73 Shattered Sun, Forged Blade

Lilith closed a fist around Eve’s heart. Heat first, then motion—she yanked. The still-thumping organ tore free in a spray of dark-violet blood from the Black Demon’s chest.

“Impossible. H-how am I the one falling here?” Eve stared wide-eyed, disbelief cracking like ice. She reached for the heart with a trembling hand, clawing at her stolen core. But a Demon with a hole through its life-fire can’t reclaim its source. Her voice frayed into broken scraps. “I… I was… going to become a god…”

“Shut it. You can’t even beat me, small fry.” Lilith sheathed the heart in a skin of thin frost, then tucked it into her satchel. The Little White Dragon shot Eve a look of pure contempt and couldn’t help snapping, “Dreaming about ascending to godhood every day. You stole Abaddon’s power and still slogged with me for half a day. When your strength finally ramped up, you couldn’t beat anyone. You’re dead and still mouthing off.”

“You…” Eve’s clouded eyes flared. Rage surged, and she clutched the ragged hole in her chest and tried to rise. The Black Demon’s lips worked, desperate to spit a final curse. Lilith didn’t give her the chance.

“Bad and addicted to drama. Can’t beat the strong, pick on the weak, wreck people’s homes like a rat crossing the street. Then the moment payback knocks, you crumble at a touch. With this level, you want to be a god? Useless at everything, world champion at talking big.” Lilith jabbed a finger at Eve’s face and laid into her. “What a waste. No wonder you die alone in my hands. Serves you right! Enough already!”

“You—you!” Eve flushed a feverish purple. The last breath and blood inside her roiled up her throat. With a wet gag, the Black Demon vomited a mouthful of clotted dark-violet blood. She glared, unblinking, eyes locked on Lilith in a death-stare. Her tattered body cracked, then fell away like ash, breaking into fragments that drifted into the air.

“First time I’ve seen someone get scolded to death,” Lilith muttered. She let go of the greatsword of bone and flesh. The Little White Dragon lifted her eyes to the swollen Black Sun hanging over her. Up there, the Vampire Princess was launching her final charge.

By the time Lilith ended her fight, the vortex around Elasha had shrunk a lot. The blood-tornado that had roared like a hurricane was cut in half against that pitch-dark sun. Each time Elasha drove the blood forward, she peeled off a layer from the spiral, like stripping an onion. The blood that the Black Sun devoured turned to black mist, seeping into the air, then turning on Elasha—bleeding the Vampires’ precious reserves dry.

But Elasha wasn’t wasting her strength. The opposite. Her effort was about to bear fruit.

Lilith saw it. A hairline crack had opened on that perfect black disc.

It wasn’t deep, only a sliver if you squinted hard. Small, but real.

And with every charge, the crack widened.

It was a race. Elasha’s remaining blood versus the Black Sun’s breaking point.

Lilith could do nothing.

As she’d told Eve, this was a Vampire affair. Whether their Princess was right or wrong, whether she spoke for everyone or only herself—Lilith had no right to judge and no place to meddle.

All she could do was watch. Watch a Vampire’s final charge against the Black Sun.

Elasha stilled. For a breath, Lilith’s heart went cold. But Elasha wasn’t quitting. She gathered every drop from her blood pool, drawing it in, tightening it down. She turned all of it, and herself, into a blood-red shell. She leveled herself at the Black Sun all Vampires carried like a shadow in their chest. Then she charged.

Her saber and the blood fused into a razor lance. She was like that knight from a human story—unmoved by hardship. She mounted her short, skinny nag, gripped a not-so-sharp but crushingly heavy lance, and charged a giant that looked like a windmill.

Only this time, Lilith knew she’d win.

Elasha would win. The Black Sun would shatter under the Vampire Princess’s last assault. The blue sky, absent for over two millennia, would return above Morris. Things would finally turn.

Lilith believed it with a quiet, stubborn faith.

She closed her eyes and prayed in silence.

Then—

A scarlet spear punched through the black day.

The Black Sun broke. Like a plate struck by a sledge, cracks crazed across it by the countless. Then—bang—it flew apart into several pieces.

It was over. A thousand years of misery for Morris had reached its final period. The fear that had blanketed every Vampire’s heart for an age vanished from this world.

Lilith let out a long breath. Relief spread like dawn. Her friend had done it.

But the sky turned.

Death—endless death—erupted from the broken sun. The shattered Black Sun could no longer cage the Nameless One’s stored divinity. Black vapors exploded into the air, killing all they touched, writhing like venomous snakes toward Morris beneath them.

“Damn!” The Little White Dragon’s stomach dropped. She’d thought only of breaking the Black Sun. She hadn’t thought that its shards would spray raw fragments of the god of death into open air. Death laid bare was a hundred times worse than Black Sun Devouring. If Morris’s people breathed that miasma, it wouldn’t just birth a few hundred new Sun-Devoured beasts.

“Elasha!” Lilith called up, panic first, voice after. She knew Elasha had to have a plan. If not, that last charge without care for consequence wasn’t courage—it was recklessness.

“I know. Give me thirty seconds!” The answer came down as the Vampire Princess’s urgent shout. A small shape floated near her, one the Little Dragon knew too well—the infant she’d seen in the blood pool beneath Morris. A shard of the Grim Reaper—Stillborn.

“Hurry. You were so greedy before. What, your appetite’s tiny now?” Elasha muttered under her breath. Lilith knew she was speaking with the True Ancestor. Maybe they’d struck a pact—let Stillborn swallow the erupting power and restore all her functions, so Vampires could step away from Stillborn fate.

Only—it was snagging in the doing.

Trust that unreliable Nameless One to leave a mess even now. Time, though, wouldn’t wait. Those Black Suns crawling toward Morris wouldn’t pause for Elasha to negotiate at leisure.

Lilith readied herself.

She didn’t want to intrude on Vampire matters. Even if she did nothing, she believed Elasha could handle it. But the situation had slipped its leash. If she watched from the wall, a district—half of Morris—could drown in Black Sun blight. That, the Little White Dragon refused to see.

She had to act.

But how? Unfurl the Taint fully and dam the suns’ advance? Or sweep them up in one net before they spread?

The first demanded too fine a hand on the Taint—she doubted she had it. The second—Elasha was still in the sky. She couldn’t bundle the Vampire Princess, too.

As Lilith wrestled with it, heat flared at her waist.

She turned. The pink flame in her box burned like a flower under moonless night, bright and insistent.

With the Black Sun gone, Morris fell into true night. And in night, the sky pins up its stars.

Lilith remembered the ancient necrotic line she’d seen when she claimed that flame. The memory set her body alight. Her tongue moved on its own, and the Little Dragon spoke the words aloud:

“Let it glimpse the Star Canvas.”

The pink fire unfurled into a pink longsword, floating before her. Lilith stared, wonder and inevitability braided together. Her hand moved. She drew out the Shattered Ark—now only a hilt.

Metal kissed flame. From the hilt rose a pale-pink blade. The Broken Sword reformed as a sharp, unyielding shell around the pink core. The Shattered Ark and the new blade merged into one. Yet a piece was missing. And Lilith had no sword left to fill it.

Then a rusted blade rested in her palm.

The Black Knight’s sword. The one that had kept her company for years. The first sword she’d seen when she stepped on this continent. Now in the Little Dragon’s hand.

Lilith glanced at the phantom beside her. The helmed knight gave a silent nod.

She slid the rusted sword into the gap. The pink-white blade sealed whole. A longsword of simple look and overwhelming weight of presence came to rest before her. Like the Shattered Ark, a small line was etched upon it.

“A holy blade forged to conquer all evil.”

Lilith raised the sword high.

Pink-white radiance tangled with pure, sacred light and shot out from her in all directions. The world spun around the Little Dragon. In the next heartbeat, every Black Sun gathered before her.

In her last clear second, a small figure dove toward her. Lilith couldn’t make out the face.

She blacked out.