“Fuck… F-fuck…!”
That was all Tristessa could say, breathing heavily, free from Auron’s grasp. Taking a few steps forward, the soles of her boots rippling waves that spread across the bloody ground. Crashing with the chaotic remains of both soldiers, witches and their puppets.
Now she could focus on the nauseating smell of Death around once again. Stare with bloodshot and panic-induced eyes at the torn metal of armor plates mixed with guts and body pieces impossible to identify.
“Ah…ah, if only I had… If only I had been more useful…!”
Now, after Tristessa’s lament echoed away, silence reigned over that orchard of Death and diseases, that grave where not a single strand of extra hair could fit. The presence of Daiana and Tatyana, gone, vanished. Having taken her photograph with them. Leaving behind only the result of the Coven's sinister activities: a sea of ??Death, blood, and innards.
“Miss Tristessa.” She jumped at the touch of a strong hand on her shoulder, forcing her to snap back to reality. It was Zephyr, agitated and searching for answers, standing beside her. “You have a lot to explain…”
“And what about you, General?” Auron challenged him as he approached, having removed his hat to wipe the sweat from his brow. “Tatyana Salomé is someone you call upon to get children to go to bed early, and you recognized her at first sight. Have you had encounters with her before?”
“Yes, and I assure you she won’t be coming back here. It’s her [Divinity of Sacrificial Warp]. She can travel long distances in the blink of an eye. But there are conditions she must fulfill, one of those the performing of a sacrifice,” he explained, before the gunslinger had a chance to ask more questions. His interest was still focused on Tristessa. “I can brief you later about that monster, but right now, I need to know something. Leaving aside for now all about that weird photograph that they had, what is role of the Mercer-Archeos family in all of this? Lord Youngblood never mentioned them before this operation, only the Crywolf merchant's caravan.”
“…Mercer-Archeos?” Tristessa repeated that double surname that had weighed at ton on her mind since she arrived in Nekrom so many days ago that, to her, it felt like a lifetime. “The Mercer-Archeos!”
She pulled away from the General's grip and took his hands, seeking an understanding she wasn't going to find in that situation.
“Zephyr…! I-I'm sorry, General. Didn't you hear what that lunatic bitch said?” Tristessa asked, looking at him and Auron. “They were chasing them and lost their trail in the forest! If no one here has heard from them, it means the Mercer-Archeos and the caravan are still out there! They’re hiding, even from Daiana’s Simulacrum, somehow!”
“Even if that’s the case, the southern side of the Feydra Forest is vast, miss. Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but I’ve lost half my men and women…” the man hissed, his brown eyes fixed on her, a sudden wave of morbid curiosity compelling her to glance around. Around her, at the dead. “It would take us the rest of the day to search the area.”
The shouts of Imperial patrols approaching the outpost could be heard, but Tristessa couldn’t make out what they were saying. Whether they were searching for survivors, or warning of the imminent incursion into the territory attacked by the Coven…
Tristessa didn't care. Nothing mattered, not even Daiana's ignominious promise. Only finding the Mercer-Archeos mattered, now that the witches had retreated.
“Vergil!”
The black-furred aracross quickly answered his mistress's call, passing through the mounds of gore without paying them the slightest attention. Sinking his paws into the pools of blood and splashing countless drops everywhere, the lesser demon reached her and licked the hand she offered him, brimming with happiness.
“I'm glad to see you again, too!”
“Are you planning to go off on your own again, lady?” the gunslinger asked, sighing as he watched the girl climb onto the beast.
“No, she won't.” Sensing Zephyr's opposition, Vergil growled. A threat, ready to attack this man that was thousands of times more dangerous, to defend his mistress. “…”
“General, please! Let me go!” she begged. “I swear I’ll find the caravan. They’re out there; we can’t waste any more time!”
Zephyr showed no sign of agreeing or disagreeing with her plea. His silence was eerie, perhaps even more so than Tatyana Salomé’s. And his hungry spear, which had yet to bring down any enemy of justice, yearned to fulfill its owner’s desires, the leather hilts creaking beneath the man’s fingers.
Tristessa knew that going against the wishes of the military commander was a necessary mistake she would pay for later. But at least he seemed to have given her the freedom to do as she pleased. They would surely follow her once reinforcements entered the perimeter of the destroyed outpost and yielded their means of transport. For now, she was the only one with enough speed to begin the search.
“I’ll be careful, Auron. I promise.”
“The only thing you can promise me are soul jewels, lady. Go find your friends; I’ll be right on your tail.”
Hearing the gunslinger’s reluctant promise, Tristessa smiled and patted Vergil on the back to get him moving. They headed south, toward the stretch of the Meridion Road that cut through the rest of the forest and then connected to the Derelict Outpost. The Mercer-Archeos had to be halfway there; there was no other option.
And as the black-haired girl and her mount left the ground tainted by the signs of the massacre, two hidden witnesses of everything that happened followed her movements. Seeing her disappear at high speed into the gloomy highway, their vision obstructed by the foliage and trees.
“Mmm… Should we, or should we not follow her? I’m confident that she’ll find what she’s looking for,” the tall man commented, hidden in between the vegetation like a human-size chameleon, thanks to his thaumaturgy. He was using his own middle finger and thumb to form a circle and, with the implementation of magic, could use them as a telescope. “I’m still surprised that you were able to control yourself and not jump in to save your…addiction, from danger. I’m proud of you, Vektra dear.”
“…your order was to do nothing. I obeyed… You are a cruel man, Lord Youngblood,” whispered the hooded and masked woman standing next to him. “Those witches can return and…”
“Oh please, you know as well as I do that Tatyana Salomé took a huge risk rescuing Daiana. Going back would be madness, even for a witch of the Coven.”
“B-but…”
“Don’t tell me you’re actually falling in love with that girl... That’s your Divinity speaking, and even if you two are close in age, you belong to different worlds. In more ways than one, I would say.”
Chuckling, the man looked sideways to the masked assassin. A grin full of excitement decorated his wrinkled face, and his red eyes bore testament to portentous intentions.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
“What are you going to do about it?” she asked him, fear permeated in her dark and guttural voice.
“For now, let’s continue following your cute girlfriend, Crow. That’d make you happy, right? To know that she’s alright…” Jonas Youngblood patted his companion on the shoulder, and both started to walk through the dense labyrinthine corridors of trees and shrubs. With no chance of losing the trail, since Tristessa was leaving a gigantic scent of Discord behind her, impossible for the masked assassin to lose it. “She’s becoming more and more interesting with every step she takes, don’t you think?”
“Yes… She does.”
Having left the Feydra Crossroads behind, along with all traces of the massacre perpetrated by the Coven, Tristessa traveled through the dirt highway, with the tree-lined corridors on both her sides.
She moved at a great speed, propelled by Vergil, her excited aracross brimming with energy. Her vision was partially blurred; the wind stung her eyes, still inexperienced and unaccustomed to her duties as a novice [She-Dragoon], but the shadows that swarmed in the depths of the forest were not unfamiliar to her. Even with the midday light filtering through the canopy of leaves and branches, it was difficult to see to the sides and ahead, hoping to find the exit to the open ground where the Derelict Outpost stood.
Or more importantly, to find some sign of the caravan or the Mercer-Archeos. Anything that would give her a clue to their whereabouts. Something the witches of the Coven had overlooked, something that had forced them to do the unspeakable acts they did.
“Deceiving loved ones who searched for them for years, believing they had been kidnapped…” Tristessa thought, after several minutes of travel. Alone, wanting to believe that Auron and Zephyr were following her, albeit somewhat behind. “How is such malice, such evil possible?”
Friends. Siblings. Lovers. Betrothed. The twins of the daemonion race. Lorraine and Rykard. Thinking, intelligent beings who had known unity at the beginning of their lives, then separated by the shadow that fell upon Nekrom without ceasing, meeting a violent and unrelenting end. Divided. Deceived and manipulated. Lost in the darkness emanating from the Shadow Queen with her eternal malice.
“…”
Just thinking of the Dark Lady, the one she had heard referred to as the absolute enemy of the world, was enough to make Tristessa feel the doom of eternal ruin in her bones and beyond, crushing her spirit like the fall of the hammer of the underworld.
If that mere mention caused something like that to a Stranger like her, what hope was there for the Nekromian who lives their entire life under that terrible and eternal shadow?
A question she wouldn't be able to answer at that moment, as something caught Tristessa's attention. Something unexpected, which she could discern through the tears in her eyes, irritated by the biting wind, and along with an unnatural chill concentrated at her temple thanks to her [Divinity of Whispers in the Dark].
“In a hurry?”
A shadow. Rising against one of the trees at the side of the road ahead. Nothing was projecting its humanoid form, and no source of light was too strong to make it that dense and dark. There was no doubt that it didn’t belong to the material plane.
And only Tristessa could detect it, given its male voice echoing inside her head along with the cracking music emanating from the speakers of the In-Between and her mind palace.
“Everyone's moving too fast these strange days, don't you think?" the shadow of a man, standing with his arms crossed against the tree, spoke in a voice Tristessa knew. A voice that made her heart tremble. “As if they feared that something or someone would devour them if they remained still for far too long…”
“It can’t be…”
Still staring at that shadow, mouth agape and unblinking, Tristessa forced Vergil to slow his pace until they stopped near the entity the bewildered beast couldn't see. She dismounted and stood before the shadow. Its projection grew larger around her, in varying sizes, distorting perspective of space and subtly devouring a portion of the forest, without completely obscuring it. She moved her head, gazing in the direction of the Derelict Outpost, a smile barely visible amidst her somber form.
“I wonder, what's the point of venturing out into the unknown if you're so afraid you can't afford to enjoy the journey? So many adventurers, so many naive souls, so many fools who think that armed with the sword their father gave them for their seventeenth birthday and the company of a handful of useless friends they'll accomplish anything... That kind of idiot is my favorite: easy to deceive, easy to frighten, easy to rob. The easiest prey for the Ghost Daggers.”
“Katriel…” she whispered, the name of the bandit she had killed. One of the echoes that the soul of that blade-dancer had left in the material plane before falling into the infinite darkness of the Abyss. “How…?”
While Tristessa had no experience with the echoes of the dead beyond what Viktor Enma had offered her on several occasions, this was the first time she had seen the shadow of someone she had known personally. Someone who had died in several past timelines and in the present one.
To which timeline did Katriel Strauss’s echo belong? The present one. A past one? All of them? How does the mathematical equation of the soul work when time and space are added as variables? How does chaos theory affect the spirit once it is separated from flesh and bone?
Tristessa hoped one day to have the answers, to better understand her Divinity. That day was not today.
“So many of those idiots fell into my traps right here. There’s plenty of open space between these trees. A perfect spot for an ambush, don’t you think?” the bandit’s shadow asked, leaning his head to the left side, as if signaling the empty lot of ground where there was nothing but grass and damp earth. He let out a chuckle that, against all odds, brought a fearful smile to Tristessa’s lips. “Sometimes, the most obvious place to hide is the most effective… You just need to have your eyes open and the will to see beyond what they choose to show you.”
As she finished speaking, Katriel Strauss's echo faded, and Tristessa closed her eyes for a moment, feeling that supernatural coldness at her temples subside. Absorbed by the spiritual epicenter of her body, the cornerstone of her being from which her Divinities and the miasma of darkness called Discord emanated.
“Another echo… Another Phantom Remembrance. Are you really going to help the person who killed you and caused the deaths of your companions, Katriel? What clue did you leave…?”
“Graa…?” Tristessa heard Vergil's soft roar behind her. She glanced at him, sitting and watching her intently, and couldn't help but smile.
“Give me a sec! First, I want to check something…”
She received a bark of understanding from her lesser demon and refocused her attention, looking ahead. Toward the empty space between the trees, and she skirted the perimeter along the road. Now that she looked more closely, it was a free layer of ground space created by the subterranean convergence of the roots of all the surrounding trees, preventing anything but grass from growing there. Easy to miss since it had nothing out of the ordinary, or to draw any attention.
“An effective place to hide in plain sight?” she repeated the idea she heard from the echo, frowning. There was nothing, only scrub and bushes beyond, between the wall of trees that stretched until the landscape darkened. “Hide in plain… Ah!”
That forest had witnessed people hiding within its boundaries: she and Reiden while escaping the Dullahan, thanks to the [Divinity of Shadowstep]. She still remembered the profound fear that gripped her when she heard her pursuer's footsteps in the darkness of the night, while she and the mercenary waited with grim patience within the dark dimension generated by that Divinity.
She remembered how difficult it was to breathe, the stagnant oxygen trying to enter her stagnant lungs and traveling almost statically to her stagnant brain; everything was stagnant, static, frozen. As if time had ceased to exist for them, but not for what was happening outside. The absolute darkness made her think of the microsecond of time after Death, before being pulled back into life.
“Outside, the Dullahan never had any way of finding us. That dark dimension turns you into immaterial shadows. It gives you its speed, it’s also the perfect camouflage, but…” As she whispered, Tristessa extended her right arm forward with a certain shyness. Her fingers searched for something invisible in that empty space of the forest. “I wonder if, knowing there’s something here… Knowing what it feels like to touch that dark dimension…”
The girl concentrated and thought about all those terrifying sensations she had experienced within Reiden's Divinity. The way all that darkness enveloped her, the ethereal touch of her skin made of shadows with the space of a parallel dimension.
“…!”
That sensation led her to feel something familiar at her fingertips. A simple touch, an understanding of the presence of something that was hidden. Creating an inconsistency of space; a paradox that searched for instant correction by making the invisible veil that hid everything in plain sight collapse.
Showing what wanted to stay out of sight.
What do you expect for next chapter?
