“Mira” floated in a realm blank as untouched paper, drunk on herself, lifting her arms to admire the perfect braid of muscle and bone across “her” hand.

“Do you feel it… this flawless flesh, this once-in-ten-thousand-years Time Domain, and power that crushes countless souls into my palm…”

Richard VI curled his fist, and the domain’s very medium boiled like a stormed cauldron, all at the same heartbeat.

Space kinked and writhed; colors curdled like muddied water; everything reassembled to the shape in his heart, rising and falling with his moods like tide.

This was a world carved for him alone, a private sky under his sole moon.

Even Matis couldn’t touch this, his strength only borrowed for a moment from the Void Rift; Richard VI, now, gripped every living soul inside this flesh, a miracle that grazed creation itself.

“Huhahaha… with a set this perfect, even that lofty God can’t bind me with ‘fate’ anymore!”

Shock hit Adelaide like cold brine, but the arrogant grin wearing Mira’s face forced her to swallow it; she ground her teeth and shot back, “You… aren’t afraid He’ll descend judgment Himself?”

“God’s judgment? Heh—how delightful. I’d welcome it.” He smirked, slow and unhurried, calling a pure-white blade from the airless dark. “I probably can’t beat Him. But if He forces the script back onto ‘destiny,’ if He wants me dead—He’ll pay for it.”

He finished, crooked grin bright as a knife, lifted the hilt, and aimed the tip at Adelaide, speaking in Mira’s familiar cadence.

“On that note, a little wager—tell me, will this ‘loving Father of His people’ strike me down Himself before I erase you, the ‘variable’?”

“As a former politician, you sound a bit too noisy,” Adelaide hissed, hate burning like coal, her hand settling on her hilt.

“Just stating facts. Sure, I rarely told truths while on the throne… but now? I don’t need to spend even that much effort.”

The moment the words fell, the “Mira” in her eyes vanished, snuffed like a candle.

At nearly the same heartbeat, a muffled clang of crossing steel rolled through the void like thunder behind glass.

The winsome face that, a half-day ago, had tangled with Adelaide’s lips, now rushed close—closer than lovers breathe. Only those muddy brown eyes held no love, no lingering warmth—just pure delight, malice… and triumph.

“In the face of absolute power, scheming… is far too inefficient!”

Laughter and force crashed together. The pressure on Adelaide’s blade spiked like a landslide; even as the Sacred Heart surged, pumping blood to forge strength, she was blasted away the next instant—like an egg hurled by a shot-putter—slamming at brutal speed into concept-walls that had flowered in the void, smashing through several near-unbreakable barriers before she stopped.

She gagged a mouthful of blood; anything that could shatter had turned to pulp—literally. If not for the Sacred Heart’s transcendent mending, that single hit would’ve killed the old her a hundred times over.

Fear bit deeper than pain—the speed he showed first.

At the instant his shape disappeared, she hadn’t even glimpsed a trail. Her blade had met his solely on combat instinct, as passive as Neprah was the first time it crossed swords with Mira.

The real terror: Adelaide was in Crimson Frenzy, already accelerating.

Even in full rush she couldn’t react. In other words, with millions of souls feeding the Time Domain, it had likely pushed beyond “self-acceleration,” skirting true “time stop.”

The guess proved itself in the next clashes. Aside from the moments he paused to spit swaggering trash talk, Adelaide could barely sense his position; every parry hit the last possible edge of time—slip a hair, and she’d be hewn in half.

Even when she scraped by his strikes, she was swatted like a cannonball, ricocheting through air. If Richard VI hadn’t dragged her into his crafted domain and they’d fought in reality, her flight alone might have carried her past the borders of the Sarman Empire.

Even so, she felt it—the ease in every motion, the surplus in his hands.

Richard VI held back. He was playing with her.

KLANG—!

Another explosion of steel on steel cracked the air; Adelaide became a human tennis ball, rocketed away; the instant acceleration squeezed blood from seven orifices, eyes and inner ears repaired by the Sacred Heart only to rupture again. What reached her mind came in broken, flickering scraps.

Sensory loss felt like being dropped into a colorless, silent nightmare, her world blinked to blank and back.

Even blind and deaf, she felt the wrong tremor in her palms.

Her weapon was keening.

She, with a Sacred Heart, could still fight; but the Ceremonial Sword in her grip teetered at the edge.

It wasn’t poor smithing. Surviving this long against a foe brushing divinity shouted of the craftsmanship—the Elf finesse, the Nacha Tribe’s precision—woven into its make.

But no matter how clever its design, its collapse was inevitable. And under that light—

Resolve lit like flint; in the lightning-flash before his next cut, Adelaide chose.

She didn’t block.

This strike of Richard VI’s wasn’t harsher than the last. She could have stopped it—but when his pure-white blade fell toward her vision, she moved her sword an inch aside, forcing an off-axis pass.

Pain roared, as expected, a gunshot line from right shoulder to left belly.

Then came only emptiness and numb frost.

What does it feel like to be split in two by a single stroke?

Honestly, Adelaide couldn’t say—bodily pain no longer covered the territory. It had slipped past whatever a living brain can process. And any normal creature, cut like this… its brain wouldn’t need to process anything at all.

So she tried to understand it by reason. She tried to accept going from “one whole” to “two pieces.”

That isn’t an easy concept to swallow—especially when acceptance isn’t enough, when you have to offer the severed half yourself.

That’s what she did—teeth clenched, in the instant before she was cut, she crushed a sacrificial array under her right hand, offering up half her body in a blink.

At the same time, light surged in her left palm, all that self-sacrificed power poured into the already-cracking Ceremonial Sword.

Crack—

The clear sound of glass breaking chimed.

The blade gave way. From tip to guard, metal tough enough to endure a god’s blow burst into glittering, pink shards.

Yet before it shattered completely, every drop of energy raced into the core of its magical circuit—the Dream Eater Spider’s Magic Core.

“You—!?”

For the first time since the fight began, Richard VI’s voice snapped in surprise.

Another crack cut him off.

This time, it was the Dream Eater Spider’s Magic Core.

Like the blade, it couldn’t bear that surge. Cracks webbed it in an instant.

But at the moment it broke, a white light of unprecedented intensity hurled out—a sunbeam forcing itself through a howling typhoon—and struck unguarded into Richard VI’s eyes.

The storm vanished the next second.

Adelaide felt the void around her, her flesh-pain sliding away, going soft and distant.

Because this was the world of mind.

Yes. She had used hypnosis again.

Unlike the easy job with Rockridge, this took nearly all her blood in a single pour, burned away two-thirds of her body to barely clamp him down, and overloaded both weapon and core until they broke.

It was a one-off tactic with a brutal price. She did it for one simple reason.

It was the only solution she could see.

She could not harm Mira’s body; this was the last way she had to wake her.

Damn it…!

I’m right here—

Answer me, sis—

Please wake up, Mira!

Adelaide flung her spirit wide like a net over night water, hunting for the soul pressed under millions of others and under Richard VI’s weight.

But the moment her awareness touched, she felt not the familiar warmth—but a mass of heavy dark.

It was sludge, a mire of hate, rage, despair, void—countless negatives tangled into a bottomless, black bog.

It simmered and bubbled, without shore and without floor, and in a blink it dragged Adelaide down into that fathomless malice.

This time she wasn’t browsing the Grand Archive at leisure—the scenes invaded, flooded her mind on their own.

And she saw… secrets no one should ever know.

She saw him, the young Cabot, lure his third brother onto a pleasure boat, then shove the drunk into the sea to feed the sharks.

She saw him, the young Cabot, kidnap an innocent man’s wife and children, force the man to blow himself up at a banquet and murder two hundred innocents—along with his second brother.

She saw him, the young Cabot, in a planned avalanche, brawling his eldest brother like a beast, biting and clawing, ignoring the blade stabbed into his kidney, strangling his brother until warmth fled—until he became an ice statue no different from snow.

Adelaide saw far too much: how he became a king, how he toyed with hearts.

She saw how he used Rockridge’s guilt to steer him, turning him into a lever for revenge.

She saw how he built a world that denied his youngest son utterly, then told him only he accepted him as a Blood Magic adept—and forged him into a death-servant willing to give everything.

Everyone was a tool to his end—dotting grandfather, blood children—no exceptions.

Memories without number.

Each stamped in blood and tears.

Each shoved destiny toward this day.

Richard VI’s voice kept echoing in Adelaide’s ear like wind in a hollow bell.

These methods—you know them too well, don’t you?

Because, like I said, you and I…

We’re the same kind of people, aren’t we?

Get out… get out of me—

Adelaide tried to wrench free, but that soul, almost pure malice, clung like tar, caging her within.

Tearing spread through her spirit like ice cracks, her awareness coming apart; hypnosis frayed at the edges.

And at the instant her soul was about to be lost, Richard VI’s voice wavered.

What…? How—

His voice cut off.

Into pure malice, something dissonant bled.

A memory far longer than humans can hold bubbled up from the mud’s spring and spilled into a flood.

It wasn’t keen, aggressive hate like Richard VI’s. Instead Adelaide felt a faint, almost-not-there sadness and a great loneliness.

Almost-not-there, not for lack of depth—but because time, too long to count, had washed away its first colors and fire, leaving only the deepest thread of feeling.

And that single thread of feeling, a quiet ember in her chest, somehow held back Richard VI’s power that yoked a million souls.

Then the vivid color that had once steered Adelaide as the ritual array bloomed flared back, like a pennant catching sudden wind.

She, on instinct, seized it like a kite string and let it pull her forward.

Richard VI’s voice thinned into distance, while Adelaide stepped into a space like a sheet of yellowed parchment, dry and hushed.

Following that same line, she moved on, and a new sound drifted in like mist over water.

It was… a bell, dulled and a little muffled, like bronze wrapped in cloth, nowhere near crisp.

And yet—it was a tone she knew by heart, a familiar knock at her inner door.