「 episode 15; arc 0.9c 」 —fragments of cipher//accident— 「 historia iii 」

“The others you are with...who are they…?”

“They’re my friends. We came here together.”

“If they are with you, and if you are not a threat to my existence, then…”

“They aren’t either, no. We aren’t looking to cause you any harm.”

“I see...there is little need for them to keep such distance, then. If they wish to approach...they may.”

A quiet breeze rolled down the ruined street laden with death. It lightly swept Chaewon’s hair as she turned halfway, looking towards her four companions down the road behind her. She gave them a small nod to signal them forward, ushering in a respectfully cautious approach lead by Sooyoung at the helm.

A tense silence fell as the girl’s sight wandered between the five sorceresses. Her breaths were slowing down gradually, indicating the oncoming expiration of her body. She looked at each of them in kind as they came closer step by step, her visage unchanging as they stared back with general concern shared amongst their expressions.

The four came to a staggered stop just behind Chaewon. Haseul and Jiwoo remained close together with hands held below locked arms. Haseul’s focus fell upon the wriggling manastream underneath the girl’s dying skin, worriedly wincing at the sight of it. Jungeun and Sooyoung ended their strides next to Chaewon. The swordswoman stood between the two shorter girls, her gaze completely locked onto the girl’s flooded eye of shadow before her.

“This is Haseul, Jungeun, Sooyoung, and Jiwoo,” Chaewon introduced her friends one by one, motioning towards each to allow the girl to link each face to each name.  She attempted to return the introduction as her eyes quickly moved across the other sorceresses. “And this is…”

Chaewon’s voice trailed off as she realized she had yet to learn of the girl’s identity. “Ah, I’m sorry...I forgot to ask. What’s your name?”

“My name…?”

The corrupted girl’s weak voice and the wind both came to a stop, granting stiff noiselessness the opportunity to strike the group. Apparently baffled by the inquiry, she remained nearly motionless as her eyes fell. “My name...my true name…”

“I expected some degree of amnesia, but to forget her own identity...” Haseul muttered under her breath, her perceptive mind already running loops around itself as it sought reasoning in the midst of probable impossibility. “She truly is poisoned beyond belief…”

“Have you forgotten?”

Chaewon’s question hung in the air as the girl’s vision remained upon the floor. Her face scrunched up as she visibly went through the process of rummaging through her mind for an answer. It eased up a moment later when she lifted her head, bringing her detached eyes back to Chaewon.

“Yes, I...I suppose I have,” she conceded, a small frown forming on her face. “For the past near year of wandering, I am only just now realizing that I have no recollection of my true name…”

“It’s alright,” Chaewon reassured her, equipping herself with a smile to counter the pout facing her. “Why don’t you pick a name for yourself, then? What would you like us to call you?”

“There is one name which feels almost...appropriate, yet something within me wanes when I imagine taking it up as a mantle of my own...” the girl slowly explained through deep breaths. Ominous and vague as her words were, Chaewon’s focus wasn’t deterred. “It feels improper, as if it is but a false identity worn as a disguise. Yet I can imagine little else to be referred to as…”

“What would that name be?”

“The name I heard her calling out to when I found myself reborn with new life within her…‘Mother.’ She called for her mother, and I answered. Am I to be considered her mother, then? Am I...Olivia…?”

Chaewon’s silence persisted as the girl temporarily withdrew her voice, the ongoing conundrum of her identity racking her brain. The others remained just as quiet, giving the girl with no name an opportunity to sort her mind as she thought aloud to herself.

“No, that cannot be...I know full well that I am not her mother. I have no memory of raising her...my memories are entirely the girl’s, alongside splintered fragments of my own past. Reborn within her depths with access to her history, I am doubtless connected to her on levels beyond...but I am not her, and she is not me. I cannot solely claim the name of my vessel...nor can I solely claim her mother’s name, even if that was the call my soul answered.  And still, my true name escapes my tongue. Thus…” 

An oddly bestilling calm fell upon the corrupted girl’s face as her eyes met Chaewon’s again. “...for now, until my true name returns to me, I can only be seen as a sum of the two halves which brought me forth. The vessel I inhabit, and the one she called for when I arose within her. I will answer to Olivia, but my name...my name can only be Olivia Hye.”

Chaewon nodded quietly, following the girl’s helplessly incoherent nonsense as best she could. She was the only one of the sorceresses smiling, her comrades’ expressions sinking further and further with every word the girl spoke as their confused pity amplified.

“For such an intricate monologue, that, uh...didn’t make a whole lot of sense,” Jungeun muttered under her breath with a defeated sigh of disappointment. “Can’t say I expected much else, though...kinda figured she’d be this deep into corruption delirium by now.”

“I’m afraid that’s the likely explanation,” Haseul agreed in a quiet whisper, the pained frown on her face growing little by little. “I was hoping her mind might still be intact, but…” 

“Wishful thinking, given the severity of the corruption,” Jiwoo whispered back. With downcast eyes, she fought a deepening depression in her heart as she spoke. “She must be blessed by Fate to even be speaking in her current state. I have to wonder how much of that explanation wasn’t the result of a potential ongoing hallucination…”

Barely overhearing the assertions of the other three, Sooyoung crossed her arms and shook her head to herself. Her unbreaking focus on the girl’s glowing eye multiplied as she inaudibly disagreed with them. “What if all of it was the truth…?”

Giving the girl a nod, Chaewon ignored the hushed words filling the air around her. “Okay. We’ll call you Olivia, then. Thank you.”

“Olivia...you said you’ve been wandering for nearly a year?”

Jungeun’s voice rose with a question, summoning eyes to her. Discomfort was plainly set about her face as she showcased a full grimace. “Is the rest of this world like this…?”

“Yes, it is. The devastation you see before you is mirrored elsewhere...so it has been for several cycles, and so it shall likely continue for endless successions until this planet expires.”

Expressions lowered further still as Olivia nonchalantly confirmed the long-running post-apocalyptic state of the world. Sooyoung’s voice came next, her vision momentarily drifting to the sea of bodies around them all. “Is there anyone else around?”

“No,” Olivia answered flatly to the surprise of the others. “We have wandered a remarkable distance since my rebirth eleven months ago, and in that time...I have never laid eyes upon another living being. All that remains are relics from the past.”

“Wait, ‘we?’” Sooyoung asked abruptly. “There is someone else, then. Someone you’re traveling with? Where are they?”

“Right in front of you.”

Sooyoung blinked. Jiwoo’s voice continued where hers had failed to continue. “Er, Olivia...there isn’t anyone else here…”

“You misunderstand,” Olivia began to clarify, though her following explanation did little in the way of clearing things up for the sorceresses. “I am referring to the cursed one. My soul resides within her body. She is my vessel...we are one in the same, yet simultaneously, we are not.”

“What do you—”

“Sooyoung, this matter specifically isn’t one to press further discussion about,” Haseul cut Sooyoung off with a sharp whisper, drawing the swordswoman’s eyes to her momentarily as she continued at a hushed volume. “She’s very obviously suffering from delusions and hallucinations brought about by her manapoisoning. A topic of this nature isn’t going to get us anywhere. We need to focus on what happened here.”

Sooyoung pursed her lips. 

Haseul was making sense. It all made sense. She knew it did. Olivia was exhibiting clear-cut symptoms of late stage corruption, most notably delirium as presented through what could only be interpreted as illogical balderdash. Sooyoung had every reason to agree with the conclusion that Olivia’s words shouldn’t be taken as truth.

Yet, despite knowing as much and having Haseul remind her that she should know as much, there was a deep-seated feeling in her gut that wouldn’t go away. When she brought her eyes back to Olivia, Sooyoung felt the feeling intensify—the notion that they were not being fed the wild hallucinations of a madwoman.

Merely gazing upon the girl’s swallowed eye of shining lavender tore apart the foundation of the belief that she normally would have trusted in. As Sooyoung considered it further, she thought back to what Jiwoo had said moments prior and realized that her discontent with accepting Olivia’s claims as false wasn’t entirely without reason. No, there were a number of things that could prove that the situation before them was not what they seemed, and Sooyoung was feeling particularly adamant about expressing it.

Judging by Olivia’s slow, hoarse breathing and growth of decayed skin, however, it became clear to Sooyoung that it wasn’t the time for an investigative push. She refrained from further questioning, if only to appease one of her closest friends of over twenty years.

“What caused all of this then, if you know? What happened that lead to this death and destruction?”

“The cursed one’s desire to live on.”

Jungeun grimaced as Olivia answered her question with a statement as vague as the rest. Olivia paused briefly as she found the rest of her words. Deep breaths which caused her visible manastream to squirm underneath her skin were interwoven between words which should not have been spoken as calmly as they were.

“The cataclysmic occurrence which brought an end to all that remains before us...it was the very call I answered when I awoke within this vessel.”

“What...what exactly do you mean, Olivia?” Chaewon asked slowly.

“Precisely what I have implied,” Olivia reiterated through a ragged breath. Alongside her voice, more patches of skin across her face began to actively die with a shift to gray. “My rebirth...the girl’s burning conviction to continue living which willed me into existence and which fuels every fiber of my being...it was that very event which laid waste to the world around us.”

“Are you serious…?”

Despite her own agreement with herself to not press Olivia with too many questions, Sooyoung couldn’t stop her words from manifesting as opened. Eyes widened as the group processed the information, and debates of truth versus delirium quickly took hold as Haseul spoke up louder than she intended to. “Sooyoung, you don’t believe her, do you?”

“Do I...have reason to deceive you…?”

Haseul froze up as Olivia addressed her directly, staring right into her eyes with her burning bright shade of overwhelming violet. Haseul was lost between the girl’s glowing eye and now quickening expanse of forthcoming death eating away at her face. “Such mendacity would serve no purpose...I speak the truth.”

At the sight of Olivia’s corruption coming to a tipping point, Chaewon’s mind had discarded Olivia’s words and the ongoing discussion of reality against fiction. Whether it was truth or hysterical babble mattered little in the face of her safety. Knowing she would soon be out of time, the sorceress took a small breath and brought to life a warm sphere of light in front of her chest from a small cloud of dust.

Sooyoung stepped forward in response, looking to Chaewon with a hesitation in her eyes. “Chaewon, wait—”

Just like she had during her initial approach, the girl of light shamelessly defied a direct order as a tether of mana began to pour forth from her effect. “There’s no time, Sooyoung. She’s at her limit. I need to begin the purification.”

“Olivia, what exactly was the cataclysmic occurrence?”

Sooyoung’s focus had immediately returned to Olivia, her wanting eyes straining for a more detailed answer as she continued. “Just what do you mean by your rebirth?”

“Ah...such warmth...”

Olivia’s response was not towards Sooyoung’s inquiries. Instead, her eyes fell upon Chaewon as she shared in being engulfed by a tender aura of her beige mana. “This light…what is this…?”

“Your manastream is corrupted, Olivia,” Chaewon explained quietly, her tether becoming thicker and thicker as she fed more of her mana into it. “In order to save you, I need to purify it.”

“You aim to save me…?” Olivia repeated, blinking slowly as she felt warmth radiate from her center. With every breath she took while being encompassed in Chaewon’s mana, pain began to slowly dull and subside across her body. “For what purpose…? You are not indebted to me…”

“I don’t need a reason to help someone,” Chaewon instantly responded with tremendous resolve. “It doesn’t matter if I don’t owe you anything or if we just met. I won’t leave you to die alone.”

“I see...after nearly a year of searching, I have finally found an answer…”

The five sorceresses fell silent as Olivia spoke. Though she addressed the group in full, her gaze was locked entirely onto Chaewon, and Chaewon’s onto hers.

“All I have sought since my awakening was a means to continue living...from the moment I found myself in this world, the safety of this vessel was the only thing that ever mattered to me. I am compelled to do whatever it takes to continue drawing breath. The urge to survive, to do whatever I must to live on...it ascends beyond the concept of a basic necessity. It consumes me. I care not for anything but my survival, and by extension, hers. We must live on. We must.

“Yet, as I traveled, I could feel it within me...my vessel has been living on borrowed time. With my rebirth, something has been ailing her, growing more severe with each passing day. I had little in the way of an answer as to what it was, but now I do...corruption,” Olivia concluded, her words now as heavy as her breaths. “But her memories...there is nothing within her memories explaining these symptoms, nor indicating a history of suffering from them. It leaves me wondering...was my awakening the onset of this sickness? Or is my existence...a side effect…?”

Before Olivia could continue, her focus broke as she suddenly gasped for air. The team of expeditioners winced as she leaned forward slightly, cradling her head with one hand. “I can feel myself...fading...and with it, her presence returns piece by piece...this is not unlike prior instances in which conscious control was transferred…”

“What do you mean by rebirth?” Sooyoung asked suddenly, seeking to cut through the vagueness of Olivia’s potentially senseless maunderings.

“Sooyoung, please!” Haseul retorted. Her eyes shook slightly as she glanced at the woman of ice. “This interrogation act isn’t helping…!”

“It...it matters not,” Olivia revealed in the middle of a series of exhausted huffs. Sooyoung found herself graced with the girl’s attention as she finally looked at her, the ocean of her odd eye’s vibrancy slowly receding. “I am sure you will have the opportunity to ask her yourself…sooner than you might expect...”

The strength to stand failed Olivia. 

She fell onto her knees as the coat of Chaewon’s mana that covered both her and the sorceress of light began to increase in density. Chaewon was quick to step forward in aid, coming down to her own knees and holding Olivia steady by the shoulders. Olivia’s voice was especially quiet when she brought her half open eyes to Chaewon. “You say that you are saving me, but...I cannot help but feel that I am at death’s door…”

“Purification for such a heavy degree of corruption will cause you go unconscious for a little while,” Chaewon divulged, her eyes scanning the recession of Olivia’s dead skin and visible manastream, “but I’m going to be right next to you when you wake up. I promise.”

Chaewon blinked as she found herself the sudden recipient of a deep stare. 

With falling eyelids, Olivia was looking at her in a mesmerizing manner she had never been looked at before. The girl’s gaze seemed to penetrate her own, looking well beyond her eyes. Chaewon felt as if her very soul itself was being examined, and she was left speechless when Olivia spoke again.

“Chaewon...the selfsame name. The selfsame hair, the selfsame eyes...the resemblance is so painfully striking, even if it is merely a comparison I can only make through her memories. But beyond that...part of me cannot help but feel that this is not the first time I have experienced this specific moment in history...as if countless times, I have been in this exact situation, at this exact moment in time, being saved by you. What a puzzling sensation…”

The corrupted girl’s voice briefly vanished into nothing as she collapsed forward without warning, falling into Chaewon’s ready arms. Smaller and shorter than her by a fair margin, the girl of light eased herself into a sitting position to better hold Olivia. Her companions stepped closer, encircling the pair as Olivia’s final words came and went.

“The cursed one cannot perish. She cannot. Her tenacious will to live exceeds all reason, and my very existence is proof of that. No matter what it takes, I will ensure that her life does not expire before it is meant to. If you cannot maintain the safety of my vessel and guarantee her longevity, or if she cannot keep herself safe even with your assistance, then it will be under unfortunate circumstances that we meet again…”

With a claim that carried the atmosphere of a foreboding threat behind it, Olivia’s odd eye was fully drained of its excessive luminescence. For a split second, right before it closed as she fell into a deep slumber, the sorceresses saw it—a fully transformed iris present even despite the absence of mana or a weapon, bright violet in color.

A ruminative silence encompassed the area as LOONA’s magi stood still in the eerie calm of the deleted world they had ventured into. Chaewon’s vision was entirely set upon Olivia’s sleeping face, now fully clear of the grisly manifestations of her corruption. Their bodies became even more illuminated as more spheres of light were born with Chaewon’s breath.

Chaewon’s small voice broke the silence before long. Her eyes didn’t leave Olivia’s face as she addressed her companions while establishing more mana tethers to amplify her purification. “I’ve never seen someone with a manastream so poisoned...this may take me a few hours.”

“We should set up shop somewhere out of town, then,” Sooyoung ruled, her gaze rising to the remnants of civilization and the corpses littered around her. “There’s better spots to wake up in than the middle of a place like this.”

“Somewhere by the outskirts, then?” Jungeun suggested. “Hopefully the bodies don’t reach out that far…”

“Might want to go farther than that,” Sooyoung admitted with a sigh. “If she really went eleven months without seeing a single living thing like she said, then I’m sure this isn’t the only graveyard around.”

“You do believe her, then? Truly?”

Tinged with disbelief, Haseul’s voice brought opposition forward. She turned towards Sooyoung, a quiet Jiwoo shifting with her and looking between the two. “Sooyoung, how many times now have we seen something like this? Even beyond our time with LOONA, but in our own reality alone...just what exactly is driving this ongoing belief of yours that this isn’t another clear cut case of corruption delirium?”

“My true name. My vessel. The cursed one. Her memories. Awakening. Rebirth.”

Sooyoung’s repetition of the most bewilderingly frequent segments of their exchange with Olivia held off a counter from Haseul. The swordswoman’s eyes briefly focused onto Jiwoo, recalling her words. “Just like you said, Jiwoo. She was blessed to even be talking in that state...and that’s the problem here. Even as just a blessing, it makes zero sense.”

Sooyoung shifted her mixed hues to Haseul, fearless of challenging even one of her oldest friends as she presented the basis for her argument. “For all we’ve seen of victims of corruption and their loss of sanity when they hit that stage of delirium, have you ever heard any of them speak with such clarity about anything like that? Especially someone that deep into corruption—someone so poisoned they were probably minutes from death. When has anyone that far along ever been able to speak so clearly, let alone think?”

“You believe she wasn’t delirious, then?” Jiwoo asked sincerely, her expression rife with contemplation.

“Not for a second,” Sooyoung asserted. “No matter how you splice it, this doesn’t add up. With how poisoned she was, actual delirium would have rendered her incapable of speaking so clearly.”

“And because it doesn’t make sense, that means she’s telling the truth?”

Shifting her eyes, Sooyoung met Haseul’s dead-on sight of skepticism. Sooyoung gave a firm nod, sure of her assessment. “Like she said, she had no reason to lie to us. Don’t see what she would’ve gained from it. With no reason to lie and with her having a clear train of thought even that deep into corruption, I think she was telling the truth.”

“Sooyoung...do you even realize what you’re implying?”

Mounting skepticism claimed Haseul’s tone of voice. “If you believe her, then you believe her account for the state of this world? How her ‘rebirth’ caused this...apocalypse, for lack of a better word?”

“I do.”

Haseul’s expression soured. In exasperated disbelief, her grip on Jiwoo’s hand tightened ever so slightly as she struggled to understand her longtime comrade’s point of view. “That makes even less sense than what you’re claiming made no sense to begin with! Look around you, Sooyoung! Regardless of what she even meant by ‘rebirth’—if she meant anything—how could one girl be the reason for all of this? An entire world, just—”

“Alright, that’s enough of that, thanks.”

Haseul’s thoughts crashed and dissipated at the onset of Jungeun’s voice and accompanying footsteps. Quickly growing tired of misplaced debates in the middle of a field of corpses, the spearwoman broke the conversation while approaching Chaewon. “You two really like to heads at the weirdest times...let’s save ourselves the headache and focus on what actually matters right now. This argument isn’t gonna get us anywhere.”

Unseen to Jungeun, Jiwoo smiled warmly at her from behind as she watched her bend down on one knee to hoist the unconscious Olivia onto her back with Chaewon’s help. She hooked her arms underneath Olivia’s knees and stood up straight, turning to face them. “Let’s just take it easy and get her out of here so she can wake up comfortably.”

“You all can go on ahead. I’ll catch up with you in a bit.”

Haseul’s words came with a sharp gust of wind. Her left eye had become washed over with a glowing verdant hue as a transparent tornado of jade enveloped her frame. Floating into the air above the group, she addressed the other sorceresses while scanning the locale. “I’d like to examine the surrounding area. I find it extremely difficult to believe that this catastrophe could really be so widespread…”

“I’ll leave a trail for you, then,” Sooyoung said, relaxing her hands into her pockets. “How far out you going?”

“Maybe five hundred miles in a few directions,” Haseul decided. The winds around her began to pick up in velocity, now thoroughly ruffling her green dress shirt and straightened hair. “It shouldn’t be more than an hour or two.”

“Dear, may I accompany you?”

“Oh, Jiwoo, I’ll be fine,” Haseul insisted, inciting a slight frown from Jiwoo below. “It’s just a search.”

“Take her with you,” Sooyoung called out over the winds growing louder and fiercer still. “All she’s gonna do is secretly worry about you the whole time.”

“S-Sooyoung!”

“The three of us can handle ourselves if anything happens,” Sooyoung added, ignoring the now blushing woman of water. “Just keep your mana in check. Take a breather if you need to before coming back. Be careful out there.”

“From a heated debate to travel advice and well wishes in less than a minute...talk about jarring,” Jungeun said to herself as she began to walk forwards, a smirk growing on her face. “Never seen such a close friendship continue to thrive even in the face of repeated arguments...”

With a nod to Sooyoung and a flash of light from her odd eye, Haseul turned her gaze back towards Jiwoo. The diviner found herself shrouded in a veil of wind much like her beloved as she was lifted into the air alongside her. She secured her loose jewelry more tightly before extending a hand towards Haseul, returning her smile tenfold. “Thank you, dear.”

“Hold on tight,” Haseul politely instructed as their fingers intertwined. 

The currents carrying the two combined into one cyclone that brought them further upwards. They were now settled a few hundred feet below the thick ocean of deep gray that blanketed the sky. Streams of wind diverted upwards with Haseul’s breath, protecting her and Jiwoo from the slow cascade of corrupted mana from above.

With a final exhale, a significant portion of the currents keeping them afloat twisted backwards and briefly rotated in place behind them before rushing forth. Expelled forward at a tremendous speed with hurricane force winds, the atmosphere was briefly displaced with an ear-piercing boom before the pair vanished into the horizon like a speeding bullet. Sooyoung watched them depart with a grin set upon her shaking head before turning back towards Jungeun and Chaewon.

The two were already a little ways ahead, Chaewon keeping close to Olivia on Jungeun’s back and continuing her multifaceted purification process. Walking towards them at a relaxed pace, Sooyoung exhaled steadily. Her cyan eye momentarily came to life as her mana aggregated behind her in a tall column that rose dozens of stories high. In a flash, it materialized into a swirling spire of ice that was easy to see well above the desolation of the city.

Between Jungeun and Sooyoung, a quiet Chaewon was staring hard at Olivia’s body on Jungeun’s back. Her mind was downheartedly lost in thought, trying to make even the slightest bit of sense of everything she had heard the girl say. Sooyoung’s and Haseul’s dissension with one another’s views resulted in her questioning herself if she had been listening to nothing but feverish drivel or cryptic truths hidden behind the false veil of lunacy. 

Chaewon...the selfsame name.

Olivia’s words made themselves right at home in Chaewon’s troubled head, confusing her without end. With a deep breath, the girl of light recollected herself as best she could and simply continued forward with her allies.

Whatever the truth was, whoever Olivia was...she wasn’t in danger anymore. Chaewon had done what her parents refused to do—what her entire world had refused to do. She had acknowledged her, and in doing so, she had saved her.

That was all that mattered.

「 ⮜⮜⮜ ★ ⮜⮜⮜ 」

“Lupus Central Police Department! Open the door!”

An ongoing raucous barrage of noise beyond a closed door was the only response to the demand. Disorderly and rowdy in nature, imaginations ran wild as to what sort of domestic dispute awaited them behind it.

“This is your final warning! Open the door!”

A high-pitched shriek came to life behind the locked entrance of the small apartment. With it, the sounds of what seemed to be things being tossed about came to an end. What followed was loud sobbing from inside and a vigorous kick from the outside hallway.

“Hands in the air! Don’t move!”

In tandem with the slam of a door being forced open, shouts from armed police officers shattered the silence of the tattered home. A staggered rush of several guns cocking in unison followed as footsteps came to a stop. A ring of policemen and policewomen had surrounded a sight they didn’t expect to find at the source of what was initially a simple noise complaint.

On the floor in front of them, a weeping twenty year old girl with frayed, messy jet black hair was on her knees. Hyejoo cradled her head with shaky hands as she cried, her eyes anxiously flittering about all over the sight of something in front of her.

“Mother...Mother!”

The living space around them was in complete disarray. Books were scattered across the floor, their originating shelves entirely collapsed. A dining room table was on its side, and its accompanying chairs were far removed from it. An officer slowly stepped over a capsized couch, her shoes crunching the broken remains of ceramic plates during her careful approach to the girl’s front. She kept her firearm ready as she looked down and saw it.

“It was an accident…!”

Hyejoo’s pleas were disregarded as the other officers slowly joined in taking proper sight of the apparent murder before them. In front of Hyejoo, a body was sprawled out on the ground. 

Stiff and motionless, it was an older woman with an eyepatch and a frozen expression of nightmarish shock imprinted upon her face. 

Olivia’s abdomen and neck had been cleanly impaled all the way through at several points by thorned spikes colored a sickening shade of deep violet. Their sharpened metal surfaces were slick with fresh blood. The pool of crimson beneath her was rapidly expanding, soiling Hyejoo’s calves as her cascading tears from above mixed in with it. 

In the middle of the puddle of blood, an aged razor blade sat upon the tile floor not far from Olivia’s hand. Its faded stains of vermilion were given new life, soaked again in its owner’s blood for the first time in decades.

“I promise it was an accident…! I didn’t mean to...I don’t even know how I...it was…”

The officer in charge brought her eyes back to the girl—the clear perpetrator, as indicated by the soft lavender glow emitted by Lucifer’s iris within her left eye. Even as it slowly began to transition back to its original shade of dark brown alongside the gradual dissipation of the violet spikes, the evidence of the police force’s eyewitness account was already established by means of the actively recording body cam set upon her chest.

“Tase her.”

Before Hyejoo could even process the words spoken by the chief officer, a surge of electricity paralyzed her from the base of her neck. 

The stunning currents rolled across her body for precisely four seconds before stopping, causing her to spasm uncontrollably before falling forward into her mother’s blood. Helplessly dazed and still shaking violently, the young girl barely registered what was happening as she was handcuffed from behind and pulled up to her feet. As she was dragged out of the sanctuary she had so rarely left, figures clad in white began to swarm in after her, invading her home with monstrous cameras and numerous bags of equipment for crime scene investigation.

“Get the sedative in her. Standard dosage,” the voice of the chief officer rang in Hyejoo’s disoriented ears. “Don’t want her trying to pull anything,” 

Hyejoo felt a needle prick the skin of her arm. 

Noises and voices from all around her gradually slurred into a single stream of incomprehensible sound as she was sedated. She fought with what strength she had against the growing urge to close her eyes, but with the fading of her mind, she was powerless to stop it. Pushed into the backseat of a police car with its siren still blaring, a forced slumber reined in a pause to her frantic, restless mind.

Some time later, a screeching buzz brought Hyejoo back to life. 

The weary necromancer jolted awake in a frightened frenzy. She attempted to stand, but when she failed to do so, she looked down and was into a puzzled panic. Bound to a metal chair at her wrists and ankles by thick chains of iron, Hyejoo was rendered completely immobile. 

Her eyes darted madly across her surroundings. The room she was imprisoned within was absurdly tiny and featureless with blank walls of gray, outfitted with absolutely nothing minus a speaker hanging above her and a small television mounted onto the wall to her front. Atop the television was a camera pointed right at her, a light near the lens intermittently flashing red.

A clock hanging on the wall near the television restored Hyejoo’s lost perception of time. It was nearing five o’clock in the afternoon, something Hyejoo was having trouble fully registering. The sedative that was administered to her had put her into a deep sleep that felt much longer than the mere two hours which had passed since the incident.

The incident…

Mother…

Bit by bit, the girl’s memories resurfaced within the mess of her troubled headspace. 

Her eyes welled as streams of tears began anew, following the same dried path of their ancestors. With every fragment that came back to her, her soul broke into smaller and smaller pieces as she remembered it all in painfully crisp detail. Grim images and her mother’s final words resonated within her mind, driving her deeper into a dark pit of grief that was still far too fresh.

Lose the eye. Moments of pain. Weeks of recovery. A lifetime of safety.

Her mother’s unsettlingly calm approach with the razor blade in her hand, reciting the mantra she had lived by for so long—the mantra she ultimately forced upon her only child, convinced beyond reason that it was the only way the girl could safely live her life out to the fullest.

Lucifer’s iris will manifest upon your eye, Hyejoo. Even if you never engage in necromancy, in due time, it will show. It matters not if it takes decades—it will show itself and it will put you in grave danger.

The frighteningly empty look in Olivia’s eye as she stared at her very reason to live running away from her in horror. Detached from the situation, her mother had become little more than an empty husk as she followed Hyejoo throughout their home. Had she allowed her mind to remain, Olivia knew she was likely to lose hold of the courage she had summoned again.

You cannot let yourself become comfortable. You cannot delay the inevitable. You cannot make the same mistake I made, Hyejoo. I won’t let you. You need to face reality. You need to lose the eye, here and now.

The lack of reaction from Olivia as Hyejoo crashed into every possible object in their home during her escape, begging and bargaining for any other possible alternative. The tears that rolled down her cheeks as her mother cornered her, seizing her by the neck and holding her against the wall.

If you wish to live, Hyejoo, then you need to lose the eye. And you need to live. You must live on, because you promised me. You promised me that you would live, Hyejoo. You—

The ill-timed premiere of Hyejoo’s darkness brought forth by the insurmountable fear of the razor’s edge being a hair’s breadth away from her eye. The harsh, twisted countenance of disbelief and agony set upon her mother’s face, a sight that would surely haunt Hyejoo for the rest of her life. 

You...promised me...Hyejoo...

The loud thud as her body fell over backwards, pierced and stabbed by demonic skewers unintentionally brought to life from mere dust.

“Current time...four forty-four PM. Current date and month...twenty-first moon, eleventh cycle. Current year...831st succession of the Noble Wolf. Beginning suspect identification.”

An electronic voice from the speaker above her drew the sobbing girl’s attention away from the recollection of her accidental crime. She looked up and then forward as she heard the television turn on.

“Son Hyejoo...twenty years old...born on the thirteenth moon of the eleventh cycle during the 811th succession of the Noble Wolf…”

A grainy image of an older gentleman in a white and gray suit seated at a table was on the screen. He combed through some files inside a manila folder, listing off the information contained upon the pages before him.

“...unemployed...sophomore at Lupus Institute of Technology, majoring in game design. Is all of this information correct?”

“It was an accident!”

Body, mind, and voice alike strained and exhausted, Hyejoo steeled herself through her nervous breakdown as best she could in order to speak. “It was an accident, I swear!”

The man brought his eyes up, looking at Hyejoo directly from behind his square-rimmed glasses. “Son Hyejoo. Twenty years old. Born on the thirteenth moon of the eleventh cycle during the 811th succession of the Noble Wolf. Unemployed. Sophomore at Lupus Institute of Technology, majoring in game design. Is all of this information correct?”

“I didn’t mean to do it! I don’t even know how I did it! I started breathing spiritus for the first time barely three hours ago! Please, you have to believe me!”

“Is all of this information correct?”

Hyejoo bit her tongue in frustration as her interrogator dismissed her words with his eyes back on the files below him. He was leaning forward against the desk, arms folded on the table as he brought his microphone closer and repeated himself. “Is all of this information correct? Please confirm or deny.”

Hyejoo’s lips quivered. She took a deep breath, struggling to keep herself in check. Stretching her fingers, she flexed the muscles in her hand as best she could under their restraints while digging her nails into the metal of her seat’s armrests. “Yes, that’s...that’s all correct...”

“Thank you. Suspect has confirmed her identity.”

Hyejoo’s interrogator closed the folder in his hands. Sliding it to the side, he wore a blank expression as he briefly adjusted his hair. The disquieting lack of emotion in his eyes reminded Hyejoo of her mother—it almost seemed like he was forcibly disconnecting himself from his emotions, as if they would interfere with what he knew he had to do. “Alright. That’ll be all.”

Hyejoo gulped. Her heart was beating with ferocious strength entirely out of raw, unhinged fear, fueled by her anxiety and nearly smashing its way through her ribcage. “W-what do you mean…?! That can’t be all! What’s going to happen to me?!”

Already in the middle of standing up from his seat, the interrogator paused. He sat back down slowly, peering at Hyejoo through the camera aimed at him with incredulous eyes. “Really, kid? Do you need me to say it…?”

Hyejoo didn’t respond. She merely looked at him pleadingly with trembling irises, her feet fidgeting uncomfortably against the tight pressure of the chains around her ankles. The interrogator sighed once again, removing his glasses and rubbing his eyes in exhaustion. 

“Alright then...Son Hyejoo, you killed your mother in an act of homicide,” he began, sliding his glasses back into place. 

“Why can’t anyone understand that it was an accident—”

“—and normally, we’d conduct a full investigation to determine that, and you’d be given a fair trial by jury, no matter how damning the evidence against you was. However...none of that applies in this case,” he returned her interruption with one of his own, staring Hyejoo down with a forced lack of concern or remorse in his eyes. His ongoing effort to sustain his falsified cold demeanor visible, he attempted to remain detached from his words and from the image of Hyejoo before him.

“Due to your status as a necromancer, this matter is beyond the police’s jurisdiction. Much like any other case involving necromancers, all we’ve been tasked with is identifying you. Your prosecution is something that will be handled directly by the Church of the Sacred Fang. Representatives from the Church are already en route to retrieve you. Probably a few minutes away now. From there, they’ll…well...”

As the interrogator’s explanation drifted into nothing with the emergence of silence, Hyejoo’s mental stability hit a critical low. 

Mouth agape, the uncertainty of her future began to attack her, giving birth to tears once more. “It was an accident…! I promise it was! You have to believe me!”

“I’m sorry. This is out of my hands. It’s out of all of our hands. There’s absolutely nothing anyone can do for you at this point.”

The interrogator’s claim cleaved Hyejoo’s spirit. She shook her head in denial, failing to believe what was happening as actual truth. “No, there has to be something you can do! Please don’t let them take me! I’m begging you…! It was an—”

“Kid, listen...”

The interrogator stopped after cutting Hyejoo off. Her ongoing pleas for life breaking his steel-faced facade little by little, Hyejoo’s descent into anguished madness was becoming more and more difficult to watch. “Whether or not it was an accident doesn’t matter here. There’s video evidence of you performing necromancy...that’s all they need to see. Even if you didn’t mean to do it, you’ve been proven to be a necromancer.”

“C-can’t you delete the footage?! Wouldn’t that—”

“They’ve already seen it.”

Hyejoo froze.

The interrogator tiredly rubbed the creases on his forehead. He brought his eyes down as he spoke, the task of looking at a crying girl who still had so much to live for right in the eyes becoming downright impossible.

“The Church runs absolutely everything in this world...you should already know that, kid. Especially here in the capital...we have to report any necromancer activity straight to them the moment it happens, well before we’d ever have a chance to do something like that. Not to mention what would happen to anyone who was caught tampering with evidence to protect a necromancer. That’s grounds for execution...only someone who really loved you would risk their lives like that for you. The only person you should ever expect that kind of sacrifice from would be...I don’t know, a soulmate or something.”

“What are they...what are they going to do to me…?”

Hyejoo’s fractured voice came after an excruciating pause. As small and quiet as her words were, the deep-seated dismay they were constructed from was loud and clear. “Am I...am I going to be executed…?”

The interrogator sighed once again, shaking his head slowly. He brought his vision upwards, gracing Hyejoo with the now despondent look in his eyes. 

“You’re a necromancer born of shadow...an archdemon of Lucifer’s deepest darkness,” he explained, his tone falling in composure and rising in pity. “Not too many people know the truth behind this, but necromancers who share your iris aren’t executed quite like the others. It’s likely that they’ll...well, they’ll…”

A strenuous eternity passed, stealthily disguised as a single moment. 

Through his own screen in his room several floors above Hyejoo’s chamber, he gazed at the girl lined up to experience a horrific and unjust death—forced upon her by the world she lived in due to nothing more than what she had become outside of her own control.

Before he could properly finish his statement, a loud sound broke through the speaker on his side. The door to her cell had been opened from the outside. 

Three figures dressed in robes of ebony larger than themselves stepped into the room. Two were unmasked men, scorn set about their faces as they came to Hyejoo’s sides and looked down at her with scowls. The third figure stopped at Hyejoo’s front, his hood preventing her from a clear view of much of his face even from below. His voice, however, clued her in to his identity.

“I see...all this time, my suspicions were correct.”

Hyejoo’s mind was suddenly deep into her past. The voice that spoke to her was the same voice she had heard on several occasions as a child. Visions of hot summer afternoons and cold winter nights spent standing in the middle of a large crowd flooded her mind, clutching onto her mother’s hand as she watched necromancer after necromancer die before her eyes.

“Though it was little more than a fleeting inkling, I consistently felt it. Every single instance in which I laid my eyes upon you, something stirred in the pit of my stomach, as if God was warning me of what you were to become. I wondered if such a turn of events could truly come to pass, the innocent child of one so dedicated to assisting us being of Lucifer’s blood herself...but it seems my presentiment was not misplaced.”

The executioner frowned underneath the cover of his hood, shaking his head as he retrieved a conspicuous needle from a pouch tied to his waist. “To end the life of the very woman who stopped at nothing to provide for you, the very woman who killed for you…truly, you must be one of the most reprehensible demons I have ever had the displeasure of crossing paths with.”

“My mother wasn’t a killer!”

The executioner paused his tapping of his gloved finger against the needle’s tip. He looked up slowly, taking in the surprising sight of Hyejoo’s despair turned into rage.

Half-standing, her body was raised into the air as much as her restraints allowed her. Through furious eyes b with tears, she bared her fangs through clenched teeth. “She didn’t kill anyone! You did! It’s always been you! From the very beginning, all your holy order has ever done is kill innocent people for being different!”

“People...?”

The executioner scoffed, gazing at the girl of darkness with lurid contempt underneath the veil of his hood. “You consider necromancers human beings? How preposterous. Did the prestigious school system of our blessed holy capital teach you nothing? Or was it your mother’s fault, perhaps? Had she only shared in our faith so you could have been raised with a proper mindset...perhaps that is why Lucifer claimed you. I am sure he sensed your blasphemous compassion for his subordinates.”

In response to the executioner’s callous claims, Hyejoo’s anger underwent a startling metamorphosis. 

It quickly evolved into a boiling wrath quite unlike anything she had ever experienced. It coursed through her veins with palpable intensity, rising within her at a breakneck pace. Her breathing quickly becoming unstable, she was unable to find words that could properly articulate the thoughts that were taking shape in her mind. Pressing up against the chains that held her down even as they began to bruise her wrists and ankles with the force she was exerting against them, she remained half-standing, refusing to relent.

“You’re a monster,” Hyejoo declared in a harsh whisper. Her seething fury presented itself through her subtle grinding of her teeth and the extreme tightness of her balled up fists. “You all are. You’re not helping anyone. You...you’re just…”

Emotions that Hyejoo couldn’t put into words became more and more present in her mind. Riled up and unable to settle down, a spike of rushed thoughts seized her headspace for a moment. In that same instant, Hyejoo fell silent in stunned shock as she saw her violet dust suddenly come to life in front of her once more.

Any opportunity Hyejoo could have had to better understand why her spiritus had just materialized was quickly seized from her by the rapid injection made into the side of her neck.

“I’ll give you no chance for such antics, archdemon. Your campaign of terror starts and ends with your murder of your mother.”

Sedated in the same manner as when the police had taken her in, a familiar sense of unanticipated tiredness washed over Hyejoo. She felt herself slipping into unconsciousness even faster this time, assaulted with a higher dose than before.

Her senses were vanishing one by one. Her sight became a blurry mess as she valiantly struggled to keep her eyes open. She barely heard the sound of locks clicking open as her restraints were undone, and she could only make out disconnected fragments of the executioner’s voice as she was lifted and placed over the shoulder of one of his lackeys.

“...archdemon of Lucifer’s deepest darkness...return her...post haste...to Hell itself. Prepare transport...throw...inside...portal to Lucifer...outside the city...”

The three holy men filed out of the room with a sleeping Hyejoo in tow, slamming the door behind them. On the screen of a television nobody was watching, Hyejoo’s interrogator held his head in his hands. He pressed his fingers into his temples, muttering to himself with a sigh.

“Cut the feed.”

Gloomy eyes behind his glasses blinked hard. He unhurriedly stood up, speaking to someone out of frame as he walked away from the camera facing him.

“No, it’s...it’s over. We’re done here. Cut the damn feed.”

As the television in the room turned off, the interrogator and his team returned to their duties for the final hour of their lives before they and everyone else around them would cease to exist.

「 ➤➤➤ ★ ➤➤➤ 」

“Jungeun, I’ve been meaning to ask you something.”

“Yeah? Alright, shoot.”

“How long have you had feelings for Jiwoo?”

The answer to Sooyoung’s question was the silent descent of Jungeun’s gaze to the ground beneath them. With it, a wistful smile of profound contemplation as she laughed. “Well, damn. That was...blunt.”

In a grassy plain unclaimed by civilization and detached from a nearby highway a few miles away with the remnants of the devastated city in the horizon, Jungeun and Sooyoung sat at the opposite ends of a small campfire made of loose branches and dead leaves. 

A short distance to the side of them and just out of earshot, a quiet Chaewon was resting against a splintered tree with an unconscious Olivia in her lap and a single beige tether of her mana between them. Chaewon’s focus was honed in on the peaceful image of undisturbed serenity set upon Olivia’s sleeping face, her chest gradually rising and falling with her breaths.

In the distance, a series of frozen spires reached high into the sky, creating a path to the group’s temporary encampment. A perimeter of even thicker and taller towers of ice encircled the area around the sorceresses, breaching even the dense layer of corrupted mana above them and acting as a landmark that Sooyoung was sure Haseul and Jiwoo couldn’t possibly miss. A dense sheet of ice that spanned a generous area was suspended above them, the same icy pillars acting as its foundations and protecting the group from the slow rain of corrupted mana.

Battered by a gust of wind, the flames that danced between Jungeun and Sooyoung began to lose form. Sooyoung watched a pensive Jungeun stare into the fire for a moment before her eye of crimson emitted a soft light. Crimson dust which had settled at the base of the firewood ignited into flames, adding to the source of warmth between the two. 

Their campfire reinvigorated and steadily burning, Jungeun crossed gazes with Sooyoung as she lifted her head. Sooyoung was delivered a small shrug and a forlorn expression in the spearwoman’s downcast hues as she spoke. “That obvious, huh?”

“Putting it lightly, but yeah,” Sooyoung revealed. “Ever since they started dating a few months ago, I’ve noticed the depressed look you get in your eyes when you see them together before you eventually just...look away. You make it so obvious that I can’t tell if you don’t care about hiding it or if you’re just really bad at being discreet about it.”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

Sooyoung remained silent as Jungeun leaned over backwards. Laying down on the grass in full, she folded her hands together and rested them atop her stomach. Introspective eyes of flaming vermilion and tender hazel stared at nothing in particular, merely absorbing the sight of the sea of dark gray above. 

Jungeun’s voice was uncharacteristically soft as she spoke, drawing Sooyoung’s attention further. “A retainer falling in love with the woman she’s bound to protect, the woman she both lives for and is always ready to die for...sounds like the plot to some preteen romance novel, but that was my life. I’ve felt this way for a long time now. Definitely before we met Heejin and Hyunjin...it’s been several years now.

“For the longest time, though, I couldn’t tell how genuine it was. Wasn’t sure whether or not it was just dumb puppy love that developed because of how much time I spent with her. Didn’t want to act on it until I was positive it was real, so I just let myself run circles around the idea in my head, constantly questioning if my feelings were true. Eventually, I knew they were, but I was still scared. I bided my time way longer than I should have, and when I was finally over my fear and decided I should confess, well…”

“They had just started dating?”

“Yep,” Jungeun confirmed Sooyoung’s suspicions with a small laugh of self-deprecation. “Missed whatever chance I may or may not have had. Too little, too late. Not that I have anyone to blame but myself, of course. I’ve never been great with this stuff...romance, feelings. Not exactly what I’d call my strong suit. Guess that’s just how it goes for someone like me.”

Jungeun was met with silence as Sooyoung nodded, absorbing the information quietly. A sobering lack of sound became the monarch of the campfire until the swordswoman’s voice usurped its reign.  “How’d you finally figure it out, then?”

“Figure what out? The fact that it wasn’t just some crush?”

“Yeah. The fact that your feelings were real.”

“The butterflies in my stomach.”

Sooyoung kept quiet as Jungeun oddly chuckled to herself. Her rueful smile had returned to her. “I had never experienced anything like that before. That’s what convinced me that it was real—the god damned butterflies in my stomach that I started to get whenever I saw her. I first felt them when she looked at me a certain way one day...don’t know what started it, but there they were. 

“After that, I’d feel them more and more often, no matter how she looked at me...but thankfully, I haven’t felt anything like that with another girl,” Jungeun concluded with a sigh dipped in relief. Sooyoung raised an eyebrow as she saw a smile much warmer in nature replace the one on the spearwoman’s face.

“Thankfully?” Sooyoung parroted, Jungeun’s choice of words and relaxed attitude coming off as especially strange. “You’re describing love, Jungeun. You don’t want to feel that?”

“Sooyoung, what I’m describing is a crippling, paralyzing sensation that made it extremely difficult to look my closest friend in the eye—a feeling of constant anxiety that made me second guess my true feelings and prevented me from being honest with myself. That’s what I don’t want to feel ever again.”

Jungeun’s correction of Sooyoung’s definition came with the sullen darkening of her expression. Her words were heavy, crashing down into Sooyoung’s ears as Jungeun made her mindset clear. “These butterflies...I’m sure they’re a good thing to some people. Maybe even cute. A sign that you’re in love, that you’ve found a special someone...that’s how I interpret it, too. But that’s not all they are. 

“They’re an untimely pause. An unsolicited break. They freeze me up and overwhelm my thoughts. They make me question what I should know as truth. They stop me, Sooyoung. They stop me even when I can’t afford to be stopped. Even when there’s dozens or hundreds of fiends around us, even when there’s people I need to protect...they still manage to stop me.”

Sooyoung held her tongue as Jungeun lifted herself off the floor. She brought her knees close to her, resting her arms on top of them. Her vision locking onto the campfire between them, the spearwoman’s crimson hue became lost in the sight of the flames which shared both its color and her spirit.

“The butterflies stop me even when I can’t afford to be stopped...and I hate it. I absolutely hate it,” Jungeun decisively emphasized with a sorrowful reiteration. Shifting her gaze to Sooyoung, fire and ice clashed as she looked into the swordswoman’s eyes. “Of course I want that kind of love. Who doesn’t? But if finding it and experiencing it means struggling like that again, if it means losing focus when lives are on the line...I don’t want to feel them ever again.”

Sooyoung was ill-equipped to counter Jungeun’s philosophy or claim it as incorrect. She replied with a light sigh and a small nod, showing her junior the respect she deserved. “Alright, that’s fair. No butterflies, then. So are they what you’re feeling when you see them together?”

“No, that’s not it,” Jungeun said, her eyes easing slightly. 

“I haven’t felt them in a long time, not ever since they started dating. I’m looking away because I want to respect them. Seeing them together sometimes makes me imagine what things might be like if the butterflies didn’t stop me from speaking up to Jiwoo sooner...and I don’t like that one bit. Feels wrong, picturing a bunch of what-if scenarios like that when I’m trying to move on from my feelings for her. I just want my best friend to be happy, and imagining myself in her girlfriend’s shoes is definitely not helping that goal. Jiwoo deserves better from me. They both do.”

With every word of Jungeun’s explanation, Sooyoung’s warm-hearted smile grew wider and wider. It reflected onto Jungeun as she spoke, her tone built with reverence. “Damn, mindful and considerate to the very end...some girl’s gonna be real lucky to call you her wife one day, Jungeun.”

“Please shut up.”

Jungeun’s rebuttal, though deadpan, was delivered with a smile upon her shaking head, inciting a laugh from Sooyoung. Silence made itself at home between the two as they basked in the warmth of the fire, though Jungeun broke it not long after. “Why’d I even tell you all of that…?”

Sooyoung’s eyes perked up as Jungeun looked at her with a smirk of disbelief. Without even realizing it, the woman of fire had settled into the spontaneous spotlight she had been gently nudged into, comfortable enough with Sooyoung to privately share with her the emotions she had normally kept locked away in the furthest reaches of her heart. “I haven’t really told anyone any of that before...”

“Kahei said the same thing.”

Surprised to hear the name of the earthen Master brought up from seemingly nowhere, Jungeun’s eyes quietly found Sooyoung. The swordswoman kept her gaze onto the fire in front of her as she spoke, her smile warm much like its gentle flames. 

“She went through something pretty similar to what you experienced. Loving someone for years on end, but being stopped by anxieties and reservations and never speaking up because of it. Just like you, she was pretty obvious about it, always looking at her a certain way. I asked her about it, she told me about it at length, and at the end of it...she was just as confused as you were.”

Sooyoung’s smile slowly widened. Lifting her eyes to Jungeun, she peered through the spearwoman’s eyes, seemingly analyzing her soul itself for a moment. “Not that I mind or anything. If you need someone to talk to, I’ll listen. It’s just kinda funny that you both ended up spontaneously getting this off your chest with me. Thinking about it, you and Kahei are actually pretty similar in more ways than one...hm. Makes me wonder…”

Before Jungeun could ponder Sooyoung’s statement for long, a faraway sound of howling winds came into their earshot. Growing in volume by the second, it stole the attention of the sorceresses as they looked up to the skies above them.

High above, Haseul and Jiwoo had flown in, coming to a stop at the edge of the makeshift campsite that had been set up. The vigorous cyclone of jade winds that swirled around the pair gradually lessened in intensity as they carefully descended towards the grassy earth below them. With their feet safely upon the ground, Haseul’s left eye returned to its unaltered state.

The woman of wind wore a particularly darkened expression as she approached the seated Sooyoung and Jungeun. With Jiwoo’s fingers still locked around hers, they took a seat next to one other across Sooyoung. When a brief silence came into existence as opposed to words or information of any sort, the women of ice and fire inferred the worst.

“No luck, huh?” Jungeun correctly surmised, her vision settling onto Haseul. “Didn’t run into anyone at all?”

“No,” Haseul dejectedly confirmed, fallen eyes resting upon the dance of flames before them. “No matter how far we went out, there was nothing. Not even fiends. There were nothing but bodies and destroyed cities just like the one we walked into.”

“And the corrupted mana in the sky?”

“For as far out as we ventured, it persisted,” Jiwoo answered Sooyoung’s question, crossing glances with her as she grimaced, “and it seemed to continue on still. It feels absurd to claim that it might truly cover the entirety of the planet, but that may very well be the case…”

“Oh, Jungeun…”

Jungeun’s eyes perked up as Haseul procured something from the depths of her pants pocket. It was a small electronic device—a smartphone, beaten and battered with cracks all over the screen.

“One of the few we found that wasn’t completely destroyed,” Haseul explained. “We were hoping you could get it to turn on again. Not that I expect to find out much from it, but...”

“Why couldn’t Jiwoo do it?” Jungeun asked in surprise, eyeing Jiwoo for a moment as she gently took the phone from Haseul’s grasp. “Your affinity with electricity is level seven just like mine. You’re more than capable.”

“Similar affinities aside, it was somewhat difficult for me to control it to the required degree. I seem to lack the precision you do with it, Jungeun.” Jiwoo confessed with a sheepish smile. “I was worried I might destroy it...”

“Nothing some practice can’t fix. We’ll work on it sometime,” Jungeun said while flipping the phone over. Popping off the back cover, she removed the rectangular battery. Silently, the spearwoman inhaled and held her breath for a few seconds. Her odd eye gently flashed with a soft light as a miniscule cloud of golden mana took shape on the fingertip of her free hand’s index finger.

With Jungeun’s exhale, the mana sparked to life in the form of a single thin bolt of expertly controlled electricity. She focused her attention as she directed it towards the battery’s gold contacts and kept it steady. Jiwoo watched her quietly as Sooyoung spoke up to Haseul. “A two-and-a-half hour search turning up nothing but a broken phone...guess she wasn’t delusional about everything.”

Haseul’s thoughts stirred as she formulated her response. “I admit, the situation is much more dire than I expected. While life might still exist still even further out, the bodies I checked showed signs of having long been deceased. If the corruption above our heads truly does encompass the globe, then I’m left to assume that it’s wiped out everything off the face of this world…”

“Everything except her.”

Haseul’s gaze rose from the campfire. She witnessed Sooyoung staring pensively at the incapacitated girl resting in Chaewon’s lap across the field. Sooyoung brought her eyes back to Haseul before long. “You saw it, didn’t you? Right before she passed out. Her eye.”

“Yes, I did,” Haseul affirmed. “She’s a magus aligned to darkness...one who’s used enough mana to trigger a permanent shift in her eye color, which is startling, given how young she appears to be. Unless it was the result of something else...”

“So what do you think of my original idea, then?”

“Sooyoung, I still find it difficult to believe that she was actually Absolute,” Haseul insisted, asserting dominance as she cut Sooyoung short. “I know her eye made it seem as such, but it was plainly her corruption. Her body was overflowing with mana because of it. We saw as much. It’s similar to Absolution, yes, but correlation does not imply causation.”

“There’s nothing else it could have been.”

Haseul’s patience was tested as Sooyoung countered her without hesitation. “The only way you’d ever survive living in this environment for that long is by going Absolute at regular intervals, since—”

“—the process of going Absolute wipes the manastream clean of corruption as your body’s production of managen begins to increase exponentially, yes, I know. Please don’t explain something like that to a practiced aetherial scientist of all people, Sooyoung.”

Haseul’s request was tinged with slight annoyance, growing weary of the ongoing back-and-forth with her friend. “Anyway, that line of thought assumes she was without shelter. She could have been living somewhere with a roof over her head, safe from the corruption until just recently. I’m sure she had to look for food and water...she likely stayed out too long which led to her being in the state we found her in.”

“Then what about what she said?”

“She said a lot of things, Sooyoung, many of which I’ve spent the past several hours trying to make any sort of sense of. Which part are you referring to?”

“The urge to survive, to do whatever I must to live on. It ascends beyond the concept of a basic necessity. It consumes me.”

Haseul didn’t respond. She closed her eyes in exhaustion as Sooyoung continued, rubbing her forehead with her free hand and leaning slightly into Jiwoo next to her. “She described it perfectly, Haseul. Being compelled to act on a single thought, a single desire, absorbed and consumed by it to the point where you either see it through to completion or you die trying. She even mentioned a transference of consciousness. She described Absolution.”

“Did I not just clarify that I don’t require this sort of thing explained to me?”

“I don’t think it could have been anything else other than Absolution,” Sooyoung reiterated with complete disregard towards Haseul’s protest, happily settling into what she saw as undeniable truth. “Signs are pointing to it. Wonder what Archmagus Lee and Grandmaster Hyuna would make of this…”

“Sooyoung—”

“Jinsol was right. You two really can have a drawn out debate over just about anything.”

Sooyoung and Haseul blinked, their minds coming to a collective stop as an exasperated Jungeun introduced herself into the conversation. Eyes turned to her and the smartphone she held out towards them, its now charged battery and back cover affixed to it anew. Its display was on, showcasing a barren home screen with a generic background and a few icons beneath its damaged surface. “Not much of worth on it. Most noteworthy thing is the date, but that doesn’t help us much.”

Jiwoo watched Haseul carefully take the phone from Jungeun. Opening the calendar application and viewing the current date, Jiwoo’s thoughts escaped her as Haseul contemplated it silently. “Second moon of the tenth cycle, 832nd succession of the Noble Wolf...how strange…”

Shuffling footsteps broke the forthcoming silence before it could even make itself known.

Heads turned to Sooyoung as she suddenly rose to her feet. They turned again upon seeing what she had suddenly become so focused on. 

“Who are you people? And you...why do you look and sound just like her…? What’s going on?”

“Please stay calm, Olivia. You might be a little disoriented still...”

“What...what did you just call me...?”

The others rose one by one, now facing the sight across the field alongside Sooyoung. At the base of the broken tree, Chaewon was standing next to an awakened Olivia. The girl of light had an unnerving distress set into her eyes as she looked between Olivia and the approaching sorceresses.

Coming to a stop close to Olivia and Chaewon, the four sorceresses quickly understood the source of Chaewon’s concern. It was a reflection of Olivia’s own barely contained befuddlement, her mixed eyes of violet and brown shaking slightly as they shot across the team of reality-jumping expeditioners.

“Olivia...that’s what you told us to call you. Olivia Hye,” Chaewon explained slowly. Eyebrows were raised and confusion multiplied as Olivia remained silent. “It was only a few hours ago, when you first met all of us...don’t you remember?”

“That isn’t my name, and I’ve...I’ve never seen the four of them before in my life,” the girl announced after a brief moment of looking upon the sorceresses. Despite her tall stature, her voice was tiny and quiet. Turning her gaze back to Chaewon, her following words threw the girl of light for an unprecedented loop that left her mind in disarray. “I’ve seen you before, but you...you couldn’t be her. There’s no way...is there…?”

“If Olivia isn’t your name, then what is?”

Sooyoung’s voice came to life with a question. The swordswoman stepped forward, peering at the survivor with a freezing aura of calm. The girl was momentarily stunned, her thoughts jumbled as she looked towards Sooyoung.

“It’s...it’s Hyejoo. My name is Hyejoo,” she said, birthing layers of confusion within the minds of the sorceresses. It multiplied exponentially as she turned and looked back to Chaewon with strained eyes. “I don’t understand. You’re...you’re practically her twin...”

Chaewon blinked. Her gaze wandered to her comrades for any sort of assistance, but she was met with looks of equal stupefaction. Gradually, she found bits and pieces of her thoughts as she spoke up. “I’m sorry, but I don’t quite understand what you’re talking about, Oliv—Hyejoo...do you really not remember meeting us…? It wasn’t even four hours ago…”

“This wouldn’t happen to be a result of her manastream poisoning, would it?” Jungeun asked, crossing her arms and looking at Hyejoo with mystified eyes. “Any sort of corruption amnesia is just one way most of the time, yeah?”

“Yes, memories from an episode of corruption are not usually jeopardized upon recovery,” Haseul confirmed. The conversation was unintelligible gibberish to Hyejoo, supplementing her dazed panic. “In most cases, victims remember what happened during their episode. This is more akin to a blackout, making it more similar to…”

As Haseul realized it, her eyes found Sooyoung. To her surprise, Sooyoung was already peering at her. 

A look of ice cold solemnity was painted upon the swordswoman’s face, her mind already having arrived at its own further conclusions. To her own dismay, in this particular instance, Haseul lacked the ammunition to shoot down the argument Sooyoung implied through her sharpened eyes.

With nowhere else for her cornered eyes to stray, Hyejoo’s vision ended up falling upon the bridge of dust that extended from her torso to Chaewon. In her anxiety-ridden reawakening, she had failed to notice its existence. Following it to Chaewon, her heart sank as her focus fell upon Chaewon’s odd eye, peculiarly captivated by its altered fawn hue. Shamelessly, Hyejoo stared at it in full, forcing a full stop to whatever was running through Chaewon’s mind. 

“So you really aren’t her...she would’ve told me if she was a necromancer. She wouldn’t have hid something like that from me...and even if she did, there’s still no way she survived. But then...why do you look just like her?”

“Hyejoo…?”

“What day is it?”

The five sorceresses failed to respond in time to Hyejoo’s sudden inquiry. She looked between them slowly, gradually regaining herself as her panic began to subside. Anxiety was plainly written all over her shaky frame and discomforted eyes, however, as she pressed the matter a second time. “Do any of you know what day it is?”

“Does the second moon of the tenth cycle mean anything to you?” Jungeun chimed in.

“And the year?”

“The 832nd succession of, uh...the Noble Wolf, was it…?”

Jungeun’s response was met with silence from Hyejoo. The survivor jumped into her mind for a moment, visibly recounting something in her memories while thinking aloud to herself. “Still the same year, at least...but the tenth cycle...? The last time I remember being awake was the first week of the eighth cycle. Two months, then? Was she really in control for that long…?”

“Who exactly are you talking about?”

“The person you actually met.”

Sooyoung was caught off guard by Hyejoo’s sudden clarity. The girl of darkness, though surely younger than her by a number of years, looked at Sooyoung head on by means of their matched height. It was as if she had just found the missing piece of the puzzle, and with a satisfying click, she was beginning to make sense of the situation at hand.

“Are you saying that the person we spoke to...wasn’t you?” Haseul asked slowly.

Hyejoo answered her with a decisive shake of her head. “No, it wasn’t. She’s...well, she never told me what her name was, actually. In reality, it’s more that I never thought to ask...but why did she tell you to call her Olivia? Of all the names…”

“Hyejoo—”

“How are all of you even alive?”

Sooyoung’s second question was struck down by Hyejoo. Disbelief poured from her being as her eyes wandered from each individual of the group, unable to make sense of their present existence. “It doesn’t make sense...you shouldn’t be here. Everyone’s...everyone’s dead…”

“Hyejoo...what happened to you...?”

Hearing Chaewon’s voice, Hyejoo turned to face her and she felt it—a pain striking her heart, as if a knife had just been driven through it, brought about by the concerned look in Chaewon’s worried eyes.

Merely seeing Chaewon again in the flesh instilled Hyejoo with a degree of clashing emotions that she couldn’t even begin to comprehend, especially with the knowledge that she, much like everyone else, had surely long since perished. And even if she hadn’t, the spiritus at her command which enveloped Hyejoo negated the theory still...there was no possible way the girl in front of her could have been the Chaewon she had grown so close to, the only real friend she had ever had.

Hyejoo swallowed hard, fighting a war on two fronts versus the concerning sight of her best friend seemingly resurrected before her as a necromancer and the memories her question brought to life in her mind. Simply recounting the tragedy was already taking its toll on her mental state. She steeled herself as best she could, and to little fanfare, she presented an answer that only served to give rise to more questions.

“I was...I was thrown into a portal by the Church of the Sacred Fang. That’s why...that’s why everything’s gone.”

“A...portal?”

Jiwoo’s voice broke through first, her confusion was shared by the others. “What manner of portal might you be referring to…?”

“A portal to Lucifer.”

Hyejoo’s clarification was anything but for the team of cross-reality adventurers. Haseul was the one who made the connection, her fast-working scientific mind exercising its strengths. “This portal...it wouldn’t happen to be a large sinkhole with dust around it and inside of it, would it? And with streams of it coming and going to and from the sky…?”

Hyejoo’s wordless confirmation came in the form of a small nod, and from it, expressions of utter shock were born. Sooyoung’s was markedly more indignant in nature than the others, her eyes narrowing in fury as she clenched her fist. “A manachasm…? Someone threw you into a bottomless pit…? Why?”

Sooyoung’s question gave pause to Hyejoo’s mind.

Why?

It was a question she had long since pondered. 

A question she always failed to find a satisfying answer to, for no answer she could concoct from any potential line of reasoning ever seemed to justify the action. It was a question that depressed her to no end, one which had been the cause of countless nights of crying herself to sleep in a ruined world totally and completely depleted of all forms of life.

Hyejoo’s eyes had dejectedly fallen to the floor, whatever spirit she had remaining shoved face-first into the ground below her as she was asked the very same question she never found the answer to. Silently, she reached into the back pocket of her jeans. LOONA’s sorceresses watched her retrieve a broken hand mirror, cracked along its center with splintered branches of damage spreading across it.

Hyejoo peered into the mirror. She looked at her violet odd eye—the curse that would have eventually marked her for death in a world which she no longer needed to fear persecution in, for those who would have hunted her were no longer around to do so. Had it not resulted in the end of everything she had ever known, the irony would have almost been humorous.

Pocketing her mirror again, Hyejoo took a deep breath before bringing her head as high up as she could. Despite how much it hurt to say it, she answered Sooyoung’s question—her own question of several moons and cycles now—with the only answer that ever made any sense. 

“They threw me in because of what I am...and because of an accident,” Hyejoo explained slowly, fighting resurfacing images that haunted her much like they did every waking day of her now cursed life. “And while I was falling...I…”

Hyejoo paused. 

Speaking in a manner as if she was trying to convince herself more than she was trying to convince her saviors, her quavering voice was laced with quiet sincerity that harshly juxtaposed the dark truth her words revealed. Haseul particularly was rendered especially speechless upon hearing what was, to her, the single most unbelievable aspect of the entire tale stated a second time.

“...I killed everyone. I didn’t mean to. I know that sounds ridiculous, but you have to believe me. I don’t even know how it happened...it was...it was an accident…”