Chương 154: Interlude: Do What You Should

[Time]: Year 1939 [Location]: Milan'thir · The White City · The Ruins of the Rear-Echelon Hospital Tasia did not know what Ovelia saw in her. Those eyes, abyssal and star-flecked, held a cold, inescapable gravity, and yet to meet them was to feel one's interior life pulled outward, as if her ribs had been opened and the thing inside laid bare, an open book under a gaze that read without asking permission. No one else in the world had ever done that to her. Then the moment shattered. Blood. Ovelia was bleeding.

Every thread of Tasia's mind ground to a halt. The image refused to compile. Ovelia did not bleed. Ovelia coughed, and the crimson was vivid and horribly mortal. Across her exposed skin, black thorns erupted from the curse burrowing beneath the surface, tearing outward, spreading like necrosis through flesh. The delayed epiphany arrived with the mercy of an avalanche. The rose. She had left it behind.

A single drop of Ovelia's blood suspended mid-fall above the dark petals, caught in the moment before it would have touched the bloom. Blood drawn from a time when Ovelia was still bound by the fragile architecture of mortality. What arrived in the wake of that understanding was not fury. Fury was too warm. It was something absolute and glacial, a temperature with no name, flooding her body from the inside. Slowly, Tasia turned her gaze toward the center of the ruins. Francesca and Angie did not look at her.

They had not looked at her once. Francesca's face had split open into an expression Tasia did not recognize: a twisted, euphoric ecstasy, the specific exaltation of a woman who had spent years waiting to see one particular thing, and had finally seen it. Two strangers stood where her mothers had been. Then the White City screamed. The sound arrived through bone.

The Doomsday Clock Tower, the ultimate, final-resort weapon of Witch civilization, forged with the blood of the Conqueror herself as its medium, burning more than half of the Milan'thirskaya family's millennial treasury as its fuel, struck its first toll. GONG. Tasia's eardrums ruptured. Warm blood slid down her jaw. The resonance bypassed biology entirely, ringing directly against the walls of her skull with the bright, maddening clarity of something that had decided it would never stop. Ovelia's form came apart.

GONG. The star-black contracted, then coalesced. She drew a breath. The next toll took her apart again. GONG. The bell rang thirteen times. Thirteen times, Ovelia was unmade. Thirteen times, the void released her, only to receive her back. In the intervals between each toll, the White City's suppressed cry rose and fell, not knowing which death would be the last. As the star-black coalesced for the fourteenth time, the air pressure collapsed. Ash arrived.

Tasia's eyes and ears had long ceased to function as instruments. She did not need them. Ash descended and placed herself between her mothers and Ovelia. She stood there. Ash, Tasia, Francesca, Angie. At their core, all carved from the same cursed marble. Tasia understood, watching her sister's back, that Ash had parsed the brutal calculus of their mothers' choice with the same cold precision she brought to everything. She had arrived too late to alter any of it. But she could stand inside it.

She could ask, without speaking, for the one thing she had always wanted and never been able to say aloud. And then Tasia witnessed, for the first time, what Ovelia looked like when she was genuinely done waiting. The blood on Ovelia's lips vaporized. Her standard robes dissolved and rebuilt themselves in the space of a breath: a majestic, shoulder-baring vestment of devastating formality, layered with dozens of black ribbons that drifted against gravity as though submerged.

A magnificent ornate crown manifested above her brow. She stood in silence, while the ambient mana of the White City was actively consumed by her, a creeping void expanding across the stone in every direction. From the depth of that darkness, a sound emerged. Meow. Soft. Viscous. The frequency so dense it simply overwrote the localized flow of time. Beneath Tasia's boots, the dust kicked up by the falling ruins froze dead in the air, then slowly began to drift upward.

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. Behind Ovelia, nine colossal feline tails uncoiled into the air, swaying with a hypnotic, predatory patience. Balanced at the tip of each tail, entirely indifferent to the apocalypse around them, rested a grimoire glowing in a different, world-ending color. The spatial dimensions around her locked shut. Distance ceased to have operational meaning.

The ancient draconic blood in her veins roused, and beneath the spectral shroud absorbing lethal force before it could land, the damage resistance of a Primordial Dragon came fully online. Her illusion craft, her transmutation techniques, her enchantment architecture. Every spell in her incomprehensible repertoire existed solely to enforce one inescapable reality: Stand. Trade. Neither of us leaves. The nine tails drove into the bedrock. The leylines surged.

The first collision peeled the facades off the surrounding buildings. The White City. When Ovelia had executed Mary Noeffler, they had the decency to select an alternate dimension to absorb the wreckage. Here, the two most terrifying entities in recorded history were unmaking reality in the center of the continent's most densely populated capital.

Across the burning cityscape, the White City's surviving top-tier Witches went beyond paralysis and arrived at something white-hot and entirely reasonable: the fury of people watching their home detonate from the inside, courtesy of the family that was supposed to protect it. Casendiara had chosen surrender to spare its streets. The Milan'thirskaya family had not extended its people the same courtesy. There was only a supernova, and the White City was inside it.

Witches of the Ludwig, Lucent, and Corvin families abandoned all military protocol and threw themselves into the streets. A Lucent barrier caught a stray volley of draconic fire before it reached the residential blocks. Ludwig vanguards bodily tackled civilians out of the path of falling spires. From the other side, figures emerged from the spatial rifts.

Josephine Durant and Don Gil Ross, who had followed Ovelia after the fall of Casendiara, unable to remain in their conquered home yet unwilling to raise a weapon against Ash, dropped into the collapsing commercial districts alongside Famia Schüder and Akkukataya. Yesterday's enemies stood shoulder to shoulder across the crumbling plazas, throwing up barriers against the fallout raining from above. No word was exchanged. The politics could burn. Tasia wiped the blood from her jaw.

She looked at the sky, where the two of them were rewriting the laws of the world at ten thousand meters above the ruins of everything she had grown up in. She understood with the cold, settling clarity of a theorem finally proven that she had no place in that sky. She turned her back on the light and began to walk. The high corridors of The Palace of Rex Mundi were a portrait of collapse in progress.

The automated defenses hummed against the bombardment outside, mindless machinery maintaining its function while the human soul of the palace quietly routed. In the administration wings, veteran retainers barked evacuation orders into the city's communication arrays, fulfilling the last dregs of institutional duty.

In the shadowed antechambers and gallery halls, the fringe members of the branch families, distant cousins and sycophants who had spent their lives dining at the Milan'thirskaya name, were converting centuries of accumulated prestige into portable assets as quickly as their spatial rings could hold. Paintings had been ripped from their frames. A minor noble froze as Tasia's boots echoed down the gallery corridor, guilt resolving into a defensive sneer.

"Has the Second Princess returned to pack her bags and run?" Tasia did not break her stride. Her eyes never reached the woman. She walked past the looters, through the grand doors of the audience chamber, up the steps of the dais. She sat down on the throne. The velvet was cool. The armrests fit her hands exactly. The proportions of the room seemed to adjust, almost imperceptibly, as though it had always known who was eventually going to sit here, and had merely been waiting for the occasion.

Tasia pressed her palms flat against the throne's command node and drove her mana into the palace's core. A profound, resonant click moved through the foundations beneath her feet. The ancient protective seals on the royal vaults, centuries of accumulated Milan'thirskaya holdings, unsealed and fell silent. The heavy vault doors ground open at the far end of the hall. Her voice, channeled through the palace emergency broadcast array, fell evenly into every corner of the estate.

"Those who wish to take what they can carry and leave this place may do so now." The remaining looters stared at her. From the edge of the room, a witch stepped cautiously forward: a woman who had tutored Tasia in calligraphy at the age of seven, who had stood in the doorway of the nursery when Tasia and Alucard were barely old enough to form words. Her hands were shaking.

"What are you going to do?" she asked. Tasia closed her eyes. Her mind interfaced with the palace's central defense grid. She seized the power from the city's offensive infrastructure, the tower batteries, the perimeter cannons, the siege emplacements that had never fired a shot in this war, and rerouted all of it into the subterranean evacuation channels and civilian shelter networks. Safe corridor maps bloomed across the burning sky in letters of hard light, visible across the entire city.

"Do what I should," she said. Some of the Witches left with their arms full. Some of them dropped what they were carrying and went to find a secondary console to help her. Tasia had stopped registering the difference. The grand doors slammed open. Alucard burst in. Her uniform was covered in stone dust and scorch marks, her breathing ragged, her eyes wide with an unmoored terror that had not yet located its object.

She had sprinted back to the palace because the battlefield had become a zone she had no authorization to enter. She had run through streets full of people shouting that the Empress was here, that the Empress was protecting the city. She had expected to find Francesca and Angie. She found Tasia. Alucard stopped at the base of the dais, the holographic blue of the defense grid maps washing over her face, and stared up at the figure on the throne.

The posture Tasia held did not belong to their mothers, and it carried nothing of their eldest sister's weight. It was Tasia, entirely, unmistakably Tasia, but the silhouette lit by the blue light had hardened at its edges into something that had not existed when they said goodbye at the beginning of this war. They were twins. As Alucard looked up at the dais, she found she was looking at someone she was going to have to learn. Tasia stood up.

"You're just in time," she said, stepping down from the throne.

"I leave the rest to you." Alucard blinked. Her hands rose in reflexive confusion.

"Me—? Why me? What am I supposed to—""Do what you should," Tasia said, passing her. Alucard's hand reached out and stopped an inch from her sleeve.

"And what about you?" Tasia paused at the threshold. Beyond the shattered doors, the sky above the White City was tearing itself apart in long, burning ribbons of ash-grey and star-black. She looked at it for a moment.

"I am going to bear witness," Tasia said, "to the end of all things." She stepped out into the light. Behind her, the heavy doors ground slowly shut.