Auri wasn't breathing.

  It wasn't a choice. It was instinct — the same one that years in dark alleyways had taught him: that air makes noise, that even lungs can betray you. He had pressed himself against the back wall of the alley, invisible, the mana clinging to his skin like a second layer of silence.

  But what he was watching had no name.

  ━━━━━━━━━━

  Ela raised her fist toward the sick sky.

  The crimson light didn't pour out of her — it inhabited her. It coiled around her arm like skin peeling itself back, like veins bursting from the inside out, searching for more space than a body could hold. It wasn't power. It was too much to be called power. It was the Crimson God answering someone who had stopped asking and started being.

  "Tark…" Her head tilted with a tenderness that hurt more than any scream. "Tark…"

  She repeated the name like a lullaby. Like she was calling him in for dinner.

  What she saw: her companion, standing before her, with that crooked half-smile he always wore when he was pretending everything was under control. Waiting for her. Loving her.

  What was there: a man with a severed arm, his clothes soaked through with his own blood, his eyes moving without rest — searching for a crack, a mistake, a miracle that the universe had no intention of granting.

  Tark wasn't surrendering. His body was. He wasn't.

  Ela's fist descended with ceremonial slowness.

  "I WILL NOT DIE, ELA!"

  The dagger left his belt in a motion that wasn't bravery — it was pure mathematics. Tark had spent his whole life learning that heroes have blind spots. That power without training leaves gaps. That the crimson barrier, however dense, responded to Ela's attention, and attention had limits.

  He went straight for the heart.

  The barrier closed.

  Not like a shield — like something alive that had anticipated. The dagger struck the red mantle and bounced back with a dry crack that resonated in Tark's bones more than in his ears. Ela's mana wasn't defense. It was extension. Like trying to stab someone's reflection in water.

  A silent war that lasted less than a second and left a single victor.

  Tark had known before he tried.

  He tried anyway.

  ━━━━━━━━━━

  Then the sounds came from the cart.

  Small. Nearly inaudible beneath the chaos of the red sky and the distant church bells.

  Whimpers.

  Ela heard them.

  She heard them all.

  Children. Children. CHILDREN.

  Ela's world filled with their faces — not the faces from now, but from before. Ciro asking if puppets could really fly. The girl in the corner who always arrived late but never missed a show. The one who fell asleep in the front row and snored with the soft, rhythmic hum of a nesting bird.

  She knew them all. Their names. Their dreams. The way each one laughed differently.

  The crimson light began swirling at the soles of her feet, ready to run toward them — toward her children —

  Tark already had the second dagger at Ela's throat.

  ━━━━━━━━━━

  What Tark pulled from his pocket wasn't hope.

  It was borrowed time.

  The green vial he'd taken earlier was already doing its work — new skin covering the stump, his ribs no longer moving with that wet, wrong sound. Enough to stay standing. Not enough to win.

  Two hours. That's all I have.

  He didn't think it with fear. He thought it the way a man jots a note in a ledger and keeps working.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

  The gray cloud exploded in Ela's face — not just smoke, but the most potent poison Tark had acquired in a decade of impossible missions. For any normal hero, it would have been the end. For Ela, in this state, it was a four-second inconvenience.

  But four seconds was all he needed.

  He stepped back. Measured the distance. Watched.

  Ela emerged from the cloud with her face twisted in pure annoyance — the same expression she made when someone interrupted a performance halfway through. The light at her feet blazed crimson and she charged.

  And fell.

  Her knees hit the ground with an impact that shook the dark earth. Her whole body seized in short convulsions, fingers clawing at the damp soil, the light at her feet flickering like a flame in a storm.

  Now.

  Tark ran.

  Not with a hero's speed. With the speed of someone who knows they're not fast enough and runs anyway. He threw himself on top of her, drove all his weight, all his mass, everything left in the one arm he still had, into a single point: Ela's temple.

  The dagger pressed.

  It didn't give.

  The crimson barrier responded even through the convulsions, even through the poison, even with Ela staring at a world that didn't exist. It was part of her now. It didn't need her to command it.

  Tark pushed harder.

  Then something happened that shouldn't have happened.

  The dagger grew warm.

  A reddish light — not crimson, not the red of the moons — something dimmer, more his, began to spread across the metal. Tark's thoughts clouded, but not with fear. With something he had never felt before: the universe listening to him for the first time in his life.

  I'll be the protagonist this time, Ela.

  He pushed with everything he had.

  I wasn't born a hero. But I'll show you that I have the power of one.

  The dagger moved a millimeter. Then two. The barrier yielding to something it didn't understand — a desire without ambiguity, without layers, without history. Only this. Only now.

  But the poison was already dissolving.

  And Ela was too powerful.

  And Tark had known that from the beginning.

  I'm sorry. I'm not strong enough.

  The light on the dagger didn't go out. It stayed there — faint, real — when Tark's eyes found Ela's. Those red pits without pupils that were no longer green, that no longer belonged to anyone he recognized.

  He looked at her anyway.

  I never thought I could beat you.

  A pause. Not of doubt — of honesty.

  Maybe I should have wanted it more.

  He didn't say it with bitterness. He said it the way someone discovers the answer to a riddle five minutes after time runs out. With that specific irony of understanding too late.

  The truth is I always envied you, Ela. I wanted to know what it felt like to be truly powerful. Even so — I know someone will stop you. For my sake. For everyone else's. And for yours.

  A smile.

  Not of resignation. Of something harder: of someone who chose, until the very end, to love the person who was killing them.

  I love you, Ela.

  ━━━━━━━━━━

  What Ela saw: Tark closing his eyes, letting go, finally resting after so many years. She laid him down slowly. Carefully. With the tenderness she had always wanted to give him and never known how.

  What happened: Ela's hand, filled with crimson light, cut through the air with the precision of something that does not judge.

  Tark's head separated from his body.

  A clean sound. Final. The kind of sound that doesn't ask permission.

  Ela remained kneeling beside him for a moment. Her hand traced what was no longer his face with a tenderness the universe didn't deserve to witness.

  "Sleep," she whispered. And her voice sounded like it used to. Like the girl who told stories. "You can rest now."

  ━━━━━━━━━━

  Nobody saw what happened between the beasts and the cart.

  Nobody except Auri.

  The horses hadn't transformed because of the moon. The moon was only the catalyst — the spark in a powder keg that had been building for years. They were animals born to run that had lived their whole lives in chains. They didn't think about freedom in words. They didn't ask for it through ritual. They simply wanted it, with the brutal purity that only belongs to those who never learned to accept less.

  The Crimson God heard them.

  And as always, heard without understanding.

  The flesh swelled until it burst. Their eyes hung like rotten grapes on a diseased vine. Their mouths opened at angles no living animal could sustain, revealing teeth that weren't teeth but something older and hungrier. Bones cracked as they broke and reformed in the same breath, blackened muscle erupting like roots finding fertile ground, their hindquarters doubling in mass, in force, in the capacity to destroy anything that tried to stop them.

  Those things were no longer horses.

  They were the idea of freedom made flesh. Without possible chains. Without possible owners. Without anything that could tell them stop — because the Crimson God had given them exactly what they asked for and the universe had no way to take it back.

  In a single heartbeat, they exploded through the fence like it was wet thread.

  They galloped into the darkness with the cart still attached — the children inside, the sedative dissolving in their small veins, their whimpers growing with every passing second.

  Straight toward the center of the city.

  Straight toward where Jean Britannia stood with a hundred soldiers and a sword of tired runes and the conviction of a man who asks nothing of the universe.

  ━━━━━━━━━━

  Auri didn't move.

  He remained pressed against the wall, invisible, the mana clinging to his skin like a cold scar. He had seen everything. The horses. Tark. The final smile of someone who died loving the person who killed them.

  The crimson light of the sky bathed him in red.

  And from the center of the city, a white light — clean, brutal, without hunger — began to grow on the horizon.

  Auri stared at it.

  He didn't understand what it was.

  He only knew, with the certainty that doesn't need words, that something had changed forever in this night. That the world that had existed this morning no longer existed. That he had watched a man who never had power reach out and brush against it in his final second — and that this was, in some way he couldn't name, the most unjust thing he had witnessed in thirteen years of daily injustice.

  Maybe I should have wanted it more.

  Tark's words lodged in him like splinters.

  Because Auri had spent thirteen years wanting things. With rage. With hunger. With all the contradiction of a human being who doesn't know what he wants but wants it with violence.

  And the universe had been listening from the very beginning.

  That wasn't justice.

  It was something much worse.

  Auri closed the eye that could close.

  And waited for the white light to finish swallowing the red.