The knee to Aurora's ribs didn't break them—not yet—but the shock of the impact from a girl who should have been paralyzed by blood-loss was enough. Aurora's grip didn't fail, but it flinched.
In the world of an assassin, a flinch is an eternity.
Alexia didn't pull away. She leaned into the pinning forearm, her face inches from Aurora's glowing crimson eyes. The acid mist was still eating at the wounds on Alexia's back, but she no longer seemed to notice. Her breathing, once ragged and shallow, had become a rhythmic, terrifyingly silent pulse.
"You're looking at the wrong thing," Alexia whispered.
Aurora's eyes widened. She tried to bring the overhead blood-spike down, to impale the girl and end the defiance, but her arm wouldn't move. She looked down.
Thin, translucent threads of concentrated Arcanum—finer than a spider's silk—were wrapped around Aurora's wrists, her neck, and the lethal spike itself. They hadn't been there a second ago. Or perhaps they had been there the whole time, invisible under the weight of the limiter.
"What... is this?" Aurora hissed, her voice vibrating with the first touch of genuine fear.
"Three days ago," Alexia said, her voice devoid of emotion, "Mira gave me a ring. She told me it would keep me safe. She meant it would keep the world safe from me."
Alexia reached up. Her fingers didn't go for Aurora's throat. They went for her own finger.
"Full Release."
The snap of the copper didn't produce a flash. It produced a void.
The Red Garden didn't just fade; it was deleted. The thick, metallic mist was sucked into Alexia's body as if she were a black hole. For a heartbeat, there was no sound, no light, and no wind. There was only Alexia.
The two daggers she had lost to the Red Garden returned to her hand.One moment her hands were empty; the next, she was holding both blades, the steel no longer silver, but a matte, soul-drinking black that seemed to absorb the ambient light of the island.
Aurora screamed—not from pain, but from the sudden, total loss of her domain. She lunged, her blood claws extended, but she struck nothing but empty air.
Alexia wasn't behind her. She wasn't above her.
She was everywhere.
"Ninety-four percent," Alexia's voice echoed from every shadow simultaneously, a cold imitation of the logic Sigma had used against Ban. "That was your probability of winning while I was restrained."
A flash of black steel opened a deep, cauterized gash across Aurora's back.
"Now," the voice whispered directly into Aurora's ear, though no one was standing there, "the probability is zero."
Aurora lunged again—a desperate, wide sweep of her claws that should have decapitated anything within three meters. But her fingers passed through the air as if it were water.
Alexia wasn't there.
"You must be thinking about my ability," a voice murmured. It didn't come from behind Aurora. It came from inside the shadows of her own clothes.
Aurora spun, her heart hammering against her ribs. "Show yourself, coward!"
"Let me give you a few licks in first," Alexia's voice whispered.
"Consider it a refund for the blood you took."
The first attack came from the ground. A matte-black blade rose from the shadow of Aurora's own foot, slicing upward through her calf. It didn't just cut; it erased the sensation of the limb. No pain—just a terrifying, empty void where the muscle used to be.
Aurora stumbled, her balance failing as her leg refused to respond.
The second attack came from the air itself. A horizontal flash of black steel across her eyes. Aurora blinked, and when she opened them, the world was no longer red. It was gray. The "Red Garden" wasn't just suppressed; it was being bleached out of existence by Alexia's sheer presence.
The third attack was a flurry. Four simultaneous slashes—shoulders, ribs, thighs.
Aurora screamed, flailing at shadows that flickered in and out of her peripheral vision like a broken film reel. Every time she thought she saw a hem of leather or a flash of dark hair, it dissolved into smoke before her claws could connect.
Alexia finally manifested three meters away, standing perfectly still. She wasn't even breathing hard. Her daggers were held loosely, the black Arcanum dripping off the tips like ink.
"You've been calculating my speed based on how I moved with the ring on," Alexia said, her eyes tracking Aurora's frantic movements. "That was your first mistake."
She stepped forward, and for a microsecond, her body glitched—appearing in three different places at once before snapping back into a single silhouette.
"Your second mistake," Alexia continued, "was thinking I needed the mist to hide."
Aurora tried to scream, but the sound died in her throat.
Alexia silhouette glitched. One moment she was three meters away; the next, she was standing directly behind Aurora, her matte-black dagger resting against the woman's shoulder blade.
There was no spray of red. The black Arcanum on the steel didn't cut flesh like a normal blade—it erased the concept of the connection.
Aurora's right arm fell limp. Her brain sent the electrical signal to lift her hand, to weave another lance, but the signal hit a void. The limb was still attached, but for all intents and purposes, it no longer belonged to her body.
"That's one," Alexia whispered, her voice sounding like a cold wind through a graveyard.
A flash of black steel across Aurora's hamstrings. The woman collapsed to her knees, her legs turning into dead weight. As a human, the sudden loss of motor function sent her nervous system into a panicked, white-hot spiral. She clawed at the air with her remaining hand, her eyes wide with a very human, very primal terror.
"Two," Alexia murmured.
She appeared in front of Aurora, tilting her head with a detached, clinical curiosity. She reached out and grabbed Aurora's chin. Her skin felt like absolute zero—a temperature no human body should be able to maintain.
"You liked the mist," Alexia said.
"You liked how it hid the pain until it was too late. Let's see how you like the silence."
Alexia's second dagger didn't stab. It traced.
She ran the edge of the black blade along Aurora's jawline, then down her throat, then across her ribs. Every place the steel touched, the "feeling" vanished. Aurora looked down in horror as her own skin turned a bruised, marble gray where the blade passed. She was a prisoner in a torso she could no longer feel, a mind trapped in a body that was being systematically uninstalled.
"Stop... please..." Aurora wheezed. Without the energy supporting her lungs, even breathing was becoming a manual chore.
"I have three minutes left," Alexia said, her eyes devoid of anything resembling empathy. "In my world, three minutes is a lifetime. You've spent yours playing with blood. I'll spend mine making sure you forget what it feels like to have any."
She began to move faster.
To an outside observer, it was a black whirlwind spinning around a kneeling woman. To Aurora, it was a rhythmic, agonizing erasure. A slice to the wrist. A puncture to the hip. A shallow line across the spine. No blood hit the pavement. The wounds were clean and dark.
By the time Alexia stopped, Aurora was still upright, held up only by the translucent energy threads Alexia had woven into the environment. She was a patchwork of gray, bloodless voids.
Alexia stood back, her image flickering—a jagged silhouette against the ruined street.
"The Ghost Corp doesn't just kill," Alexia whispered, leaning in close to Aurora's ear.
She raised both daggers, the matte-black light on the blades reaching a terminal, humming pitch.
"We make sure there's nothing left to bury."
She crossed the blades over Aurora's throat.
The light on Fishman Island didn't just dim—it snapped. A localized collapse of space that lasted for a single microsecond. When the light returned, the alley was empty. The acid mist was gone.