Chapter 75: Suicidal Assault
After twenty hours, Lilith’s mind finally blurred, like a lantern guttering in wind.
Earlier, the Little White Dragon had still joked with Nidhogg, her smile like bells in spring rain.
She covered her mouth and teased Gillian and Sakunae Mashiro, and the decades-long star-crossed pair flushed red like sunset.
Her longsword and Astrolabe had gotten full upgrades, like night forged anew.
The Ancient Ark no longer showed its old shape; a Star Canvas veil now draped it, starlight dusting its powder-white edge.
Blue-violet tracery bloomed on the blade, like frost flowers. She hadn’t cut with it, yet its breath brushed the divine.
Still, she felt the power unsated; the sword was a gaping fledgling, beak open, waiting for something to arrive.
The Astrolabe wasn’t a staff now. It had become a marble bracelet, set with scattered aquamarine chips like sea-spray.
She slid it on her right wrist; white stone and sea-blue matched her ice-crystal earring and blue-white cloak, bright as a Saint.
After that, she traded stories with Nidhogg in drifting snatches, took brief, needed rests, and held on for almost twenty hours.
Then the cost hit: using Taint to siphon the Moonswallow Mist gnawed at her mind like moths at silk.
Drowsiness surged first; her body clock demanded sleep, yet her will clung tight, like fingers on a cliff.
Another problem swelled: too much Moonswallow Mist pooled inside her. Subtle on intake, heavy when you looked.
The wings behind her had faded from pure white to a sky washed with a spoon of white paint, mist-light gathering there.
“Do you want to rest?” Nidhogg saw her wavering and spoke fast, a Black Dragon’s voice like stone under rain.
“Just half an hour. This box won’t fill with fog in that time.”
Lilith refused. She knew her state was bad, but she knew herself better than anyone under heaven.
If she relaxed now, she wouldn’t rise in half an hour; she’d wake at eight tomorrow night, heavy as lead.
“I can do it. Four hours more.” She bit down and fed herself courage, burning stubborn grit as her last fuel.
Endurance was gone; only grit remained. Grit’s the stat even dogs won’t build, but she’d maxed it anyway.
The last four hours crawled like years. She swallowed almost all the Moonswallow Mist alone, a tide pouring into a single jar.
It wasn’t like bearing all the Taint before. She was the White Holy Maiden, a vessel born to purify corruption.
Storing Mist in her was like asking a power bank to hold water—wrong shape, wrong craft, wrong destiny.
As the Mist thickened inside, her hold on the Taint thinned, like fingers numbing in snow.
The Demon King’s not-quite-dead will still stirred, trying to counterattack by picking up the mess Eternal Life left.
“Persistent as a ghost.” She grumbled inwardly, anger a coal under ash.
The Demon King was a lingering haze; everyone who’d fought beside her was gone, yet that thing stuck like gum to a boot.
“Fine. This is the last time.” She forced her spirit past its limit, eyes like steel under frost.
Only when she was like this would that loathsome thing, quiet in the Taint, leap out to seize control.
And that was the chance she’d waited for, a door that opened only in a storm.
She had an answer, to the question Nidhogg once asked like a pebble thrown in a pond.
People thought her soul was damaged, so Word Spirit Magic could sway her.
Later she learned it wasn’t damage; it was incompletion. She was only half of a sacred fragment.
Only when she devoured the Demon King entire and fused proliferating Taint with purifying white would her soul become whole.
The Star Canvas blue in Eternal Life’s eyes wasn’t her core. It was her acceptance of being an Astrologer—an anchor for the self.
What she needed was deeper knowing, a grasp of her own essence like a hand on a hilt.
The Demon King mistook the Moonswallow Mist for his chance. In truth, those mindless, pure-energy beings were her greatest leverage.
With fuel stacked high, she had no more worries. This was her inner world; she only had to blast the Demon King to dust.
Her solution was simple and mad as lightning. Fill herself with Mist, turn it into bombs, then flatten her own mind to scour him out.
“Are you insane?” When he grasped her intent, the Demon King panicked, shadows whipping like torn banners.
“You blow like this, and we both die!” he howled, voice like iron scraping bone.
“Only you die. This level can’t kill me.” Lilith sparked the fog. She refused to waste another word.
Her consciousness snapped in the next instant. Dense mist caught fire and became an unstoppable explosion, wildfire on a dry plain.
The blast lifted her spent awareness away; only raw instinct kept drawing in the outer fog, steady as a tide.
In her mind that had turned into a vast cathedral, white and dark red bled together like wine on snow.
A single ghost-blue drop fell into that churn of light and shadow and brewed a special hue.
It was a blue purer than the sky.
