[Cole Herstia.]
Calista stumbled, clutching my shoulder, as Malachi's heart was driven clean through his chest.
"No!" she screamed, and the sound shredded the air as his body went still and sagged to the ground.
I pressed my hand to my mouth until my teeth bit the flesh, tasting copper.
"Calista, I have to go all out. Take him, run." My voice cracked like thin glass.
She obeyed with a single, raw nod and vanished with his corpse, swallowed by motion.
Mucro stood over the battlefield and licked blood from the edge of her blade like a woman tasting wine.
When I turned, Stiffer's body had evaporated. Mucro laughed, a cold sound that sat in the bones.
"My lover was a fool," she said, voice flat and terrible. "A bastard who wanted only to free the lost."
She lifted her odachi until it caught the dying light. "Lord of the Sword: Mucro."
Her features shone, and the blade lengthened as if the air itself had been grafted to steel. Then she leapt, a grey comet of intent.
I had worked out her ability. No matter how the moments themselves bent, she struck where she intended.
Hits landed. Targets fell. But I was not without answer.
I anointed my blade with the blood of sacrifice and declared what I had been taught to name. "Vampire King: Sanguis."
Fangs sprouted along my spine like iron wings.
Blood gathered and rose, forming leathery appendages that beat the air and sent me rocketing upward.
I met her in midflight and our blades kissed with thunder.
The meeting was brief and brutal.
Despite every law that should have kept me whole, despite transcendent resilience dripping from my marrow, she cut true.
My arm came away in a single, clean stroke. Pain detonated, and then she shoved me into the sand and laughed.
"Did you just rid yourself of death?" she taunted, voice bright with malice. She swung again.
This time I felt life ebb. My Regalia should have sealed me against finality.
It has always shown me a strange comfort, a memory of a flower that will not wither, a field of endless bloom.
That image used to steady me, proof that I could not be ended.
But the image fractured. The flower split in two beneath her smile.
For a breath I died, and for a breath I returned. Each death hollowed me more.
As a vampire I cannot die in ordinary ways. The world's laws bend to my nature and then bow.
My Regalia ensures that any chain of events that leads to my death can be rewoven, that resurrection is a part of my architecture.
I am a Primordial Vampire, older than the petty immortals, tied to a lineage that resists simple erasure.
I had not expected to be felled so easily. I had not expected humiliation that tasted like rust.
I think Malachi surpassed me just now.
"Wait," I rasped through cracked lips. "Can I at least speak before you kill me again?"
She looked down at me with a bored annoyance.
"I hate vampires," she said. Her expression hardened. "And annoyingly, I do not have void magic."
Her tone carried a cruel curiosity. She circled, blade whispering.
Void magic erases. It can erase the anchor points of a soul, cut the threads that let resurrection stitch a thing back together.
But Primordial blood resists such erasure.
It takes something older, a force older than simple void.
She thought on that for a breath and then her words fell like iron into my chest.
"The ritual started because of her," she said, voice dull and steady.
"It is meant to bring back a forgotten angel. An angel whose true name has been lost to man."
She drove the odachi through me and I felt the air leave my lungs in a slow, obscene wind.
"We found his avatar in your world," she continued, the blade twisting. "His name is etched on our souls."
Light, holy and pure and burning, poured down then as if to answer her claim.
The brilliance seared memory and flesh. Names are dangerous things.
When I heard it, a sound like a bell in a ruined temple, I understood why I had died more times in a single instant than I could count.
"Valadeus. The Lost One," she said, each syllable a nail.
The name brought a holiness that made my teeth ache.
If Valadeus the Archangel was being pulled back into the world, if the ritual completed, then existence itself would fray.
Our reality would be unstitched and rewritten under a hand that was not ours.
She twisted the blade again.
I felt a slow, binding cold lace itself around my spirit, a seal that tasted of iron and midnight.
"I finally remembered the spell," she said. "Bye bye, little vampire. Fall into your eternal coffin."
My soul began to cry without a sound. A pressure exceeded the capacity to scream.
Sight, smell, touch, hearing, all narrowed to a pinhole. The Depths' spell folded me inward.
Endless Coffin, the hunters had whispered of it, a curse I swore I had buried the last time I fought that reckless hunter.
But curses have teeth. This one closed on me.
It is a coffin that cannot be opened from within, a collapsing infinity that grinds you down to a counterfeit self.
A dimension that eats identity until nothing is left but an echo in a void that was never meant to cradle life.
It is a vampire's worst nightmare. The world will not let me die cleanly.
It will make me live in the smallest possible death, a loop of annihilation that consumes memory until even the hunger is a ghost.
My chest tore. Blood flooded the sand and soaked into the fabric of some future I no longer had a right to.
I tried to call for help, for rage, for the laws of my unlife to answer, but the seal choked every syllable.
Mucro smiled as she watched me fold into that black, endless place. Her eyes were sharp and merciless.
I could feel nothing then but the pull, an unrelenting drag.
The last thing that reached me before the coffin closed was the thought that perhaps this was worse than death.
Perhaps being forgotten by your own immortality was the final, most exquisite cruelty.
The world unmade me in slow, deliberate strokes. The pain did not stop.
It refined itself into a slow, unbearable ache that promised to last longer than any life I had ever known.
***
[Mucro.]
I watched him peel away from the world, fade into that final, endless rest, and something like frost crept over me.
Relief and ruin braided together, a quiet I had no name for.
I lowered my gaze and found my next opponent waiting, a woman who wore the face of the man who had taken my lover like a bad joke.
She approached with bored steps, a blade in her hand that mimicked his, no chains, no halo of awful power, just a clean, lethal edge.
It lacked his mystic signature, but it glittered with a clinical cruelty.
"Hey." Her voice was thin with irritation. "My brother just died. They might blame me."
Her concern sounded rehearsed, almost comical, and yet she clung to it like a talisman. "Don't worry. I'll own up to it after I kill you."
She blinked then, as if surprised by her own words, and her eyes darted like someone listening for an answer.
"Who are you talking to?" she asked aloud, absurdly pointed at herself.
"Me? No, no, you couldn't be. There is no world in which you kill me."
Her arrogance was a thing sharpened to a point.
It stung, but beneath the show there was something else, something I felt in the slow, terrible hollow under my ribs.
It wasn't pride. It wasn't triumph. It was the lazy, certain cruelty of someone who had never paid for what they'd taken.
I moved. Anger poured down my arm like cold iron and I swung to cut her down.
Her response was a single finger.
She raised it, a bored, delicate motion, and with the fascinatedhearted force of a thing that toyed with physics, she shattered my blade.
The sound was a clean, obscene crack and the shards spat like glass across the sand.
For a heartbeat the world split into two.
My vision doubled, walls of reality overlapping and tearing.
She blew the smoke from her ruined fingertip as if it were nothing, and a small, casual smile curved her mouth.
"Pitiful," she said. "My brother lost to this?"
She waved once, careless and final. "Bye-bye, little mutt."