“…Why skip the charges and jump straight to the sentence?”

Yekase felt her throat sand-dry, a streak of cold sweat sliding over her temples like melting frost, but she kept her tone steady.

“I still don’t know what she did.”

[The sinner has no right to know, only to repent.]

…Hah.

She’d set foot in Europe and already stirred up the Iron Cross Knights. Yekase had to admire her cursed luck. She should’ve tossed the woman to those two pursuers and gone back to the inn to sleep…

“That’s a shame then.”

Yekase stripped off the blanket and draped it over the girl.

Her left hand pressed the witch hat’s brim down; her right flicked off Dawn of Eden’s safety. Infinite Power poured in, humming like a red river, and she shouldered it.

One knight ranked just under a captain-level elite; nine plus a leader… Yekase preferred brawls to duels, but was one versus ten still a brawl?

“I don’t accept nameless sins, or holy tribunals. No clear charge, no taking her.”

And the hard part was protecting a girl mid-melee. Even if the gunblade had been born in the Bozja Principality to guard others, Yekase never learned their swordcraft.

The new oni serum wasn’t ready, Luciferin couldn’t bring it, spells and gadgets barely touched them—only the Flash Energy inside her remained.

Behind her, a girl wrapped in riddles.

Before her, armored killers in God’s name.

The frame screamed heroic nonsense.

Kinda dumb. No—stupid as hell.

Yekase licked her dry lips.

“Iron Cross, huh… Must’ve been hard, hammering Jesus up there?”

[Blaspheme our Lord and be slain on the spot!]

—I laugh at you bandits who forge a lord to forgive yourselves! Come on, I’ll take ten of you!

—!

In the next heartbeat, Yekase streaked in like a red flare and slammed into the Iron Cross ranks.

She cut with blade, fired with gun, braced the Polaris Staff to parry, and when a seam opened, she vaulted up and drove a knife into the armor’s joints.

Steam-powered swords bit her and carved bright welts; a heavy hammer crushed a dip into her shoulder; a shield smash flung her, and she bounced off another shield, blood scattering like rain.

The girl sat on the ground, wrapped in the warm blanket, and watched in silence, eyes like dim lamps in fog.

Knights tried to slip past and grab her, yet somehow they were hooked back, knotted into chaos again, like fish turned by an unseen current.

No, not chance—this was a kind of technique.

She tugged on lines of motion with the least force. Her strikes hardly hurt the plate; most damage came from other knights colliding. She only ate the unavoidable hits; else she’d be paste the second she dove in.

Imagine if the knights were two opposing squads, not all keyed to her; then even the “unavoidable” hits wouldn’t land.

It was a craft born for chaos—a path-cutting art meant for one person to cross a battlefield.

The girl’s body still trembled, yet light rippled in her eyes. A whisper slipped from her lips.

“…Heh. Interesting. So interesting…!”

…Huh?

“Did… did I say that? How am I finding this… interesting?”

She dove in to save her. Even with technique, she couldn’t match trained Iron Cross Knights; once they adapted, she’d fold in a heartbeat.

Yet she felt interest here, purely at the sight of a strange art.

Was she truly a “devil”?

While she doubted herself, Yekase’s slide showed.

More hits that shouldn’t land kept landing; damage fed damage; her whole body painted red, no clean patch left, like a storm had dyed her in dusk.

Her blood spattered the ground, reddened old cobbles, and seeped into the soil in the seams.

The whole square reeked copper-thick.

The knights’ once white, “holy” plate looked fouled, a chapel wall splashed with dye.

…Something was off.

Her past was gone, but bedrock knowledge remained; otherwise she’d barely speak. Watching from the back, she caught the wrongness.

Does one person have that much blood?

The knights’ bodies were fine inside their shells; every splash of red came from Yekase, spread so evenly it felt calculated—each shield, each stone equally wet.

Why wasn’t she down from blood loss?

Or was this—blood spraying everywhere—her second-layer tactic?

She remembered a seldom-used fact: blood turns dark when it sits.

Yet—the ground, the shields, the plate—

Those stains gleamed bright, almost luminous, like fresh poppies under noon sun.

Lost inside the brawl, the Iron Cross missed the little abacus behind Yekase’s desperate flurry. One more coordinated strike and they’d seize the “sinner”—

“…Hoo.”

Yekase knelt in the center.

She planted Dawn of Eden into the stone and let out a soft breath, like wind easing after rain.

She’d guarded her head all fight; the witch hat was filthy but intact—her face still hidden.

“You’re knights of a church, yet you wield modern magic and armor. You chant Latin to a man-made god, but won’t seek wisdom and truth for yourselves?”

Five longswords, three hammers, two flails.

A net with no sky to fly through pressed down toward her head.

“Polaris Staff!”

—CLANG!!

An iron staff flashed into the gap, found the single balance point, and propped every weapon midair, like a weaver pinning threads.

Yekase held the Polaris Staff level above her head and murmured:

“Baseplate concept with milkweed runes and blood frenzy… thirteen feet in diameter, deploy the Belkan format!”

The Polaris Staff’s last-version Alchemy module spun up. A blazing triangular array unfurled on the ground, caging all ten men, rotating as it rose like a slow-breathing star.

The red she had flung earlier—her blood, and low-purity Flash Energy.

She had used her own blood to encode the alchemical field.

Inside this wide Flash Energy mist, like a ‘Re-Eco Bomb,’ everything got easier, like mud turned to water.

Weapons and armor shuddered under interference; movements turned sluggish; blades and shields glued together, warping into junk lumps.

In the next beat, the ground dropped; the spinning array hoisted them up, a ferris of iron into the night.

Their positions formed a pattern: vertically, three straight lines, with Yekase at the base of the middle.

Horizontally, six on the sides in parallel pairs; four on the middle line sat in the gaps.

Yekase raised the Polaris Staff and poked the rump of the lowest knight on the middle line.

“Good… now we’re linked.”

[What sorcery is this?!]

“Against desert monotheists like you, I borrow a tale from another desert monotheist. How’s that—brothers meeting, feeling real close?”

Blood-soaked, Yekase gave a tired smile, a lantern guttering in wind.

“This is a human reason born of ‘materialism,’ and even ‘atheism’—”

The staff’s tip unfurled into prongs. A smaller array spun above them, like a halo of gears.

Yekase rested Dawn of Eden on the top prongs, aimed at the array’s heart, and pulled the trigger.

“—Therefore,”

“Heavenly Divide!!”

A red line lanced for the sky.

Vmmm!

A massive crimson column swallowed all ten, shot into the cloudless night, and stretched beyond sight into cold space.

One shot, and the heavens were cleaved.

The beam lived three heartbeats, then vanished.

Yet to the girl nearby, it felt like swimming far through frozen time; her next breath arrived like ten thousand years had passed.

Yekase stowed staff and gunblade and walked back, boots whispering over stone.

She took off the filthy witch hat, checked inside and out, made a small sound of disgust, then pinched the unruly tip with two fingers—like the larger stains on her body didn’t exist.

She squatted in front of the girl.

Her hair was matted with blood; she looked like a ghost from a drowned well.

And… was she smaller…?

The girl wondered if common sense had vanished with her memories. She’d left as a seventeen-year-old, and returned looking seven. Was that normal under the moon?

“I forgot to ask. What’s your name?” she asked with a smile, like a candle after a storm.

“I…”

“Don’t tell me you forgot even that. How am I supposed to verify…”

The girl shook her head.

“My name is… Fa’ai.”

“…Ha. Thought so.”

Yekase remembered she could cast Clean—thanks to Jiang Bailu’s needless tutorial—and whispered the word. The blood on her clothes and hat vanished like dew at dawn.

She hoisted the bigger-by-a-ring Fa’ai onto her shoulder, butt facing forward, and headed for the budget hotel, footsteps ticking like beads.

“By their habit, a blaspheming woman would be a ‘witch.’ But they called you ‘devil.’ So I figured: either you’re not a woman, or you’re not just a woman.”

So those two questions and that line meant that…

“Pleasure to meet you, my unfamiliar old friend.”

Yekase spoke to the butt by her cheek.

“Um? I still don’t know your name, miss…”

“Yekase.”

“Why are you so strong?”

“It’s not me being strong. They had too many.”

Numbers are a disadvantage?

Fa’ai didn’t know Yekase lived on two specialties in a fight: one versus machines, one versus crowds. The Iron Cross hit both and lost their elite edge.

Drag them to her level, then beat them with experience.

“And their sword training is too standard. Every one-two has neat form. That kind of blade can’t cut me… okay, it cut me a few times…”

Yekase kept it light, but her voice thinned, like smoke losing heat.

Fa’ai felt her steps stop in the middle of the street. She turned to ask why, and then the arms holding her lost strength.

They collapsed together onto the pavement, moonlight scattering like broken glass.