[People don't deserve to die, no matter their sins. Death is too much of a punishment for any one person.]
The forest stretched endlessly around her, ancient trees with gnarled roots that clawed at the earth like grasping hands. She walked alone, her footsteps muffled by the thick carpet of fallen leaves. The canopy above filtered the sunlight into scattered golden coins that danced across the forest floor as the wind stirred the branches.
[Family mana techniques are exclusive, the only factor that differentiates one family from another. If someone from outside learns their technique, it spreads. Other witches steal it, make it their own. And suddenly, your family isn't special anymore.]
She kicked a stone out of her path. It skittered into the undergrowth, startling a small bird from its hiding place.
[So they guard their techniques like dragons. They marry within bloodlines. They cast out anyone who might dilute the purity of their legacy.]
Her hand drifted to her mouth, her tongue pressing against her teeth. Split down the middle. A Bifid tongue. A small mutation, barely noticeable unless she showed someone.
[I was born with a defect. A bifid tongue, the muscle split into two. Just a small change. Nothing that affected my ability to learn, nothing that made me weaker or less capable.]
A branch snapped beneath her foot. She didn't flinch.
[But it was enough for them, something so minor. An imperfection in the bloodline. I was never taught the techniques. Never given a chance to prove myself. Just... discarded, like garbage. I didn't even get to choose]
She walked faster.
The trees thinned slightly, revealing a glimpse of sky, leaden gray, heavy with clouds that hadn't yet decided whether to rain. The air was cool against her skin, carrying the scent of damp earth and something else. Something metallic.
[So why do this now?]
Her eyes dropped to the golden star pinned to her shoulder, the Walker family crest, a star on a field of crimson. It gleamed in the filtered light, mocking her.
[I can't believe they put this stupid emblem on me.]
Her fingers trembled as she gripped the badge. The metal was warm from her body heat, the edges slightly sharp against her palm.
[I should've ripped it out from the beginning.]
She pulled.
The fabric of her uniform stretched. The pin dug into her skin. But she couldn't make herself tear it off.
Her hand fell to her side.
[I can't.]
The admission tasted like ash in her mouth.
[I can't do it.]
She resumed walking.
A squirrel darted across her path, chittering angrily at her intrusion. She barely noticed. Her mind was elsewhere.
[Dominic.]
The ground trembled.
At first, she thought it was her imagination, a trick of her exhausted mind. But then the tremor came again, stronger this time, and the leaves beneath her feet began to dance.
A crack split the earth fifty meters ahead.
Lucy's head snapped up.
In the distance, beyond the treeline, a pillar of crimson mana shot toward the sky like a beacon of blood. It was massive, impossibly vast.
Her brother.
[This amount of mana... it must be elder brother's mana. There's no way it could be anyone else's. It could be her, but she's not even here]
The ground began to rumble beneath her feet. Cracks spiderwebbed across the forest floor, and in the distance, a massive surge of mana erupted skyward like a pillar of crimson fire.
"I have to save them." Lucy's eyes widened. "He's going to kill all of them."
She started to run.
Sweat poured down her face as her dark blue hair flew behind her in the rushing wind.
Her feet barely touched the ground. all of her mana was concentrated into her toes, enhancing her speed to superhuman levels. Trees blurred past her in streaks of brown and green.
"He's uncontrollable once he starts going. I have to stop him!"
Lucy sprinted through the forest, her heart pounding against her ribs. Every crack of a branch beneath her feet vibrated through her entire body.
The trees around her began to shake from the sheer speed of her passage, leaves raining down in her wake.
The forest opened into a clearing.
It had once been a peaceful meadow, but now it was a battlefield. Trees lay splintered and shattered, their trunks riddled with holes the size of fists.
The grass was blackened and scorched, and the air smelled of copper and rot, heavy, humid, wrong.
And in the center of it all stood Dominic Walker.
He was tall, his dark blue hair fluttering in the airless space despite the absence of wind.
His eyes were unnaturally blue, not the warm crimson Lucy remembered from childhood, but a cold, winter sky blue that seemed to pierce through everything they looked at. Rings of blood orbited him like the rings of Saturn, rotating slowly, lazily, as if they had all the time in the world.
"What are you doing here, Lucy?"
The air ignited.
A burst of fire roared toward Dominic like a tidal wave, David's opening attack, a wall of superheated plasma that should have reduced everything in its path to ash.
Dominic didn't move.
A thin wall of his own blood rose from the ground, impossibly thin, barely thicker than paper. The flames struck it and parted, flowing around him like water around a stone. The grass on either side of him was incinerated instantly, but Dominic stood untouched in the center of the inferno, his blue eyes never leaving Lucy's face.
"I'll deal with you later. Stop interrupting me."
David dashed forward, tearing through his own dissipating flames with his sheer momentum.
His fists were wreathed in fire, the air around them shimmering with heat. He closed the distance in a heartbeat, his burning fist aimed directly at Dominic's face.
"Argghh!!"
"I told you that I would deal with you later."
A layer of blood, thick and viscous, materialized across Dominic's face like a second skin.
David's fist struck it and stopped, the impact absorbed, the flames extinguished on contact. The blood rippled but didn't break.
David's eyes widened.
He pushed off instantly, flipping backward through the air to put distance between them, landing in a crouch with his hands raised and ready. His chest heaved.
[I boosted myself with fire and mana, yet he blocked it so easily. THis is absurd.]
[He's the epitome of what it means to be a monster.]
Lucy froze at the edge of the clearing.
Her hands were shaking. She could feel her own blood responding to her fear, pulsing erratically beneath her skin, ready to defend her at the slightest provocation.
But she couldn't move. Couldn't breathe. Could only stare at Dominic's calm demeanor, those cold blue eyes staring straight through her.
"Lucy." His voice was flat. "What is it that you want? Spit it out."
"Don't kill him." The words came out before she could stop them. "Please, brother. Don't-"
"I don't think I can promise you that." A pool of crimson spread around Dominic's feet, rippling outward in concentric circles. "He's protecting his gold coins with his life, I don't think I can get it out of him if I don't kill him."
The tendrils of blood shot from the pool like striking serpents.
David twisted sideways, barely avoiding the first wave. The second tendril came from his blind spot, he threw himself into a roll, feeling the blood whistle past his ear, close enough to draw a thin line of crimson across his cheek.
He came up on one knee, his hand pressed against his broken nose from the earlier encounter, blood seeping between his fingers.
The air grew heavy.
David's instincts screamed at him. He threw himself sideways—just as a tendril of blood shot through the space where his chest had been, piercing the ground where he'd been kneeling. The impact sent a shockwave through the earth, cracking the soil.
"He would've shot a hole straight through my intestines if I hadn't dodged that."
He gripped the bleeding gash in his side, a graze, but still deep enough to hurt.
His teeth clenched, drawing more blood from his split lip.
[I can't run from him either. He's just going to chase me down.]
David ran straight at Dominic.
Not in a straight line, he zigzagged, feinted left, then right, his burning fists leaving trails of flame in the air. A distraction. A desperate attempt to create an opening.
He launched a kick at Dominic's head.
Dominic's hand shot up and caught his ankle.
Before David could react, Dominic's other fist slammed into his stomach like a cannonball.
The impact folded David in half, the air exploding from his lungs in a spray of blood and spit. He flew backward, his body tumbling end over end before crashing into a tree trunk with a sickening crack.
The bark splintered around him. His head lolled forward.
"I'm disappointed."
Lucy moved.
Without warning, blood surged upward from the ground beneath Dominic, not tendrils this time, but spears, dozens of them, each one sharpened to a razor's edge. They shot toward him from every angle, a cage of crimson death.
Dominic shifted his center of balance.
Just slightly. Just enough.
The spears shot past him, embedding themselves in the tree behind him with a sound like thunder. Wood splintered. Bark flew. But not a single drop of his blood was spilled.
"Are you really going against me?"
Lucy's crimson eyes blazed. "Yea."
"Seems like you're the one trying to kill me." Dominic shrugged, the motion casual, almost lazy. "That won't kill you, I already know that."
"Your eyes." Lucy's voice was steady despite the pounding of her heart. "They always turn blue when you're ready to kill someone."
"Is that supposed to surprise me? That you managed to figure that out?"
Lucy's foot planted firmly on the ground. She launched herself forward, her fist driving toward Dominic's face with all the force her enhanced body could generate.
Dominic dodged. His body moved before his mind caught up, his head tilting just enough that her knuckles passed through empty air. His hand shot out and grabbed her arm.
His grip tightened around her wrist.
Crack.
Every single bone in her forearm shattered simultaneously.
Lucy's vision went white at the edges. She felt the sharp, bright pain of splintered radius and ulna grinding against each other, felt her fingers go numb, felt her arm become a useless thing at the end of her shoulder.
She didn't falter.
Her other hand shot up, fingers curling around the back of Dominic's head. She pulled him forward, directly into a punch aimed at his face.
The impact was solid. Satisfying.
Dominic's nose exploded in a spray of crimson. Blood poured down his face, over his lips, dripping from his chin. He stumbled backward, one hand pressing against his ruined nose, his blue eyes wide with something that might have been surprise.
For the first time in a long time, he was bleeding.
A pool of blood crackled at his feet, responding to his agitation. His eyes pulsed with vibrant blue light as he wiped the blood from his face with the back of his hand.
"You kidding me?"
"No joke."
Lucy flicked her fingers.
Sharp blasts of blood shot toward Dominic, not in a straight line, but in a wide spread, forcing him to deal with multiple angles simultaneously. Each projectile was small, dense, moving fast enough to punch through steel.
Dominic raised his hand.
His own blood answered, multiple blasts, perfectly aimed, each one intercepting Lucy's mid-flight. The collisions created explosions of crimson mist that hung in the air like smoke.
"Stop getting in my way."
She couldn't dodge in time.
The counter-blasts punched through her defenses, through her shoulder, her side, her thigh. Holes opened in her body, dark and wet and painful. Blood poured from the wounds in thick streams.
But she smiled.
With a wave of her hand, her own blood surged back into the wounds, refilling them, stitching the torn flesh back together. The holes closed. The bleeding stopped. Her body returned to normal, at least on the surface.
[That took too much mana. I can't keep this up forever.]
"Hey, elder brother, why can't you just leave him alone then? I'll give you all my points."
"I can't do that, I'm not going to let you give up your future for some random child from the Smith's family."
Dominic lunged.
Tiny spears of blood, no larger than needles, shot from his fingertips as he closed the distance. They pierced her a dozen times, a hundred times, each one a pinprick of pain that added to the overwhelming chorus of agony. She couldn't block them all. Couldn't dodge them all.
His hand closed around her throat.
He slammed her to the ground.
The impact drove the air from her lungs.
Stars burst behind her eyes. Her back arched against the dirt as Dominic's weight pressed down on her, his fingers tightening around her windpipe.
[I can't breathe.]
Her breathing slowed as her eyes widened. She stared up at those cold blue eyes, searching for any trace of the brother she remembered.
She found nothing.
"This is what you wanted." His voice was flat. Empty. "You're the one who chose to fight me."
Lucy's hands clawed at his wrist, her nails drawing blood that healed almost instantly. Her legs kicked uselessly against the ground.
Flaming rocks shot toward Dominic, not one or two, but a dozen, each one the size of a human head, wreathed in blue-white flames. They came from David's position, launched with all the force his depleted mana could muster.
The first rock struck Dominic in the temple.
His head snapped sideways.
The second hit his shoulder. The third his back. The fourth, fifth, sixth, a relentless barrage that finally forced him to release Lucy and raise his arms to defend himself.
"This isn't very fair, don't you think?"
David dashed forward.
His fingers ignited with a burst of flame, not the wild inferno from before, but a concentrated, controlled burn that turned his entire hand into a blade of fire. He swung at Dominic's throat.
"Burn."
Dominic sidestepped.
His hand caught David's wrist, and held it in place despite the flames licking at his skin. His other hand shot forward, mana-enhanced, and struck David square in the face.
"Arghh!"
David's head snapped back. Blood sprayed from his split lip, from his already-broken nose, from the gash opening on his forehead. But he didn't fall. Didn't retreat.
His entire body ignited.
Flames exploded from every inch of his skin, a last-ditch attack, a desperate attempt to create distance, to burn Dominic's grip away, to do something before he was overwhelmed.
"How pitiful."
Dominic kicked him away.
David's body flew backward, skidding across the rocky ground, leaving a trail of scorched earth in his wake. He came to rest against a shattered tree trunk, his chest heaving, his flames guttering and dying.
Crimson red feathers formed in the air.
They weren't feathers at all, they were blades, each one shaped like a feather, each one razor-sharp and blindingly bright. They hung in the air for a moment, suspended like a frozen storm, and then they moved.
Cutting through Dominic's dissipating flames. Slicing through the trees behind him. Carving furrows in the earth. For a moment, the entire battlefield was painted in shades of crimson and gold, shining like rubies under the setting sun.
Dominic's eyes widened.
He raised his hands to defend himself-
And felt a fist connect with his spine.
The impact compressed his vertebrae, driving the air from his lungs. His eyes bulged. Every bone in his body shuddered from the sheer force of the strike, and then he was flying, thrown like a ragdoll, tumbling through the air, crashing into the dirt with enough force to crack the earth.
"Dominic."
Hoshimi stood over him, his violet eyes narrowed, a faint smile playing at the corners of his lips. His fist was still raised from the strike.
"I'll peel off that outer shell."
[I really don't want to fight him.] Hoshimi thought, rolling his shoulder and loosening the muscles.
He glanced at Lucy, who was pushing herself to her feet across the clearing, her shattered arm already beginning to heal.
[But I need her to be my ally, a small risk I need to take]
His gaze returned to Dominic.
The older witch was rising, his movements controlled despite the damage, his blue eyes fixed on Hoshimi with something like respect.
The rings of blood around him were spinning faster now, the air crackling with barely contained power.
[Dominic Walker has yet to go all out.]
Hoshimi's smile widened.
"Come on then," he said. "Let's see what you've got."