I climbed down the battlements. Soldiers, middle-aged, kept watch on the battlements. They joked and laughed as archers took shots at the Blighted. Someone, Punisher Whilly I think, even started a betting pool.

  I didn’t care. There was a table laid just inside the courtyard. And it had food. There was warm porridge, some cold meat, bread, and butter in front of me.

  Yes, Ilya spooned some sparkling sugar inside the porridge. Mana-enriched and crunchy, but it was warm and I attacked it like a feral beast.

  The meat was tough, but that was the second thing to disappear inside me. Leaving me with bread rolls and butter. Then the butter magically vanished, leaving me with just the bread.

  My seal hummed inside me. My mouth opened, and the bread roll I was holding with my teeth dropped down to the table I was sitting in front of.

  This had never happened. I had lived with seals for centuries. Seals were created from my own soul and my essence. Nobody but me had any control over them, so why was my seal humming?

  What could make it hum like this?

  “Voss? Is everything okay?” Ilya looked at my consternated expression and asked.

  I lifted a finger to stop her and held my hand out.

  A green flash announced my Reaper’s blade materializing in my hand. The silver swirls on the sword half of the blade hissed and smoked, releasing strange essence that drifted down to the ground.

  The blade vibrated, and words drifted into my mind.

  “You have eliminated the Blighted. You have preserved all lives. Prepare yourself.”

  Prepare myself? For what? What did Gaia want from me now? I did as she asked. Was she not pleased that I didn’t kill all the Blighted myself?

  The ground shook underneath me. It cracked. Ilya and Grek took quick steps backwards.

  Mana, dark, thick and wild, floated up to me. It streamed, covered me head to toe in seconds, and lingered all around me. My death core spun harder than it ever had. I gasped in shock, and mana rushed in with every breath.

  Changing me imperceptibly.

  The table in front of me warped. The bread roll that had fallen on the table withered and decayed.

  Knowledge, old and new, filtered into me. I instinctively closed my eyes, trying to parse what my mind was learning.

  Decaying cut. It was a spell conducted through my blade. It was a simple slash. So simple that you really couldn’t call it magic. Everything decayed. It was a part of life. It was entropy.

  Slow and steady. Just like the bread roll turning into dust in front of my eyes and the table turning dark and brittle, everything and everyone would decay one day or the other. Their cells would break down. Their muscles would atrophy. And their minds would stop creating connections.

  And now I knew how to speed up that process.

  The cracks on the ground sealed, jostling me, and the remaining mana drifted back down.

  I looked at the sealing cracks with wide eyes. How strong was the entity known as Gaia? Could she open up a crack that could swallow up the Blighted, and the Damned?

  If so, why did she need me? While my mind asked numerous questions like that, the swirls on my weapon changed and the blade buzzed once again.

  “Follow the marks, hunter.”

  I looked at the two dots remaining on the pommel stone of my blade. And looked up at Ilya.

  She was looking at my weapon with curiosity. Grek, on the other hand, had his mouth open in awe.

  “Brother, care to explain what that abomination of a blade is?” Ilya asked finally. “And how did it open up cracks in the ground?”

  “Eh… It didn’t.” I shook my head. “I don’t think it did.”

  “Words, Voss. Words. Use them.” Ilya waved her hands to hurry me up.

  “This was supposed to be my Reaper's blade. It is created of my essence. But I think Gaia did something to it, and now the name doesn’t suit it.” I frowned at my blade.

  It wasn’t just the name. The blade didn’t work the way it was supposed to. A Reaper’s blade was supposed to amplify my power. It was supposed to make me unstoppable. It was supposed to suck in my power and let me shoot arching waves of destruction.

  Instead, all it let me do was cut everything in sight.

  Honestly, after the fight with the Blighted, I was a little disappointed. But only a little.

  When I had created my first blade, I had been on my third seal. I had needed that much power to use a blade. I had created this one on my first seal. And I had expected it to be unusable. But it had worked.

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  I had chalked it up to my previous experience.

  But no, now I could sense it. The blade was imperceptibly connected to a different will. My will remained the primary will guiding the blade, but there was a little essence. Strong and constant, guiding parts of the blade to do as it beckoned.

  That will was mostly centered around the hilt and the pommel, but it was there. And right now it was asking me to follow the marks that the crystal displayed on its edges.

  “Your Highness.” Grek raised a finger towards the blade and pulled it back. “It’s got its name written on the sword.”

  I looked up at Grek and then at the sword half of my blade. All I saw were swirls and lines.

  “It’s druidic. An old language,” Grek responded without taking his eyes off the blade.

  “Yeah, it looks similar to what Father's spear has on its blade,” Ilya nodded.

  I looked at Ilya and then at Grek, waiting for them to continue.

  Ilya tried to keep down her smile and gave up. She started to chuckle. “It’s not fun when someone doesn’t answer you, is it?”

  I grunted and turned to Grek. “Mouth, what does my blade say?”

  Grek's eyes had glazed over. He focused back on me. “Oh, Dark Hunter’s Edge.”

  “Hmm…” I looked at the blade and made it disappear back into my soul. I turned back to Ilya and said, “We need to leave.”

  Ilya looked at me and frowned. “No.”

  “No?”

  “No,” Ilya nodded.

  “Why?”

  “Because, oh brother of mine, the land just shook, cracked, spewed out a torrent of death mana, and then sealed. And you need to explain to me what just happened.” Ilya raised her voice at the end.

  “Oh. Right.”

  I began to explain what had happened. I was stopped and had to backtrack to my cultivation. The complication I had during the ingestion of mana. Following that, I was asked to explain about the size of my seeds and then my vows. Mother Savera’s intervention, and then finally go back to my weapon.

  And Ilya kept asking question after question while pacing up and down. By the stars, how many questions could one person have?

  Meanwhile, soldiers and punishers packed up the weapons in the castle, and we finally began to move out of the castle and through the fallen Blighted towards one of my markers.

  Ilya took a break to digest all the information, and I turned from my sister to ask a few questions of my own.

  “If the castle is under siege, where did these soldiers come from?” I asked Grek.

  “The church.” Grek still had a thoughtful expression on his face.

  “They have soldiers in the church?”

  Grek focused his eyes back on me and smiled. “They are the devout.”

  I gave him a blank look.

  “They all have mortal injuries, Your Highness. They wish to spend the rest of their lives either praying to Starbright, or fighting alongside him or his children. So when we arrived at the church with a Damned lady, they chose to follow your sister.”

  “Can they fight?”

  Grek nodded. “Most of them have internal wounds. Two have hands missing, and one lost his hearing.”

  I hesitated. I didn’t know how to put my next words. Taking the injured and the disabled to a battle outnumbered and inadequately armed felt wrong. Most of them, if not all, would fall fighting the Damned, and I had a feeling that the next battle would be with Baz and his small army.

  It was what my new weapon was murmuring to me.

  Grek read my thoughts and chuckled. “It will be their honor to fight alongside you, Your Highness. As it will be mine. Just one request, show them your new weapon.”

  “Why?”

  Grek bowed his head while walking alongside me. “They will recognize the patterns on the blade. We all have seen those before. Some of us can even read them.”

  I gave Grek a side-eyed look. “What is Father’s spear called, Grek?”

  “The World Defender’s Point.”

  Ilya, who was walking on the other side of Grek, looked down at him and took out her two scimitars and looked at them. She frowned. “I am really jealous, you know.”

  Grek took two steps back and left me alone to deal with my sister.

  I gave him an annoyed look and turned back to look at Ilya.

  “Why, Ilya?”

  Ilya gave me an annoyed look. “Your sword-scythe, it's a named weapon. Do you know how rare those are?”

  I shook my head. “I am three months old, remember?”

  “Exactly! I have walked these lands for years. Battled Blighted, horrors, pirates, and demons. And you, a newborn, gets a named blade.”

  “I got lucky.”

  Ilya ignored my words. “Why you? What makes you so special?”

  I thought quickly, and an idea popped in my head. “I can teach you how to create a seal. Maybe Gaia will give you a weapon.”

  Ilya looked at me for a long moment and asked, “Did you just lie to me?”

  I exhaled and nodded. “Yes. You need a Reaper’s soul to create a seal. We are malleable.”

  Ilya snorted. “Reaper this. Reaper that.” She huffed. “You don’t even know anything about this world, and the world gives you a named blade. What do I…” Ilya turned away from me and hissed, “Oh great. Just perfect!”

  I looked at Ilya and at the statue we were passing. “What’s wrong?”

  She nodded at the statues. “House Lisk.”

  We had just exited the catacombs, and three bear statues had greeted us. They were sharpening their claws with large files. They all had angry snarls on their faces. One looked at us. Another looked at the door opposite us, and the third looked ahead at the entrance to the palace.

  “Ah… What?”

  “Is your marker taking us to the door opposite?” Ilya asked.

  I didn’t need to summon my weapon; I could sense where my weapon wanted to take me. I still did and confirmed, “Yes.”

  “Blight and curses. This is bad,” Ilya muttered.

  “Ilya?”

  Ilya wet her lips. “House Lisk is a noble family that is loyal, but they are also territorial like bears. If the Voss clan would have fallen completely, they would be Father’s first choice to govern the range. The problem with them is that they are annoyingly stubborn. Like bears.”

  “So?”

  “I have a feeling that gate will take us to their lands.”

  “Okay. But why do you look like that?” I asked.

  Ilya winced. “Do you remember the Baron I took to my…” Ilya let out a long sigh. “To my bed?”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “Yes. His name was Ert Lisk.”

  I looked at her with confusion.

  “Voss, he is the strong, burly type. If I go and save him, it's going to ruin my romance,” Ilya said with a hint of frustration in her tone. “He needs to be the strong protector in a relationship.”

  “Ilya, there is an army of Damned on the other side of that gate. And you are worried about romance?” I asked.

  Ilya nodded. “He is really good with his tongue.”

  “I didn’t need to know that,” I said quickly.

  Ilya smirked. “He says he learned that from licking honey.”

  Was she doing this on purpose? Was she doing this as some sort of strange revenge for me getting a named blade?

  “The way he moved his tongue. Getting everywhere. Again and again,” Ilya continued.

  I looked at the gate. The Damned army didn’t look so mean anymore.

  I raised my Reaper’s blade... No, my Hunter’s Edge, over my head and looked back at the soldiers following us.

  A ripple went through the people following us.

  I gave Ilya an annoyed look.

  “What? I am sure you can learn how to make a woman squirm like him, too,” Ilya chuckled.

  I turned back to the soldiers. “I am going through that gate. I really need to kill some Damned. Follow me if you want to fight some big, scary lizards.”

  I kicked the door and ran away from my sister. I heard Ilya laughing behind me.

  I wasn’t lying; the first Damned I found was going to...

  ROOAAR!

  Something hairy and wild hit me on my side and sent me flying.