Chapter 9: Rotting Revelations
Amber and Leo fell into stance, a well-practiced motion that usually felt like power. Now it felt like a prayer. Leo’s form dissolved in a flash of silver light, condensing into the sleek, double-edged broadsword known as Witch Hunter. Amber caught the hilt, the familiar weight both a comfort and a condemnation.
Stein didn’t move. He stood within the shimmering hex-grid cage, hands loose at his sides.
Amber charged. She came in high, a feint, then dropped low for a leg sweep. Witch Hunter gleamed. Stein didn’t block. He shifted his weight an inch to the left, and the blade whistled through empty air. She reversed her grip, thrusting upward. He leaned back, the tip passing so close it stirred the wild white streaks of his hair. He wasn’t fast; he was inevitable. Every attack was met not with a parry, but with a minimal, economical tilt of his body, a fractional turn of his head. His lab coat whispered as he moved.
“Analysis!” Leo’s voice, metallic and strained, rang from the blade.
Amber disengaged, breathing hard. Her ribs ached from earlier impacts she couldn’t remember taking. “He’s… not even using a weapon,” she gasped, sweat stinging her eyes. “His soul wavelength… it’s projecting a defensive field. He reads the intent of the attack before I finish the thought. He’s not dodging the blade. He’s dodging me.”
“So get ahead of yourself,” Leo urged. “Stop thinking. Just be. You’re Amber Delacroix. You’re the strongest meister of our generation. Your mother’s legacy isn’t a chain. It’s the blueprint. Now build something she never saw.”
His words weren’t just encouragement; they were a catalyst. Amber felt a surge, not of borrowed confidence, but of a fierce, personal ownership. Her soul wavelength, ordered and precise, began to vibrate with a new, rebellious harmonic. Witch Hunter responded, the blade throbbing with a low, gathering hum. Light, not silver but gold, bled from the edges.
“Witch Hunter,” Amber whispered, planting her feet.
She didn’t swing. She pulled. The air in the room warped, sucking towards the blade as if it were a sinkhole for light and sound. The golden glow condensed into a searing, compact star around the steel. It was the pinnacle of their partnership, a technique that consumed a week’s worth of resonance in a single blow.
She lunged. It was a perfect strike, a line of devastating force that left no room for evasion.
Stein finally raised his hands. He didn’t form a fist. He simply placed his palms together, flat, as if in prayer, and caught the blazing blade between them.
The collision made no sound. For a heartbeat, the golden star pressed against his flesh, sizzling. Then, a spiderweb of cracks raced up Witch Hunter’s magnificent form. The light imploded. With a sound like a mountain of glass shattering, the broadsword dissolved. Leo tumbled back into his human form, hitting the ground hard, clutching his chest, his body steaming faintly.
In the sudden silence, a sharp click echoed. A single fracture appeared across the left lens of Stein’s round, tinted spectacles.
He peered through the cracked glass, his head tilting. His earlier analytical tone was gone, replaced by something dripping with a venomous, familiar amusement.
“You know, I’ve heard a lot about you! ‘Strongest meister of your generation.’ Your mother was quite legendary too. A prodigy. She created many Death Weapons in her time at the academy.” He paused, letting the name hang in the ozone-scented air. “But what happened to her again? Oh, yes. Went on a suicide mission to try and stop a Keshin Egg from growing in a witch’s den. And never came back out.”
Amber was on her knees, the resonance drain leaving her hollow. She looked up, eyes wide.
“Was your father devastated?” Stein continued, his voice a mockery of sympathy. “Hmmm. No. Your father was famous for being a ladies’ man, wasn’t he? That’s why they divorced, right? He couldn’t keep it in his pants. Too busy with other women to mourn the greatest meister of the age. Or her daughter.”
A raw, animal sound tore from Amber’s throat. Exhaustion was incinerated by pure, undiluted rage. She pushed off the floor, a last, desperate surge of strength propelling her not with technique, but with blind fury. She swung a fist, a pathetic, human blow.
Stein caught her wrist with contemptuous ease. “Tsk. Emotional regression. The first sign of a breaking mind.”
He slung her sideways like a ragdoll. Her body left the ground, twisted, and connected with the edge of a steel workbench with a sickening crunch. She slid to the floor and did not move.
Leo scrambled, crawling over to her, his body trembling as he transformed not into a weapon, but into a shield, covering her unconscious form with his own.
“How touching,” Stein sighed, turning away from them as if already bored.
He didn’t see Angel until it was almost too late.
The hex-grid separating the halves of the room hadn’t fallen. Angel had simply watched, her mind working with a terrifying, cold clarity. She’d seen Stein’s pattern, the slight forward lean of his shoulders when he taunted. When he turned from Amber, his back was to the energy wall, and to her.
Alyce was already a scythe in her hands, the blue flame along the blade not cheerful, but a cold, focused burn. Angel didn’t announce herself. She stepped through the hex-grid. The energy sizzled against her skin, a shocking pain she ignored, and she was through.
She came from his back, a silent, sweeping arc aimed for his spine.
Stein sensed it—a ripple in the soul wavelengths around him. He started to turn, but the scythe bit deep into his shoulder, not a clean cut but a brutal tear through lab coat and flesh. He hissed, more surprise than pain, and spun, a backhand aimed at her head.
Angel was already ducking, Alyce’s shaft a pivot point. She moved with an instinct she didn’t know she possessed. She didn’t just attack; she resonated. Not in the trained, harmonic way of a meister and weapon, but in a broader, absorbent wave. She pushed her own strange, calm frequency outward, and where it met the buzzing, violent static of the film around Stein’s soul, it didn’t clash. It dampened. It nullified. His next soul-powered punch, meant to shatter bone, fizzled into a push of air that merely staggered her.
For a few minutes, it worked. Angel was a whirlwind of desperate, precise violence. Alyce’s scythe form was an extension of her own rage, drawing lines of blue fire across Stein’s arms and chest. He was forced to block, to actually defend, his analytical cool fraying into irritation.
Then Angel felt it. A tremor in the weapon she held. Not a physical shudder, but a quaver in the soul connected to hers. The fierce, chaotic energy of Alyce’s wavelength was guttering, growing thin and brittle.
“Alyce?” Angel whispered between panting breaths, parrying a kick that vibrated up her arms.
“Nothing. Nothing, keep going!” Alyce’s voice was a tight wire in her mind. But it was wet. Choked.
Angel saw it then, not with her eyes, but with that inner sight. Alyce’s soul, always a scattered storm of red and defiance, was dimming. It was weeping. Not from physical pain, but from a deep, exhausted shame. The shame of being the unstable element, the liability, cracking under the pressure of a real fight.
Stein noticed it the same instant. He stopped his aggressive advance, stepping back and straightening his torn coat. A smile played on his lips.
“The weapon is tired,” he announced, as if giving a lecture. “Emotionally compromised. A poor foundation for resonance. You can’t build a house on a fault line, girl.”
“Shut up,” Angel snarled.
“Why? It’s the truth. Her soul is a damaged, erratic thing. It’s why her family discarded her. It’s why no meister can hold her. She’s fundamentally broken. You’re wielding a cracked blade. It’s only a matter of time before she shatters and cuts you open instead.”
“I said SHUT UP!” Angel’s scream was raw. She charged again, but the rhythm was gone. Alyce’s resonance was failing, the blue flame sputtering.
Stein saw the opening. He didn’t bother with physical contact this time. He raised a hand, palm out. The air coalesced into a jagged, visible spike of pure soul energy, vibrating with a malicious, high-pitched whine. It was a killing blow, condensed and cruel.
He thrust his hand forward. The spike shot across the room.
Angel twisted, swinging Alyce to block. The soul-spike hit the flat of the scythe blade.
Alyce didn’t scream a name. She screamed a sound—a high, piercing, utterly agonized shriek that wasn’t human, wasn’t weapon, but pure, unfiltered suffering. The blue flame died instantly. The scythe’s metal groaned.
In that fraction of a second, Angel understood. The attack wasn’t just physical. It was an invasive, corrupting resonance designed to shatter a weapon’s soul from the inside. Alyce was feeling every ounce of it.
“NO!”
Angel didn’t think. She wrenched the scythe away from the path of the still-pushing energy spike and threw the weapon, the beautiful, terrible scythe, sideways across the room. Alyce clattered against the far wall, reverting to her human form in a heap, curled and shaking.
The soul-spike, deprived of its target, continued its path.
Straight into Angel’s chest.
There was no impact. It passed through her skin as if it were smoke, and then it was inside her.
The world dissolved into white, silent agony. It was not pain like being cut or burned. It was the pain of violation, of a screaming, foreign frequency being forced into the very core of her being. It scraped against her memories, sought out her fears, and vibrated with a singular purpose: to unravel her.
Angel didn’t fall. She stood rigid, back arched, mouth open in a soundless scream. Then the sound came, tearing from her throat, a raw, endless scrape of torment that echoed off the stitched walls and the floating, pulsing organs. It was the worst pain she had ever felt, a nuclear fire in her soul. She could feel the malignant energy twisting inside her, searching for a weakness to exploit, a crack to widen.
Through the blinding white agony, only one thought, clear and sharp as glass, remained.
Mine.
The scream ended. Her knees buckled. She hit the floor on her hands, gasping, trembling violently. The soul-spike was gone. Not deflected. Not nullified.
Consumed.
She looked up, her vision swimming. Stein was staring at her, his cracked glasses reflecting her hunched form. His theatrical smile was gone. In its place was an expression of utter, profound shock.
In its place was an expression of utter, profound shock.
His head tilted further, the cracked lens obscuring one eye but not the intense focus of the other. “You… digested it.” The words were a clinical murmur, devoid of his earlier performative flair. “A soul wavelength attack of that magnitude, designed to disintegrate resonance, and you… metabolized it. That shouldn’t be possible for a meister. It shouldn’t be possible for anything.”
Angel couldn’t answer. The consumed energy was a storm of razors inside her, carving pathways through her nerves. She could feel the pain radiating throughout her entire body, a deep, cellular ache that made her bones feel loose in their sockets. Tears streamed down her face silently, hot tracks through the grime and sweat. Her vision pulsed, darkening at the edges, but she kept her gaze locked on him—Crow, Stein, whoever he was.
He took a step toward her, then another, his movements curious now, predatory in a new way. “What are you?”
She knew, in the shattered, screaming core of her heart, that she just needed to get close to him. To stop the questions, to stop the analysis, to stop him. She used all of her remaining strength to pull herself up from the floor. Her legs trembled, threatening to buckle. She charged.
It was not a graceful attack. It was a staggering, broken run. She defaulted to her training, the muscle memory of countless hours in the spare training ring with Crow. She threw a sloppy jab he easily deflected. A cross. A low kick. Every dodge she forced him to make sent fresh lightning through her joints. Every punch, every kick, was extremely painful to execute, every part of her body feeling like lead to control. She was moving through syrup, through fire.
He parried her strikes with open palms, not fighting back, just observing. “Fascinating. The somatic response is deteriorating, but the will is… persistent. Adrenaline and soul-debt. A toxic cocktail.”
Her next swing was so slow he didn’t even bother to block. He simply stepped inside her guard. Stein shocked her. He grabbed her by her ponytail, yanking her head back, and twisted her around to be against him, her back against his chest. Her breath hitched. She braced for her body to lock up in fear, the old, familiar paralysis that seized her in moments of violation.
But it didn’t.
His breath was warm and unsettlingly close against her ear. His other hand slid around her torso, the cold backs of his fingers skating up under the hem of her shirt. “Interesting specimen you are,” Stein whispered, the clinical tone gone, replaced by a low, intimate menace. He pulled her hair tighter, exposing her throat. His fingers lifted her shirt, exposing her stomach to the cold, antiseptic air. “Maybe I should cut you open and rearrange your insides. See what makes your resonance so… hungry.”
Her body reacted the exact opposite that she wanted. A traitorous, electric jolt ran through her. His touch on her stomach, over the newly formed abs building there, tingled where his fingers hovered. It was a nauseating mix of revulsion and a raw, unexpected spark of sensation. He hooked a thumb into the waistband of her skirt and pulled it down slightly, the fabric tugging against her hips.
Her knees wobbled. She squeezed her legs shut, a wave of heat flooding her face. What the fuck is happening to me?
She felt the click of a pen being deployed. The cold, precise tip touched her skin just below her navel. Stein began drawing a light, tickling line, an outline of where he would make his incision. Her heart pounded against her ribs, a frantic bird. This was it. The madness Crow kept contained had broken free.
Angel stopped thinking. She drove her head back, aiming for his nose, but he anticipated it, jerking his face aside. So she did the only other thing she could think of. She slammed her boot heel backward with all her failing strength, a dirty, brutal kick straight into his groin.
The connection was solid. A pained, utterly undignified oof escaped him. The hands on her shirt and hair vanished. He let her go and fell to his knees on the ground, doubling over.
“Shit, Angel!” The voice that came out was a strained, familiar gasp. It wasn’t Stein’s mocking baritone. It was higher, choked with real pain. “I was just kidding! God…” He held himself, rocking slightly. “You all passed. Geez. Test’s over. You passed.”
Angel stumbled forward, catching herself on a workbench. She turned, chest heaving. Passed?
On his knees, the man groaned. He reached up, grabbed a handful of his own wild, white-streaked hair, and pulled. The entire wig came away in his hand, revealing the familiar, perpetually messy dark hair of Professor Crow. He reached up with his other hand and removed the round, cracked spectacles, tossing them aside. He blinked up at her, his face pale but his own, his expression a complex map of pain, pride, and lingering strangeness.
“What…” Angel’s voice was a ragged scrape.
“A final exam,” Crow wheezed, slowly, painfully getting to his feet. He adjusted his real clothes beneath the torn lab coat. “A practical. To see if you’d break under pressure, or find a way to unite under it. To see if you’d quit.” He looked at Amber, still unconscious, at Leo shielding her, at Alyce curled in a ball by the wall. Then his eyes, dark and tired, settled back on Angel. “You didn’t.”
He took a step toward her and placed a hand on her shoulder. The gesture was meant to be congratulatory. “You passed.”
Angel was pissed. A boiling, towering fury rose through the pain at the violation, the terror, the psychological game played with real stakes. But she could be pissed later. Right now, the world was tilting on its axis. The fluorescent lights streaked. The floor was getting closer, or maybe she was getting closer to the floor. The last of the adrenaline evaporated, leaving the full, crushing weight of her injuries and the consumed, hostile energy within her.
She vaguely remembered Crow’s eyes widening, saw his arms start to come up. He caught her before the back of her head hit the hard, cold floor. Then everything went black.