With a hood pulled low and a windcoat draped like shadow, he looked like any traveler of the Demonic Human Race who couldn’t bear sunlight’s knife-edge glare.
Eyes slid off him like water off stone, and no one felt a ripple of wrongness.
He slipped through the tide of bodies and through the cordon’s loose mesh, moving against the current like a fish in a dim stream.
He got close to Shelika’s party before a sharp-eyed legionary, hawk-keen under a steel helm, finally marked him.
“Stop. No approach without leave!” the soldier snapped, his voice a whip-crack in the heat.
The man only halted and muttered, “Damn…” the word writhing like a curse-worm gnawing in his throat.
The soldier thought it was just another Dark Spirit lowlife picking a fight, a fly buzzing around rot, and he barked back with his chest lifted like a shield.
“Damn what? Say it again if you’ve got the guts!” he shot back, words like thrown stones.
“Damn…”
“Damn, damn…”
“Damn damn damn damn damn…”
He kept chanting like a man hexed, the beat quickening like storm-drums rising over a black sea.
The soldier felt the air turn wrong and started to draw steel, moonlight sliding off the blade like ice.
Then the man snapped, voice cracking like thunder: “Damn damn damn… damn you, Shelika—aaahhhh!”
His short blade flicked light and cut clean; blood fountained like a burst spring, and the soldier hit earth like a felled pine.
The man tore off his coat, and noon’s white blaze peeled back the dark—he was a human of Nordland, face bared like a mask in a spotlight.
He was fully armed, a walking armory, and likely a Sky Rank Knight by the iron calm in his stance.
“Enemy attack, enemy attack!” the alarm rang, a clamor of iron bells kicking up flocks of birds in the heart.
The human knight bounded high, a black shape against the sun, grinning like a cracked mask.
In his fist gleamed a deadly javelin carved entirely of magic stone, a Battle Aura weapon that drank light like deep water.
“Vile Blood Clan that ravaged the Doran Kingdom, go to hell!” he howled, voice a furnace roar.
He poured Sky Rank Battle Aura into the javelin, light sheathing it like fire-silk, and hurled at Shelika with a hawk’s killing dive.
Against a Sky Rank Knight’s full-force strike, Shelika had no shield to raise and no space to slip through like a deer before a lance.
If that spear cored her heart, her life would blow out like a candle in wind.
Luck, thin as a red thread—she held the True Crimson Whirl in her hand like a lifeline.
If she opened the Feast of Night Domain, no blade under heaven could crack its shadow-banquet.
“Feast of Night Domain!” she called, voice ringing like a bell in a winter grove.
But the True Crimson Whirl dimmed, its glow ash-dull; the Eternal War Armor had drunk too much divine power and left it hollow as a spent ember.
“Is this where it ends?” As the spear filled her world like a falling sky, Shelika closed her eyes at the cliff’s edge.
No way was still no way; the Feast wouldn’t answer, and there wasn’t time to undo Dual Incarnation, no matter how she burned the seconds.
As her ideals cracked like frost under a hard heel, Shelika—no, Fulin—heard Dielnis, the God of Wine, like a cold law whispered over snow.
“Only the fit endure; every being has its season, and beyond it, any extra breath is ugly thrashing.”
“Better a natural fading than a graceless crawl.”
Fulin wondered if her “quiet life” was just such thrashing, a lone boat rowing upstream, unseen and unblessed by the crowd.
Was wearing Shelika’s face, keeping one who should have died walking the earth, simply another graceless crawl in borrowed skin?
I’ve always done this, haven’t I? Played Lance… then played Shelika… the thought drifted like smoke.
Should I let that thought go? Fulin sagged inside like wet paper.
Maybe peace was never mine to hold; the instant she knew it, sorrow spilled through her like cold rain over slate.
However deep the grief, it would weather soon into a helpless calm, a stone rounded by surf.
Just before she chose to meet Shelika’s death with that calm, a shout tore the sky.
“Over my dead body!” Rex streaked in like a shooting star and planted himself before Shelika like a nailed stake.
He met the javelin with a Battle Aura-fed scimitar, steel shrieking like gulls, staking life on life.
Water and fire answered each other, two contrary streams of Battle Aura clashing like rivers in flood.
Sand leapt and wind howled; pressure stacked like a storm-wall, making a dead zone no ordinary soul could cross.
Rex wrestled the hurtling spear, bearing the core’s furnace heat and the crush like a mountain on his shoulders.
He started to fail; one of his paired scimitars spiderwebbed like thin ice, yet his gaze stayed steady as a north star.
“Shelika, don’t you dare give up! Don’t you dare give up your ideal!” he roared, voice a drum that wouldn’t break.
“I love it most—that bone-deep stupidity to fight for it till the end!”
Rex bellowed and flared his Battle Aura, stance rooted like an old tree against a river’s pull, straining against that hope-stealing demon spear.
His aura matched the foe’s like twin torches, but his gear fell behind like leather against steel.
The Celestial Spirit’s refined alchemy forged magic-stone Battle Aura arms, blades that turned a knight’s strength into starlight’s edge.
Lance had such arms; by ill luck, this demonlike human knight had them too, a storm given teeth.
The man roared and fed more aura to his javelin, bellows fanning a forge into white.
“Useless, useless, useless—no one can stop my revenge!” he screamed, eyes like coals that wouldn’t die.
Before such crafted arms, Rex’s scimitars were brittle reeds in a torrent, snapping one after the other.
Soon both blades exploded like glass under a hammer, shards spinning like frost in sun.
A knight without blades still has his hands, two stones to dam a river.
“I won’t let you!” Rex grabbed the spear-tip with both hands, tendons standing like ropes, choking off its murderous thrust.
“Ahhhh!” His palms split and bled; pain crawled like fire ants, but he didn’t budge, and his face didn’t flicker.
“Die, die, die!” Seeing him unarmed, the demonlike human knight laughed, a hyena’s rattle in a canyon.
It would go as he wished: the spear would pulp those hands, then punch through that hateful Blood Clan breast like lightning through a tree.
If he’d stood alone, fate might have obliged; the world, however, had other hands on the scale.
“Give it up, criminal!” Menea and the others swept in like a wind through banners.
One Sky Rank Knight with magic-stone arms is a storm; he still can’t outblow two, much less many.
Many hands make a mountain; Menea and several Sky Rank Knights smothered the human knight like wolves pulling down a bull.
They pinned him to the dirt; he stared at Shelika, alive and breathing, with eyes like burning knives trying to cut miles.
“Why, why, why! My revenge!” his wail rose like smoke and vanished.
“Pitiful puppet…” Menea and the others couldn’t bear the view; one clean stroke, and they granted him a swift end like a candle snuffed between fingers.
Shelika looked at Rex on the stretcher, puzzled, like a cloud torn by wind. “Rex, why would you do this?”
“Hah…” Spent and fading, breath thin as silk, Rex smiled with a dusk-soft calm. “Didn’t you just say it?”
“What did I say?”
Before his eyes sank shut from weakness, Rex spoke, each word set like a seal in wax. “The ones you wish to protect will always be with you.”
