At 14:12 on the afternoon of 2.30, Medith and Cecilia spurred hard, riding like sparks on dry grass; one horse died under them, and they pushed through the night to the scene.

The corpses atop Misty Gorge had been cleared, yet the battlefield still gaped like a torn earth-wound; the gullies and sword scars made Medith relive the siege at the Elf king-city like thunder behind her eyes.

“Why do you trust me?” Medith’s voice was a tired smile, her phoenix eyes cool on Cecilia’s youthful face, a flower in frost. “They call me the killer, and you still walk beside me?”

Cecilia’s face held no ripples. “I only trust what I see. Nothing more,” she said, like a blade laid flat on calm water.

Medith nodded and swept the area; her phoenix eyes flickered, and she opened that hidden Mark, like lifting a veil in moonlight, and in an instant, pillars of light speared up everywhere.

One was thick as an ancient pine within the Sanctuary of Freedom, and its glow hinted at a sizable Divine Stone sleeping within like a heart in stone.

But she had no mind to linger; her gaze anchored to rubble by the cliff edge, the shard Gill had named as key, a lone tooth by a broken jaw.

She stepped in and looked.

Sure enough, she found the characters she herself had carved, and a crooked little line after, like a child’s scrawl in dust.

Cecilia leaned in; she saw the writing on the stone, and her smile spilled into tears, rain on a sunlit leaf. “That’s so... exactly our Young Lord.”

Medith held her tongue and studied the shard, her focus tight as a drawn bow.

“Why would ‘4’ be read as ‘is’?” Medith asked, brows knit like crossed twigs.

Cecilia tipped her head back, caged her tears with a breath, and spoke as if unspooling an old tale by the fire. “It’s a saying from the Shenlong Clan; in their tongue, ‘4’ reads as ‘is’, and we kept the habit because it was fun.”

“If you’re not guild-aligned or in the know, you don’t hear that kind of thing,” she added, as if casting a stone into a deep well.

“Shenlong Clan?” Medith blinked, surprise rippling, but she let it pass like a cloud over the sun; she peered again, and under the ‘4’ she found another stroke, the character for ‘do’, stark as a knife cut.

“‘4—do.’ So, ‘is—did’... Did the Dusk Elves do this?” Her thoughts moved like lanterns in fog. “And that ‘S’—what is it?”

“‘Dead’? Or, as Gill said, S-class personnel...” Her eyes narrowed, then snagged on a jagged edge. “Hm? Is something missing here?”

Above the writing, a line of blood had dried like rust, and something had been there and shattered; Medith searched the surroundings, piecing the giant stone’s face back together like a broken moon.

Only the corner was missing, a tooth from a silence.

“No... no!” Cecilia suddenly cried out at the cliff’s lip, her voice a crack of lightning on bare rock.

Medith set the stone down and stepped up. “What is it?” Her words were a steady hand on a shaking bough.

“Here...” Cecilia’s golden eyes widened, disbelief blooming like frost fire. “O’Neil said the bridge was chopped by Sprites, and it felt wrong at the time.”

“Why would Wind Sprites use fire? With that much power, why bother severing the retreat?” Her doubt hung like mist over cold water.

“Fire with wind isn’t strange,” Medith said, calm as winter bamboo. “Wind feeds fire, fire rides wind; that’s a classic feint-and-flame tactic.”

“It’s just... cutting off the retreat is what a ruthless hand does,” she continued, voice flat as a blade laid on a whetstone. “They don’t want anyone walking out alive.”

“In that case, O’Neil ‘just so happens’ to be thrown off the cliff, and ‘just so happens’ to trigger Magic Breaker and get away; that’s a taste worth rolling on the tongue.” Her words hid thorns in silk, and Cecilia’s doubts deepened like a shadow at noon.

They peered down into the abyss; under the strong afternoon sun, the depths showed a blurred face, like a mirror in flowing water.

A swamp-jungle spread below, lush as a green sea; layered canopies blazed with life, flowers flared like lanterns, and whatever else lived there lay cloaked, eyes in leaves.

“Mm?” They both caught a seam out of place; among the waving grasses lay a black-red gouge, like flesh seared and glazed with molten iron, a scar that still felt hot.

“I’m going.” Medith drew her greatsword, steel humming like a cold river, and warmed her shoulders at the brink, a hawk testing the wind.

Cecilia snapped her golden whip, light flaring like a sheet of sun. “Are you insane?! It’s over four hundred meters down! Even a fourth-tier ‘Tsunami’-class could barely cushion it with a strong Magic Breaker Circle.”

“That’d drain you dry, and what lives below isn’t in your imagination,” she said, voice tight as braided cord. “Unless your Elf Clan can walk on air?”

“I used to,” Medith said, and the wind carried away the ache. “Not now. It’s complicated. I won’t die.”

“If I don’t go, Herbert’s death stays mud, nothing more.” Two lines like iron nails pinned the argument shut.

She stepped forward and jumped with the greatsword, a dark petal blown off a cliff; she soared ten meters and more, but before that sky-cut gorge it was a firefly in a well.

A heartbeat later, gravity took her, and she fell like a stone arrow.

Cecilia watched that slim shadow drop, the Black Sun cloak roaring in the cyclone like a storm-torn banner; respect rose in her like a tide, and the thought hardened—Medith wasn’t the killer.

THOOM—DOOM— A colossal pillar of light stabbed from the valley floor into the clouds, a spear thrown by the earth; its span dwarfed any Breaker Light Pillar Cecilia had ever seen.

Within it, even the Black Sun washed out and turned pure white, snow over obsidian; the only thing that poured from that light was awe, the kind that bowed the soul.

It felt like kneeling before a god.

Crackle... crackle... Fractures veined the pillar like ice about to give, and it trembled on the edge of shattering.

Cecilia burned half her strength, Magic Breaker defense blooming around her like a pale shell, as if to test the pillar’s bite.

The light broke apart with a soft roar, yet it didn’t lash at her; it gathered itself and poured down, a river reversing to its source.

Cecilia leaned out and looked.

KOOOOM—wooooo— The explosion rolled up, a mountain-sized drumbeat, and the whole gorge shuddered as if a giant breathed; the forest hissed and rustled, great birds tore free like arrows.

A skein of geese wheeled in panic and fled, black stitches unpicked from the sky.

Even a jungle tiger flattened to the earth, paws slapped over its head, shaking like a leaf in hard rain.

Woooo—woooo— Cecilia stared at the white mushroom cloud rising twenty meters and more, a ghost-tree of steam; her golden eyes nearly popped like seeds.

In about five seconds the cloud set its shape, then thinned and folded, and vanished like ink in water.

Below, the blasted woods had been scraped into a raw clearing, as if a giant had dragged a flat blade and shaved the earth smooth.

Tss tss tss— Snakes, rats, ants, and scorpions skittered from the brown boots that snapped twigs like bones; everything that crawled or bit streamed away in panic.

Poison spiders, strange birds, piranhas with abyssal maws in black pools, and carnivorous blooms that twitched like tongues—all saw a plague god and became a retreating tide.

Within a hundred meters of Medith, who dragged her greatsword like a fallen thunderbolt, an eerie circle opened and held, a hush that pushed life back.

Each step she took, life ahead flinched away like lightning, and not one creature dared meet her eyes, as if sight alone would burn.

Medith reached the odd red streaks, lines like clawed wounds.

She found melted iron chains pooled and frozen like black sap, and her frown deepened; she chopped off a chunk of congealed iron, then hunted the missing stone fragment like a hound on cold wind.

By the time she found the fragment and climbed back up the cliff, night had poured in like ink.

Cecilia slept against a broken boulder, breath soft as reeds; days on the road had worn her, and sleep took her like a quiet tide.

Medith felt the weight, too; chased nights and earth-shaking moves had gnawed her strength like moths at silk.

She pulled out the tiny piece of stone; the symbols on it were thorns in fog, and even strung together, they refused to flower.

“Maybe I’m just tired,” she thought, the words a hand to her own cheek; she leaned on Cecilia’s shoulder and slid into sleep like falling snow.