Artist
Artist
CRACK-BOOM!
The thunderclap reverberated across the toxic lake. Aslan's foot slammed against the unyielding surface, launching him forward with brutal force.
Falling from such a height, the liquid had struck harder than solid ground. The Thunder Call had propelled his body, but the full impact of the landing shattered his left foot.
The shock hammered through the ruined limb, concussive force rattling his brain.
Still.
"Aslan...!"
He had rebounded off the surface and into the air.
He was alive.
The poison-choked lake rushed up to meet him again, but that brief moment of reprieve was all Aslan needed to assess the field. The true ground was still far below, scattered in sparse patches between the toxic pools. None were large enough for two people to land on simultaneously.
Aslan wrapped an arm around Ereta's waist and pulled her tight, scanning for a landing zone. Only one viable patch was close enough. He knew immediately it couldn't hold them both. He moved without hesitation.
"No, you can't—!"
"Thun-der Call."
CRACK-BOOM!
He drew the horrified Ereta against him, then hurled her away with a Thunder Call-charged arm. The force would hurt, but it sent her arcing through the air to crash onto solid ground.
She tumbled with a heavy thud, coughing in pain, but the objective was achieved.
Ereta was safe.
That was all Aslan needed.
FWOOOOSH!
The toxic lake erupted in a massive spray as his body plunged into it. Ereta sucked in a breath, her eyes filling with dread.
"Aslan! ASLAN!"
The venom flooding Olpasbet's inner depths had already spent its true purpose: killing a god. Its potency was diminished, no longer fatal to a deity, but it remained a monstrously lethal poison. One splash could spread through an ordinary human's body and kill them within moments.
And Aslan had fallen entirely into a pool of it. Ereta saw the inevitable future in her mind's eye, her pink irises swimming with terror. She didn't hesitate, stepping toward the pool's edge.
The moment her foot moved, the full horror of what was about to happen to Aslan struck her. He was going to die. Because of her.
Her teeth began chattering uncontrollably. She couldn't tell if it was the poison or sheer, raw fear.
Somehow, she found him—convulsing on the surface. Ereta clutched Aslan's body to her chest and carved through the poison, dragging him toward the patch of ground she'd landed on.
"Ngh, aah...."
Even that brief crossing was enough for the venom to seep into her flesh.
Despite the life force surging through the Valor of the Conquering Bird, the innate toxicity gnawed at her very existence. She poured the Valor's power into suppressing it, but Ereta was not naive enough to find hope in a desperate, losing battle.
Still, it got her to solid ground. She collapsed, practically throwing Aslan's body down, and only then did she truly see him.
"No, no. Aslan..."
He was at the very brink of death.
His left arm was completely crushed—an unrecognizable ruin where muscle and bone were indistinguishable. His left foot was also shattered, poison already worming its way in. His right arm was shielded by what remained of his armor and spared the worst of the venom, but the rest of his body was a mottled tapestry of black and purple. He convulsed violently, every spasm a countdown toward the end.
"Hrk... ghh... hha..."
And it was happening to her too. Ereta felt the venom spreading through her veins. Gasping, she channeled the Valor of the Conquering Bird and pressed her hands to Aslan's chest.
"You can't die."
Her teeth rattled in her skull. Her muscles cramped beyond her control. Her breathing turned ragged, consciousness blurring into a haze of pain.
And still, she poured every drop of life stored within the Valor into Aslan.
He couldn't die. She might not matter, but Aslan—Aslan could not die.
This was the Aslan who had declared he would change the world. The absurd man whose sole motivation was simply that he could do it. The one who never looked away, never flinched, no matter the catastrophe or suffering rushing toward him. He was worth more than her. She believed that absolutely.
The moment the Valor's well of life ran dry, Ereta, without a flicker of hesitation, began pouring her own lifeforce into him instead.
It was like pouring water into a shattered jar—nothing might take hold. But she shared her life with him anyway, driven by the singular hope that he would survive.
Right up until her own reserves hit empty.
Her consciousness grew heavy, sodden and dragging. Her eyelids drooped. Wheezing, she kept her hands on Aslan. Every last ember of life she possessed, she meant to spend on him.
This was all her fault.
She had let the sight of Mother unbalance her, pushed Aslan into rushing forward. She had taken the Artist's obvious bait and faced him alone. She had forced Aslan to overextend, and that had put him here.
And even in that moment, he had saved her. Ereta could not betray that.
'No, that's not it.'
She loved him.
That single reason was enough.
So Ereta gave everything she had, holding nothing back. To save him.
Even with a missing foot and a ruined arm, she burned every fragment of her being to stop his bleeding and drive out the venom.
"Hhh, ha, ngh...."
Her life spent, she collapsed limply.
In her fading consciousness, Ereta felt a faint tremor. Death was coming. The approaching darkness brought a deeper black, and within it, she saw something beyond.
The shadows were the twilight of a setting sun, the hue of dusk.
It was what people called a life's panorama.
And in it stood a girl.
Smaller than Fay was now. Snow-white hair, snow-white skin, and pink eyes. A priestess the order called the Daughter of the Spider—a being who received the Spider's undivided affection.
The girl was Ereta. A younger Ereta, not so very long ago.
Ereta had no parents.
Or rather, she had no memory of them. Whenever she had asked within the order, the only reply was a vague story about parents who had given her up to become a priestess. Ereta never believed it. Somehow, she could tell—she had never had parents in the first place. Not abandoned. Not deceased. Simply absent from the beginning.
In her hazy, pale-white memories, the girl had been shaped out of nothing.
She'd heard whispers that people like her were called hybrids.
Hybrids. Brethren who grew spider legs, or dragon tails, or towered like giants with dull minds. Unlike Ereta, they were made incomplete. So Ereta quickly understood her own uniqueness. Not only did she look different, but the Mother, the Spider, cherished and adored her without reserve.
Unlike the way the Three Evils treated other hybrids, the Spider loved the girl deeply.
From her earliest days, the Spider had dwelled in her mind, speaking to her constantly. Comforting her when she was sad. Giving her answers when she was confused. Even without a physical presence, the Spider's divinity—warm, soft, like a gentle flame—had always watched over her. On cold nights, it wrapped her in fire to keep her warm.
To Ereta, the Universe-Burning Spider was not a god. She was a mother. And the Spider also saw the girl as her daughter.
So Ereta called the Spider 'Mother.' Believing, maybe, that she might truly be so.
That was why the moment of abandonment had shattered her.
And yet, some part of her had expected it. She thought it couldn't be helped. Even if she wasn't truly a daughter, even if she had only imagined that love... of course this would happen. She was just another expendable tool, like every other brother and sister in the order. That was why she had believed Aslan's words, even while suspecting they might be a lie.
Watching this panorama, Ereta finally understood.
Mother had never abandoned her.
There was no reason, no evidence—nothing to support it. But instinct told her the truth. Even with Aslan's world-shaking revelation still echoing in her mind, she was certain now. Aslan had been wrong.
Realizing that, Ereta felt no anger, no sense of betrayal. Only relief. The simple knowledge that her mother had not discarded her was enough. In the face of death, it was all she had left.
"C-cold..."
Ereta, the Saintess of Slaughter, had always, in truth, loved contact with others. She craved their warmth, loved being touched. The way she had once pursued that intimacy was twisted and wrong, but the woman had simply longed to be loved. Perhaps her strange pleasure in the violence Aslan had once dealt her had been born from that same starvation for affection—a hunger for tangible, visible love, not the invisible kind.
Maybe that was why, when she'd seen Mother caged and dragged away, a part of her had thought: 'At last, I can hold her.'
She had fainted immediately afterward, horrified by her own thought at such a moment, but the sentiment had been sincere.
And realizing that, Ereta thought of the Spider—a being doomed to wander the cosmos and bring about its destruction.
A mother who had probably never known an embrace either.
She wished she could have taught her the warmth of a hug. That was her only regret.
Ereta closed her eyes. An eternal-seeming stillness crept in. Just as that silence began to gnaw away her awareness, a strange warmth bloomed.
It was like the fire the Spider had sent her on those cold nights when she shivered. The warmth she had always thought must be a mother's way of embracing her child when she could not hold them.
Ereta opened her eyes. Through the flickering afterimages, she saw the Spider. A translucent body cradling a dying flame, with all but two skeletal legs torn away.
Those two spindly limbs were wrapped around Ereta's body. And flowing through them was divinity.
"Ah..."
A cracked voice escaped her lips. At the sound, the Spider drew Ereta closer. Inside the Spider's cold body, only the guttering ember of that flame still flickered.
Through the warmth of that dying fire, through the strange, chitinous firmness of her mother's embrace, Ereta reached out and hugged her back.
She rested her chin gently against the Spider and breathed, shallow and slow. No words came. The divinity streaming into her spoke for her instead.
The Spider had not abandoned her. She had tried to save Ereta and resolve the situation, but she had been blocked—able only to preserve her daughter's life at the cost of her own. She had lost most of her divinity and was dying. The laws of this world, Geladrion, would not permit her physical form to remain. So the Spider was fading. Dying, but refusing to pass—holding on just long enough to see Ereta one last time.
And yet she had not wanted Ereta to see her like this. She knew the pain it would cause.
Caught between those two feelings, the Universe-Burning Spider made a single choice.
"Moth-er..."
This was the same thing that had happened before, when Aslan and Ereta had fought for each other's lives. Pouring divinity into her daughter to save her. But the price for the Spider this time was different.
Ereta felt her mother's body crumbling in her arms. The incoming divinity told her exactly what was about to happen.
"No..."
A priest without divinity cannot survive. An Evil God without divinity is no different. The Twilight Flock, the principle underpinning Geladrion's very laws, does not permit such violations.
The Spider was dying.
"No."
The Spider collapsed from within. Ereta felt it, and her mind clawed back to full awareness. The warmth in her arms was fading, cooling into nothing.
"No, no, no, NO!"
The scream tore out of her. She begged her not to leave. She begged her to take it back. But the Spider gave no answer. She could not speak human words. Her final communication was the divinity itself. Even through the agony of her very existence being erased, the Spider simply held Ereta. She held her tight and, with her newly regenerated, skeletal spider legs, gently stroked her daughter's back.
That strange, hard coldness told Ereta the truth, and Ereta wept.
Psssshhh.
The Universe-Burning Spider.
The Evil God destined to burn the universe and birth the next one—dissolved into nothing.
All that remained was Verdict, clattering across the ground, and a pile of ash that had once been a god.
Ereta collapsed on top of the ashes and cried. In a grief too deep for a single moan, the woman wept in silence and anguish.
Clap. Clap. Clap.
What stopped her mourning was applause.
Ereta lifted her head. The clapping stopped as abruptly as it had approached.
"Reunion over?"
A low, old man's voice—yet charged with a strange, youthful vitality. Ereta slowly turned her gaze and glared at the Artist. He flinched under her stare, then let out a laugh.
"What a terrifying expression. Positively chilling. Is that how you feel?"
Ereta didn't answer. She simply picked up the axe lying beside her. The weapon she had wielded since long before she became the Saintess of Slaughter blazed to life, as if finally reunited with its true master, resonating with her divinity.
FWOOOOSH!
Flames erupted. Heat surged down the axe, racing across the ground and boiling away the toxic pools. As the charred remains of the venom scattered in thick, acrid fumes, the scorched and bleached earth beneath was laid bare. Ereta stepped onto it. She walked toward the Artist.
Her gait was unsteady, but the Artist felt a primal chill crawl up his spine and grinned in response.
Hsssss.
With the sizzle of searing flesh, his wounds regenerated. The tattoos carved into his body flared red. Ereta understood now. His mana tattoos and divinity had fused into one—a tattoo that converted the life force of his victims into his own divine power. She knew it as naturally as a god knows its own divinity, as naturally as a body knows how to blink and breathe.
The divinity coursing through her rippled outward as living flame, colliding with the Artist's heat and poison fumes. The two forces warped and wavered between them. Standing her ground, the woman gripped the blazing axe in both hands. The blade glowed a seething, liquid red. The Artist looked from the axe-head to her face and smiled gently.
"It's been a while, Saintess of Slaughter."
She still didn't answer. Instead, she settled into her stance—axe-head raised high, both hands on the shaft, the butt of the handle aimed at the Artist. Ready at any moment to cleave him from crown to groin.
The Artist watched her and smiled with deep satisfaction.
"Well then, shall we dance?"
Ereta lunged. Her flame-lit eyes blazed trails through the poisonous haze as she closed the distance, axe and mace meeting in a cataclysmic crash.
—CLANG-G-G-G!
The shockwave erupted outward from the clash of weapons, gouging through the toxic pools and hurling venom in every direction.