—Why would she choose a bell hairclip as a gift?

What’s that supposed to mean—what nonsense is this woman suddenly saying? Even on Richard VI’s face of abstract black mist, confusion rippled like wind over ink.

Then, in a flash of false enlightenment, he nodded, all understanding and approval.

“Ah, ah, even now you’re playing the family card. You want your little sister to keep fighting. Touching.” His voice sighed like an old lute. “I get it. You still believe in your precious sister, think your bond can suppress me—maybe even beat me. So you brought up the gift that matters most to you both—”

“That bell hairclip isn’t a gift. It’s a locator to hunt her down.”

“…Huh?”

Adelaide scoffed, that “you think?” look sliding across her face like a knife’s reflection.

“Logistics, darling. The plan was to burn our house during her birthday party to cover the assassination. Chaos everywhere. If I couldn’t find her, that’d be a mess. So I made the hairclip—its ring is subtly off from normal bells. Only I can tell. In the stampede, I’d follow that note, reach her fast, drag her somewhere no one would look, and finish it.”

She dragged a finger across her neck, theatrical and glinting, then rolled her eyes and shrugged. Her mouth kept running about how she had to play the devoted sister, handcrafting a birthday present so Mira would actually wear it.

Across from her, the two of them were completely stunned.

“…?”

Richard VI couldn’t squeeze out a single word.

“I mean it. Mira’s got a ridiculous filter about me. Don’t learn who I am from her side of the story.” Adelaide’s tone was flat as winter slate. “Trust me, I’m not the perfect, kind, beautiful big sister she remembers.”

Mira went blank. “Sister, w-what are you saying…”

She stared, disbelief quaking in her eyes, but Adelaide moved on like she couldn’t hear the tremor in her voice. She laid out how she toyed with hearts, built her popularity by stepping on Mira, and called her own ruthless self-interest what it was. At the end, she spread her hands and sighed, “If a person doesn’t live for herself, heaven and earth will wipe her out,” wearing the expression of those trashy novels’ villainess that readers ache to see executed.

“See? Mira handed you a bundle of unrealistic hopes. But me? I’m actually a total piece of garbage.” She waved lazily and let out a white breath. “Especially when it comes to Mira… hey, I won’t claim I feel nothing. But the truth is, plotting to kill my cute little sister? I already tried it once.”

Richard VI, dazed till now, snapped alert. He put on a senior’s gentle mask.

“No, no, you did try once—but that was ages ago. So much has happened since. You two aren’t what you were. Listen to me. An impulsive choice now will haunt you—”

“—Shut up. I’m not talking to you.”

She cut him off again, clean as a blade. He looked even more lost, mumbling, “What do you mean you’re not talking to me, then who—?” His head hadn’t caught up.

Mira’s eyes went wide.

“You all”…?

And—

“Not talking to you”…?

The two points clicked in her head. Panic crashed in. She shook her head hard, first to grasp what was happening, then to deny it.

“W—wait—Sister! Stop!”

She screamed till her voice tore, but Adelaide only watched her sister’s breaking face…

And smiled, then gently shook her head.

“I’ve spent my life lying to crowds, hypnotizing friends who trusted me, even betraying kindness. For my goals, I put Queen Dreamlan and the others in harm’s way.” Her words fell like ash, then sharpened. “If that still isn’t spicy enough for you, hear the other stories of ‘me.’”

“No, don’t say it!”

Mira snapped, completely lost to fear, and bolted.

With a monster stealing her body’s reins, every step was a stumble. She ran crooked, but still burned herself trying to reach Adelaide, to clamp her sister’s mouth shut, to stop the next word.

But even with Mira doing all that, Adelaide wouldn’t yield. She walked backward, step by step, holding the space between them like a quiet boundary.

So, in this empty empire, a strange pursuit began.

Unlike their earlier clash, where both moved faster than sound, the blonde sister now ran and reeled, the white-haired sister moved unhurried, and the rhythm felt less like a chase, more like a sister’s teasing in a garden.

Of course, it wasn’t play.

Mira’s voice bled despair, begging again and again. Adelaide only kept retreating, eyes lowered, and unspooled the sealed past.

First, her disgrace and failure in another world—a life that did nothing, meant nothing. Then, her inhuman brutality as the great emperor.

She schemed to steal the Elves’ bloodline, launched purges and persecutions to set her authority like iron.

Famine, slaughter, civil war…

Events tied to the current Adelaide by a hundred threads, yet not perfectly equal to her, were narrated as one hundred percent her fault.

As the words went on, her voice lost its early calm. It grew hoarse, a tremor threading each syllable like frost cracking wood.

Was that repentance for sin?

No. Not emotion. Something more physical.

With each confession, a ripping pain tore deep in her chest, like lying in snow while a pack of coyotes fed, feeling your body carved alive, flesh bitten and tugged away.

The agony twisted her voice, yet it excited her.

It wasn’t proud, exactly… but like drinking mercury, most people get that once in a lifetime. For her, it wasn’t unfamiliar.

Feeling it again meant her plan worked.

Thinking that, a fever lit her weakening voice. “Your textbooks won’t say it, but I’ve killed plenty. I even forced knights who followed me for decades to murder infants to prove loyalty—yes, that’s the real me! A pure, dyed-in-the-wool villain!” Her smile split like a crack in porcelain. “And villains have dignity! If, at the end, you mistake me for some hero, I’d be insulting the rotten, stinking heart born in my chest!”

She shouted, swaggering, then her backward step faltered. She staggered several paces, slammed her right shoulder into a lamp post, and barely held herself upright.

“Sister…!”

Mira hit her own limit and stopped, reaching toward Adelaide with empty hands.

Her sister shook her head. Again.

“No… don’t… please… don’t…”

Her voice thinned, tears fraying its edge.

Even Richard VI’s murky soul woke to something then.

His shadow-flesh churned, Mira’s panic sliding into him like cold water.

“W—wait… you can’t be—!?”

When Adelaide met his warped, black face, her eyes changed from fond when looking at Mira to—

A curl of contempt at her lips, sharp as a hook.

Finally figured it out?

Too bad. You’re already late.

Her hand lifted to her chest. Then—she pushed it in.

“You—?!”

Madwoman—his last words blurred to an echo in Adelaide’s ears. The pain in her chest swallowed everything for a heartbeat. She wavered, snow filled her vision.

Metal-sweet blood surged into her throat. She spat a mouthful red as sunset, kept upright only by the lamp post at her shoulder.

Even then, her mouth held that thin, contemptuous smile.

Yes—contempt.

Like she’d said, that whole sudden confession wasn’t addressed to Richard VI.

In truth, she wasn’t confessing to Mira either.

She wasn’t raving to herself. And she wasn’t chatting with Rockridge, already cold on the tiles.

The ones Adelaide aimed to reach stood right here, close enough to touch.

But they weren’t Mira, and they weren’t Richard VI…

They were everyone beyond those two.

Yes.

“You all.”

From the start, she hadn’t chosen “you.” She chose “you all.”

Not one, not two, but a set of hundreds of millions.

Now, with a bloody rasp, laughing through it, she shouted the most important line.

“Now you finally get it, right? Someone like me—doesn’t deserve to be king!!!”

Squish.

The moment the words ended, her hand tore free. Blood burst open like a flower.

The strength in her limbs—enough to rival the Nacha Tribe—bled away. Gravity grew heavy again. Standing turned difficult, like those days right after waking from a coma.

The change snapped into place in milliseconds.

Then came a rhythm like an ancient bell’s slow toll.

Thump.

Thump.

Thump—

A heart, slick with blood, jumped in Adelaide’s hand, cut from her body, no thread left to tie it back.

Under that beating heart, a small sigil rotated, casting crimson light.

“Impossible…”

“K—kh… haha… what, surprised?” Adelaide’s laugh stuttered through coughs. “Ha… kh…”

Blood ran from her lips. She couldn’t hold the cough down.

Massive blood loss turned her paler than the Sacred Heart, yet her voice felt lighter than at any moment since she returned, like she’d ripped out a burden, not a divine engine.

Richard VI stared, disbelief boiling and cold.

He couldn’t believe she actually pulled the Sacred Heart out.

It’s nearly impossible.

As said before, merging with the Sacred Heart is already hard, since it won’t let you kill. But compared to breaking that merge, fusion is the easy part.

The Sacred Heart only releases in two cases: when the host dies physiologically, or when every citizen of the empire denies the host’s right to be king.

Between those two, the former is easier.

Even if the Sacred Heart grants near-infinite recovery, killing the host is still simpler than getting absolute denial from every citizen at once.

If even one person still believes the host deserves the crown, the Sacred Heart won’t be forced out. Imagine making every single soul in the empire fully accept that idea—how hard is that? That’s why, even with Emperor Belior’s countless crimes, it took ages to strip her.

And even that precedent required famine and war to cut the population down, infants who couldn’t think to nearly vanish, leaving only middle-aged and old folk inside the borders, hearts packed tight with hate for her.

Right now, Adelaide had no breath to spare to recreate those same conditions.

If she died, the board would drop to black, and nothing would be solved.

So even she, at first, never reached for the Sacred Heart as an answer.

But then—just now—drowned like a stone in deep water, she remembered a fact.

On any ordinary day, getting every subject to deny you at once is near impossible, like herding a storm.

Except the Greatest Sacrifice had just been set in motion, a bell struck across heaven.

It was a moment the chronicles had never held.

Every soul of the Empire poured like rivers into one vessel.

And that vessel stood before Adelaide, an altar lit within arm’s reach.

It handed her a chance—a chance to confess before all, and send a message to each, like wind laying down wheat.

—Come on, spit on the trash that I am.

—Please, deny my right to wear the crown.

It was a plea and a command; the array’s chains had numbed those souls, and they took her words like snow takes quiet.

Then, as she hoped, they denied her in one breath.

Together they recreated the severance condition that only triggered after Emperor Belior’s mountain of sins.

Yes—Adelaide pulled it off.

She walked the old rut and lost the Sacred Heart once more, like a queen laying down her crown.

Only this time, not a drop of regret stained her.

She watched the pure-white heart throb in her palm, a small moon pulsing, and her lips curved in a satisfied, cocky crescent.

Across from her, Richard VI couldn’t keep that trash-talking calm; the bluff blew apart like smoke.

“Why would you—”

“Cough, cough... You ask why take out the Sacred Heart? Heh—thank your good son, Rahman.”

“Rah... man?”

“Yeah. Thanks to his hint, it came back to me. We Blood Mages aren’t righteous duelists who win by our own strength. We’re villains who fight by a sacrifice’s might, stealing what others forged.”

True, while fused with the Sacred Heart she couldn’t command that god-tier power; she only leaned on its blood-forge, still flinging her own blood like blades.

But once she broke the fusion, this heart had no right to refuse—prey caught in a snare.

A god-tier foe demands god-tier material.

That’s a Blood Mage’s way to war.

Adelaide laughed, bright as a blade.

Behind Mira, the black mist showed fear for the first time, shrinking like shadow at noon.

“You... you’re going to sacrifice a god’s heart?!”

“Yeah—what else? Think I took it out for show?” Adelaide sneered.

“That’s part of a god’s body, the power granted to kings...! Impossible, you can’t—how could you abandon it, abandon eternal life?!”

He roared; the black mist inside him swelled like a tide of ink.

In a blink it drowned the light at Mira’s chest and jerked her body toward Adelaide.

Yet with the threat at arm’s length, Adelaide didn’t move, a stone set in a river.

At the very end, she only shook her head, a leaf saying no to winter.

How could I decide to give it up?

You told me the answer yourself.

“Without her beside me, those endless years... how bitter they’d be.”

She left that line behind, then no more hesitation.

Her fingers clenched, and she crushed the spell array in her palm, snapping the sacrifice’s final seal.

After that, a tide of pure white light unfurled from her, like dawn spilling over the rim of the world.

It spread and covered the entire Sumerland Continent.