Aphelia steps forward with rain-slick calm, the cuffs on her wrists flimsy reeds against a river’s current, yet she feigns a limp, and “strenuously” rolls the fallen figure over.
“Still trying to threaten me…” Her voice drifts like frost on glass, while her hands bloom with the power of a True God, a dawn-white guard around the prone shadow.
Their eyes meet, and she locks up like ice under sudden thunder.
When she sees who it is, her held breath turns to a storm; her slim body trembles like a plucked string. The cuffs on her arms flash to ash like burnt paper. Her True God power erupts like a breached dam; a rain of argent blades falls from the heights and shreds the tough-looking barrier like thin bark.
“How dare you!!!” The roar rips from a slender chest, yet hits like a god cracking mountains; the entire arena caves like a sandcastle under a tidal wave. Roland can’t sit calm on the high dais anymore; he grabs the well-dressed man by the collar like a rat fleeing a flood.
He hadn’t expected this—he’s always been the anvil; now he’s slammed his foot into a cliff of iron.
That vast True God power isn’t a joke; brush it once, and his armor would rot like metal in acid.
He pivots to run, but a forest of divine light-swords slams down like lightning bars, caging his path. A silver-bright figure steps through the glow; her fist lands dead center on his breastplate like a meteor, and hammers him down.
The collapsing arena shudders again, whole tiers breaking like old bones, the ruins kicked to dust and thrown up as a choking cloud.
Aphelia cradles the cast-down figure, grief and fury boiling in her eyes like black waves, ready to swallow the two before her whole.
“Violet, Violet, it’s over now…” She whispers like a lullaby after a nightmare, tightly lacing her fingers through Violet’s, as argent light settles over the battered body like moonlight on snow, mending wounds and washing filth away, revealing the true face beneath.
The ravaged figure is none other than her friend—Violet.
The deeper that silver radiance sinks into Violet, the sharper the beast-light in Aphelia’s gaze; even the halo around her starts to darken, silver bleeding toward ink, like compassion twisting into malice.
Roland blasts out of the rubble with a snarl of stone; deep-gray Arcane Power billows like stormcloud and spreads into a gray-black domain, holding back Aphelia’s shining tide.
He looks at the cratered fist-print in his chestplate and flinches cold; if he hadn’t unleashed his heartscape at the last heartbeat, he’d be a corpse under one punch.
The man in finery he had “protected” lies crushed under broken blocks; scarlet leaks out with white splinters like spilled bone-marrow. Roland sneers, turns away, and stares at Aphelia hanging in the air like a war-goddess in moonfire.
A deep-gray greatsword forms in his hands, and a deathly rot breathes from it like wet decay; his gray armor flexes like a living thing, new ridges rising like interlocked fangs.
“Who’s your master?” Aphelia’s tone is lake-still, belying the storm she wields.
She grips a spear forged of divinity; a host of light-swords hang over Roland like cold stars. If he says no, she’ll break him in an eye-blink, then pry the truth out with the “friendliest” ice under a silk glove.
She doesn’t know why Violet came to the Demon World, but to be tortured by some hidden hand—Aphelia will make them pay, even if they’re a Demonic Knight.
Besides, in her current state, Roland isn’t worth a glance; she isn’t arrogant, but the power of a True God isn’t a bedtime tale.
“If I refuse?” Roland meets her eyes, fingers clamping the blade till the knuckles pale; deep-gray breath coils up his arms like smoke. A snarling Asura mask creeps from his pauldrons and seals his helm like a hungry skull.
In a blink, his gray blade is at Aphelia’s face, as if it cut the distance out of the world, and it shears through her silver light like cloth.
Aphelia breathes in once, winter-clean, and chooses the simplest path: lift, thrust.
Silver radiance condenses on the spearpoint like a star on a needle; with her motion, a pillar of heaven-splitting light answers the descending blade and slams down, its argent glare washing the sky like noon.
There’s almost no suspense—the gray sword and the body behind it vanish in the beam, the ground drilled through like soft clay, the neighboring ruins smoldered to ash.
But the strike isn’t done. Aphelia draws back mid-flow and drives another vast spear of light into an empty patch of ground, a hunter’s stab into rustling grass.
A figure bolts out, ragged as a singed crow—Roland, the gray greatsword still in hand. His armor is char-black, his gray domain ripped like torn canvas, and some unknown gray liquid creeps along his blade like tar.
“As expected. If it died that easy, it wouldn’t be called a Demonic Knight.” Aphelia’s voice is arctic, though a flicker of surprise taps at her ribs. When Roland slipped her first bombardment, she felt no ripple of space at all, and he didn’t rely on speed.
If not for her innate razor sense and that silver glow, she’d have believed he’d been erased outright.
“Remarkable. A True God, alive in the world?” Roland murmurs; the gray blade hums back like a wasp hive. His face doesn’t darken; instead, his eyes brim with fierce joy, looking at Aphelia with the hunger of a pilgrim before a miracle.
“Well? Will you talk now?” Silver gathers again at her spear-tip like a pearl of lightning. She looks down on him, voice still cold as hoarfrost.
Right now, pain and wrath flood her like a red tide, but the hotter it burns, the colder she thinks; she knows she isn’t a true True God yet.
This terrifying strength comes from the reserves inside her; without her own domain formed, the world doesn’t reject her, but replenishing that well is tortoise-slow.
So, though the store is vast, it won’t carry a drawn-out war. She must finish this like a thunderclap.
“If you want it, earn it!” His words fall, and Roland vanishes like a shadow blown off a candle; the gray blade cleaves for her brow again, a storm-line of steel.
She moves to fire by reflex—but a scarlet flame slams into her back without warning, a hammer out of the dark, and her motion snags for a heartbeat. The gray blade suddenly veers, stabbing for the Violet in her arms.
Her eyes flare like tearing seams; she wraps Violet to her breast and brings her own arm up to meet the gray blade, a shield made of flesh and moonlight.
“Man-Slashing Blade—” Roland’s voice cracks with glee, near a howl. The gray blade moves like a living thing; it doesn’t chop straight in, but twists like a vine and coils around her forearm.
As it climbs, Aphelia’s instinct is to detonate, to burn blade and wielder to cinders—however—
“Abhorrence!!” Endless rot floods from the vine, a swamp-wind that wraps her body in a blink; for a heartbeat, the formless miasma and soft tendril harden into a thousand edges, a giant meat-grinder, sawing through her guard and carving savage grooves across her flesh.
The instant her body opens, silver erupts like a sun-flare from within; the gray decay and climbing vines flash to ash in that burst of noon.
Roland is forced to break away, dodging the searing glare like a moth from a torch; his figure blurs and vanishes from before her.
Argent light rolls back over Aphelia, sealing wounds like frost knitting thin ice. Yet after a cycle of healing, the cuts don’t close as before; some still seep blood like ink.
Her brow knots like drawn bowstring, but her focus hooks on the sudden crimson flame.
That familiar, hated scent, like burned pitch, makes her heart lurch; her mind-sense flares reckless as wildfire, scouring the ruined arena stone by stone.
“So it was you!” Under her scouring thought, the ambusher steps into sight; this time he doesn’t hide, as if begging to be seen.
In her mind’s eye, the figure is wreathed in pitch-black flame; the stark enmity and twisted rage make her gasp like a cut, and the blaze inside her climbs higher, a pyre in a night wind.
