Adelaide and Mira were torn apart by the storm.

Her vision spun; a behemoth heart roared in her ears; blood-red wind wrapped the village, sand-brick houses crumbling back to bare grain.

Pins, porcelain shards, bent iron—things of daily life whirled faster and faster, their sharp edges turned into stray bullets screaming through the air.

Chaos hit too fast. Adelaide barely threw thin shields over herself and Mira before the storm lifted them like everything else.

Weightlessness flipped her, nausea clawed up; her grip failed. Half-conscious Mira slipped away into the howl.

Adelaide fought the shrapnel with her shield, while her eyes hunted through the storm for Mira’s shape.

“Mira! Where are you!”

Every shout filled her mouth with grit. She kept trying anyway, panic beating like wings in her chest. She had to find Mira, then drag her out of the storm’s jaws.

The high-speed shrapnel wasn’t the worst threat. The infant at the eye was.

Wailing Matis—another legion-class spell Adelaide had only seen in ancient texts.

It took its name from an old tale: a man of the Nuhaman Tribe cheated on his pregnant wife, dissolved in nightly debauchery.

His gentle wife cracked, clutching her swelling belly, whispering Matis the demon’s name. When the child was born, grotesque birthmarks covered its back.

Someone cried “demon-born!” and raised a blade—but the baby cried first.

In the legend, the instant it wailed, everything around was sucked into its body. Watching the winds and debris accelerate, Adelaide knew the book hadn’t lied.

As recorded, the blood infant the monster left behind ate the world like a black hole. Adelaide was no exception.

The storm slung her in orbit around the blood infant, a spiral tightening, the radius shrinking fast.

She knew zero wouldn’t be kind. To slip a black hole’s pull, there were only two roads: destroy the singularity—the crying blood infant—by spending power equal to the legion-class spell itself.

She and Mira were drained from the fight. Even together, the odds were thin as paper.

So the only feasible path left was to push herself to escape velocity and break free.

Even in a world with magic, Adelaide had to lean on bare physics—if something bore a force toward the core, she could take the equal and opposite kick.

In other words, if she had a solid slab, half a house, some big piece, she could shove it inward and ride the recoil out, hauling Mira with her.

Problem: in the core, extreme acceleration shredded anything without warding arrays into grit. There was no anchor to push off.

At the knife-edge of panic, she caught a flash of gold among the mud-sand.

Her eyes lit. She reached, fingers clawing through the gale.

“Mira!”

Her scream drowned under the thunderous heartbeat. But Mira seemed to feel it. Her drifting fingers twitched; her eyes opened.

A breath of confusion, then she turned and saw Adelaide ten meters away.

“Mira, come to me—!”

Those few meters were a chasm. Every meter cost brutal effort. Even their voices couldn’t cross.

Adelaide saw Mira’s lips part, but no sound reached. She lunged her hand out anyway, pouring everything she had into the reach.

“Grab—my hand!”

Mira raised her hand for a heartbeat, then it fell, as if strength snapped.

She bit her lip, scanned the storm, looked back at Adelaide, and pressed a palm to her chest.

[Adelaide, I have… a way out.]

Adelaide froze for half a second at the voice, then realized it came from the voice-transmission Magic Crystal Stone in her pocket.

Right—sound died in the storm, but the Magic Crystal Stone still had one use left. Knowing Mira used it smoothed a knot in Adelaide’s chest. One line blew away her helpless panic.

[Mira…]

She had a thousand things to say. She shook her head and shoved the flood of feeling down.

[Did you find a weak spot we can push through?]

Silence. Mira’s lashes lowered, then she nodded.

[Mm. Come take my hand.]

The words hit like a shot of life. Adelaide even laughed.

Hope re-lit her, turned to fuel. She stopped sparing her body. She let more shards slam her shield and rode the hits toward Mira.

Bit by bit, the gap shrank. Adelaide watched that hand grow closer. Her little flame of hope flared high.

Good. Mira had found a seam. No more worrying about dumb leverage points—

Adelaide reached one last time. They were a breath apart. They’d go back together, just like they promised—!

Yes—look—Mira had raised her hand—

—but it wasn’t to clasp. Her fingers traced a tiny array in the air, then tapped Adelaide’s chest.

Pale blue sparks danced on her nail. A shock slammed Adelaide. The storm flung her away.

Eh…?

Her mind went white. Thought vanished.

It was a shutdown to survive. If she thought, reason would crush her. Every sound, every clue roared the same verdict, shoved her face into it, forced her to admit a simple fact.

There was never a magical seam to save them both.

No miracle would appear.

Only simple physics.

To escape a black hole, you push something else into the hole.

Adelaide watched the golden-haired figure drop toward the core. That beautiful face looked back at her—the face she’d grown up with; the face too stunning to recognize at their reunion; the face that showed strangers a brazen, arrogant mask, yet in front of her lowered its gaze, tongue-tied, unsure—now it curved soft, like a wish fulfilled, relief loosening brow and eyes.

What did that mean? Of course Adelaide knew. From the start, there was no leaving together. Mira had made a choice.

A choice that was hers. A choice an elder sister had no right to override, should respect—

—To hell with that.

At that hint of relief, the last chain in Adelaide’s mind snapped.

She had reached the outer layer, where big wall-chunks spun—perfect leverage. A few throws with her chain-blade could sling her out.

She did summon the Bloodsword, hooked a slab of wall, dragged it close, then kicked off.

Only, her vector wasn’t outward. It was inward, straight at the core.

A deep-crimson array flashed at her ankles. The kick flipped her momentum. She arrowed for the center at several times her speed, crashed into Mira before surprise could bloom, and locked her in her arms.

“Adelaide! You—”

“Shut up!!!”

At this distance they could hear. Adelaide just roared like a cornered beast and hurled into a razor chant. Her free hand carved sigils with the fastest speed of her life—the array for the Tarkus Point-Needle, a spell impossible now with her magic drained.

She knew. She didn’t stop. Her white hair whipped in the gale; her heart hammered like a drum in a storm; blood burned in her ventricles, birthing power to feed the lines.

“It’s not enough. Why—why did you come back!”

Mira screamed. She knew exactly what Adelaide intended. Despair colored her voice.

Adelaide didn’t look. The Tarkus Point-Needle formed—but to Mira it meant nothing. The blood infant swelled faster in their view than the array could build. The spell wouldn’t finish in time—

Then a jet of gold ripped the sand-curtain.

At the same instant, Adelaide’s fierce voice reached its end.

“Starte nas—”

The incomplete Tarkus Point-Needle released with the Elven incantation. Its needle-surface was dull, as Mira expected. Alone, it couldn’t pierce the blood infant’s core heart.

But that was without outside help.

A blast rolled over the valley, loud enough to drown the storm. The gold streak tore away most of the infant’s flesh, and Adelaide’s needle struck the heart laid bare.

After that? They didn’t know. Half a heartbeat later, they smashed into the heart themselves.

One sure thing: the instant-melt, instant-devour never came. A flood of rank, metallic liquid hit them; next second, they punched through.

Then pain, so real it shattered thought. They hit ground hard, tumbled a dozen times, slammed a rock wall, and finally stopped.

Every scrape, every bruise, the stab of a snapped rib—all slammed into mind at once. Mira couldn’t hold back a groan.

But that pain told her she was alive.

She opened her eyes and saw a heart burst midair into a blood-blossom.

It bloomed so brilliant it carried a warped beauty, like a declaration that the night was over. It broke into a torrential blood-rain that washed her face.

At the last second, that gold light, paired with Adelaide’s Tarkus Point-Needle, broke the core of the array.

In other words, she… survived? With her sister…?

The dreamlike scene left Mira dizzy. Even the pain seemed to thin.

Panic fluttered in her chest like a startled sparrow.

She turned her head and pushed up on one arm, like a sapling bracing in the wind.

She lifted her gaze to find Adelaide—then weight struck her shoulder like a falling rock and slammed her back to the earth.

The rough shove ripped a pained grunt from her, sharp as cold iron against skin.

When she forced her eyes open again, Adelaide loomed like a storm cloud, both hands clamping her to the ground like iron.

Adelaide’s voice cracked like ice on a river as she demanded, “What am I to you?!”