Chapter 139 – Theophane

"Fuck!" A man cursed under his breath, running through an alley so hidden it was swallowed by thick darkness despite the morning, a putrid odour clinging to the air with infuriating intensity. "Where did that damned woman run off to?"

He looked around forty years old, blue hair, one blue eye. He was blind in one.

His words were directed at his teammate. A woman with light grey hair and a mask covering her face except for her black eyes. Both of them wore a blue vest with the insignia of a lightning bolt boldly stitched across the back.

"First, we need to stop." The woman said, her eyes narrowing as she scanned the twisted alleys around them. "Running blindly like this will get us nowhere. That woman knows this area. We will lose her if we keep going like this."

"That is exactly why we need to be fast and not stop, you bloody idiot." The man snapped, his heart hammering frantically against his chest.

He was the one who had been supposed to be guarding her the moment she escaped. He didn’t know how she had managed it.

Actually, he did know. But none of that mattered right now.

Because with him having failed his duty, if they returned to Storm City empty-handed...

The mere thought of it made him shiver, his jaw clenching so hard it popped.

"We must find her." He growled, putting force into every word as he looked at his teammate. "We must, or we are both dead. You know what the Lord is like. I do not need to explain what will happen."

"I know exactly what will happen. Which is why you need to shut up." She hissed, dropping to one knee and pressing her palm reluctantly against the squalid floor. "Your restless heart and your voice are disrupting my skill. Stay silent. She is most likely still in this zone. That witch is no fool, she knows she would lose her terrain advantage if she fled too far."

"Stop rambling and do your job."

The woman said nothing further and activated her skill.

Meanwhile, just a few thousand meters away, a woman was hiding behind a low, steep wall.

Looking at her, there were no words adequate enough to describe what she was.

She didn’t feel like someone. She felt like something that was not supposed to walk the earth.

Something new, yet eternal.

New in the sense that there had never been — and would never be — anything like her in the world. Eternal in the sense that anyone who set eyes on her would carry her existence inside their mind, heart and soul for the rest of their lives, forever the definition of perfection in their memory.

The very air she breathed would remember her. The floor she walked upon would weep when she left. And the clothes she wore would mourn when she discarded them.

Her hair was a blend of gold and white, so perfectly mixed and the colour so dazzling and pure it felt unnatural. She had tied it into a ponytail, giving her a look that belonged to another world entirely.

Her eyes, meanwhile, were an immaculate white — no pupils, no irises. Nothing.

Even dressed in shredded clothes stained with blood and sweat, every noble who had ever existed would pale in comparison beside her.

And yet, for all that beauty, there was something terribly wrong in those eyes.

They were empty. Dead.

As for what they were empty of...that was something no one could say.

"Quite persistent." She muttered to herself, sensing the hunters trailing behind her with perfect clarity. Where most people would have felt fear and stress in such a situation, she felt neither.

Her expression was entirely placid.

Then she blinked — once, twice — and by the third time, her white eyes were filled with golden stars swirling and moving inside them, as if her eyes had miraculously become a cosmos unto themselves.

She lifted her head toward the sky.

There, to her sight, the world had darkened completely, adorned with countless stars, each one carrying a different vision.

She ignored all the others and fixed on one.

There, she saw a vast landscape being destroyed by a swarm of the undead, and something else she couldn’t quite see or visualise.

But based on what she knew...

"Soul power." She murmured, and her lips pulled into a smile. A cold, empty smile, filled with nothing.

"The Hood family. The gods are finally favouring me."

Not that she cared anymore.

Suddenly, her left hand trembled. She peeked her head out from behind her hiding place and saw the two hunters running straight toward her with furious, hungry expressions.

She looked at the sky, looked around her, calculated the boundaries of the Death Zone, and arrived at a plan instantly.

Her eyes had begun to weep blood.

White blood.

Without a word, she closed her eyes and deactivated her skill entirely. Then she drew a deep breath, rose to her feet, grabbed the edges of her white robe — and began to run as though struck by existential terror.

Her movement was spotted immediately by the two hunters, whose faces split open with wicked delight.

"There you are, witch!" The one-eyed man bellowed and surged forward even faster.

The witch — as she was called — looked back over her shoulder. Her face was now the very picture of fear, her pure white eyes streaming with hot tears.

"NO!" she shrieked and ran harder.

Or tried to. Because somehow, she found herself catching her foot on an uneven patch of ground and fell unglamorously — face first.

A yelp of pain escaped her lips, her face burning.

With her on the ground, the two hunters descended upon her.

The one-eyed man arrived first. His hand snapped out, grabbed her hair and yanked without mercy, pivoting her so that she faced him.

There, he saw her face drenched in fear and tears.

A wave of joy surged through his chest.

Watching a beauty so saintly, so untouchable, wailing under his grip awoke a hunger inside him he hadn’t known he possessed.

He wanted more of it.

And somehow, the woman wailed even harder and began to beg.

"Please, don’t kill me!" She pleaded, clutching his hand with the fervour of a mortal praying to their god. "Please! I beg you, don’t bring me back to that hell! I will do whatever you want, I swear! Anything you want!"

Her voice was heavenly. Even more so when it broke under fear.

The man’s heart thundered. His lips spread into a wide smile, his one blue eye burning like that of a beast about to pounce. "Whatever I want?"

"Hey, don’t lose yourself, idiot." His teammate stepped up beside him, looking at him sternly. "Remember that the Lord wants her. If you dare to touch—!"

"Then keep me for yourself!" The witch cried out, cutting her off. "I don’t want to go back! You can take me! I don’t want Lord Stormblessed! He is a monster! A monster!"

"He is indeed a monster." The man crouched down, bringing his face level with hers, grinning wide. "But what do you think I am? An angel?"

The witch said nothing...only cried. But the man could see that her tears were for fear of his Lord, not for him.

That realisation chilled his heart with an irrational anger and jealousy he couldn’t name.

Looking into those pure white eyes, he felt a compulsive, consuming need to make her cry for him. To make her wail and beg and kneel helpless on the ground, trembling...because of him.

Not because of Lord Stormblessed.

That desire surged through his chest like the closing jaw of something dark, gripping his heart and soul in a tight, unyielding fist.

Then he acted without thought.

His left hand moved, and his thin dagger opened his teammate’s throat in a single slash.

"W-What?" The woman exclaimed in deep-rooted shock, her black eyes wide, her mouth gurgling with blood. She pressed both hands uselessly to her throat, trying to stop the fountain of red. She sank to her knees, feeling the dagger’s poison entering her system.

Realisation came as she looked at the witch, and saw something that turned her heart cold.

There, kneeling in front of the one-eyed man, for just a brief instant, the witch’s pale eyes were cold and utterly unfeeling, staring at her the way a person stares at an insect.

It lasted only a moment. Then those eyes transformed back into eyes of pure, wrenching terror.

The witch opened her mouth and wailed, thrashing with visible fear at the sight of the now-dead teammate.

"Hahah! Yes, yes, yes!" The man laughed in euphoric delight, ignoring his teammate completely. "It’s me you should fear! It’s me—!"

"It is time."

The witch said it in a sudden, completely calm voice. Her cries and wails stopped as if a switch had been thrown.

The transformation was so abrupt the man’s mind froze for an instant.

That was all she needed.

She seized his hand, twisted it, and flung him hard toward the wall a couple of metres behind her. At the same time, she rolled onto her feet and put eight steps of distance between herself and where she had been standing.

Then, at that exact moment, a deathly voice echoed through the surrounding space.

"Second Manifestation: Death Zone."

Instantly, the woman witnessed a black dome-like barrier rise and expand in a wide circle around the area.

The last thing she saw was the one-eyed man staring at her, his mind still frozen in dread. By the time understanding reached him, the barrier had closed entirely, sealing him inside.

Without any change in expression, she raised her hand and wiped both her tears and blood away in one motion.

She drew a slow breath, turned, and walked away, dusting her clothes as she went.

She pulled a cracked phone from one of her pockets — stolen from that pitiful guard — and checked the date.

"The Scholarship Exam... around two weeks from now." She muttered, and slipped the phone away.

"I will need somewhere to stay until then."

Theophane — little sister of Évangile — whispered under her breath as she walked away from the scene, leaving behind a zone that would soon be reduced to nothing by the combined power of Morenna and Hel Hood.

"What perfect timing. I wonder what the Hood are doing here."

She wondered one last time, then disappeared into the dark, squalid alley.

...

Back at the Hood Palace, inside the training ground, Cassius was crouching down in front of Isolde, who lay face-down on the floor.

Her body was wrapped in chains. Her skin was deathly pale, riddled with wounds, blood trickling from her broken lips.

She lifted her exhausted eyes with difficulty, taking in the sight of a wounded, bloodied and smiling Cassius.

"Well," He said, with a tone dripping with mockery, "I believe it is time for you to start watching cooking tutorials, darling."

Isolde cursed.

—End of Chapter 139—