Perfect.

Like a blacksmith finally getting dream-forged steel, the Follower of Pleasure, Cruz, used that word for the white-haired girl under the blood moon. His gaze burned with pure zeal, praise spilling free. If you ignored the world-ending beast beneath him, he looked like a devotee before a shrine—no jealousy, no vexation, just uncut admiration and joy.

As the target of that praise, Adelaide listened to the words he sent straight to her ear. She lifted her skirt a touch, offered a refined nod, and kept a smile at her lips.

“Senior Cruz, I’m flattered beyond measure~” She answered like at a noble ball, gracious and well-bred. “But save the compliments till our duet is done. As I dislike unfinished games, a cut-short performance feels a pity, don’t you think?”

“Of course—continue your brilliant show, my dear, beautiful fiancée!!” Cruz drew a deep breath, face alight.

“Eh…? It seems we do have a little rift, especially over titles—no matter. If it makes you happy, suit yourself.”

Adelaide spread her hands, magnanimous. The blood moon hummed to her gesture, and a scarlet waterfall poured into the array behind her—the First Generation, the Type-59 Battlefield, and Mira’s combo all snapping into perfect place on her cue.

A blinding cruciform flare burst, followed by a sacrificial hush as Chaos was burned. Another great slab of flesh was carved off the Chaos Beast. It shrieked, and its Deconstruction Domain faltered, weakening so clearly that ordinary allied soldiers could finally press close.

Its regeneration dropped, too.

Even the Lionheart Hero Varie’s mighty strikes had only gouged temporary wounds. With the Void Rift’s aid, a body cleaved in two should’ve snapped whole in an instant.

This time, it didn’t. Adelaide’s mana barrage left wounds that refused to knit, and worsened by the breath.

Across the torn flesh, black cysts split and oozed. Black-red threads crawled along the edge, like an infection only the living should suffer—Adelaide’s handiwork. That void corrosion which unravels all things now ate at the Beast itself, canceling its self-repair.

Riven so hard, the Beast panicked again. All the eyes in its skin flipped and bulged, fixing on Adelaide—her small white-haired figure reflected in its muddy orbs, somehow more dreadful than the blood moon’s drone.

A familiar jolt ran like lightning through what remained of it—the same dread as when Varie struck. Its root wasn’t now, but deep in its Void core: the first taste of failure after it ground down world upon world, and the fear of a seal spanning millennia.

Born to erase meaning itself, the Chaos Beast felt the despair it was meant to grant. The feeling was so sharp it made it shiver and hum.

It retracted its tentacles, growing grasping hands and beast-feet to flee faster. Scarlet cross-flashes and every kind of attack chased it. Hit or not, it refused to counter. It just ran, even cutting off infected limbs mid-flight, desperate to reach the safest place it knew—the Void Rift’s embrace.

If it could return, it could at least hide in the Void, even without home-field edge. Everyone knew. No one would let it go.

Spells of every hue covered the sky. Thick chains wreathed in blue fire cinched its crown tentacles. Silan and Bingxia’s duet spell surged, making every step stickier.

“You won’t get away, monster!” Silan’s face flushed from the long fight, yet the turning tide hit like a shot of steel to the heart. She dug in for a lethal tug-of-war, anger blazing in her eyes. “Surrender. Your vile dream to restore the Chaos dynasty has failed!”

The Chaos Beast did not answer. It kept severing its own limbs, straining against the flame-steel locks.

Strangely, Cruz overhead showed no such panic.

Even stranger, hemmed in this hard, he still didn’t strike. He let the living host vivisect the Beast again and again. It wasn’t lack of power.

Adelaide had already named his infamous epithet—the Follower of Pleasure, a human fiend even the reclusive Elves had heard of. With a demon’s title, his floor sat near a typical First Generation. If he moved, he might not flip the board, but waiting to die made no sense.

Yet he did exactly that. Since the Void Rift tore open and he arrived, he’d done little to sway the fight.

Now, the same. A mage’s nimble fingers danced in air, drawing no sigils.

He watched the sky-wide volley streak toward him and the Beast, palm pressed to an unseen wall, eyes entranced.

“Ah, how beautiful… how grand…”

He drank the battlefield. Shots from the First Generation, the Nacha Tribe, and the Elf mage phalanx came in a thousand shapes, meteors under the blood moon’s red. Most turned into junk and symbols near the Beast’s Deconstruction Domain.

Dolls, envelopes, red flags with skulls, balloons sloshing rainbow paint—oddities and pressure-proof strikes hammered the Beast’s last shield. Weird and familiar, color-splashed and bleached, a riot of sounds and sights flooded Cruz’s vision, like a jaundiced child burning with fever, trapped in half-sleep delirium.

Face gone crimson, he let out a low moan he couldn’t hold.

“This… this is the salute I wanted—this is the grand wedding worthy of her and me!”

He shouted in rapture. Had his words not drowned in the din, anyone hearing would call him mad.

And this wasn’t his strangest act.

As a new cruciform flash bloomed afar, and the First Generation with the Type-59 Battlefield brought their barrage to point-blank, he finally moved.

His first strike didn’t target anyone attacking the Beast.

He curled his fingers, palm sharpening to a blade.

Then he stabbed that blade-hand into the Beast’s crown.

Every mind paused for half a beat at the shock.

The Beast had been ready to accelerate past Mira’s electric edge, but the instant his hand pierced its hide, it froze. A body meant to move locked in place, like a squid with its central nerve cut. Its skin blanched to gray in a blink.

What is he doing?

No one knew. Cruz’s random-seeming act defied reason. Who backstabs their only ally now? Everyone quick enough reached that same, wrong conclusion. Only Mira, watching in slow motion within her Time Domain, felt the true off-note.

She saw Cruz lift his face in that instant, and… smile at her.

Alarms screamed inside her. Yet the Beast’s sudden freeze broke her prediction. By the time she felt it, her gap with the Beast had nearly vanished.

She tried to pull back at full speed, but Cruz was faster.

Yes—faster than her, a master of the Time Domain.

Everyone else moved like a slow play; Cruz became the exception. He flashed to Mira almost in an instant. She couldn’t even catch his motion.

Mira jolted, mind blank. Battle habit drove a thrust. As she gripped the hilt, a wicked, uncanny whistle slid into her ear.

With that note, her heart physically stalled for a beat. Magma ants seemed to chew through every limb. Blood burst from her lips. Her grip failed.

The next moment, the Time Domain collapsed.

Cruz hung in air, and in his hand was Mira’s slender neck.

“Got you~”

His tone was light, but the sound itself was only “broken”—the literal kind. His windpipe lay exposed. The fragile white tube deconstructed, rotted, then knit again. Air rasped through, a bellows-slit groan that turned the gut.

The same rot crept through the rest of him. Every inch of skin decayed and sloughed. Black vapor leaked from open lesions.

“You…!”

Mira fought, but the spell-script etched into her body tightened every muscle fiber. All the pressure funneled into her chest, pinning her heartbeat.

Just raising her hand drained everything. She could only clutch at the fingers on her throat. Against that crushing power, it was useless.

“You… betrayed Chaos…!?”

She stared at him, horror sharp, the puzzle snapping in place.

History never notes the Follower of Pleasure wielding a Time Domain. Yet he’d matched her speed.

There’s one answer. In that instant, he cut the Beast’s link to the Void Rift. The Beast lost mobility. The power meant to flow into it pooled in Cruz, the “relay.”

With that surge, he hit acceleration to rival the Time Domain. He seized her in the heartbeat that whistle staggered her.

There was a price. His body’s rapid decay showed it—weight no mortal flesh should bear.

Cruz simply didn’t care.

“Betray? Such an ugly word, little Mira. I never planned to revive a Chaos dynasty. How could I betray that great presence?”

His voice stayed jagged and harsh, yet the lilt of pleasure didn’t change. He looked, satisfied, at the golden-haired girl in his grip, his ruined mouth trying to curl.

“Ah, no need for the snarl. I’m saving your life, little Mira.” His gaze dropped to her heaving chest. He sighed. “Your soul’s tenacity surprised me, but Tessmi’s Lament is one of my proudest inventions. You, fighting under that curse at this intensity… tsk, tsk…”

Even if your soul endures, how long can your flesh last? Twice… three times? Three at most. After that, if you keep opening your Time Domain, your heart will rot for good—Cruz wheezed a laugh, and his eyes slid to the far horizon.

“So you really don’t need to be scared; if I’d wanted to snuff you out, little sneaking kitten… haha, blunt truth? You’d have died like a candle pinched out, over and over.”

“...Let… go… of me!”

Mira thrashed again, breath ragged like wind against broken reeds, and it wasn’t strength returning but fear flooding her veins like ice water.

Because she followed Krus’s gaze and saw the white‑haired girl under the blood moon, a pale moth caught in crimson lanternlight.

“And yet you’re still alive… Tell me, why would I leave you breathing?” His words coiled like smoke.

The answer hung in the air like a blade, and his hand tightened like an iron hoop; a strangled whimper bled from Mira’s throat as her body bucked like a fish on a hook, her sea‑blue eyes clouding, the light drowning like stars under deep water.

You wretch—Anger flared like a grass fire in the First Generation and the allied soldiers, their glares like drawn steel, yet no one moved while his fingers were a vise on Mira’s neck; far off, Adelaide lowered her spellcasting arm like a wilting branch, and the sigil behind her—bloated with blood‑slurry and poised like a loaded crossbow—ground to a halt.

“I think I don’t need to spell out what comes next, my brilliant fiancée,” Krus drawled, his tone honeyed and cruel, his fingers closing like a trap.

“This little sister is burning her life to shield you; shouldn’t you do something to repay that loyalty?” His mockery glittered like frost.

“No…” Mira squeezed the last breath from her lungs, the plea thin as paper, and the plea wasn’t to him but to stop her sister, a cry thrown like a stone against a tide.

“Of course I understand you, Senior Krus.” Adelaide answered at once, voice as clear as bell‑glass, not a grain of resentment, only that familiar, gentle grace like moonlight on still water.

No. Panic crashed through Mira like a black wave; she scraped for a reason like fingers on ice, telling herself it had to be a stalling gambit, a ribbon of time she could seize to keep her sister from stepping into a pyre for a sinner like herself.

That fragile hope shattered the next heartbeat, like thin glass under a hammer.

Adelaide snapped her fingers, a crisp crack like winter twigs, and the array that could maul a Chaos Beast unraveled like a torn tapestry; above, the blood moon cinched tight like a wounded heart, chains of blood scraped air with a dry hiss, imploded in a single gulp, and vanished, leaving a ghostly giggle skittering across the wilds like dry leaves.

“I’ve gone this far; please be generous and release my dear sister, Senior Krus,” she said lightly, her tone a silk ribbon even as she cut her own anchor rope.

Her poise was porcelain, but the truth was iron: the chaotic magic field around her had bled away like heat from ash, and the strike she’d used before was now as unreachable as a star.

Even so, Krus didn’t loosen the noose of his hand; he only stared at Adelaide, eyes tipping upward like a man savoring a scent.

Adelaide sighed, a tired breeze through reeds, raised both hands, and let a few syllables drip from her lips; a ring of binding runes curled into bracelets around her wrists, ink‑bright and cold as shackles.

The moment they lit, every other sigil on her skin burst like fireflies into the dark, and her knees gave like cut strings, dropping her to the dirt.

“Heh… so, is this enough to satisfy you, Senior Krus?” She reached for lightness like a singer short of breath, but weakness threaded her voice like water through sand.

She had sealed away her access to inner‑source mana, a locked well under stone; she couldn’t cast, couldn’t even hold the muscle‑fortifying spells that kept her standing, her strength ebbing like tide.

Mira’s eyes dimmed to stormglass and filled with despair; she’d returned to shield her sister, yet had turned into her soft underbelly, a flaw like a crack in jade.

Regret burned into tears, and she fought again, shaking her head at Adelaide like a bird battering a window, begging the world to stop.

But the hourglass had already bled out; everything was too late, like rain after the fire.

“Though she’s technically an impostor, this ‘sister’ of yours really does run deep,” Krus sneered, his smile a blade’s reflection. “Jealousy, twice over—how cruel and how sweet.”

With a lazy flick, he hurled Mira away; she flew like a rag of shadow and skidded across the dust in a spray of grit.

The stretch of wasteland between him and Adelaide folded like paper, and in a blink he stood before the white‑haired girl, close as breath.

“I’m delighted our duet is so in sync; it saves so much needless trouble for this wedding,” he murmured, his ruined voice rasping right at her ear like torn silk, not a projection across miles but a knife at the throat.

Color rose to Adelaide’s cheeks like wine blooming in water, the blush of a shy bride only in appearance, because the heat came from something more immediate, a spike like a brand.

She clutched her belly, a soft gasp spilling from her lips, as if smothering a desire stoked from embers, forcing her breath to a slow tide.

“Ha… ha… you’re thorough, Senior Krus,” she said, the smile on her mouth a thin, defiant cut. “But your body looks like a storm‑wrecked hull; aren’t you worried how you’ll weather Void corrosion once your plan lands?”

As she said, Krus looked wretched, a statue flaking under acid rain; the vast Chaos he’d hijacked from the Void Rift gnawed at every corner of his flesh, and even a blood‑plasma slime’s top‑tier regeneration lagged behind the rot, gray‑black flesh bared like char.

He didn’t care; he lifted his hand, pleasure bright in his eyes like a devil watching a candle gutter.

“Why worry? This vessel will be useless soon anyway,” he said, and black light gathered at his fingertip like a hungry star.

“Heh. You finally found the nerve to lay hands on me?” Adelaide’s laugh was a thin bell, brittle and brave.

“Please. I told you already—I’m a Follower of Pleasure,” Krus breathed, devotion like fever. “And a Follower of Pleasure has long been ready to welcome ‘death.’”

His fingertip punched through Adelaide’s abdomen like a nail through paper, and the girl’s vision folded into night, a curtain falling without a sound.