At this moment, Demoness Trissy had barely escaped the grasp of those who served the Evernight Goddess. The Nighthawks were relentless and dangerous, but she had outmaneuvered them since they lacked information about her, and that ignorance had been her path of escape as Tingen City shrank behind her.
But she had encountered something far more dangerous than Nighthawks.
Hiding in her wagon was a Beyonder whose power was greater than hers, radiating the unsettling, suffocating presence of something that no longer belonged to the land of the living.
A dead that refused to stay dead.
But since he seemed content to ignore her, she had extended the same courtesy. Whatever had brought a walking corpse onto this locomotive was none of her concern. As long as she escaped both the sect and the churches, she was satisfied with this development.
Trissy was still coming to terms with having been turned into a woman, her mental state unstable, filled with confusion and pain. And beneath her composed face, a cold and venomous hatred boiled in her heart.
Witch... They never told me the potion would forcefully change my gender. Damnit! I was too foolish to believe her. But no longer, I refuse to become their puppet again. And now that both the Theosophy Order and the Demoness Sect are hunting me...
Backlund. There's no other way. That's my destination... She thought, biting her nail in frustration.
But... can I really escape? Can I really get a taste of freedom? Haaaaa... I don't know...
She sighed, leaning back and crossing her long, slender legs gracefully, tapping her cheek with a focused expression, as if deliberating over which dessert to order.
In reality, she was watching the Zombie.
He clutched his chest, his breathing ragged and pained, one hand pressed to his mouth as though fighting the urge to spit his stomach out. Agony twisted his face unnaturally, resembling a bestial horror. His teeth ground so violently she could hear them, a little more and they would snap and shatter.
What's happening... She frowned. What caused such a reaction? It feels like... Wait. Why does it seem like he's been... cursed?
This is too dangerous. I need to leave as soon as possible. This situation gives me a strange feeling, as if something terrible is about to happen.
She rose to leave the wagon, and if things deteriorated further, she would abandon the locomotive entirely.
But as she uncrossed her alluring legs and pressed her slender fingers to her thighs to stand, she felt a faint distortion in the air and the burning smell.
What the-
BOOM!
BOOM!
BOOM!
Flames and smoke devoured everything.
Ash rained from a sky that had been blue moments ago, transforming a bright afternoon into a blurry, suffocating abyss that carried the stench of burned flesh and boiled blood.
Severed limbs, burned torsos and shredded organs rained down along with ash. Intestines hung in the air like strings, snagged between destroyed machinery above where the burning locomotive lay, bodily fluids dripping from them. You could see limbs, faces and bodies, separated from each other, each carrying different characteristics, some big, some small, some muscular or soft. It was clear that they belonged to men, women, the elderly and children.
A woman's head dropped below the bridge, beside a child's arm, her expression frozen in terror, her ribcage caught between ruined steel rails, organs sliding down and dropping beside her head.
No one was spared. Every single one of them was consumed by flames of malice.
A dark pillar of smoke rose into the sky, the intense heat turning the air blurry and hazy, like staring into the distance across a desert.
Trissy had barely managed to leap into the mirror world for a few seconds before she was cast away, the doors of the mirror world closing to her as the reflective surface of the glass she had used melted. But those few seconds saved her from the explosion, allowing her to avoid the catastrophe that had slaughtered hundreds.
As she was banished, she fell from the sky, balancing her body in mid-air, covering her face to avoid inhaling ash and smoke, and to shield herself from the intense heat that brought discomfort.
She glided down, her hands spread slightly like an eagle's, her eyes observing the destruction as she stepped onto the ground slowly, descending like a feather.
She pursed her lips, looking down at her torn, burning dress, quickly extinguishing the flames with the frost element and pressing her hand to her abdomen where a piece of metal from the locomotive had penetrated.
Taking a deep breath, she inhaled the filthy air, coughing, her chest rising and falling as she ripped the curved metal from her body with closed eyes, her fingers trembling as she threw it away. Blood flowed down her dress but she quickly froze it to avoid death from blood loss.
She wanted to leave immediately but she was too injured, her body not in good shape. Even if she had managed to avoid a direct hit from the explosion, she had still been damaged by the flames, her arm sizzling and her bones shaking from the impact they had withstood. Moving in such a state would worsen her injuries. She couldn't use the mirror world to travel yet, and she couldn't exactly stay here either. So she decided to hide for now and think about how to escape.
Around her was nothing but endless, tortured screaming and a cruelty she had never witnessed before. Even if she had done many terrible things herself, ruthlessness of this magnitude still baffled her.
Looking down, she saw the twitching body of a child. Half of it wasn't even there, split and mutilated. One lung still sat in his ribcage, faintly expanding and contracting on reflex, one leg attached by a little piece of flesh like a string. His cheeks were burned like the rest of his body, flesh sizzling and melting, some of it liquefying and sliding down his neck, leaving only exposed teeth and jaw behind.
Beside the child, a woman burned, her flesh scorched as searing fire licked at her skin that slowly split open, similar to how a pig's flesh splits when overcooked. Her hair was gone, already turned to ash, and her left hand, or what remained of it, was only a blackened bone. Her breasts melted, turning red and then dark as fire continued devouring her body.
Trissy wiped ash from her eyes, cutting the lower half of her dress for better mobility. But then she paused, her heightened sense of smell registering everything at once. She covered her mouth, clamping it shut, her throat burning with pain while her stomach convulsed in disgust, fighting back the rising bile that threatened to escape her lips.
Gritting her teeth, she tasted acid, spitting with an appalled expression, breathing heavily as her eyes turned watery, tearing up involuntarily from the intense smell that nearly forced her to retch, leaving her disoriented and lost, her body shaking as she stood beneath the rain of ash.
But then she froze, her ears perking up as her body stilled. Amid the burning corpses, roaring flames and the screams, a faint, unrecognizable sound grew slowly clearer and transformed into a deranged laughter.
She turned around instantly, her head snapping toward the source, her electric-blue eyes piercing the darkness and flashing with pale light as she prepared to defend herself but what she heard rooted her in place. It wasn't anything threatening or dangerous; instead it was rather casual and laid-back.
"Yo. Long time no see..."