With Adelaide’s covering fire and spellbursts crackling like summer hail, Soul Devourer Sormaidon never caught their whispers; it only saw Mira and the others melt into the Magma Forge’s labyrinthine ribs, like fish slipping into reeds. It mistook the vanishing for a scatter, prey bolting in different streams.

Its lip curled, and sunless fury lit its ashen drake-eyes like cold coals flaring under ash.

“It could have been simpler, yet you demand my first meal observe table manners upon waking,” it rumbled, voice like rock under a tide. “So be it. You won’t run far. I’ll savor you one by one, like bones cracked clean under the moon.”

It looked at Varie and Adelaide left behind, then threw its wings wide like stormclouds, a body a hundredfold their size blotting the furnace-glow.

“Then the pre-meal exercise to stoke the gut,” it hissed, like wind through slag, “starts with you.”

Adelaide moved on a tight breath. Her left hand crushed a glass vial; scarlet juice bled between her fingers like pomegranate wine, tracing etched lines down her forearm. Red light flared, a specialized augmentation array blooming like a brand. She lifted, for the first time, the magic-core sword she’d taken from the outpost, a two-hander longer than her usual Bloodsword.

Mana poured in, and the blade answered like a struck bell. Blood-red power streamed within it like molten rivers, then focused at the white Dreamfeast Spider core, which sighed a pale pink glow like dawn on frost.

“Here’s hoping your ancestors’ forgecraft is as good as legend,” she muttered, a grin like a knife-edge. “Otherwise we’ll need luck to drop from the sky—and a lot of it.”

Varie ignored the bite in her tone. She closed her eyes, listening for tremors her eardrums could not catch, like a hunter reading ripples in a dark pond.

Her song kept flowing, a thin stream under stone.

So there was only one thing to do.

Live. Then pin this dead lizard under the Forging Hammer’s fall like a nail under a mountain.

Varie gripped her bow. Golden motes crept from her palm to the string like fireflies taking roost, and the fletchings caught fire like new stars.

Only now did the battle truly begin, like sunrise knifing over a ridge.

**

“The plate says three-zero-seven-two!”

“So we’re in Room 3072. Lemme see—by layout #8, we go left to pipe twenty—”

Tela, frantic as an ant on a hot pan, flipped her little notebook like a fluttering fan, trying to find the corridor to the Firestone’s control room. Her nail traced a way out through the knotted lines like a twig parts vines, and she hadn’t even wiped the sweat beading her brow when a metallic voice rolled in like cold rain.

[Warning: Energy line #8 unavailable. Attempting facility layout #9. Please wait—]

“You’ve got to be kidding me—again?!”

Her wail couldn’t stop the Magma Forge from shuddering like a waking beast. Hos snapped, breath hot as steam. “Why’d you ‘inventors’ make this thing so blasted complicated?”

“You know nothing,” Tela shot back, flicking his forehead with a knuckle like a pebble pinging bronze. “Without contingency layouts, the whole thing would’ve died already! And who jinxed fighting that dead lizard and got us into this mess?”

“H-how is that my fault?! It’s had its eyes on us from the start—”

Wind brushed Hos’s nose like a gnat’s wing. Splat—something burst beside him. Empty air changed color like paint spilling across glass, then, like a squid with its ganglia cut, a black mass the shape of nothing but a gaping maw slumped into view. Hos and Tela moved in the same breath, a punch and a kick like mule-hooves, booting the limp thing aside.

“What the—what the hell is that?!” Kabos swore, fear sharp as broken glass. The others sweated cold, spines prickling like frost rime.

“Chaos Spawn!”

Beanpole—the one who’d dropped it with a single bolt—shouted, and the rest snapped up their weapons like shutters slamming.

Nameless, formless, soulless—the stories of the Chaos Uprising weren’t exaggeration. The true Chaos Spawn were silent and clear as glass in the dark. Without a warning bell in your mind, even the Nacha Tribe could barely fix their place.

They were lucky, in a way. They’d put distance between themselves and Sormaidon, their senses clearing like fog lifting, and Beanpole’s were keen even for the Nacha.

That didn’t mean the danger was gone. Stumbling into one wasn’t chance. Nacha ears stood sharp as blades; fine yet viscous footsteps, like syrup dripping fast, were racing closer. Evils that once slumbered with Sormaidon had woken. They poured from every seam of the Magma Forge like oil-smoke, weaving a deadly shadow to catch all living things.

“Damn it, that dead lizard won’t give us a single breath!” Hos roared, voice like flint.

He ripped the Type-24 Harpoon Impact Cannon off Tela’s back like a thunderbolt. “You find the way,” he barked, muscles drawing tight like bowstrings, while he and the others fired toward every abnormal sound like hail shredding leaves.

In a sense, they were blessed. To fight the unseen up close was a drowning nightmare. If they hadn’t found these suppression-heavy ranged weapons at the outpost fort, the floor would already be slick with blood.

Even so, they were on the back foot, reeds in a flood. Chaos Spawn kept coming from all sides like an endless tide. Corpses skewered by ballista bolts clogged the walkways like driftwood, but countless new lumps of meat still surged from fore to aft.

Holding the line alone was backbreaking. Breaking through toward the control room felt like punching through iron.

“I’m young, I’m not married, I don’t even have kids—I’m not dying in this hellhole!” Kabos yelled, his cry boiling like a kettle. The raw grief caught like fire.

Mira, silent at the rear since the start, lifted her face like a flower toward rain.

Stay… here?

A thin light kindled in her unfocused eyes like a lantern under fog.

If one of the sisters had to stay to face the soul-eating monster, the old Mira would have shattered the wall between her and Adelaide like glass, and taken the rear herself.

Yet now she stood here, leaving her sister in the deadliest field, like a candle set in the wind.

What am I doing?

In the war-cries and the spawn-tossed eddies, the bell on her side-lock chimed like a single drop on still water.

Her mind was a storm. One voice cursed her shamelessness like crows on a corpse. Another called in panic, urging her to turn back now; there was still time to trade herself for her sister’s escape. Compared to the plan she was running, that was the safer bridge across the gorge.

And the cost was only a life that belonged to Adelaide from the start, said the cold in her bones.

After all, a sinner like you never deserved another path, her inner voice screamed, cold claws closing around her heart.

Pain tightened her chest like a fist of iron. She did not look back. She stepped forward as if off a cliff—and found a bridge of lightning.

Her rapier rang free. Violet-blue arcs leapt across walls and blades like quicksilver fish, then gathered midair into a tide of stormwater. It punched through the corridor Tela had pointed out like a spear through silk.

When the thunderlight faded, she already stood at the far end, a shadow against the glow. Behind her, Chaos Spawn piled like a hill of offal, then, like lit paper, they bleached and drifted away.

“Holy—”

Tela and the others stared, mouths open like doorways. Mira’s blade still crackled, lightning crawling like ivy. She tilted her head, eyes veiled in shadow.

“Which way next?”

Tela snapped back, legs already moving, flipping pages like wings. Each time she pointed, Mira cleared the path at a speed the eye could not catch, then waited at the end like a sentinel stone.

They moved far faster than before, arrows on a straight wind, and soon burst into the control room that held the Firestone.

The door swung, and Tela’s mouth dropped wide as a fish. The Firestone no longer sprawled on the floor. It hung in the center, fixed between ceiling and floor magnetic generators like a whale held in twin tides. The person-high stone floated with a slow breath, rising and falling. Fissures along its skin leaked a soft orange glow like lava veins under night.

Around them, copper panels that once looked like random plates woke one by one, spilling numbers and commands like constellations.

Just as Tela had said—this was the heart of the Magma Forge. The master controls for the Forging Hammer thrummed here like a pulse.

“Told you—once you’ve seen this, who gives a damn about the long-ears’ pile of junk tablets!” Tela whooped, joy flaring like sparks—then her face soured like milk. A panel beside the Firestone showed a big fat zero in ancient Nacha script, a cold moon of nothing left.

Before she could ask, Mira stepped to the Firestone and set her palm upon it like a vow.

She whispered a trembling spell. Blue-violet, high-density arcs streamed from her hand like braided rivers into the stone. Numbers began to climb like rain filling a cistern. The fissure-glow shifted from orange to blue, a sea changing under the sky.

The Firestone was charging fast. The squad’s hope leapt like birds flushed from grass. No one noticed the sweat pearling Mira’s brow like dew, or the molars she clenched like iron.

Heart… it hurts.

From the start, Kabos and the others had felt Mira stronger than in the desert village, almost back to her Holywell Academy height, like a blade re-honed. None could feel the pain in her heart.

Endless guilt and regret flooded her chest like black water. Every second might mean a final farewell to her sister. Anxiety and fear punched through Tessmi’s Lament inside her like thorns through cloth. Some power returned with the breach, yet her heart felt torn open like wet parchment.

Even bound by iron chains, she didn’t stop. Her body kept to this plan with lower odds and higher risk, a narrow path along a cliff.

Because only this plan let both her and her sister live, like two candles shielded under one hand.

Yes. She herself wanted to live.

It was likely the first time since that birthday banquet that the thought burned clear, a coal under snow.

Not because she’d promised that only Adelaide could decide her life and death, but because her own will reached for the light like a shoot in spring.

Selfish. Shameful. Yet that lone spark was the one reason she could burn everything now.

Since the fight with Firefly ended, she’d found it harder to lie to herself, harder to smother her longing—like trying to dam a spring with bare hands.

She had worked so hard to make peace with her sister. She’d been given, once more, the chance to be her little sister, a name warm as bread.

The scenery she once only dared to dream had become daily life, soft as morning steam. It changed her. It thawed the whisper at the bottom of her heart like ice easing in sun.

—Even if it’s only a day, an hour… no, even a few seconds…

—She wants to live, and spend them with her sister, like two lanterns side by side in the dark.