Chương 155: Interlude: All There Was to See

[Time]: Year 1939 [Location]: The Firmament · The White City · The Ruins of the Rear-Echelon Hospital The firmament shattered like brittle glass beneath Tasia's wings. She breached the atmospheric canopy and ascended into a battlefield that had long ceased to adhere to the geometric laws of the physical world.

Torn rivers of molten flame bled across the sky, only to be caught by a gravitational tide of pure, crushing magic and hurled higher still, seized by a summoned river of stars, forced to orbit around microscopic, fragile constellations, each one holding the silhouette of a watching Witch. Reality groaned. Then it tore. A ragged, bleeding wound opened in the fabric of the world. Inside that irregular void boiled a churning, maddening nothingness.

From the wound poured a tide of pure obscurity, the distilled essence of night liquefied into a tidal wave. The darkness accelerated, compounding upon itself, blanketing thousands of meters of the upper atmosphere in a single heartbeat. At this concentration, the curse factors required no fragile spellcraft to kill. They only needed to touch a form. The moment the darkness draped over a body, it would drain the power from the marrow, hollow out the life force, execute a systemic collapse. Ash was swallowed whole.

"Fools!" Ash roared, her voice vibrating through the vacuum.

"I am Death itself! You dare use my own domain against me?!" Her grey eyes flared with blinding, monochromatic light. Around her, a localized domain of pure necrosis erupted, cycling endlessly, pushing outward. Through sheer, unreasonable brute force of raw mana, she ground Ovelia's curse to a halt. From the shifting cosmos, Ovelia's scoff echoed, cold as splintering glass.

"Idiot. How could I not know what you know? Why would I ever use your own power to oppose you?" In the space between her syllables, the fundamental nature of the magic inverted. The suffocating curse unspooled, reversing its frequency from rot to sudden, explosive genesis. A swirling vortex of overwhelming blessing detonated across the firmament. Ash's death domain was instantly washed away. The left half of her body began to assimilate into the starlight, her flesh transmuting into glittering, starry ether.

Ash threw her head back and let out a raw, agonizing roar. But she was the avatar of Death. Driven by sheer feral instinct, she physically wrenched herself free, overturning Ovelia's localized reality through sheer attrition. Around them, stars ignited and were extinguished in the span of heartbeats. New life was forced into being, only to be crushed into dust a microsecond later. They were annihilating the sun and moon, only to forge greater, more terrifying celestial bodies in the crossfire.

Finally, after trapping Ovelia within a conical eruption of four-element dragon breath, Ash reached for the bedrock of her soul. She drew forth the most forbidden architecture in her grimoire. At the tip of her staff, a darkness completely stripped of the definitions of light and shadow began to expand. As the sphere of nothingness swelled, it devoured the ambient temperature, dropping the atmosphere to absolute zero. Sound was cancelled.

Within this expanding event horizon, the tides of extinction churned, methodically pinching out every remaining spark of life and brilliance it touched. Yet as the spell manifested, a profound revulsion twisted Ash's features, aimed not at the enemy but inward. When she spoke the incantation, it sounded like a fragile, exhausted sigh." [Ash'sindra's Death Spell]." The sprawling void snapped inward at speeds that defied physics, compressing into a concentrated singularity that swallowed Ovelia entirely.

All that remained was the final edict. Ash lowered her staff.

"Please die, Ovelia," she whispered. From within the singularity, a boundless aura of death erupted outward. The darkness slowly peeled away. Ovelia remained suspended in the center of the clearing air. Her skin was the color of chalk, completely drained of blood. She had petrified perfectly, her hands folded gently over her chest in a posture of elegant, dignified repose. Even in death, it seemed Death harbored a specific, aesthetic bias toward her.

Tasia hovered at the edge of the battlefield, her hands numb, her chest hollow. Is she really dead? She glanced sideways. Even Francesca and Angie had gone utterly still, their faces stripped of triumph, stripped of relief. They stared, frozen. Ash shared their disbelief. Her grey eyes tracked Ovelia's stilled form, running diagnostic after diagnostic, verifying the total absence of a soul-spark. Once. Twice. A dozen times. Every magical, biological, and conceptual metric returned the same value: zero. Dead.

And right at the exact microsecond she finally allowed herself to believe it— The corpse opened its eyes. A terror so profound it bypassed logic and struck at the root of her existence clawed its way up Ash's throat for the first time in her blood-soaked life. In the Witch world, dying and resurrecting was a Tuesday. But Ash was the authority on mortality.

For her, seeing Ovelia open her eyes was a physicist watching a dropped apple accelerate upward into the sky: the violent erasure of every foundational axiom she had built her existence upon. Why was she blinking? Ovelia stretched her arms, letting out a small, delicate yawn.

"Ah," Ovelia murmured, her tone painfully casual.

"I took a brief little detour for a soul-ascension dream. I suppose I gave you the illusion that you had won. My sincerest apologies."

"Are you a Witch right now," Ash breathed, "or a God?" Ovelia's expression flattened.

"A Witch, naturally." Despite the mind-bending horror of the situation, a hysterical, inappropriate urge to scream spiked in Ash's chest. Who on earth is going to believe that?! Questions piled up, suffocating her. Ash realized the impossible truth: Ovelia's mastery over the concept of Death had actually surpassed her own. Ovelia's lips curved into a breathtakingly venomous smile. The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

"Please go die," Ovelia said smoothly, " Ash'sindra Nadezhda Ivanovna von Milan'thirskaya." It was a completely inappropriate moment, and the memory hit anyway. Ovelia had looked at her, tilting her head.

"Everyone just calls you Ash. What is your full name?" Something almost amused caught at the corner of Ash's mouth.

"Didn't you look it up? My full title is in every diplomatic index ever printed." Ovelia hadn't blinked.

"I want to hear you tell me yourself." Ash had sighed.

"My name is... Ash'sindra Nadezhda Ivanovna von Milan'thirskaya."

"Understood," Ovelia had replied.

"I'll just call you Ash from now on."

"You can call me by my full name, you know," Ash had said.

"Ash," Ovelia had repeated, flatly. Ash had insisted. And so, Ovelia had meticulously attempted the full name, and bit her tongue precisely in the middle of it. Ovelia had glared at her furiously for the rest of the afternoon. The memory dissolved, returning Ash to the burning sky. A helpless, quiet smile touched her lips. They said your life flashed before your eyes when you were about to die. So, Ash thought, the magic taking hold. I really am dying. How unfair.

The very last thing filling her mind, as the abyss opened, was Ovelia's face. There would be no afterlife. She had seen to that herself. Even now, looking at the woman who was currently killing her, she could not bring herself to wish their paths had never crossed. Not in this life, nor in any other. Tasia watched Ash die. Strangely, there was no terror. In its place, a quiet settling moved through her, as if dust had finally come to rest.

It was a terrible thing to admit, but after witnessing so many reality-breaking impossibilities, watching someone actually die felt grounding. And in that absence of fear, she finally deciphered the enigmatic smile Mary Noeffler had worn at her execution all those years ago. To die at Ovelia's hand is a mercy. The proof was written on Ash's face exactly as it had been on Mary's: they both passed with expressions of total, tranquil fulfillment. Tasia thought back to the Defense of Casendiara.

Ovelia had retreated six times, deliberately sparing those three lives. Our family will be remembered by her forever, Tasia realized. A surge of some irrational warmth moved through her chest at the thought. My brain is completely broken, Tasia noted. It doesn't matter anymore. High on the firmament, Ovelia stood perfectly still. Her nine tails lashed the air with undisguised irritation. She cast a brief glance at Tasia, then at Francesca and Angie. The surviving Witches had witnessed everything.

They waited in breathless silence for the Conqueror's judgment. Ovelia clicked her tongue, licking her lips with obvious annoyance. She raised a single hand, her voice laced with the weight of a final edict.

"Declaration: There shall be no death in this place I have not permitted." The universe hitched. Before the collective eyes of the surviving armies, Ash'sindra simply existed again: a gasp, a heaving chest, life reinstated where there had been none. Tasia choked on her own breath. Wait—what does that even mean?! Ash sat up, clutching her chest, staring at her own hands in total bewilderment. Ovelia didn't spare the resurrected Ash a single glance.

She descended smoothly toward the shattered earth, and the spectator Witches scrambled to follow her descent. Ovelia landed. She gave her nine tails a single, sweeping flick. From the folds of her cosmic mana, several massive, pitch-black feline entities drifted into the open air, their fur shimmering with the latent luminescence of a starry night sky.

They were impossibly plush, softer and larger than any Lantern Cat Tasia had ever seen, radiating the heavy, contemplative aura of ancient philosophers: thick fur that couldn't conceal enormous, glowing eyes, whiskers that practically demanded to be touched, ears absurdly oversized, and tails that swept behind them like those of foxes rather than felines. Then, the impossible escalated into the absurd. The Greater Cats began to morph, their silhouettes shifting and elongating until most of them wore Ovelia's face.

Tasia stared at them, her mind genuinely struggling to isolate the exact chronological moment she had slipped into a hallucination. Did the dream start the moment I met Ovelia? Why are there suddenly multiple Ovelias? Ovelia really is a cat, and now there is a whole flock of her. How could I possibly conjure a dream this wonderful? The first to step forward was startlingly young: snow-white skin, black hair falling over enormous cat ears wrapped in wild black curls.

Unrestrained mana bled from her edges, dyeing the air around her subtly darker. She nullified the established timeline in which the destroyed Witch Eggs could not be recovered. Teenage edition Ovelia. The second had Ovelia's face, but softer, rounder, worn in gently. The sharp precision dialed back into something calmer. She looked, somehow, more like a Lantern Cat than Ovelia ever had. She raised her hands, weaving the rational foundation that made the event logically coherent. Mother edition Ovelia.

The third arrived as if descending from a stage that existed specifically for her: tall, slender, devastating, with a thick mane of naturally curling hair, a silk top hat adorned with black phoenix feathers, and runic lines spiraling up her hosiery in hot-stamped gold. She smoothed her skirts without hurry and stepped toward the void, pushing open something that should not have had a door.... A direct hit to my specific weaknesses.

The fourth simply stayed a cat, crouching behind her paws, blue-black eyes peering out from beneath dark fur with fragile, melancholy dignity. Nevertheless, something locked into place. The paradox anchored permanently: The Milan'thirskaya family destroyed the Witch Eggs, yet the Witch Eggs live. Cat edition Ovelia. When miracles are dispensed at wholesale prices, the capacity for shock simply stops functioning. Her internal monologue had flatlined into a dial tone: Ah. It's Ovelia.

Nothing she does is weird anymore. If she cleared her throat right now and announced she was the omnipotent Creator of the Universe, I would nod and ask what time dinner was. As the reborn Witch Eggs pulsed with new, impossible life, the surrounding Witches stared at Ovelia with the glazed reverence reserved for deities. Their rational minds knew she was a Witch. They had literally watched her bleed and die. But logic had no traction here.

Out of the corner of her eye, Tasia caught sight of Famia Schüder and Akkukataya. The specific expressions on those two faces, Tasia thought, required no further commentary. With the impossible quietly resolved, Ovelia turned her attention to the authors of the crime.

"Exile." The word landed. Silence held.

"As long as I draw breath," Ovelia declared, "Francesca and Angie are permanently barred from setting foot within the borders of the Inner Sea." Francesca laughed, broken and wheezing, tears streaming down her face. She leveled her staff at herself. The death curse collapsed before it could take hold, swallowed by the ambient pressure of Ovelia's presence. Beside her, Angie's regal composure broke entirely, her body collapsing into the ash as she wept openly. Ovelia turned her cold eyes to the resurrected Ash.

"You will assume the position of the Third Seat. You will serve as the Eternal Guardian of the Border." A pause.

"If the day comes when the entirety of the multiverse is assimilated into the territory of the Inner Sea, your mothers' exile will be lifted." Ash stood where she was and said nothing. Liandra arrived as the sentence was being finalized. She had missed everything. By the time she breached the White City perimeter, the dust had settled and Ovelia was speaking. What reached her first was the meaning: her mothers would not be coming back. The exile of the mothers was a consequence Liandra could logically process.

She knew the crimes. She knew the Witch Eggs. But the subsequent decree chaining Ash to the eternal border, the permanent separation from the person she loved most, was the structural load that finally snapped her mind. A primal, heartbroken sound tore from Liandra's throat. She lunged directly at Ovelia, mana flaring wildly from her hands. Ovelia didn't even blink. Famia Schüder and Akkukataya moved with terrifying, synchronized lethality, intercepting the strike before Liandra crossed half the distance.

Famia slammed her into the earth. Liandra's face was wet with tears, her mouth open, inhaling to scream a blood-choked curse at the Conqueror. Akkukataya didn't hesitate. A flick of her wrist. A [Silence] hex dropped over Liandra's head, and the curse died in her throat.

"Let her stand," Ash said. Famia stepped back. Liandra dragged herself up from the dirt, shaking. Ash placed a hand on her trembling shoulder and looked her directly in the eyes.

"Ovelia did nothing wrong." Whatever fire had been driving the youngest Milan'thirskaya daughter simply extinguished, leaving behind nothing but dead, grey ash. Ovelia didn't spare Liandra a glance. She turned, and her gaze settled on Tasia.

"From this day forward," Ovelia said, "you and Alucard are the Lords of the White City." Tasia stood paralyzed. Her throat was tight. She knew that Ovelia had seen her, had observed, even while locked in a reality-breaking deathmatch high above the ruins, exactly what Tasia had chosen to do on the ground below. She had seen it, and she had approved. And in that exact, devastating moment, Tasia understood something else. Ovelia would never look at her again. Because she had already seen everything there was to see.