Chapter One:It Calls

[Sophia Van Gongorei]

The air on the fractured peak tasted of ozone and despair.

"Damned beast..." Sophia sucked her teeth in disdain. Her efforts had fallen flat. Needle and thread, normally instruments of exquisite control, had woven a prison of immolating Deadflame around the monstrous form, yet the azure amalgam had survived its fray, shrugging off the necrotic fire as if it were a mild inconvenience. From the corner of her eye, she caught the scathing grimace of Alice. The girl’s glare was a physical weight, charged with a fury nigh akin to that of the coiling whip of the beast they faced.

"Oh?" If looks could kill, Alice’s countenance would be a sweeping scythe of the reaper's purpose given shape. The boiling of her blood nearly brought life to her obsidian skin, radiating heat Sophia could almost feel across the ravaged ground. Yet, as intrigued as Sophia was by what she could have possibly done now to garner such incandescent rage, there was little time to focus on it.

The beast retaliated, and lacked nothing for raw power. Its monstrous whip cracked like thunder splitting reality, literally splitting the boundaries of space-time in twain like an afterthought. The laws of the universe seemed its playthings, twisting around its frame before unleashing gale after gale of electrified winds, scathing and tearing the mountain top asunder.

Sophia, poised to muster a hastily constructed defense, caught the words of the commander echoing over the din.

"A shard?" She saw it – a flash of sapphire glinting in the storm, and felt its palpable presence blooming nearby. It emanated protection, a shield of pure, radiant light. She obliged, using a burst of momentum magic to propel herself behind the shimmering light field. The hurricane gales of ionized blizzard thrashed against the barrier, howling their frustration, yet gained no entry. The commander’s very flesh fueled the stalwart defense, his form taut with the incredible drain.

But that was not all. Through the man’s focused effort, pouring his life force into the sapphire fragment, the amalgam became something more… knowable. Discernible. As if by its own sudden remembrance of natural law, did it become something… slayable. Sophia knew it instinctively.

Now was the time to truly strike. But she wouldn't be able to just throw Deadflame and hope. She would need time. To knead, to muster, to draw upon her deepest, most dangerous reserves.

"I call upon thee... Black Knight."

As the valorous light of the commander's life force seemed to flicker away, the traces of its fleeting mote were swallowed by a thick, viscous mass of shadows appearing beneath Sophia. Like molten night, living ribbons of darkness threaded themselves into existence, coalescing and giving terrifying form to Sophia's other half – the demon to which she was eternally bound, in this life and here after. Its form solidified to that of a hulking humanoid, its wings spanning nearly six feet in reach even folded. Eyes burned with the malachite flare of Necrofyre, a form of grafted abyss, a walking void given shape.

"Gongorei... I can't even gain a spec of rest without you calling upon me," the Black Knight said, its voice a low, resonant rumble, noticeably annoyed.

"You said to find the Astral Vein... I did," she replied, flicking her hand casually through her hair, a stark contrast to the chaos. "How was I to know something like this was strutting about?" She gestured towards the raging beast. "Besides... it can be killed. I just need time to... prepare..."

"So you're using that?" The Black Knight tilted its head, the Necrofyre eyes fixing on her.

"Indeed," Sophia smirked. "Now go and fight it... or are you worried you're not tough enough?"

The smallest, nearly imperceptible tick tightened the muscle in the demon's jaw as it tried to hide its irritation, not wishing to give her the satisfaction of knowing her words picked at it. "Please, find a mortal to play with, not me." It casually folded its arms together as its massive wings spread wide, a single powerful gesture that caused a storm of loose rubble to be casually whisked away from the immediate area. "Hurry up."

With that, the Black Knight launched itself forward, a blur of darkness against the azure and white fury of the storm. Necrofyre swirled around its hand as it tightened into a blistering fist, aimed for an exposed limb of the beast.

Sophia smirked, a truly dastardly grin. She began weaving arcane energy, not into threads this time, but into swirling patterns around her feet. "I'm going to kill that fucking thing," she murmured, her voice gaining a dangerous edge. "Assist the Black Knight, assuming you all wish to survive..." Her eye lingered on the girl Alice a bit longer, her snicker shortened slightly. "...Especially you."

With that chilling promise hanging in the air, the Night Mother began casting a barrier around herself, a shimmer of deep emerald energy enclosing her in a temporary sanctuary as she continued her invocation. Upon its maturation, this spell would be an arbiter capable of sending this mutant to the afterlife. If she managed to pull together the monstrous essence needed to invoke the spell before all else was lost.

[Alice Akuma]

The wind howled across the shattered expanse, the echoes of Commander Kaelen’s scream still bleeding into the void. His body was gone—reduced to feathers and blue dust—but his sacrifice held the line. For now.

Alice stood at the edge of the dead zone, boots half-submerged in meltwater and ash, her Ava still flickering with unfinished strands. The battlefield crackled with fractured air and residual chronomantic tremors. The Leviathan loomed beyond, its colossal body swaying—unbalanced, unraveling.

And yet...

It was not dying.

Its whip, now slack and steaming, coiled upward like a serpent summoned to the stars. Limbs that should not be, twisted and reformed. Where light touched its skin, geometry failed—the beast grew new spines, mirrored wings that shimmered like broken time. A thousand screaming faces unfurled across its flanks before vanishing into nothing. And in its center: a core, seething with white-hot memory, untouchable and alive.

Alice’s pulse hammered in her ears.

She couldn’t breathe.

A single glance toward Sophia confirmed what she feared—Sophia was still locked in preparation, barrier up, arcane circles blazing brighter now, deeper green and stitched with shadows. Her spell wasn’t ready.

The Black Knight clashed with the Leviathan again and again, striking a blow to its shoulder that split space itself—but the creature bent, twisted, and devoured the damage with a chittering, distorted laugh.

A scream tore across the Mountaintop, raw and broken. The rookie—barely more than a girl—crawled through ice and fire, dragging herself toward the shattered remains of the commander’s Azure shard.

“No! Don’t!” Alice shouted, her voice hoarse.

But the girl didn’t stop.

All around her, the world warped—the Leviathan was preparing something final now. The wind died. The sky bled white. Its core split open, revealing a ring of shifting glyphs pulsing like heartbeats.

Alice had seen enough battles to recognize when a creature had abandoned defense.

This was an ending.

And the rookie was in its path.

The beast raised its head, and for the first time, Alice felt it look at her. Not with hatred. Not with rage. But with ancient, bitter judgment. It opened its mouth. Not to roar. Not to scream.

But to unmake.

The light bent inward. Color drained. Sound bled out of the air.

The rookie collapsed, clutching the crystal Kaelen had left behind—its surface now cracked, flickering like a dying star.

Alice moved.

Electricity surged to life around her, tendrils of light weaving across her limbs. She didn’t finish her spell. She didn’t think. She ran.

Each step burned. Her lungs tore open with cold. The ground around her buckled and cracked, impossibly heavy—like time itself was thickening, resisting her forward motion.

The Leviathan unleashed its final strike.

Not a beam. Not fire. Not storm.

Sound. An impossibly soft sound of erasure. More subtle than deaths whisper.

A wave of ending rolled forward, consuming color, space, memory and yet. Just in time…Alice reached the rookie just as the edge uncertainty reached them—

And their world shattered. Instantly dissolving into emptiness.

For a moment, there was no pain. No light. No self.

But..the memory of Kaelen’s voice.

“You rookies—listen close. You keep fighting like that and your first will be your last.

Then… breath.

A scream not of terror—but of resistance, emergence, renewal.

Alice’s eyes snapped open. Her body was locked in place, knees half-buried in snowmelt and starlight. The wave she was sure devoured them was now halted, just inches from her chest, dissolving against a wall of radiant, pulsing blue.

She turned.

The rookie stood.

She shouldn’t be able to. Her legs were broken. Her arms bloodied. But she stood—eyes wild, tears cutting clean lines through soot.

The crystal wasn’t cracked anymore.

It was alive. Binding to both Alice and The Aurorai.

Burning from within.

The girl’s body pulsed with that same impossible light. Her limbs moved in jagged rhythm—not graceful, not perfect—but connected. Threads of Azure curled around her like a second skin, anchoring her feet to the earth. She wasn’t channeling it.

She was becoming it

Alice stared, realization dawning not in awe… but in kinship.

Her own body responded, weaving Ava to command the threads as if she always had the knowledge.

The lightstrings snapped into harmony. No longer golden—but blueish-white, flecked with some ember of pink-they same tint as her naten. Her skin lit from within.

Alice wasn’t a warrior because she trained. She wasn’t here because she happened upon this adventure.

She was chosen, led by something deeper than coincidence . The same force that spared the rookie now awakened in her.

They were becoming something new, a being who could safely use the azure shards- Shardbearers. The Leviathan shrieked in fury, aware now that its final judgment had been denied and not avoided.

It moved, body cracking into a thousand broken silhouettes. It swarmed them. All of them sending a countless, infinite army of itself after each of them.

Alice and the Aurorai moved in unison. The rookie raised her hand, projecting a field of crystalline force that locked the Leviathan’s core in a fixed point. It fought, twisted, broke time around itself—

But Alice pierced the blur.

She drove thw arourai blade into the exposed membrane just above its heart, embedding light into light. The beast *froze*—just for a breath and all of its infinite projections froze aswell.

A beat of stillness.

And then—

Alice: “NOW, SOPHIA!”

[Ovan Hellgate]

“Oh yeah, it’s all coming together!”

Ovan worked tirelessly, munching on the replenishing morsels provided by his comrade from the bottom of the world. He planned to save most of it for the rest of his expedition, but crossing paths with Sophia and Alice seemed to cut his safari time in less than half, giving him a large surplus of rations to share and consume himself. Though generally inadmissible, this particular moment left Ovan with no choice but to throw caution to the wind and maximize his potential. He needed the energy to match his inspiration, the sacrifice of the Aurorai, of these femme fatales, of Lana’s training, and of Okoye’s conditioning, pushing him to the edge of innovation.

His mind raced, his hands danced along the special alloys of the Aurorai armory, crafting it into place as the creature wailed behind him.

“Almost…” he said, as his fingers unknowingly crafted a new mudra he hadn’t used himself before. Instinctively, this Ava flashed as Ovan ran his hands from the center of the tool down its sides and coated it with an ultraviolet resin a few inches thick.

“Dun dun dun DOOOONE!”

The Severwing finally came together and Ovan held it triumphantly above his head, the boomerang stretching as high into the air as he was tall. He marveled at it for just a moment, enjoying the hallmark traits of the Aurorai armory blended with his own personal sensibilities, all encased in a thick layer of crystal that pulsed with his own heartbeat, the pinnacle of Crystal Conjures, Hadalstone.

Without missing a beat, Ovan pivoted toward the kaleidoscoped creature assailed by a dark knight and held in place by a single point with its many timelines fanning out around it. He found his mark thanks to Alice anchoring it in place, somehow learning to harness the Azure energy the beast produced. Even in their short meeting, Ovan felt happy to see her go beyond her limits and his expectations from their first meeting just moments ago.

Ovan cocked his arm back, far back, waaaay back, so far back he stood on one leg and might have fallen if the giant boomerang held any more weight, but he found his center and his heartbeat synchronized with the Hadalstone weapon whose tip dipped into the frozen bedrock beneath the snow and sent a concerning crackling sound under their feet, like an anvil dropped from a blacksmith’s hands.

Ovan lunged forward and gave the Severwing a full body launch with all he had and the boomerang groaned through the air, clearing the ground beneath him and Sophia completely clear of snow revealing the splintered mountainous bedrock beneath them centered right behind him. The ultraviolet tool arced through space, maybe even through time, but directly towards the heart of the beast that Alice bound in electric chains.

Ovan’s chest heaved, the throw took a bit more out of him than he thought, but David’s nutritious rations provided him the reserves to press on.

Hadalstone was the greatest tool in the Horus craft, but one he never thought of being able to use himself. Now, he finally felt he reached the starting line to succeeding the Horus Crown.

[Sophia Van Gongorei]

The emerald aegis shimmered, casting a sickly green pallor upon Sophia’s face. Outside its sanctuary, the world was a symphony of chaos. The beast, a creature of tempest and sinew, roared with the sound of a collapsing mountain, its strikes against the Black Knight sending shockwaves through the ruined plaza. The Black Knight was a phantom of violence, a blur of obsidian muscle and malachite flame, his movements fluid and deadly as he parried and struck, buying her the precious seconds she required.

The combined efforts of Azure glint that emanated from Alice and the Aurorai girl were a beacon of promise in a seemingly hopeless situation, their light intermixing with the glittering aura above. The Black Knight noticed this, his eyes narrowing.

"That girl..."

He said to himself as the duo struck the creature, binding it with chains of scathing, leeching, azure vengeance, authority.

Inside the bubble, all was preternaturally still. This was the eye of her own personal storm. For Sophia, casting a spell of this magnitude was not a simple act of will, but a complex and dangerous act of metaphysical surgery. She called it the Kiln of Cessation. It was not a spell of fire or force, not in the mortal sense. It was a spell of unmaking. A direct tap into the entropy at the heat-death of the universe, a channeled moment of the inevitable end, brought forward into the now.

First came the Anchor. She sank her consciousness downwards, past the stone beneath her feet, past the bedrock of the world itself, until she found it: the Astral Vein. It was not a physical thing, but a roaring river of pure, untamed cosmic energy, the lifeblood of reality. To touch it directly was to be annihilated, the soul os a lesser being would have been consumed in its current. But Sophia, a living lynch pin, could do more than survive its pull; she could grab. As she drew the power upwards, it did not flow into her pure; it curdled, soured by the necrotic gravity of her soul. The raw, white-hot energy of creation was twisted and inverted, becoming a thick, cold slurry of blazing void.

Next, the Schema. The swirling patterns around her feet were not mere decoration. They were a blueprint, a sigil of cosmic blasphemy drawn not with ink, but with her focused intent. Each curve and line was a specific instruction, a key designed to fit the impossibly complex locks that held the walls of reality in place. She was, in essence, writing a line of corrupt code into the source of existence.

Then, the Invocation. Sophia’s lips parted, but the voice that emerged was not entirely her own. It was a layered, discordant sound, her mezzo-soprano undertone woven through with the guttural rumble of The Black Knight and the dry, sibilant hiss of dying stars. They were words of untwisting, syllables that scraped against the very concept of sound, each one a metaphysical hammer blow against the Schema she had laid.

"Orsus... vac Vhorr... Kael'eth'nul..."

The air inside her barrier grew thin, tasting of ancient dust. The darkened emerald light of her shield began to flicker, not from attack, but from the sheer pressure building within. Outside, even amidst the titanic struggle, the atmosphere grew heavy. The light of the storm dimmed, as if a greater, more profound darkness was bleeding through the sky.

Alice and the other survivors would feel it first. A deep, bone-quaking hum that vibrated not in their ears, but in their teeth, in their souls. A primal fear seized them, far worse than the terror the beast inspired. The beast was a thing of rage and flesh. What Sophia was unveiling...This was a violation.

The seams of reality began to melt. That was the only word for it. Space itself, on either side of the raging beast, lost its integrity. It drooped and ran like heated wax, the air shimmering and distorting into a viscous, mineral soup of grotto-black and sickly, bruised purple. It was the colour of a void that was not empty, but full of dreadful potential.

“Finaaalllly,” the word hissed from Sophia’s mouth, a sound of profound and terrible satisfaction. Her emerald barrier dissolved, its purpose served. The raw power now swirling around her was shield enough.

Space-time groaned, a sound like a continent tearing in two. And from the weeping orifices in reality, they emerged. Twin appendages, vast and skeletal, wrenched their way into the physical realm. They were built not of earthly calcium, but of a glistening, semi-translucent malachite bone that pulsed with a faint, infernal Necrofyre. They were impossibly huge, each finger the size of a grown man, and they seemed to grip the very “flesh” of reality, anchoring themselves to pull with terrifying force.

The beast, for the first time, seemed to know fear. It paused its assault on The Black Knight, its eyes swivelling to the impossible sight. The Efforts of the Girl Scouts and the sacrifice of their commander had forced the beast into a creature of this world, of this reality. And it recognized that what it was now facing, Sophia, was its antithesis.

"Behold," Sophia’s voice boomed, imbued with the power she now wielded, " the closing of the circle. The final silence."

With a mental command that cost her a visible shudder, a spasm of pain that tightened her face into a mask, she directed the hands. They moved with an unnatural speed, slamming shut on the creature from both sides. There was no sound of impact, no crunch of exoskeleton or flesh—only a sudden, deafening silence. The Light of the Aurora became mute, swallowed by the voids of her creation, their cosmic tapestry severed by the blackened authority with which she spilt the heavens.

"Time and space, reality, causality, they are the baubles of the truly divine..."

The malachite fingers tightened, and from the rifts they had torn, the Deadflame poured forth. It was not a fire. It was a torrent of bubbling void. Scathing death. A cascade of shimmering blackness, a visual representation of that which consumed light, heat, sound, and matter. The beast did not burn or explode. It was simply… unwritten. Where the Deadflame touched it, its form dissolved, its essence siphoned away into the Nether.

"Not Beast..."

Its bellow of fury was cut short, its physical form eroding into motes of dust that didn't even have time to scatter before they too were annihilated. In the height of her magical unveiling, Sophia was a fixture of blood-curdling beauty, her living immolation of dead flame scathing around her as if she herself were caught in the Kiln blaze.

In seconds, it was over. The colossal beast was gone. Not dead. Gone.

The skeletal hands released their non-existent captive and retreated into their portals. With a snap that sounded like the universe healing a wound, the rifts sealed themselves shut, leaving behind only the faintest shimmer and a profound, chilling cold. The ground where the creature had stood was now a smooth, glassy crater of vitrified earth, sterile and dead.

Sophia swayed, her once-mocha complexion now ashen. A single trickle of blood ran from her nose. Her eyes, for a fleeting moment, glowed with the same malachite flare as The Black Knight before returning to their normal shade. The Kiln always demanded its price—a sliver of her vitality, a sanding, a soul shaved away to fuel the abyss.

The Black Knight landed beside her with a near-silent thud, folding his immense wings. He surveyed the glassy crater, then glanced at her pale, smirking face. "A bit dramatic, don't you think?" he rumbled, his irritation already returning.

Sophia laughed, a weak but genuinely triumphant sound. Her gaze drifted over the terrified survivors and landed once more on Alice. Her dastardly grin returned, sharp and predatory. She had not only proven her power but also delivered on her chilling promise. They had survived, but now they knew what manner of being the Night Mother truly was—not just a wielder of dark spells, but a conduit of what remained to be seen.

"What's life... without a little drama..."

[Alice Akuma]

The battlefield trembled.

Alice’s eyes never left the creature. It pulsed with layered, agonized motion—a body too large for the space it occupied, shifting through flickers of size and phase, its boundaries blurred like heatwaves over water. The air bent around it, pulled inward as though reality itself was being inhaled by its presence. And still, it fought.

It wrestled the storm—not Sophia’s, not the Black Knight’s—but the one inside itself.

Two minds. Two cores. One form.

The Anomaly clung to the Leviathan’s center like a second heart—four-legged, limber, and trembling. Its long, telescopic neck moved with erratic rhythm. That singular eye blinked wide in panic, unblinking now, stretching toward the sky as if searching for an escape hatch in a collapsing world. It reared. Not to strike. Not to run. But to launch.

Alice could feel it—the weight of the moment before the act. A wind without a sound. A silence before cataclysm.

Then, in one impossible, planet-breaking motion, the Leviathan hurled the Anomaly. The smaller Aevorran was flung with a grace that broke the horizon itself. A blur of light and instinct trailing through the upper atmosphere like a fallen comet returning home. It didn’t tumble—it glided, spinning once, then vanished, too far and too fast for the eye to follow. A being ripped out of proximity. Slung from the cradle of its protector into the black beyond, no different than a star orphaned from its constellation.

and then the hands came. Sophia had begun and reality cracked in the silence. Vast skeletal appendages, slick with malachite glow, erupted from the open wound of existence. They did not grab—they collapsed. Space obeyed their will.

The Leviathan screamed.

Not a sound of rage—this was deeper. A guttural, shattering tone that warped the mountains, shook the snow into the air, and bent the spectrum of color itself. The creature had begun to collapse, but not willingly. Every piece of it fought the end. Its mirrored wings unfurled, collapsing back into themselves like dying stars. Spines jutted out, snapping open across space in impossible patterns, some folding through one another as if rejecting their own existence. The mountain cracked beneath its final form, unable to support the sheer wrongness of what it was becoming in death.

And Sophia—Sophia moved with stillness.

She walked through the storm of unraveling timelines like a scalpel through silk. Her barrier flickered away, arcane circles folding inward, and then—

The glyphs beneath her feet no longer glowed—they pulsed, weaving strange geometries in the air, coiling around her like a crown of locked intent. Her arms rose and fell in silent rhythm, fingers spreading through ghostlight symbols as tall as she was. All sound drained from the air as something ancient answered her call. No longer green, no longer shadowed—her magic bloomed in stark white laced with obsidian script, delicate and unreadable.

The Leviathan thrashed, broken silhouettes tearing from its core. It launched fractals of itself forward, vast limbs in spirals and spears, jaws within jaws stretching toward her. But she never looked away. She simply raised one hand and the universe seemed to bend around it.

Alice barely had the stomach to watch.

Even without knowing the language, she could feel it—it wasn’t sorcery. It was authority. Law. The moment of judgment so complete it denied interpretation-Unmaking.

The Leviathan convulsed. Entire wings vaporized. Faces screamed and were silenced forever. Then Sophia spoke—but the sound wasn’t a word. It was an execution.

The final glyph snapped.

A beam, no, a thread of annihilation split the world from her hand. Not fire, not darkness —just absence. It moved in utter silence. Reality vanished where it passed.

Alice dove. Her body blurred with electric response, knees bending in a crouch that flung her free of the deathfield just as the rift sealed behind her. No noise followed—only a radiant hush, an instant of dead quiet so absolute her heart nearly forgot to beat.

She hit the snow shoulder-first, rolled beneath the arc of the attack, narrowly escaping the clean slice of finality. The mountaintop behind her folded in on itself. Particles shimmered, turned silver, and ceased. She knew it then.

Sophia wasn’t an ally.
That was never the arrangement.

Their connection wasn’t trust—it was something worse.

*Silence.*

The Leviathan’s body peeled away layer by layer, drifting like burned leaves across the scorched sky. Its core flickered once—then vanished. No explosion. No glory.

Just stillness.

Until the air split.

Without warning, a shimmer danced above the ruins, and space cracked open like glass dropped onto stone. A ring of light spiraled out of nothing, colors inverted, refracted, and reversed. From within the rupture, they came.

A dozen or more.

Figures cloaked in sleek matte-black armor, lenses gleaming where eyes should be. Others moved unnaturally, skin cracked with crystal threads or pulsing with synthetic veins. Machinery and flesh, twisted together with no intent toward grace—only utility. One had a spine growing outward, ribbed with chrome. Another’s hands clicked and bent backward as they waved a scanning device over the remnants of the Leviathan.

SEED.

They spoke in static-laced code, deciphering readings in tongues only they understood.

“Crystalline bind secure. Dual-hosted resonance detected.”
“Stabilized. Pattern Bloom. Confirmation: Seedling-Seedlink achieved.”
“Prepare sample exfil. Priority status: Living Azure Flame—Confirmed.”

They didn’t even glance at Sophia or Ovan. Only when their scans swept across Alice—her skin still glowing faint blue, her aura webbed with light, and the Aurorai rookie standing beside her like a newborn specter—did they pause.

One of them reached forward, slowly. Not to touch. To witness.

Then he stepped aside.

And they came.

Three more figures emerged from the gateway with reverence. Not armored. Not disfigured.

Human—or nearly.

The first was a towering man, easily four meters tall. His muscles tensed visibly beneath his skin-tight uniform, black with storm-gray bands that pulsed with biometric readings. His shoulders bore insignias scorched into the fabric, impossible to decipher. A faint crystal star embedded in his chest beat slowly like a second heart.

He did not speak.

Instead, the twins flanked him.

Both women moved in perfect harmony—elegance honed into weaponry. They wore the same sleeveless black uniforms, cut to hug their bodies in brutalist precision. Smooth, unblemished skin the color of moonlight glowed faintly beneath their veils—each one sheer and silk-thin, wrapped from nose to collar in silent ritual. Their eyes, what little could be seen behind the veil, were sharp as blades, rimmed in platinum ink. Neither blinked.

One wore gloves with silver threading across her knuckles—etched symbols pulsing with restrained power. The other’s nails were bare and sharp, and when she moved, the fabric of her uniform whispered with integrated micro-filament—alive, responsive.

They stood before Alice, and for the first time, the cult-crew halted their scanning. A moment of regard.

The twins stepped forward in unison, as if drawn to her.

The veiled one on the right leaned ever so slightly toward the Aurorai girl, her eyes flicking over the bonded crystal with an unreadable calculation.

And then she spoke. Not with curiosity.

With reverence.

> “There it is. We have arrived at just the right time.”

“The blooming.”

Alice didn’t answer. She couldn’t.

Because for all the Leviathan’s terror…
For all Sophia’s unknowable power…
For all the broken time left to rebuild—

It was Seed who truly terrified her.

[Fate I]

Their uniforms were unfamiliar. Some wore hooded robes with their eyes veiled and their left arms exposed. Others were clad in tight, metallic armor, blue veins coursing across it, pulsing faintly in synchronized rhythm. Yet all of them bore the same mark — whether tattooed on flesh or pressed into steel: a blue flame with an eye at its center.

They moved with purpose, scanning the area with tools Alice had never seen before. At their forefront walked twin women, flanking a tall, broad-shouldered man in heavy armor. The women smiled as they stared, speaking only to each other in a strange, near-mechanical cadence.

“It blooms,” they said in unison to the armored man.

He gave a slight nod, his expression barely shifting.

“I am Iris,” the twins intoned together.

Alice glanced at Sophia, then at Ovan, and finally down at the Aurorai Elv nestled at her feet. The question rose in her throat unbidden, yet once spoken, it felt inevitable.

“Why are you standing so close… to me?”

The twins blinked, momentarily confused, then adjusted their spacing with eerie synchronization. They stepped away from Alice, still refusing to acknowledge either Ovan or Sophia.

“Have you—” one began.

“Who are you?” Alice cut in sharply.

“I am Ir—”

“Not your names.” Alice’s finger stabbed toward the mark on their shoulders, the burning eye within the flame.

The twins fell silent, their smiles dimming. They turned to the man behind them. For a long moment, the three stared at one another, their stillness more unsettling than any answer. Then, at last, Iris broke the silence.

The silence stretched until one of the twins finally spoke, her voice soft but unyielding.

“A symbol of my service,” Iris said, though her words carried no trace of duty. It was not spoken like an oath, but like breath itself — something that simply was.

Alice narrowed her eyes. “Serve? Like soldiers? A faction?”

“No.” The twins tilted their heads in mirrored motion. “You misunderstand. I do not work for Seed. I am the seed that seeks the Light of the Azure, so that seed may bloom. So that the Azure flame may awaken within.”

Their smiles widened faintly, but not with warmth. It was reverence.

“When I say we are Seed,” they said, giving a slight glance at the rest of their team.

[Sophia Van Gongorei]

The air itself was a wound. It shimmered with the ghost-image of a thousand dying stars, tasting of ozone and burnt sugar. The fracture of spacetime, a cataclysmic scream torn from the throat of reality, had sealed itself shut, but the scar remained. It throbbed above the blighted mountain peak, a constant reminder of the power Sophia had just wielded. For one infinitesimal, perfect second, she had been whole. She had been the Night Mother in her full, terrifying glory. Now, the memory of it was a phantom limb, aching for a body it no longer possessed.

The aftershock was an intimate agony. It was the world's pain, a recoil from the violation she had inflicted upon it, and it coursed through her veins. Blood, thick and dark as crude oil, wept from the corners of her eyes, tracing paths down her cheeks. Her hand, clutching the obsidian haft of her spear, trembled not with fear, but with the sheer effort of containing the echoes of the Necrofyre. It was a void now, a hollow ache in the core of her being where that conflagration had been, but deep within that emptiness, an ember of malthicte yearning glowed with renewed resolve. She would be whole again. It was no longer a wish; it was a vow.

The power she had torn from the Astral Vein was fading, its divine succor leaving her system like a potent drug. Discomfortingly humbling, to be so mighty one moment and so fragile the next. She straightened from her crouch, each movement a careful negotiation with her protesting body.

Beside her, a statue of midnight and malice stood silent sentinel. The Black Knight. He was not merely watching; he was calculating, his unseen gaze weighing her depleted essence against the monumental task ahead. His silence was a judgment chamber, and she could feel his doubt like a physical pressure.

“You can stop with the glaring and processing,”. Sophia’s voice was a rasp, stripped of its usual silken authority.

Seconds ticked by, each one a small eternity. Then, a profound darkness began to emanate from her skin, a soft, absorbing glow like a black sun. The abyssal energy of her demonic companion seeped into her, a transfusion of pure will. The exhaustion receded, the trembling in her hand stilled, and the blood on her face dried to a fine, dark powder. The display of weakness was over, a brief, shameful vulnerability she would never permit mortals to witness again.

“We continue,” she stated, her voice regaining its strength. “I will continue.”

That was all the assurance she would offer. The Black Knight, a figure wreathed in solidified shadow, unfolded his arms. A low rumble, more a feeling in her bones than a sound, emanated from him. “Of course you will. This world has yet to become ours.”

With a motion that defied physics, he stepped into her. His demonic form poured into her like ink into water, a seamless, chilling union. He was the furnace within her; she was the hand that wielded his fire. Her power, now stabilized, settled comfortably within her. Her grip on the spear was iron.

Her gaze found Alice. The girl stood a short distance away, her exotic features a canvas of dawning horror and comprehension. She had seen the truth of the Night Mother, the raw, world-breaking power she commanded. Yet, in Sophia’s eyes, the girl was not an adversary. She was a curiosity, a catalyst. Not an enemy. Not yet.

Before a word could be spoken, reality buckled again. Not with the raw, chaotic energy of Sophia’s magic, but with a cold, geometric precision. A section of space folded in on itself, creating a perfect, shimmering doorway from which stepped five figures. They were encased in articulated armor of matte black and polished chrome, their forms humanoid but unnervingly sterile. Red optical sensors swept across the devastated landscape, devoid of any discernible emotion. It was only when their leader’s synthesized voice sliced through the air that a flicker of recognition, and then revulsion, ignited in Sophia.

“Crystalline bind secure. Dual-hosted resonance detected.”
“Stabilized. Pattern Bloom. Confirmation: Seedling-Seedlink achieved.”
“Prepare sample exfil. Priority status: Living Azure Flame—Confirmed.”

SEED. The name was a barb in her memory, dragging with it the cloying scent of the man-spit, Belif. He and his pathetic organization had been her jailers on the desolate plane of Rudral. Her tether to him had been a chain, and only the blazing sacrificial rite—the screams of six hundred of Rudral’s natives fueling her spell—had shattered it.

But these were not the SEED she remembered. Belif’s agents had been clumsy, arrogant fools, easily outmaneuvered. These constructs were different. They radiated a quiet, lethal competence. A fusion of advanced technology and arcane knowledge hummed beneath their chrome plating, a power signature that made the old SEED look like fumbling children.

Yet, one thing remained constant: their obsessive focus on Alice. The girl flinched as their red optics locked onto her, her fear a palpable scent in the air. What was so vital about this one young woman? Sophia’s intrigue deepened, twisting around her contempt for the name they carried. Alice feared them. And Sophia, with an ancient and deeply ingrained instinct, despised them. A man—or a machine aping a man—would not take a woman by force in her presence. It was a principle as old and as sharp as her spear.

A slow, predatory smile touched Sophia’s lips. The click of her armored heel on the scorched, naked earth was the only sound. The snow had been vaporized, the very ground baked dry.

“Well, such a touching reunion,” she purred, her voice dripping with venomous sarcasm. She began to walk, not towards SEED, but in a slow, deliberate arc that placed her between them and Alice. “But it seems you really should be going.”

Her eyes, no longer weeping blood but glowing with a faint, internal darkness, narrowed.

Sophia laughed, a low, dangerous sound. She stopped, planting the butt of her spear into the cracked ground with a resounding thud. The earth around it hissed, a ring of black spreading outwards from the point of impact.