poured through the broken planks in the walls, dripping across the floorboards like spilled wine. The whole room looked dipped in blood.
Victoria and the Lady were speaking softly near the fire, their silhouettes stretched long and sharp by the crimson burn.
"How long was I out?" I wondered, checking my hands like they could tell me the time.
We had no clocks, no sand timers, no way of measuring anything except my own qi level. When I probed mine and felt it sitting comfortably at eighty percent, the answer formed by instinct:
Hours. Long enough for day to die and night to resurrect itself.
"You're finally awake," the Lady said, the corner of her mouth curling in a tone halfway between mockery and mild relief.
Victoria looked fine — tired, but fine — and that alone calmed the storm in my chest. The Lady, however, had a bottle of liquor in hand, half-empty already. Her cheeks held the faintest flush, but her eyes were painfully sharp.
Dangerously sober in the way only drunk people with too much knowledge can be.
She didn't waste time.
"I need you to stop the sect that attacked you," she said, lifting the bottle slightly like making a toast to our impending misfortune. "Stop them before they put their plan into motion."
I stared at her.
Not in disbelief. Not in agreement. Just waiting. Because people like her always reveal more if you give them silence to fill.
Sure enough —
"I'm not being hunted because of my pact with a demon, there are people in the church with that—I believe" she continued, her voice slowing as though choosing each word carefully, "but because of what could happen if I am left… unchecked."
The crimson moonlight sharpened her profile — the hollowness beneath her eyes, the slight tremble in her fingers, the way she held her drink like a shield.
She lifted her chin.
"There are worse things than demons."
I must have made a face.
Because she laughed. A soft, humorless breath.
"Yes, yes — I know. You think hell is the worst the universe has to offer. Cute."
She took a slow sip. "Hell is a nursery rhyme compared to the things that live in the cracks of existence."
Her eyes flicked to Victoria.
"I've already… shared details with Miss Victoria. And relax — none of this interferes with your heroic little mission to save your province."
The room felt smaller by the second.
I waited for her to explain herself, but she simply stared into her bottle like it might give her courage. Victoria's hand drifted toward her sleeve, fingers fidgeting.
The Lady spoke again, this time with a softness that didn't match anything she'd shown before.
"It seems my time has run out."
Something cold and instinctive made my hand curl toward my blade.
"What time?" I asked.
She gave a faint, tired smile that made her look a century older.
"It was never just Victoria's shallow misunderstanding of her 'death contract,' Miss Heiwa."
Her voice was losing strength, thinning like fabric wearing through.
"It was the impossibility behind the death she invoked. I envied something that cannot be owned. Something that simply… returns to sleep after ending everything else."
Her breath hitched — not in fear, but in resignation.
"I envied death itself, not the grim reaper but more."
The confession hung in the air like a thrown knife.
"And the cost of that envy…" She shook her head. "Hell charges interest."
A single tear slid down her cheek, carving a path through grime and dried blood.
"Seere was generous. Fair, even." Her lips twitched into a grim smile. "As devils go."
Victoria stepped closer to me, trembling. I could feel her heartbeat through the sleeve of my coat.
The Lady's chest wound — the one she'd been hiding with sheer stubbornness — began to glow. A sickly, muted green throbbed beneath her clothing.
"Death itself does not die," she whispered, her eyes flicking to Victoria with a strange, aching envy.
Then—
A sound rose.
A chorus of whispers.
A hundred overlapping voices.
Mocking.
Knowing.
Seere's voice.
"Kenneth, Kenneth… the clock always wins."
The Lady's face froze mid-breath.
The green glow erupted violently, filling the room with a nauseating pulse of energy. The temperature dropped so fast frost spiderwebbed across the broken window frame.
Then the air soured — sulfur coiling in my throat, copper blooming like blood in my mouth.
The signature of the Court of Envy.
Something unseen pressed against the bullet wound in her chest.
The skin didn't burst outward.
It unzipped.
Slow. Deliberate.
Wrong.
Beneath the opening wasn't muscle.
Or bone.
Or anything mortal.
Just a churning, depthless void.
From its swirling blackness, small chitinous hands crawled outward — dozens of them, twitching eagerly. Imps of the Envy Court. Their skin was the dull bronze of tarnish, their nails hooked like fishing barbs.
Victoria whimpered and buried her face against me — yet kept looking through trembling fingers.
I couldn't move.
The imps reached inside the wound as though reaching into a pocket, grasping something.
Something struggling.
Something screaming soundlessly.
Her soul.
A knot of pulsing green light.
The imps tugged.
Her ribs bent and peeled open like torn paper. Her spine arched until it looked ready to snap. Yet her face — twisted in a silent scream — never made a sound.
Her trembling hand stretched toward Victoria.
Not in threat.
Not in anger.
But in raw, consuming envy.
With one brutal, final tug, the imps yanked her soul free and dragged it into the void.
The hole slammed shut with a wet pop, swallowing the stench of sulfur and copper.
The Lady's empty body collapsed to the floor like a marionette whose strings had been cut. Nothing left but skin, hollow bone, and a silence so heavy it felt like a blanket over the world.
Then a whisper curled through the air like cold breath at the nape of the neck:
"Daughter of the Pale Monarch… Seere of the Court of Envy greets you. Ha!"
The green fog dissolved.
The oppressive weight vanished.
And then—
Snap.
A twig outside the shack.
Someone — or something — was waiting in the crimson-lit night.