Millennium Witch

Book 3: Chapter 233: Sorry

After the unending lightning and thunder, the rain finally began to fall. Beast Spirit College’s Truth Barrier was like an invisible glass dome that kept the rain outside. Looking up, the sky beyond the dome was a blurred gray, and even the silvery, branching lightning had lost its earlier sting.In a pitch-dark room on the second floor of the theory building, Anya carefully closed the door. After a quick sweep of the room, she stepped to the window, peered toward the beast pens, and felt a little crushed.

People really are complicated, she thought. When Lucia left, she chose to stay, clinging to life and looking for a hole to hide in. Now that she was safe, she regretted it and thought she should have gone with Lucia. Skulking alone felt too uncharitable.

Of course, she knew she was only thinking it. If she had to choose again, she would probably do the same. She had always been clear-eyed about herself—timid, not much use when things turned ugly.

So she envied Lucia. Before, she had only envied the god-given talent. Now she longed for that decisiveness, that courage to set life and death aside.

She had always been a little jealous and resentful in the background, telling herself Lucia was just a lucky girl blessed by the gods. If she had that kind of talent, her own future would be limitless. Now she felt that, whatever the talent, some people are born to be the flower in the bouquet. People like her, even with power, could not bring out its true use. Better to be an honest green leaf, and if she could be a leaf for the right flower, that alone was worth being grateful for, wasn’t it?

She sighed again, waiting while anxiety gnawed at her, worrying about where Lucia and Flami were and what state they were in.

As a child she had a prickly personality, plain looks, no sense of style, and a touch of solitude. She never had friends. The only two she could call friends were people she met after entering the Academy of Truth. It had only been a single term, but she cherished the friendship among the three of them. If either of the two came to harm, she did not dare imagine how long it would take her to crawl out of that grief.

Worth mentioning, after the Flower Street subway incident she had tried to placate Yvette, to make peace and befriend her. Yvette never cared to engage, which only made Lucia and Flami feel more precious. For the last month she was almost never apart from them.

Then she prayed devoutly to the God of Magic and the God of Serendipity, asking that the two return safe.

================

As she waited, things outside grew stranger. Bestial roars rose and fell, and she could see masses of magibeasts pouring out of the nearby Verdant Woodland.

First came flocks of Loomlight Butterflies, beautiful creatures whose wings cast a blue glow and were famously gentle. Not tonight. They were swarming in lumps and randomly shedding toxic spores on everything around them like indiscriminate attacks.

Then came the Brambleback Boars. They were far less polite, charging as they went. The defensive array across the theory building buckled, and the wall collapsed with it.

After that it was Verdant Wraith Spiders, shadow-thief foxes, wind-beak eagles. All the magibeasts looked the same—like they had downed bad liquor, all jitter and rage. Anya watched, heart pounding, trying to make herself small so no one would notice the peeper on the second floor.

What on earth was happening?

Why did it feel like the end of the world?

With only half her face eased past the window, Anya watched in secret. Deep in the pens a silhouette as big as a building loomed. Other figures flickered along the campus paths. The instant they collided with the herds, fighting broke out—fierce, but one-sided.

Weighing her strength, she stayed out of it. She watched instead as many were torn apart by the riled magibeasts. The beasts ripped at bodies, dragging out mangled viscera. It was less a hunt than a purge of rage.

She swallowed, throat tight. She had never been this close to death. Among the dead, besides unknown intruders, were Disciplinary Committee members like her. Under the beasts’ assault they were pulled apart in horrible shapes. The blood and meat of it hit hard, especially for a coward like her.

This was no longer a question of courage. Any sane person would not run out and die here. Survive first; that was the rule.

But just as she decided, from the bottom of her heart, to play the coward and hide till dawn, a familiar, slender figure in uniform with an armband staggered out of the darkness in a copse not far away, and the bloodthirsty beasts in that sector turned toward her. The ending wrote itself.

“Flami?!”

Anya felt her blood turn to ice. Terror flooded in. She had already watched several people get hunted down and torn apart. She could not bear to picture those brutal scenes happening to Flami.

I have to go.

I must go.

Within three or four seconds, that surge of impulse drowned her first instinct to live. She smashed the glass, dropped from the second floor, gripped her sword, and sprinted for Flami. The odds were slim, the risk extreme, but it felt better than doing nothing.

Even those who cling to life do not always think only of saving their own skin.

Yet as she reached her friend, what filled her sight was a blade sheathed in blue-black light, and Flami’s cold, unfamiliar eyes.

There was a wet pop. Her protective aura shattered into stardust. Warm blood burst from her chest. Anya stood there blankly as Flami thrust a blade through her heart and drew it out again. Before she could understand, her body folded backward and she fell into a spreading pool of red.

What… is happening?

The cold of blood loss washed over her like tidewater, and her thoughts broke into fragments. She did not understand why events had turned like this, why Flami had killed her, just as she did not understand why such a disaster had erupted tonight. It was too absurd, like a nightmare.

Looking at the stunned black-haired girl, a few seconds later she seemed to realize something. A light dawned on her face. She tugged weakly at colorless lips and murmured, “So… so it’s a dream.”

She looked into Flami’s eyes and, with a gentle voice, said in real relief, “Thank goodness, Flami.”

“You’re alright. Thank goodness.”

With a crash, the Truth Barrier in the sky shattered. The cold rain finally broke through and came down, mixing with the blood until they were the same. The magibeasts’ cries rose in pitch, the sound of the barrier breaking like a trumpet of freedom. Most of those poisoned by the Frenzy Toxin surged toward the lamplit streets of District Four through the rainy night.

Spending what little she had left to cut down the beasts around her, Flami gripped her sword till her knuckles whitened and stared at the pink-haired girl lying in the rain-slick blood, the body soaking through. Her lips trembled.

Maybe it was guilt. Maybe it was weakness like she had never known. When she saw Anya running toward her with a sword, she had reflexively assumed that Anya, like Lucia, had come to judge her.

But Anya clearly did not know. Even at the moment of death, she was still worrying about Flami.

Since becoming an Evernight Apostle, she had never felt regret like this. The long undercover assignment had blurred who she was.

Rain fell in cold sheets. Mist drifted. Flami’s face emptied out. She crouched and reached toward the body as it cooled.

A scream of such raw pain it sounded like a soul tearing open rose behind her.

She turned. Lucia stood in the trees, soaked through. Her mana was all but gone, the red glow around her flickering like it would collapse at any moment, but in her aster-violet eyes a demon-fire burned.

Flami had never seen that kind of bone-deep hatred on Lucia’s face. In her impression the prodigy was always cheerful, a carefree optimist. She could be a little rebellious, but it only made her charming. Now, hair wild, face twisted like a revenant, she was someone else entirely.

“You… killed… her.” Lucia’s voice rasped. The red light around her fluttered faster. She was trying to trigger her combat art, but with her mana drained her pressure wobbled.

Even now she could not bring herself to believe it. She needed the final confirmation.

=*

In the eyes of the world, the Witch Cult’s followers are antisocial lunatics who hate the world and would drag everyone down with them. Most come from the bottom, lives broken, futures foreclosed, minds twisted, with no respect for order or life.

But when it comes to missions that truly serve a strategy, you cannot rely on people like that. Benedictions can give you a quick surge of power, yet those with true ability tend to be people who still believe in life. Why would they become cultists?

So the Witch Cult has another branch: the Choir of Sisters. Unlike the Evernight Conclave, which fights directly, the Choir mainly provides support, including talent training.

Flami was one of the Choir’s most successful products—arguably the best of several years. From the moment she could remember she lived in the Cult’s secret convent. With exceptional learning, she rose from among hundreds of abandoned infants like her and entered the Evernight Conclave. Favored by the Evernight Matron, her strength climbed fast. She became an Evernight Apostle at a young age. Even the special power called Frenzy Toxin was a boon the Matron begged from the one they called the Primordial Witch.

Under the sisters’ strict hand, the first half of her life was colorless. Only in the latter half, carrying out missions, did it gain any hue. She touched ordinary society, learned how nations and other churches worked, even dipped a toe into philosophy.

None of it changed her. The sisters planted a core creed in her: repay your debt. If not for the Cult, you would have died as an orphan. The church gave you life and strength. You owe it everything.

The second creed was simple: an eye for an eye. The world has no love for you, only malice, so meet it with equal malice. Wake the goddess and bring final judgment to the world. That is the proper ideal.

The doctrine also says that all people, good or bad, are traitors to the goddess. Death is the penance they owe.

With those layers of influence, after becoming an Evernight Apostle, Flami never wavered no matter the mission or how many innocents she killed. Even undercover, she could make it seamless. Only a few ever sensed the distance hidden behind her smile.

Tonight, when Anya fell, she felt for the first time that she was not as cold as she imagined. She had simply never had the chance to spend real time with someone, to know them, to be known.

“I killed her,” she heard herself say.

Then she closed her eyes. When she opened them, her gaze had returned to its first chill. “Thank you, both of you, for looking after me. I’m not ready to die. Next, I’ll make sure you don’t feel pain. Maybe one day the three of us will meet again in the Yellow Springs.”

Blue-black light welled over her body. With five thousand mana, she was a high-tier swordsman. Even close to running dry, she still had more in reserve than Lucia.

The rain crashed down like a world-flood. For a fire-aspected combatant it was worse still. The instant she chose, the genius girl before her already had her ending.

Hearing Flami’s answer, Lucia lost the last trace of color in her face. For a heartbeat she had hoped to hear no, that Anya was not dead by her hand, that this was all a misunderstanding. Reality crushed the hope to dust.

Something snapped inside her. With her mana exhausted she had not a drop of strength left. She staggered two paces and dropped to her knees, the image of a condemned prisoner awaiting the headsman’s stroke.

It felt like the last moment of her life. The rain roared. She was as heartsick and furious as she had ever been, yet try as she might, her core would not yield another spark.

Still, she felt strings snapping.

It was as if cords inside her kept breaking one after another, though she did not know what that meant, until a new heat surged up from within—not from her mana core, but from somewhere else, as if from every inch of flesh.

Her red hair with its purple tips bleached pale and began to shine. Her aster eyes turned white. White sigils crawled over her skin so that she looked like a waking god.

She could not see it and had no strength to wonder where it came from. She only tightened her grip and loosed a cry that was half sob, half roar. Like a furious fire-drake she boiled the rain to steam and drove straight at Flami.

Steel flashed. The mana screen split.

Flami stared at the girl, gray eyes showing real pain for the first time, and screamed. She had killed too many and thought herself past life and death. Not until death stood before her did she realize she was not ready at all.

Lucia drew back her blade.

Flami clutched her chest and stumbled away until she slumped against a charred trunk. She slid down it. The rain soaked her hair and clothes. The bone-deep cold fuzzed her senses. After a long while she forced out, “So… you…”

So you carry demonkin blood.

Full-blooded demonkin.

No wonder you are humanity’s foremost prodigy.

But, Lucia… on the Eastern Continent, is that blood really a blessing for you?

Maybe it was the nearness of death. A girl who had never had a third friend found herself worrying for Lucia. Brokenly, she urged her, “Put it—— away. Put it away. Don’t let——anyone——see.”

Lucia blinked. Hearing that familiar tone felt like a return to normal. She obeyed without thinking.

Flami leaned back against the tree, face white, feeling her warmth drain out with the blood. The cold bit to the marrow, a cold like nothing before. So this was what Anya had felt. It hurt.

“Sorry,” she said, eyes closing, not sure who the apology was for.