Drip, drip.

Water beaded off the eaves like cold prayer beads. In shadow, its fall left no trail; only the splash told the world it existed.

Then that fragile proof drowned under a louder tide.

Splash, splash, splash, splash...

Filthy shoes kissed filthy puddles, like frogs slapping reeds. In the wet-black alley, two sets of footsteps rose like twin drums.

One set panicked, a swarm in flight. Their splashes stitched a frantic rhythm. The other set came from one person, dry as bone, steady as a hunter’s breath.

Her soles never touched the scum, like a lone wolf walking fresh snow. Yet her steps beat loud, a coil of force straining like a bowstring.

Each fall sounded like she pressed down a hidden surge and a thorn of urgency, biting hard on the pack’s heels like winter frost.

Until a dozen figures split at a fork, three streams scattering like startled sparrows.

The shadow’s steps halted. The wolf’s blade-flash folded into the dark, like a moon swallowed by cloud. She hesitated at the crossroads.

“B*t—! Idiot! Get lost, hahahaha—ugh!”

The fat man spat curses, then yelped, as if a bullet bit his backside. Fear kicked him like a mule; he ran without breathing.

But the hunter’s steps didn’t follow.

The alley mouth fell into hushed dark, like a pond after stones. Either she chased someone else, or she gave up.

They clung to that hope like drowning men to driftwood. They ran another half hour, circling the city like lost geese, then gathered at a drab suburban warehouse.

All three routes returned whole. Cheers burst like corks.

“B-b-big bro, she… she… she wasn’t—”

“Not lo-lo-local! Lost us! Hahaha!”

“Med—! Meds! Endless meds! Where?!”

“N-not time yet, why so… s-so hasty!”

Even the joy of cheating death came warped by their stutter, like a cracked bell ringing. They didn’t notice. They slapped hands and smashed shoulders, bones clicking like wind chimes.

Mid-celebration, the fat man grunted. Something in his rump fat seemed to crush like overripe fruit.

“What… what the hell?”

He scooped his groin and grabbed crystal shards. Slant light from the window caught them, scattering colors that didn’t belong in this grime.

A Magic Crystal Stone, same as the one that violet-haired kid had crushed.

“Holy f—”

The Nacha curse died as a blade’s chill kissed his double chin. His mouth sealed tight like winter clay.

“Is this your base?”

That devil-cold voice iced every spine. Only the burliest Nacha, the obvious head, glared at the Mira stepping out of shadow and roared.

“I-i-i—” His tongue tripped, like a fish on sand. Then he bellowed, “Iceberg Demoness!”

Mira’s pupils tightened like needles. He stuttered a long threat about turf and payback, but she lowered her gaze like a falling frost and cut him cold.

“How do you know that name?”

“Eek!” He flinched a step, fingers groping behind him like a crab. He grabbed something. “Re-release the dogs!”

He needed courage, so he shouted as if coughing up his lungs. He didn’t care she held one of his men like a shield. He yanked a lever like tearing vine.

Mechanisms shrieked open like iron jaws. Grated doors clanged. Dozens of half-man-high maws lunged, throats glowing ember-red like kiln hearts.

Infernal Python Hounds—two meters of muscle and ash. Their snake-like jaws stretched like pits, and their fire-breath licked like forge tongues.

Old rumor said the Nacha Tribe once fielded a unit of hounds and beastmasters, a spearhead fierce as a storm. They fought Chaos Spawn even before a god’s blessing.

No wonder his courage flared. These beasts hunted spear-spider swarms despite being outnumbered. Their prey tonight seemed a lone woman. His eyes veined red like maples; revenge tasted sugar-sweet and close.

“—hundo.”

Her sword hilt tapped the fat hostage’s nape like a knuckle on a bell. His eyes rolled white. As darkness took him, he heard one word of casting.

His lids fell; arcs climbed her blade like lightning vines.

In the next heartbeat, Mira vanished from every eye.

Unlike her fight with the Prince of Neprah, she didn’t open the Time Domain. She chose something simpler and crueler.

A flash like ammonium nitrate flaring washed the warehouse, a noon thrown into night. All living things screamed, except the caster and the fainted fat man.

Without eyes, none could see where Mira went.

Hounds crashed mid-pounce like felled trunks. Nacha with strengthened sight grabbed their faces, rolling and howling like boars under spears.

“D-d-damn it!”

The head cursed on the floor. A fist lifted him by the collar like a hook. A blur of gold smeared his broken vision like sun in fog.

“Where did you hear that name?”

Same words, pressure multiplied by a storm. Even the others stopped wailing, their breath clipped like snared birds.

The warehouse held only hound keening and Mira’s ghost-cold voice.

“Tell me straight. Or you die here.”

“Eek!”

Her sword point kissed his throat like an icicle. She showed she wasn’t bluffing.

She had to know—why he called her Iceberg Demoness.

That nickname should’ve belonged only to the orphanage kids. Since lessons began, they called her teacher or master. She hadn’t heard that name in a long while.

Maybe a child had slipped and told someone, long ago. Even so, she rarely went out. Even if someone heard the nickname, they had no face to match it, no way to peg her.

Yet this head used it like a nail hammered true.

She wore mimicked Elf ears, and he never paused to treat her as an Elven patrol. He seemed to know her bones from the first breath.

Why? The threads in Mira’s mind tangled like vines. They hinted at connection, yet a vital link was missing. Her blade slid forward an inch, pricking his throat like thorn. Blood ran down the edge like a red ribbon.

“You have three seconds. Three—”

“I-I-I’ll talk! I’ll talk!”

Before she reached two, he crumbled, tears and snot smeared like rain.

“The Medicine Peddler told us!” Death’s breath sobered him; words flowed like water. “He said, follow the ‘script’. Harass the purple-haired and blue-haired kids on that street. If the Iceberg Demoness shows, run. After, he gives us however much medicine. For free!”

Mira’s eyes flickered like candle flame. Those words carried weight. Who is the Medicine Peddler? When and where do you trade? What medicine—Stimulant Elixir laced with Soul Devourer Sormaidon material?

All crucial. But one word froze her deeper than frost.

“Scr…ipt?”

She mouthed it like tasting iron. Fear pricked her lungs.

She had heard that word. Too many nights.

Not in theater class. At a bedside in the dark.

Countless times, she heard her sister whisper it in sleep.

Like “Jiaqi”, that word haunted Adelaide’s dream-talk, again and again.

Mira remembered. After the king’s assassination, her sister burned with fever. Mira sat at her bed, fingers laced like roots, keeping watch. Adelaide repeated that word almost all night.

Mira kept its sound like a bead in a pouch. Later, in the Elven Realm, when she studied Chinese, she learned what it meant.

“Script.”

But what did it stand for? Why did her sister’s face twist like nightmare whenever she spoke it?

She didn’t want to think about it, as she didn’t want to think about “Jiaqi.”

A sister’s secret wasn’t hers to dig. If Adelaide didn’t want her to know, she wouldn’t cross that line. She told herself that, like a vow carved in ice. Yet hearing strangers say it, her grip tightened like iron. Her blade-hand trembled like a reed.

“What is the ‘script’! Speak!”

“Ugh! Don’t—”

“Speak! Or I’ll make you wish for death.”

She lost her calm like a lantern kicked over. She didn’t consider the word might be unrelated to Adelaide. Her sword pressed to a lethal depth, almost kissing his windpipe.

“I—I don’t know! He only said everything on the ‘script’ will happen! I swear I don’t know more! Don’t kill me! I—I can take you to the Medicine Peddler—”

The last two words stuck in his throat like fishbones. He choked. A watery rasp bubbled. His just-clearing eyes rolled back, whites blooming like lilies.

It happened too fast. Mira thought she’d nicked his windpipe. She loosened, and he grabbed her sleeve like a drowning hand, lunging at her like a boar’s charge.

Her blade still rested on his throat. She yanked back, but too late.

Glug—

The sound was thick as mud through reeds. Blood sprayed her like a red rain.

The hilt pulsed with his last two struggles. Then it went still, like a pond after wind.

“…”

Mira stared at the Nacha man turned corpse, disbelief gnawing like frostbite. Her mind blurred like fog.

No answer came. The room answered with frenzy.

Hounds and men roared together, not at her, but at each other, like rival packs under a red moon.

“Stop!”

She shouted like a gong. It meant nothing. Everything alive became feral.

Infernal Python Hounds bit open throats and arteries, spraying warmth like geysers. Orange breath charred heads to coal.

Men drove claws into hound hearts like nails into bark, then ripped hard, a butcher’s yank.

They roared together, twin storms. Then they toppled together, sinking into their shared blood like stones into a crimson lake.

In the end, like the man still pinned on Mira’s rapier, they jerked twice, then life slipped away like smoke in winter air.

Shock flooded her first, cold as river water. Everything had happened too fast; faster than Mira could ever move to stop it.

Worse, even with time, then what? What could she do—brandish a sword and order them not to slaughter each other?

So what, truly... happened? Mist pooled in her mind, like fog draping a quiet valley.

She hadn’t wanted to really hurt them. She wore an Elf’s face, and the Flower Dancer election stood at its crucial hour.

If she spilled blood in Sanda as an Elf, trouble would crash down like a falling temple.

Mira refused to shatter the hard-won peace between Elves and the Nacha Tribe. That’s why she used nonlethal blinding tactics to subdue them—however...

A swallow caught in her throat; fear fluttered like a caged sparrow. The hilt in her hand shivered, steel buzzing like a hornet.

She jerked her eyes to the leader, his throat skewered—only his final spasm. It loosened the satchel on his waist. It slid down, then hit the floor.

Bottles chimed together, a brittle chorus like ice cracking.

Her stare fixed on the bag; an eerie sixth sense beat at her skull like moth wings.

She bit down, then drew the blade from his throat and flicked the blood like rain. She crouched and opened the satchel. Darkness smelled of herbs and iron.

Inside waited bottles like the ones she had seen before. Most were empty.

Only one held a gray-white liquid, clouded like dusk milk.

Mira lifted it. A string looped the neck, and a sticker clung to the glass.

“…Gift?” she breathed, confusion pooling in her eyes like rain in a bowl.

Did she miss something? The bottle turned; the string tugged, fishing out a crystal from the jumble.

At a glance, it looked like the communication Magic Crystal Stone Mira had given Anta.

But the sigils inside were clearly different. She narrowed her eyes and sent mana probing in.

Understanding clicked—this was a recording Magic Crystal Stone.

“What is going on…?” The facts were many, the threads too few; her worry spread like ink in water.

Then footfalls came from the entrance, like pebbles tapping down a well.

Seconds later, a boom shook the cramped room, wind slamming like a storm door.

The warehouse doors blew open under a wind spell. Light speared in and painted corpses and blood.

It also lit the newcomer’s bright gold hair and pointed ears.

The Elf who’d blown the door sighed, helpless, at their teammates, a breeze turning into a weary breath.

“Ha, late again by a step...”