There was no sound in the space between worlds. Only pressure. A pressure that crushed lungs and twisted bones.
Nyra was running. Not with her legs, they were numb from exhaustion, but with pure will. Behind her, the red sky of the Underworld was collapsing, a festering wound in reality trying to heal shut. Dracula's psychic scream still echoed in her skull, an absolute command to stop, obey, kneel.
But the mental chain had cracked. And Nyra pulled until it snapped.
The dimensional rift was right ahead, a vertical slash of cold white light tearing through the crimson darkness. She threw herself toward it.
Something grabbed her ankle. A shadow, a tentacle of solid darkness, the master's final attempt to reclaim his hunting dog. Nyra twisted mid-air, the motion fluid despite her fading strength, and the Kaburami sang.
The blade, forged in black steel and hammered in the blood of a thousand demons, swung in a perfect arc. It cut the shadow. But the rift was unstable. Reality lurched violently.
There was a snap. Loud and dry, like lightning splitting an ancient tree.
Nyra felt the weight disappear from her hand. As her body was swallowed by the white light, her wide blue eyes caught one last image of that hell: the upper half of the Kaburami, her faithful companion, spinning in the Underworld's air, abandoned. Broken.
Then the light consumed her.
The landing wasn't heroic. Nyra hit the frozen ground like a corpse tossed from a cart. The air burst from her lungs in a sharp gasp.
Cold.
The first thing she felt wasn't pain — it was a biting cold that seemed to gnaw at her skin. She blinked, forcing her blurry vision to focus. There was no fire. No smell of sulfur. Only… white.
Snow. Thick, silent flakes drifted from a gray sky, covering the world like a shroud.
Nyra tried to get up. Her arms trembled and gave out. She looked down. Her torn black leather was soaked. Warm blood seeped from a deep wound in her side, dripping onto the untouched snow.
Plip. Plip. Plip.
Red blooming on white. A violent contrast. A living painting of her mortality.
I'm free, she thought, her mind strangely quiet without His voice. But her body wouldn't respond.
She dragged herself forward. Her fingers, nails still dirty with infernal ash — dug into the frozen dirt of the rural road.
She needed to hide. She needed a weapon. Her right hand reached instinctively for the sword's hilt, but found nothing.
The Kaburami was gone. She was a samurai without her soul.
She collapsed a few meters from a small stone shrine by the roadside. The world spun. The dead trees looked like skeletal fingers pointing at her. Her vision darkened at the edges, closing like an old camera lens.
Footsteps.
The sound was faint, muffled by snow, but Nyra's wolf-trained ears caught the rhythm. Heavy. Calm. Not an animal. Not a demon.
She tried to growl, tried to summon the beast inside, but all that came out was a thin, shaky puff of white vapor.
Through the haze of her half-closed eyes, she saw a figure stop in front of her. Worn straw sandals. Thick, patched pants.
A man.
He crouched down. There was no fear in his movements, only cautious curiosity. Nyra focused on his face. It was a face marked by sun and time, skin a deep bronze that didn't belong to those pale Japanese mountains. A foreigner, just like her.
He had dark eyes, deep and unreadable.
The man reached out. Nyra tried, with her last survival instinct, to grab his wrist, but her fingers only slid weakly across his warm skin.
He didn't pull back. Instead, his calloused hand, rough like sandpaper — brushed a sweat-and-blood-stuck strand of silver hair away from her forehead.
"You're far from home," he murmured. His voice was low, rough from disuse, his Japanese carrying a distant accent.
Nyra wanted to tell him she had no home. Wanted to tell him to run, that she was a monster, that her blood would attract things worse than wolves. But the darkness finally claimed her.
Her last sensation was being lifted from the cold ground — not like a burden, but with surprising ease, held by arms that knew the weight of work and loneliness.
The silence of the falling snow swallowed them both.