I tumble ever deeper into the watery darkness, a prisoner in my own body.
At the surface, something wearing my skin propels itself forward.
No. The thing driving me is every bit as Evelyn as I am, just… made more. As much as I hate to admit it, I am still here. It’s just a different facet of myself, mixed together with something other.
The darkness my splintered soul swims within is an ocean, buoying me up one moment before sucking me into its smothering abyss the next. For brief seconds here and there, I surface, but my thoughts are so scrambled that I can barely tell what I’m doing. I tear away at myself, trying to find some semblance of order, but my entire world is darkness and blood and screaming.
I can’t trace the magic that brought me here. One moment, I took my copy’s hand in mine, and the next, darkness.
This small part of me can’t even see the notifications of my new skills, which I clearly have. Though my mind might be trapped, I can still see through my eyes, feel through my skin. I definitely did not possess this much magic power before.
The Bloodpath I find myself on lasts far longer than it feels like it should, and I unveil skills that I’ve never used before. When I attack Sierra, I use Devour in a way that I’ve never done before, consuming pieces of her soul with the outstretched Phantom Shaped limbs. The latter skill also reaches far further than it has in the past.
I drift listlessly, this part of me a passenger to the body that does what it wants. My soul feels as if it’s fraying apart, the stresses of the wraithfire combining with whatever this class up did.
Obviously, this isn’t how a class evolution is supposed to go. My soul-amalgam provides me enough information about advancement to know that.
But with that knowledge comes the same core tenet that’s kept me moving forward since the start, the same fundamental truth that’s kept me from settling down and taking a break before launching myself headfirst into the next battle.
No matter the cost, I will advance.
No matter the cost.
As I float, the current of my soul-sea battering away at what remains of this personality, I turn that phrase over.
To advance means to sacrifice, does it not? Now, I sacrifice the allies I have made. I have grown strong enough to eliminate them, and thus I should use them.
A conversation half-remembered from a life I never lived bubbles to the surface of my thoughts. I can feel it slipping through the depths, joining me in my prison.
Why does the largest baby not simply eat the other babies?
Why indeed? There is no reason for me to not simply let my soul shatter, to let the passenger in. It’ll still be Evelyn Carnelian. It just won’t be me, but that’s not what matters.
And yet, somehow, that justification rings hollow. It lines up perfectly with the truth I have built myself around, and now that truth shakes.
Even as my body casually turns back Adrian’s cyclone, I think of the allies I’ve made, of how they have enormous potential that I have yet to see. I think of how much fun I’ve been having, killing my way through dozens of monsters and humans alike.
I think of the thrill of fighting off eight guards alone. I think of the satisfaction of a quest completed.
I think of life.
When I was underground hours ago—though it might as well be days, for how much has occurred—I told the void that the soul-devouring wraithfire would not end me.
Something breaks under the neverending assault of the darkness, but it’s not me.
My core tenet has led me through my life, and where has that brought me? It has taken me to strife. It has sent me towards Sapphire, who has done nothing but throw me into danger again and again and again. While I cannot deny that it has been useful to me, that truth is a double-edged sword.
The same creaking thing that started to break apart under the pressure of the soul-sea and my nascent willpower shatters.
All at once, incandescent rage ignites within me, and the darkness starts to lift as I create my own light.
How dare the broken gods try to break me into a vassal of their own?
No matter the cost, I will advance.
I am at the center of everything that happens to me, good or bad. That is mine, and nobody can take that away from me.
Not even the beings that haunt my system.
I abandon my listless float in favor of a struggle. Every action strains my already-damaged soul to its limit, but I fight against the crushing pressure of the soul-sea anyway. When strands of it start to solidify into chains that bind my soul, I explode outwards with pure rage and Devour it away.
My body stumbles, missing a step, and I feel myself tumble into the ground. A second later, the strands return, and they’re weaker.
I’m lowering the amount of power this body holds, but I don’t care. It’s not my power.
For a second, just briefly, I reach the surface. I can feel the current trying to pull me back down immediately, completely overpowering me. Before I sink back into the depths, I use Shape Blood on my own Bloodpath, slicing away at my own flesh. I don’t even feel my limbs fall off.
I slip back into the dark, but somehow the sea feels ever so slightly calmer, distracted as my passenger is with keeping me alive.
I continue fighting this prison as my body attacks one of the only allies I have. Her attack lances straight through my flesh, splitting me into my constituent parts, and the thing that binds me down, the thing that pilots the shell I reside in, starts to reconstruct me from blood and magic.
At that, the bonds loosen even more, and I continue to dissolve them, returning their power to the void. Blood magic takes control of my body, and my passenger becomes paralyzed, holding our form together with its own magic while trying to fight me off.
It fails at both.
Resurfacing is as sudden as drowning in the first place was. Suddenly, my skin is mine again. My limbs return to my control, the vivid sensations stunning me as the layer of detachment between my soul and body dissipates.
In my mind’s eye, I can still see the soulspace where I was trapped, the sea that tried and failed to drown me. I see another Evelyn appear to take my place. She starts dissolving the moment she touches it.
Somehow, she’s still smiling.
We will be waiting for you, a thousand discordant voices chime in my head, and then they fade.
I return my attention to the real world just in time to be bombarded with information and the sight of the significantly-advanced demonic tree.
Trait earned: Voidtouched
You have touched the void, and now your attacks will bear its touch to others.
The tree is glowing with vibrant colors now, its flowers blooming in shades of harsh blue and grey and red. Malicious pressure hangs in the air like thick fog, but compared to the overwhelming oppressiveness of the soul-sea, it may as well be nothing.
Trait earned: Godsmarked
A god has left a mark on you. Those attuned to divinity may observe this.
I dismiss the new messages as fast as they come. Unless Godsmarked has hidden functionality that I don’t know about, it’s less than useless.
Class evolution attempted.
Relentless Demon -> ???
Class evolution rejected.
Evolution XP refunded.
That explains why I don’t feel the same rush of power that my body held when something else was controlling it. Whatever it was doing, it wasn’t through the power I wield as a demon-human amalgam experiment. It was through something it forced upon me, and I rejected that in order to remain who I am.
Critical soul damage detected.
Leveling up will not increase stats. Leveling up will not grant traits. Leveling up will not grant affinities. Leveling up will not grant skills.
Level increase paused.
XP: 2442/1000
Critical soul damage?
I look inwards, and I realize that the soul-sea is still there, pieces of the broken piece of me—the broken piece of the thing that invaded my system—drifting around like so much flotsam.
I’m cold, and it’s a cold that can’t be fixed by any kind of mundane warmth.
Everything in this world, I’m beginning to learn, has its cost.
To escape the prison of my flesh, the cost appears to have been my soul.
The embers of the fiery anger that propelled me out of myself reignite, stirred up into a wildfire by the reminder of what has been forced onto me.
It was the researchers that did this, that created me to throw everything away for advancement. To throw myself away.
Them, the organization that faciliated them, and more that I’ve never even seen. Sapphire. Marie Jade. At least three dozen more, each of them with their own connections, not to mention the unfamiliar faces that Sapphire brought in.
I think of the thing in my system, the broken deity that assumed my form and stole my self from me.
I’ll kill them.
I’ll kill them all.
I don’t even realize that I’m screaming out a promise to end them all, humans and demons and elves and gods, until my throat runs hoarse.
The demon tree screeches, interrupting me. I look up.
No, it’s not the tree producing the sounds.
It’s the spawn.
Earlier, the branches were sprouting flowers that fired off individual demon-seeds into the sky, each of which was a deadly projectile in its own right.
Now, it spreads spores. There have to be at least a hundred blossoming flowers on the tree’s branches, and each of them shoots a hundred glimmering spiked balls into the air, letting them float through the sky before they come crashing back down into the city. The smallest is barely as large as me, while the largest are half the size of an inn.
I reengage my Bloodpath, thankful that I am no longer destroying my soul with my own wraithfire as it activates, and I take to the skies, dodging the errant demon-spores as I do. I reform on one of the few remaining trees in the area, fifty feet up.
When the first one lands, kicking up a spray of ruined brick and dirt, it sprouts more seeds, each of which turns into demons that exude far more danger than the chaff at the city center did earlier.
Right. I still have an enemy to handle here.
Before I tackle the tree, though, I want more power. The three stat points awarded to me for my failed evolution haven’t been taken back, but I’m not yet sure what I want to use them on.
What I do know is that I want to use all that XP to level up, and that means I need to restore my soul.
I still have minutes left on my Wraithfire.
From my elevated position, I loose streams of the special skill onto the demons below. It won’t kill them all, but there’s a lot of them.
As I dive from the tree, activating Bloodpath as I do, I take stock of the city around me.
Unlike the seeds, the spores haven’t settled on the city center alone. They’ve crushed nearly untouched parts of Ravendale, and areas that have seen little violence so far start to fall as the streets run black with demons. Even with the river separating the city center and much of the rest of Ravendale, it’s impossible not to hear the screams.
Around us, the city dies.
Around me, demons die alongside it.
Though I despise my still-surviving passenger for what it tried to do to me, I cannot deny that its tactics were effective. I mimic some as I fall, using Bloodpath in conjunction with applications of Wraithfire. Rather than ignite my blood, however, I use it to maximize effects, combining it with a Soulknife attack to disable and kill any demon in the area. They’re newborn, still finding their way after the spores birth them, and I take full advantage of that.
As I pass by the corpses I create, I take bites out of them, carving out chunks of flesh and letting my magic seep into them, Devouring them in flybys even as I start killing my next target.
Devour granted +311 XP!
Objective: Restore your soul
Targets devoured: [20/???]
I kill and eat and kill and eat, carving a path of corpses to the location where I last saw Sierra.
I find the Blue Mage unconscious and surrounded by a trio of bear-sized demons that look like a cross between slugs and spiders. A faint shimmering barrier surrounds her, magic protecting her even in her moment of weakness.
The demons don’t even see me coming.
Devour granted +51 XP!
Targets devoured: [23/???]
As I fight them off, I feel my soul starting to warm. It’s still a pit within me, an emptiness where there should be light, but it’s reduced itself to merely a yawning abyss. Progress.
I hope I didn’t kill Adrian. He revealed true power in the last few minutes before the passenger attacked him, and it’d be a shame to lose him now.
A spore nearly lands on me as I think, and I instinctively use my Wraithfire, burning it to pieces before it can sprout more demons. Bloodpath takes me out of the way a moment later, and it smashes itself into pieces against the ground.
Devour granted +27 XP!
Targets devoured: [24/???]
The amount of XP I get from eating the spore is disappointingly tiny, but it’s the soul-soothing effect that truly matters. I’m starting to get back within a normal level of severe soul damage, I think.
Heavy soul damage detected.
Would you like to level up?
Is heavy more or less than severe? I shake my head for the time being. While the tree is still spawning monsters, I can handle them. It’s not attacking me directly, so I can take the time to power myself up in the time being.
A centipede-shaped demon just about half again my height in length crawls its way over, drawn by the scent of burning corpses and the promise of a juicy adventurer to snack on. It ignores me completely, choosing to move towards Sierra again, and I activate Wraithfire—except I don’t.
Wraithfire continues to burn around me, the air itself still set afire, but my skill produces nothing new.
I’m out of time.
Heavy soul damage detected.
Would you like to level up?
As the centipede turns its many eyes towards me, the prompt appears again.
It looks at me, considering, and then two dozen antennae rise straight from its body.
I don’t want to find out what it’s doing the hard way, so I charge forward. Knifefighting aids me, and my new Voidtouched trait must be doing something, because my knives slice through it like butter and leave tinges of dark purple where they wound it.
It takes me nearly half a minute to kill it without my Wraithfire.
By the time I’m ready to consume it, I see what those antennae were for.
On every side, all I can see is an approaching wave of black.
It called its siblings.
Heavy soul damage detected.
Would you like to level up?
I accept.
You have advanced to level 11!
All stats increased by 1.
You have gained 3 stat points.
You have advanced to level 12!
All stats increased by 1.
You have gained 3 stat points.
Due to your traits, actions, and _____, you may choose up to 2 of the following Bronze-tier skills to advance to Silver.
Appraise
Shape Self
Stealth
Acting
Phantom Shape
Paralyzing Bite
Locate Person
Misty Blade
Before I make my choice, I consider the situation around me.
Sierra is unconscious. Adrian’s status is unknown. There must be a hundred enemies converging on my position.
Thunder explodes from the sky, unnatural green lightning lancing through the air and painting the entire city in verdant hues for a brief second before it strikes the demonic tree at the center of all of this.
With my enhanced Mind (Speed) and my demonic eyesight, I can just barely make out the tiny figure in the sky that the lightning has come from.
If it were anyone else, I wouldn’t have been able to tell. But I’ve been looking at Sierra for long enough to recognize the similarities.
Marie Jade.
A hundred enemies has become a hundred and one.
I tumble ever deeper into the watery darkness, a prisoner in my own body.
At the surface, something wearing my skin propels itself forward.
No. The thing driving me is every bit as Evelyn as I am, just… made more. As much as I hate to admit it, I am still here. It’s just a different facet of myself, mixed together with something other.
The darkness my splintered soul swims within is an ocean, buoying me up one moment before sucking me into its smothering abyss the next. For brief seconds here and there, I surface, but my thoughts are so scrambled that I can barely tell what I’m doing. I tear away at myself, trying to find some semblance of order, but my entire world is darkness and blood and screaming.
I can’t trace the magic that brought me here. One moment, I took my copy’s hand in mine, and the next, darkness.
This small part of me can’t even see the notifications of my new skills, which I clearly have. Though my mind might be trapped, I can still see through my eyes, feel through my skin. I definitely did not possess this much magic power before.
The Bloodpath I find myself on lasts far longer than it feels like it should, and I unveil skills that I’ve never used before. When I attack Sierra, I use Devour in a way that I’ve never done before, consuming pieces of her soul with the outstretched Phantom Shaped limbs. The latter skill also reaches far further than it has in the past.
I drift listlessly, this part of me a passenger to the body that does what it wants. My soul feels as if it’s fraying apart, the stresses of the wraithfire combining with whatever this class up did.
Obviously, this isn’t how a class evolution is supposed to go. My soul-amalgam provides me enough information about advancement to know that.
But with that knowledge comes the same core tenet that’s kept me moving forward since the start, the same fundamental truth that’s kept me from settling down and taking a break before launching myself headfirst into the next battle.
No matter the cost, I will advance.
No matter the cost.
As I float, the current of my soul-sea battering away at what remains of this personality, I turn that phrase over.
To advance means to sacrifice, does it not? Now, I sacrifice the allies I have made. I have grown strong enough to eliminate them, and thus I should use them.
A conversation half-remembered from a life I never lived bubbles to the surface of my thoughts. I can feel it slipping through the depths, joining me in my prison.
Why does the largest baby not simply eat the other babies?
Why indeed? There is no reason for me to not simply let my soul shatter, to let the passenger in. It’ll still be Evelyn Carnelian. It just won’t be me, but that’s not what matters.
And yet, somehow, that justification rings hollow. It lines up perfectly with the truth I have built myself around, and now that truth shakes.
Even as my body casually turns back Adrian’s cyclone, I think of the allies I’ve made, of how they have enormous potential that I have yet to see. I think of how much fun I’ve been having, killing my way through dozens of monsters and humans alike.
I think of the thrill of fighting off eight guards alone. I think of the satisfaction of a quest completed.
I think of life.
When I was underground hours ago—though it might as well be days, for how much has occurred—I told the void that the soul-devouring wraithfire would not end me.
Something breaks under the neverending assault of the darkness, but it’s not me.
My core tenet has led me through my life, and where has that brought me? It has taken me to strife. It has sent me towards Sapphire, who has done nothing but throw me into danger again and again and again. While I cannot deny that it has been useful to me, that truth is a double-edged sword.
The same creaking thing that started to break apart under the pressure of the soul-sea and my nascent willpower shatters.
All at once, incandescent rage ignites within me, and the darkness starts to lift as I create my own light.
How dare the broken gods try to break me into a vassal of their own?
No matter the cost, I will advance.
I am at the center of everything that happens to me, good or bad. That is mine, and nobody can take that away from me.
Not even the beings that haunt my system.
I abandon my listless float in favor of a struggle. Every action strains my already-damaged soul to its limit, but I fight against the crushing pressure of the soul-sea anyway. When strands of it start to solidify into chains that bind my soul, I explode outwards with pure rage and Devour it away.
My body stumbles, missing a step, and I feel myself tumble into the ground. A second later, the strands return, and they’re weaker.
I’m lowering the amount of power this body holds, but I don’t care. It’s not my power.
For a second, just briefly, I reach the surface. I can feel the current trying to pull me back down immediately, completely overpowering me. Before I sink back into the depths, I use Shape Blood on my own Bloodpath, slicing away at my own flesh. I don’t even feel my limbs fall off.
I slip back into the dark, but somehow the sea feels ever so slightly calmer, distracted as my passenger is with keeping me alive.
I continue fighting this prison as my body attacks one of the only allies I have. Her attack lances straight through my flesh, splitting me into my constituent parts, and the thing that binds me down, the thing that pilots the shell I reside in, starts to reconstruct me from blood and magic.
At that, the bonds loosen even more, and I continue to dissolve them, returning their power to the void. Blood magic takes control of my body, and my passenger becomes paralyzed, holding our form together with its own magic while trying to fight me off.
It fails at both.
Resurfacing is as sudden as drowning in the first place was. Suddenly, my skin is mine again. My limbs return to my control, the vivid sensations stunning me as the layer of detachment between my soul and body dissipates.
In my mind’s eye, I can still see the soulspace where I was trapped, the sea that tried and failed to drown me. I see another Evelyn appear to take my place. She starts dissolving the moment she touches it.
Somehow, she’s still smiling.
We will be waiting for you, a thousand discordant voices chime in my head, and then they fade.
I return my attention to the real world just in time to be bombarded with information and the sight of the significantly-advanced demonic tree.
Trait earned: Voidtouched
You have touched the void, and now your attacks will bear its touch to others.
The tree is glowing with vibrant colors now, its flowers blooming in shades of harsh blue and grey and red. Malicious pressure hangs in the air like thick fog, but compared to the overwhelming oppressiveness of the soul-sea, it may as well be nothing.
Trait earned: Godsmarked
A god has left a mark on you. Those attuned to divinity may observe this.
I dismiss the new messages as fast as they come. Unless Godsmarked has hidden functionality that I don’t know about, it’s less than useless.
Class evolution attempted.
Relentless Demon -> ???
Class evolution rejected.
Evolution XP refunded.
That explains why I don’t feel the same rush of power that my body held when something else was controlling it. Whatever it was doing, it wasn’t through the power I wield as a demon-human amalgam experiment. It was through something it forced upon me, and I rejected that in order to remain who I am.
Critical soul damage detected.
Leveling up will not increase stats. Leveling up will not grant traits. Leveling up will not grant affinities. Leveling up will not grant skills.
Level increase paused.
XP: 2442/1000
Critical soul damage?
I look inwards, and I realize that the soul-sea is still there, pieces of the broken piece of me—the broken piece of the thing that invaded my system—drifting around like so much flotsam.
I’m cold, and it’s a cold that can’t be fixed by any kind of mundane warmth.
Everything in this world, I’m beginning to learn, has its cost.
To escape the prison of my flesh, the cost appears to have been my soul.
The embers of the fiery anger that propelled me out of myself reignite, stirred up into a wildfire by the reminder of what has been forced onto me.
It was the researchers that did this, that created me to throw everything away for advancement. To throw myself away.
Them, the organization that faciliated them, and more that I’ve never even seen. Sapphire. Marie Jade. At least three dozen more, each of them with their own connections, not to mention the unfamiliar faces that Sapphire brought in.
I think of the thing in my system, the broken deity that assumed my form and stole my self from me.
I’ll kill them.
I’ll kill them all.
I don’t even realize that I’m screaming out a promise to end them all, humans and demons and elves and gods, until my throat runs hoarse.
The demon tree screeches, interrupting me. I look up.
No, it’s not the tree producing the sounds.
It’s the spawn.
Earlier, the branches were sprouting flowers that fired off individual demon-seeds into the sky, each of which was a deadly projectile in its own right.
Now, it spreads spores. There have to be at least a hundred blossoming flowers on the tree’s branches, and each of them shoots a hundred glimmering spiked balls into the air, letting them float through the sky before they come crashing back down into the city. The smallest is barely as large as me, while the largest are half the size of an inn.
I reengage my Bloodpath, thankful that I am no longer destroying my soul with my own wraithfire as it activates, and I take to the skies, dodging the errant demon-spores as I do. I reform on one of the few remaining trees in the area, fifty feet up.
When the first one lands, kicking up a spray of ruined brick and dirt, it sprouts more seeds, each of which turns into demons that exude far more danger than the chaff at the city center did earlier.
Right. I still have an enemy to handle here.
Before I tackle the tree, though, I want more power. The three stat points awarded to me for my failed evolution haven’t been taken back, but I’m not yet sure what I want to use them on.
What I do know is that I want to use all that XP to level up, and that means I need to restore my soul.
I still have minutes left on my Wraithfire.
From my elevated position, I loose streams of the special skill onto the demons below. It won’t kill them all, but there’s a lot of them.
As I dive from the tree, activating Bloodpath as I do, I take stock of the city around me.
Unlike the seeds, the spores haven’t settled on the city center alone. They’ve crushed nearly untouched parts of Ravendale, and areas that have seen little violence so far start to fall as the streets run black with demons. Even with the river separating the city center and much of the rest of Ravendale, it’s impossible not to hear the screams.
Around us, the city dies.
Around me, demons die alongside it.
Though I despise my still-surviving passenger for what it tried to do to me, I cannot deny that its tactics were effective. I mimic some as I fall, using Bloodpath in conjunction with applications of Wraithfire. Rather than ignite my blood, however, I use it to maximize effects, combining it with a Soulknife attack to disable and kill any demon in the area. They’re newborn, still finding their way after the spores birth them, and I take full advantage of that.
As I pass by the corpses I create, I take bites out of them, carving out chunks of flesh and letting my magic seep into them, Devouring them in flybys even as I start killing my next target.
Devour granted +311 XP!
Objective: Restore your soul
Targets devoured: [20/???]
I kill and eat and kill and eat, carving a path of corpses to the location where I last saw Sierra.
I find the Blue Mage unconscious and surrounded by a trio of bear-sized demons that look like a cross between slugs and spiders. A faint shimmering barrier surrounds her, magic protecting her even in her moment of weakness.
The demons don’t even see me coming.
Devour granted +51 XP!
Targets devoured: [23/???]
As I fight them off, I feel my soul starting to warm. It’s still a pit within me, an emptiness where there should be light, but it’s reduced itself to merely a yawning abyss. Progress.
I hope I didn’t kill Adrian. He revealed true power in the last few minutes before the passenger attacked him, and it’d be a shame to lose him now.
A spore nearly lands on me as I think, and I instinctively use my Wraithfire, burning it to pieces before it can sprout more demons. Bloodpath takes me out of the way a moment later, and it smashes itself into pieces against the ground.
Devour granted +27 XP!
Targets devoured: [24/???]
The amount of XP I get from eating the spore is disappointingly tiny, but it’s the soul-soothing effect that truly matters. I’m starting to get back within a normal level of severe soul damage, I think.
Heavy soul damage detected.
Would you like to level up?
Is heavy more or less than severe? I shake my head for the time being. While the tree is still spawning monsters, I can handle them. It’s not attacking me directly, so I can take the time to power myself up in the time being.
A centipede-shaped demon just about half again my height in length crawls its way over, drawn by the scent of burning corpses and the promise of a juicy adventurer to snack on. It ignores me completely, choosing to move towards Sierra again, and I activate Wraithfire—except I don’t.
Wraithfire continues to burn around me, the air itself still set afire, but my skill produces nothing new.
I’m out of time.
Heavy soul damage detected.
Would you like to level up?
As the centipede turns its many eyes towards me, the prompt appears again.
It looks at me, considering, and then two dozen antennae rise straight from its body.
I don’t want to find out what it’s doing the hard way, so I charge forward. Knifefighting aids me, and my new Voidtouched trait must be doing something, because my knives slice through it like butter and leave tinges of dark purple where they wound it.
It takes me nearly half a minute to kill it without my Wraithfire.
By the time I’m ready to consume it, I see what those antennae were for.
On every side, all I can see is an approaching wave of black.
It called its siblings.
Heavy soul damage detected.
Would you like to level up?
I accept.
You have advanced to level 11!
All stats increased by 1.
You have gained 3 stat points.
You have advanced to level 12!
All stats increased by 1.
You have gained 3 stat points.
Due to your traits, actions, and _____, you may choose up to 2 of the following Bronze-tier skills to advance to Silver.
Appraise
Shape Self
Stealth
Acting
Phantom Shape
Paralyzing Bite
Locate Person
Misty Blade
Before I make my choice, I consider the situation around me.
Sierra is unconscious. Adrian’s status is unknown. There must be a hundred enemies converging on my position.
Thunder explodes from the sky, unnatural green lightning lancing through the air and painting the entire city in verdant hues for a brief second before it strikes the demonic tree at the center of all of this.
With my enhanced Mind (Speed) and my demonic eyesight, I can just barely make out the tiny figure in the sky that the lightning has come from.
If it were anyone else, I wouldn’t have been able to tell. But I’ve been looking at Sierra for long enough to recognize the similarities.
Marie Jade.
A hundred enemies has become a hundred and one.
