“I’ve heard Blood Magic feels like a stacked deck at a smoky table. But do all Blood Mages cast like you, without a single chant?”

“Maybe yes, maybe no—the truth’s a fog. Honestly, I haven’t really watched other Blood Mages work.”

Hazel lifted her shoe from corpse-water, disgust folding like storm-clouds—at Adelaide, at her soaked socks, maybe both. She murmured a water control, and the damp peeled off like mist.

“A riddle-speaking lone wolf, huh? I’ve poured tribute like incense smoke for years, and you won’t even share this?”

“The mysterious one doesn’t recall taking anything from Miss Hazel—memory slips like water through fingers.”

“You piece of work, like a thorn in my sleeve…”

Adelaide’s gaze flicked to the woman’s body drifting in corpse-water. She shrugged, light as falling ash.

“And compared to me, our princess still sits in her ivory tower, little fur cap on, waiting for a white-horse prince under a paper moon.”

Hazel’s face darkened like gathering rain. She snorted and hurried deeper underground, steps beating like a drum, refusing to argue.

Her answers were smoke, but her hands were steel. When she moved, she hid nothing, like a blade laid bare on black stone.

Down the rest of the way, Adelaide flung spell after spell, each one a new mask. Lone Blood Puppets got sliced like vegetables under a chef’s knife. Packs of Blood Puppets blew apart like rotten gourds under a hammer.

Small glass vials spun through the air like fireflies. Until they shattered, nobody knew whether the next spell would turn the puppets to ash like quiet snowfall, or splatter their foul blood across the walls like a mad carnival.

Boom—this time she strung invisible webbing in front of them, silk hung like frost-laced strands. The Blood Puppets ran through, their momentum uncut, but their bodies sheared into segments in the next heartbeat—skull, guts, and rot spilling like a tipped bucket.

That still wasn’t enough. Adelaide tapped the air; a mountain of meat appeared like a landslide from nowhere and steamrolled the line, puppets and debris alike mashed into a palm-brown semi-solid, the texture of vomit.

Hazel watched Adelaide crush and laugh, comfort pooling like warm tea while fear pricked like ice needles—was this one not actually Adelaide?

The wheelchair-bound Adelaide had a sharp tongue like a razor, but she’d never shown a taste for grinding corpses twice. The “mysterious one” clearly reveled like a cat with a caught mouse.

Hazel looked up and met the “mysterious one’s” gaze. Through a lilac veil, a playful smile curved like a crescent.

Yes—just as Hazel feared and hoped, Adelaide’s mood shone bright as lantern light.

Those raised brows looked like teasing, like show and taunt. But Adelaide wasn’t enjoying Hazel’s shifting eyes. She wasn’t flexing to cow her friend.

She was simply happy to finally field-test the magic she’d crafted behind closed doors, like a potter firing sealed clay.

Her first fight with a Dreamfeast Spider had turned cat-and-mouse on its head; she got ambushed like a deer in brush. Last time, against the black-cloaked men, she got played in the dark, trapped in “dream,” dying and living by turns, unable to weave even a sacrifice spell like a weaver with cut threads.

Across her only two real battles, Adelaide hadn’t shown her strength—always tripping for odd reasons, like slipping on wet leaves. Here, deep underground, she could throw big spells without worrying about staying hidden, and her targets were the Blood Mages she despised for wasting good materials like butchers spoiling fine cuts.

So she let her hands go, tossing every learned spell she’d never had the chance to use, testing them in live fire like arrows on a wind-swept range, venting the pent-up frustration of those two botched fights on these unlucky Blood Puppets.

She still held trump cards like knives up her sleeve. She didn’t fear anyone reading her cast and crafting a counter from traces like footprints in dust.

Thinking that, silk-gloved fingers sketched a handful of perfect circles, a new magic array blooming like red camellias. In the next breath, a red light-mist filled the passage like dawn haze, and every Blood Magic construct began to burn—array, skin, muscle, organs, then bone—layer by layer, falling to ash like a shedding kiln.

Soon, only Adelaide and Hazel remained in the passage, though the Blood Puppets’ howls still echoed from afar like wolves in a canyon.

“We’ve handled hundreds along the way. And there are more?” Adelaide traced lines in the air; probing blood-threads streamed into the dark fork like rivers seeking the sea. “Don’t mistake me. I’m happy to clear a few more waves—like sweeping leaves in autumn. I’m just curious. Where did they get so much material?”

Hazel fell silent, her quiet tight as a clenched fist. Seeing her face, Adelaide smiled and spoke the answer she already knew, light as drifting snow.

“War is a mill that always grinds out reasons.”

Hazel didn’t reply; she bit her lip until pain bloomed like iron. Adelaide didn’t press. She drew back each blood line like fishing threads, then pointed down one path.

“Her Highness is just ahead. But she’s hit a snag—trouble like a knot in silk.”

Before Adelaide finished, Hazel had already bolted down the fork like an arrow loosed.

At the corridor’s end waited a chamber vast as a cavern.

Calling it a “room” felt wrong. It rose nearly fifty meters high, stretched for hundreds more. Above, below, and to the sides, stone-brick walls merged with darkness like ink in water, their pitted faces seeming to writhe like slow worms.

Standing in one corner felt like burying your head in the ocean, opaque water pressing your sight from all sides. It looked boundless, yet the smothering weight made every other underground pit Adelaide had visited feel like a sunny retreat.

Especially once you counted the sea of corpses made of Blood Puppets, rolling like a red tide.

How many Blood Puppets was that? Adelaide glanced and gave up counting, like a monk dropping beads. At least a thousand jammed the chamber, their roars echoing like ten thousand dying infants crying—sound that would drive a normal person mad even before it deafened them.

Hazel didn’t cover her ears. Her eyes locked on the center like a hawk on a field mouse.

“Sanyi—!”

Compared to the tide of bodies, the silver-haired girl at their heart looked fragile as a reed. Her eyes were closed, weakness written across her face like frost. Without her hands braced on the staff, she looked like she’d crumple in the next breath.

Around her, a silver shield no wider than two meters gleamed like a moon puddle. It was her only wall against the corpse sea, and it was cracked like ice in spring—one storm away from shattering under the waves.

“Sanyi—!”

Hazel’s voice was a sparrow in a thunderstorm, tiny and lost. She tried to sprint forward, to reach the silver-haired girl, but scarlet cords snapped across her limbs like vines and held her fast.

“Let go of me!”

“Don’t. Not if you don’t want Her Highness to carry a lifetime of regret like a stone in her chest.”

Even half-mad, Hazel froze for one heartbeat, her struggle stilled like a held breath. In that breath, a sigil pressed to her ear, and Adelaide shared the sound she heard, clear as a bell under snow.

“Eruva Huorë—”

It was faint, but Skela’s voice cut through the layers like a needle through silk.

Hazel’s eyes widened like lanterns, because she knew that chant—everyone knew that chant.

Legend says it was the first battle between living things and Chaos. When nameless, formless monsters blasphemed the sky with their power, when their poison mist rotted all it touched like mold on grain, Emperor Belior stood atop Monte Peak, the roof of the world. He looked down on a world steeped in fear and despair like ink, and he did not bow to the dark. He spoke the words a god had given him in a dream.

“ol-nya melehtë—”

When the chant ended, the clouds melted like snow, and sunlight washed the land like pure rain. Holy light swept away the poison fog; wherever it fell, the shapeless evils screamed and burned, and under human swords and bows, they shattered like brittle clay. It was humanity’s first victory, and the first true taste of hope since Chaos had crossed the threshold.

To honor the day the war turned, that chant became the anthem of the Sarman Empire. Even a beggar who couldn’t read could recite it with eyes closed like a prayer.

And that was the poem now on Skela’s lips, flowing like river-song.

Her shield had reached its limit. When it broke, countless Blood Puppets rushed her like a locust storm. None reached her, because Skela spoke the final word.

“Cala.”

Holy Light.

In the next moment, the world drowned in gentle radiance like dawn spilling over snow.