The old Divine Healer reacted first to the ambush, eyes half-lidded like a winter moon.
“Stop,” he said, the word dropping like a temple bell.
No mana, no Grace—like a mountain outside the map—a force beyond measure held the bane arrow frozen in the air.
The Council of Sages calls it the power born of thought.
He couldn’t speak in time to clamp the second bane arrow.
Kairi screamed, a torn reed in a winter gale, and snatched the arrow out of nothing.
An anti-magic compound boiled her buffed mana to steam.
The banishing rune pressed her stats down like a millstone.
The slayer rune burned the flesh that gripped it, fire crawling through her palm.
The silver venom bled upstream, turning her veins to quicksilver.
It gnawed from palm to arm, its final shrine her heart.
Agony bit her hand like ice.
She flung the arrow away, but a third bane arrow hissed in.
Stini’s chest knotted like a fist.
She didn’t care why the Heretic Inquisitors launched a sudden strike after agreeing to talk.
She cared only about shielding Kairi.
She had no weapon, no armor.
To calm Kairi for the talk, she’d set everything down and stood in only her underclothes, bare as a blade in cold rain.
She had none of the Demonfolk’s sinew to catch a sky-splitting shaft.
Without the Holy Sword, she was only a well-trained fighter, breath steady, hands scarred.
Stini thrust her hand into its path.
The bane arrow punched through her palm.
She clenched, bone locking the shaft like iron chopsticks, and wrenched its course aside.
Aimed at Kairi’s head, the arrow skimmed her brow like a red brushstroke.
It screamed past her frightened face and nailed a pew beside the chapel wall.
“Kairi! Over here!”
She roared it, seized Kairi’s hand, and drove for the door like a storm surge.
Stini snatched the inner mail she’d thrown down—Shattered Dragonscale.
It was also one of Augustus’s titles.
Whoever wore it gained a dragon’s hide for a heartbeat.
It marked Augustus’s seal on Stini as a Hero.
Augustus had given it to her on the eve of SkywardCity.
She had meant to show it off to Andor, like a lantern held high.
There was no time for pride now.
“Hurry! Put it on!”
She shoved it into Kairi’s hands, then snatched up the Holy Sword, the blade humming like a caged storm.
Stini stood at full strength, a drawn bow.
A Hero with the Holy Sword and a Hero without it were two different creatures.
Right now, she even felt bold enough to face the Demon King.
But she was a heartbeat late.
As she turned, a fourth bane arrow kissed her ear.
The wind sheared a shallow line of blood, a red thread on pale skin.
She missed her moment.
Shattered Dragonscale slid onto only one sleeve before it jammed.
Kairi stared at the spike budding from her chest, eyes wide as frostbitten pools.
Her hands shook.
She tried to treat it like a bad joke and tug the arrow out.
Her fingers brushed the head.
Pain rose from deep in her chest like a black wave, and her limbs went slack.
She folded to the floor, weightless as ash.
Her white dress blossomed with scarlet again.
This time, the blood was her own.
Stini bit down hard, a blade between teeth, and caught her.
“You won’t die! Old Divine Healer, can you use a Divine Art? Save her!”
“I can’t. I can close the wound, but the silver venom reached her heart.
If she were human, it’d matter less.
But she’s Demonfolk…” The old Divine Healer’s brows knotted like tangled roots.
Kairi knew the end had come.
She lay in Stini’s arms and gripped her hand like a lifeline.
She tried to speak.
The silver venom’s inner ruin made her cough blood, each word broken like snapped thread.
She burned what life she had left and hacked out the clot in her throat.
There was no strength left for sound.
Kairi mouthed something to Stini.
Then she stilled.
She was dead.
What were her last words?
A murderer’s confession?
A cry against an unfair world?
A truth she had hidden like a bead in the sleeve?
No one would ever know.
“No… no, this isn’t right… It shouldn’t be like this… I… I tried to understand her, so why…”
“Stini! Don’t go to extremes!”
The old Divine Healer shouted her name, voice like a stick on a gong.
The Heretic Inquisitors burst into the chapel like a black tide.
They didn’t shield the children first.
They ringed the old Divine Healer and guarded him.
“We agreed to work together… I would have saved you… I would have helped you…”
Stini held the cooling body, eyes empty as a winter sky.
Something inside her had snapped like a bowstring.
“Stini! Think about what you’re doing! What do you even want!”
“Lord Ambroliel…”
The old Divine Healer shot a look of disgust at the Inquisitors’ ill-timed concern.
He shoved past them, rushed to Stini, gripped her shoulders, and shook hard.
“Think! You must think! You decide your own definition!”
“I don’t want to think that much!”
Her voice broke like glass.
At that cry, the wight came, drawn by the clamor.
It drifted from someplace she could not see, like fog rolling off a graveyard.
It lay over her, a cold that froze the heart’s well.
A stink rolled in, old and rotten, the smell of clotted flesh, the iron taste of battlefields.
She kept swinging a blade in her mind, kept cutting.
There was no rest.
She roared herself hoarse, to no one and everyone.
Shouting eased the ache.
“Why won’t they acknowledge you?
Why do they doubt you even when you’ve reached the end of the road?”
“Why, when peace was promised, does Kairi still die?”
“…Is it like this: ‘The Hero killed too many Demonfolk, so she learned to speak with them, and slowly accepted them’?
So even if I persuaded Kairi, no one believes me.
No one believes her.”
Her vision swam with heat, every edge rimmed in flame.
Kill—duty demanded it like thunder demands rain.
She had to vent the hate into the blade.
She couldn’t stop.
She couldn’t slacken.
If she did, that fire would gnaw her fragile grief and burn her hollow.
“Impossible. Ordinary Demonfolk don’t carry the Demon King’s mind-rot—”
“But beyond duty, what else?”
“How much of your private want is packed into your sword?
The ugliest kind.”
“You kept swinging, kept killing.
You left no rest for foes or yourself.
Demon blood splashed your armor, then writhed and reknit, new flesh clinging to your frame.”
“How long has it been since you wiped your blade?”
“No. That’s not me! I didn’t forget who I am!”
All she saw blurred like rain on glass.
She turned everywhere, hunting the voice she argued with.
The devil-noise shifted.
It wasn’t her own.
It sounded like a thousand upon a thousand throats questioning her at once.
Stini knew in her gut.
Those were the souls cut down by the Hero Stini.
Not her, and yet her.
Demons and humans both.
“I’ve never killed a human!”
“Is your blade still sharp?
Or have your eyes dulled so much you can’t even tell?”
“That’s not me. I didn’t! I don’t have that kind of hate!”
“Then kill me.
Since you refuse to think, I won’t curse you.
Because—look in a mirror: blood-smeared face, hateful eyes, an ugly shape—
you look more demon than I.”
“Shut up! I said shut up!”
“I pity you.
The slayer of demons becomes the demon.”
The nightmare popped like a bubble.
Stini woke curled on the floor, a winter cat under the eaves.
Everyone watching wore worry.
The old Divine Healer shook her shoulders hard.
Abigail was held by two Inquisitors at the side, shouting something across the air.
Only one person crouched beside Stini.
A boy in a sleeveless hospital gown, gray eyes soft as cloud-shadow, a gentle smile.
He said:
“I gathered every shard of history this time and let you watch the whole, the real thing.
You won’t feel time twist around your strong intuition anymore.
No more nightmares.”
“What… what was that? Was that me?”
She saw the boy stand, as if to leave.
She shoved through the bodies and scrambled up to ask.
“It is, and it isn’t.
It’s who you were supposed to become.
But that has already changed.”
“What changed?!”
“Many things.
So—can you try to forgive him?
Even if he lied.
Even if he’s a fraud.
Even if he’s a cold, bloodless bastard—can you feel what he calls ‘liking’?”
“Who is he?
Who are you?”
“Hero, Stini Saya, you’ll know.
Maybe think more about the sword you’re about to swing.
Don’t lean only on instinct.
The future will be better.”
The boy left like the wind, or some other unseen thing, drifting through the crowded hall and away.
Stini stared into the distance, blank as a winter horizon.
The old Divine Healer watched the boy too, his brow tied in knots.
“The wight is gone, but… O Divine Being…”
