I let out a sigh of relief as I flopped down onto the hotel bed.
Unfortunately, that comfort wouldn't last long.
The door to my hotel room exploded open, nearly flying off its hinges as a man barged through. Panic engulfing any emotions he could display.
Something was wrong.
Something terrible had happened.
Immediately I was on my feet. Ready to hear whatever had happened and act accordingly.
"Lady Luna–"
I interrupted him. My name didn't matter. His tone did. The situation was dire.
There is no time for formality.
"What," I said, already moving towards the door.
The man looked wrong. Pale. Shaking. The kind of expression you get from something you'll never forget.
A pit of worry opened in my stomach.
"Speak!" I demanded.
"It's–" He hesitated, then swallowed hard. "It's your sister." His breath hitched. "She's rampaging through the estate. Several members died… It was carnage."
His shoulders slumped, one hand rising to cover his mouth as if struggling to hold back bile.
The world felt heavier.
Disbelief washed over me, quickly giving way to grief.
Grief that I was not there.
For her.
My sister.
The most precious in my life.
The one I had sworn to protect.
I reached him in two strides. "Where."
"The inner grounds," He said, forcing the words out. "About ten miles north-east."
I shoved past him, pulling on the familiar feeling of regalia, but he grabbed my arm.
"They're calling her–"
He hesitated once again.
The hesitation burned.
"If you're going to speak," I snapped, "don't waste my time!"
"A monster."
My hands clenched, nails biting into my palms.
Without another second, I seized the familiar pull of power and carved a passage through space itself.
Within moments – no, perhaps even less than that, I arrived at the estate grounds.
—
The estate looked wrong.
Not ancient. Nor ruined by time.
Just wrong.
Clean white structures lay fractured and still, fragments of what had once been a pristine estate scattered across a silent ground of death. Sleek architecture was warped where space itself had bent under too much force.
The estate was silent.
There were no disturbances, apart from one.
Spatial energy saturated the air like poison, dense and suffocating.
An omen of all the horrors I had failed to prevent.
Snapping back to reality, I pushed through the estate, charging past the lifeless corpses of various Stellaris family members. Each person had been torn to bits, hardly recognisable. Blood stains scarred the once clean floors an irreversible sanguine shade.
My boots splashed through drying pools of red as I forced myself onwards, breath tight, chest burning. Walls I remembered polished to perfection were split open like ribs
Far too much power had been used.
My dear sister was strong, incredibly so, but she wasn't a monster. This calamity could not be her doing alone.
This was something else.
A presence that had always lurked beneath her power, buried since that incident. It wasn't mindless. It had never been. There was a mischievous intelligence to it — one that watched, waited… learned.
My fingers curled into a fist.
Why now?
Why here?
It had stayed silent for years. Dormant. Patient. As though biding its time. Had it waited for me to be gone — for Anka to be alone? Or had something else reached out first, tempting it into the open?
Immediately, I halted in my tracks.
The air shifted.
As I stared ahead of me, all sound was snuffed out like a smothered flame.
In the centre of the Stellaris' open courtyard, my sister, Anka, stood holding the lifeless body of her caretaker, Lyra.
For a moment, I couldn't move.
Lyra's head lolled against Anka's shoulder, silver hair matted dark where blood had soaked through.
My heart sank.
Lyra had never been just a caretaker to my little sister. She had been the one who stayed when I couldn't — the steady presence in the quiet hours, the gentle voice that soothed nightmares I wasn't there to chase away. If anyone had filled the space of a mother in Anka's life…
It had been her.
Except now she was a lifeless corpse — killed without reason, without hate. Not out of anger. Not even cruelty.
Simply… discarded.
My throat tightened.
Lyra wasn't collateral. She was proof. Proof that the thing wearing my sister's body did not need malice to destroy. It killed because it could. Because life, to it, was insignificant.
Lyra's body slumped to the floor with a hard thud as the beast puppeteering my sister's body noticed me.
The sound echoed far longer than it should have.
Anka straightened slowly.
Too slowly.
Her eyes locked onto me, and then her energy began to build.
It was familiar — yet profoundly out of place. This wasn't just the energy of the Stellaris Regalia. It was impure, tainted with something else. Something stronger. Deadlier.
As if the floodgates of a dam had been torn open, her power surged outward, ripping free from the confines of her body and flooding the courtyard like a violent tsunami. The ground buckled beneath it, stone splintering as the pressure of space itself vortexed around her.
The violent energy began to materialise.
Five fox-like tails unfurled behind her.
This was the raw power of a Kitsune.
A Catastrophe class beast.
Her tails twitched, igniting sparks of blue, each one packed with suffocating amounts of that same unfamiliar energy. Fox fire bloomed into existence, drifting lazily through the air, dancing around her as if celebrating her ascension to catastrophe.
Before I could even react, space ruptured.
Anka was suddenly in front of me.
She hadn't moved.
There was no blur. No step. No displacement of air. One heartbeat she stood across the courtyard — the next, she was within arm's reach, her presence crashing down on me like a physical weight.
My instincts screamed too late.
Flames of blue latched onto me, not physically burning, but instead eating away at my energy. They dealt no real damage to my body, yet the pain was immediate and profound, as though they had bypassed flesh entirely and sunk their teeth into my very soul.
Acting entirely on instinct, I pulled upon my own energy and conjured a spatial blade, slicing down where she stood.
It met nothing.
She was already gone.
No distortion. No recoil. No sign she had ever occupied the space I struck. One moment she had been within reach — the next, she stood exactly where she had been before she attacked me, fox fire still drifting lazily around her tails.
Untouched.
Unbothered.
…So that was it.
How bothersome.
The Kitsune had already begun to grasp the fundamentals of the Stellaris Regalia.
It wasn't moving.
Not truly.
It was consuming spatial energy — rewriting distance itself, forcing the world to obey its will. There was no travel, no transition. Just reality bending to place her wherever she decided to exist.
It was possible. With the Stellaris Regalia, at least.
But the cost—
I exhaled slowly.
The energy drain was obscene. Excessive even for me. To maintain that level of spatial overwrite for more than a moment should have torn her apart from the inside.
Yet she stood there effortlessly.
Fox fire drifting. Space compliant.
Which meant the energy wasn't coming from her.
My gaze hardened.
The Kitsune wasn't just using the Regalia.
It was feeding it.
Would I really have to fight against my own sister without holding back?
I hesitated, not wanting to hurt her at all.
In that single moment, the Kitsune struck once more.
I was ready for it this time, drawing my blade hastily to parry the blow without using excessive force.
A sharp claw shot forward, reinforced by dense spatial energy.
I dodged.
It didn't matter.
Distance was no longer part of the equation.
The strike slammed into my stomach regardless, the impact folding me in half as pain detonated through my core. The air was ripped from my lungs in a violent gasp, a strangled sound tearing from my throat as I choked on the force of the blow.
This beast was cunning.
My teeth clenched, grinding slightly as I set my jaw.
Hesitation meant death.
Even if this was my sister.
I couldn't hold back.
The damage this beast could inflict was incalculable.
Steeling my nerves, I pulled hard on the vast reserves of my Regalia energy.
The familiar stellar constellations of my regalia brushed against the skin of my arms, igniting one by one, their light seeping through me in faint, luminous patterns.
Spatial energy surged through me like blood, the structure of space began to shake and tremor.
The Kitsune pounced, dense blue energy materialising into flaming blade-like claws.
I felt no panic.
No desperation.
In answer, I began to conjure a constellation circle from pure spatial energy.
Its shape formed instantly, lines of stellar light locking into place with absolute grace and precision. Less than a heart-beat later the stellar energy exploded outward, an unstoppable beam of stellar light sliced through the world annihilating everything for hundreds of miles.
The moment I willed it, the constellation dispersed, energy draining into nothingness.
I turned slowly.
Unsurprised.
"So," I murmured, already scanning the warped remains of the courtyard, "you dodged it in time."
"After all, I can't seem to stop myself from holding back." I paused, my gaze settling where I felt it lingering. "Perhaps because you wield my dear sister's face."
Pulling on my energy once again, I attacked.
A spatial blade formed in my hand as portals bloomed across the battlefield – dozens, then hundreds appeared, snapping open with flawless accuracy. The blade struck through each aperture simultaneously, slashing from every direction at once.
The ruined Stellaris estate crumbled as the Kitsune pounced, attempting to avoid every strike. Thousands of cuts tore through air and stone alike, shredding what little of the courtyard and estate that remained.
This couldn't go on much longer.
Not like this.
People still lived.
Some were buried beneath the rubble. Some were wounded, terrified, waiting for help that would never come while a Catastrophe-class beast turned their home into a battlefield.
I exhaled sharply.
Enough.
The portals snapped shut in perfect unison, space sealing itself as though nothing had ever disturbed it. My blade dissolved into motes of light as I shifted my stance, not retreating — reframing.
I took a slow, measured breath.
Then, at my side, I conjured Nomos.
My true blade.
It manifested without flourish, without resistance. The weight of it was familiar in my hand, comforting in its certainty.
With a single decisive step, I manifested spatial energy pulling the world around me, conjuring it to move according to my will.
There was no need to move through the world.
The world shall move to accommodate my passing.
I appeared beside my dear sister.
She didn't have time to react.
Using Nomos, I slashed the space at our side, not with force, but precision — a clean incision in reality itself. A rift opened soundlessly, edges shimmering with controlled distortion.
I pushed energy through my Regalia once more.
Space obeyed.
Anka – or rather, the kitsune wearing her – was forced through the rift first, carried by the forced motion of space. A heartbeat later, I followed stepping into the alternate dimension as the rift collapsed.
The world beyond unfolded into a nebula of stars and distant galaxies — a realm saturated with dense stellar energy. Light and void coexisted in impossible harmony, constellations drifting freely through an endless expanse of stellar energy.
An alternate dimension forged by my Regalia, where the rules were mine to command.
In this dimension, I was all powerful.
Anka collapsed as gravity seized her form. The weight of the realm intensified instantly, amplified to an incomprehensible degree — space itself enforcing my will as her body was driven helplessly into the star-filled void.
Slowly, calmly, I stepped toward my sister's fallen form, Nomos clenched tightly in my grasp.
I raised the blade.
My arm swung down–
and stopped—
Not hesitation.
Not doubt either.
The realm had changed.
Space wavered, trembling for a fraction of a second — just long enough for me to notice. Gravity — which had answered my command so eagerly only moments ago — faltered, its flow disrupted as though a higher being had altered its command.
Nomos grew heavy in my hand.
Then, it happened—
The stellar realm shattered like glass.
The beautiful cosmos collapsed inward, stars and constellations fracturing into nothingness as the dimension itself was annulled. Light died without resistance. Distance ceased to exist.
In its place remained only a deathly void.
No stars.
No gravity.
No space to command.
My realm had simply been dismissed.
As effortlessly as one might brush aside an insect that would dare to veer its stinger.
Within that perfect nothingness, a single presence revealed itself.
A being clad in robes of illustrious shadow, bearing six seraphic wings — three as pure as snow, three as dark as night — floated, suspended within the void. In one hand it held a scythe, its edge drinking in the absence around it. In the other, a sword, still and unraised.
Authority seeped from every pore of this being's existence despite its utter stillness. It did nothing – and yet the void itself remained alert, as though holding its breath.
Another presence accompanied the beings' undeniable authority.
Something far superior.
A suffocating immensity, vast beyond measure, pressing in from every direction at once/ Power so complete it could not be grasped, quantified, or resisted.
I finally understood.
This was divinity.
Legends spoke of Regalia – God's great gift to humanity, a fragment of Himself.
But in truth, Regalia were just echoes of true greatness.
A splinter of something infinitely bigger.
Standing before true divinity, the difference was no longer theoretical.
It was absolute.
"Lunaria of Stellaris."
A voice echoed within my mind.
No words were spoken.
They didn't need to be.
"Be not afraid, I am Azrael, Arch Angel and Sovereign of Death."
The message carried no hostility.
Not that it mattered.
A being of this magnitude would've ended me long before now had that been its intent.
The Seraph gestured towards my sister.
"It appears that a being of the Aether has bound itself to the body of Anka Stellaris," She said calmly. "This outcome was inevitable in due time. Her will was overridden. Control lost."
There was no judgment in her voice.
No pity.
Just a statement of a fact.
I followed the angel's gaze to my sister's motionless form.
"This was never her fault," I said quietly.
Azrael inclined her head just slightly.
"Correct."
She paused.
"However, this condition cannot be permitted to persist."
Death raised her right hand, the sword angling toward my sister's motionless form.
The blade did not gleam.
Nor did it hum with power.
It did not need to.
The void reacted anyway, thinning around its edge as though reality itself was preparing to part. I felt it instantly – not as pressure – not as danger – but as finality. A certainty so complete resistance was conceptually useless.
My grip on Nomos tightened.
"No!"
I shouted.
The word tore through the void — raw, sharp, unrestrained.
I dashed forward, closing the distance in an instant, throwing myself over my sister's motionless form. My arms wrapped around her protectively, as though flesh and will alone would be able to stave off the finality of divine authority.
But nothing came…
No strike.
No severance.
No end.
The void thinned, then unravelled entirely, dissolving like mist under an unseen hand. Stars did not return, neither did my realm. Instead, the world folded back into itself, reality reasserting its scars as the ruined courtyard of the Stellaris estate bled back into view.
Broken stone.
Shattered pillars.
Ash and silence.
I didn't move.
Didn't breathe.
Slowly, I snapped back to reality.
My hands moved on instinct as I checked on my sister.
She was unharmed.
The damage was undone.
The Kitsune energy was gone – depleted… perhaps even sealed.
I swallowed.
Death had not taken her.
Azrael had saved Anka's life.
But why?
Death does not act without reason.
THE END~~~