"It's her!" Tristessa growled, as her brain burned both from the heat and the spiritual strain.

That phantasm version of Daiana was dressed in that erotic and revealing leather uniform of hers. Her head bald, platinum-colored eyes, and… She wasn't smiling like the creepy psychopath she was.

"D-Daiana…" Severus whispered, aghast upon seeing the eldest child of the Mercer-Archeos family like that.

In that ethereal projection, Daiana was walking in circles at a quick pace. Her face contorted in a painful grimace of aberration. Drowning in despair and hatred that surpassed the limits of madness that her bulging and disturbing eyes could express.

"…do you think you are, to defy my Lord Moebius?! Who, to deny the honorable destiny of dying under the judgment of his holy and prophetic word?! DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA OF ​​THE SIN YOU HAVE FORCED ME TO COMMIT?!" Daiana shrieked, screaming so loudly that her jaw seemed on the verge of dislocating. "I NEVER WENT AGAINST MY LORD'S WORD! HIS PROPHECIES MUST BE ACCURATE, AND YOU FUCKERS RUINED IT!"

She cried like a child throwing a tantrum. Her face so red and her eyes so bloodshot that they soon began to bleed from the sides, the veins inside unable to withstand the pressure.

Around her, the amber phantasms of the witches of the Coven began to appear, amplified by Lucahn's Divinity. All of them kneeling and praying, their heads lowered and accepting any fate that their Mistress had for them in that mind broken by madness.

Also, another ghost appeared… One that caused both Tristessa and Severus to simultaneously fall deeper into despair:

"JIN!"

"Attractor!" Using thaumaturgy, Daiana levitated the paralyzed, phantasm body of her father before her. He could barely resist with his hands and his legs had been cruelly severed below the knees. "For the last time, dear father… HOW DID YOU DISCOVER LORD MOEBIUS'S PROPHECY?! WHO TOLD YOU?! TELL MEEEEE!"

"M-my daughter…" With his face covered in blood, both mane and beard dirty and burned, he smiled at his firstborn. The smile of a loving father. "I beg you…embrace the peace of the Gods…"

"FUCK YOUUUUU!!!"

In a fit of inhuman rampage, Daiana manifested her spectral sword through her [Divinity of the Hand of the Umbral Edge] and attacked Jin with a storm of slashes. The black phantom blade sliced and severed both arms. Then his guts fell to the ground, a morbid mess made from his internal organs, and then she finished him off with a slash that sent his head flying.

All of that showed in a barrage of blood that left both Severus and Tristessa speechless and at the edge of madness.

"CURSE YOU ALL! EAT SHIT AND DIE, I DON'T NEED YOU! I ONLY NEED MY LORD! ONLY HIM!"

Screaming and crying, the Priestess clutched her head and miraculously didn't decapitate herself with her own ethereal sword.

"IT'S NOT ENOUGH, IT'S NOT ENOUGH, IT'S NOT, IT'S NOT!!! WHEN WILL IT BE?! AHHH, MY LORD, TELL ME WHEN IT'S ENOUGH!"

Her screams turned into deafening roars, cursing the heavens and the cosmos for the frustration she was experiencing. Her plans altered, ruined, and forced to improvise seemed to be something Daiana Mercer-Archeos wasn't used to.

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And it was all thanks to Tristessa's meddling in that timeline.

Suddenly, silence fell. Daiana dropped her arms, and all that flood of helplessness was erased from her deformed face, giving way to a countenance of incomparable evil. Her silver eyes flooded with fresh blood and malice; her mouth open, showing those rotten teeth that longed to kill and devour.

"It doesn't matter... It doesn't matter who you sent to Entrana for help, dear mother...dear father…" the woman hissed, her sinister voice sending chills down Tristessa's spines even in the hellish environment she found herself in. "A small crack in my omniscience is nothing. In the end, none of you can escape my Black Eye."

Daiana raised her left hand, revealing that disgusting eye in between those fleshy slits, engineered with pure evil.

"The Simulacrum of Lord Moebius. Thanks to my lord's blessing, I see EVERYTHING you do and EVERYTHING you think. You cannot escape from me; from the moment you conceived me, you doomed yourself to darkness and oblivion. No matter who the hell comes from Entrana to help you, no matter if that bitch Eramisaptor or an army comes, you will be ashes beneath my feet!"

The evil eye was like a ball of black fire on the Priestess's hand, filling with madness and suffering to anyone who dared to lay eyes on it… And that was precisely what happened to the Mercer-Archeos family and the witches of the Coven, victims of that dangerous lunatic.

"And as for that bearer of so much Discord… Yes, I can feel you. I've felt your invisible presence from the moment you put a fucking foot inside this house…" Whispering more to herself, Daiana brought an object very familiar to Tristessa to her mouth and ran her tongue over its surface: it was the [photo] she had brought with her from Earth. "I'll split your fucking head open and learn everything about you by eating your rotten, pestilent brain!"

"T-that's mine, you crazy bitch…! Ugh, gah!" Tristessa couldn't resist any longer and was forced to cut the black thread connecting her to Lucahn. The divine projection dematerialized, and the revenant communicated waves of silent hatred that transcended Death to Tristessa before collapsing to the ground, shattering like a statue into dozens of pieces and ash. "I'm sorry… Lucahn…"

"Lucci, oh Lucci…" Severus sobbed, his trembling hands reaching for the charred remains. His natural ability to resist the pain against fire and extreme heat allowed the blood elf to take Lucahn's remains in his arms, and he involuntarily caused them to collapse into ​​ash. "Ah…. Ahhhh, NOOO!"

That sight, seeing Severus' spirit getting broken, it shattered Tristessa's heart even more, as she breathed in great gulps of scalding air, searing her lungs with each inhalation and exhalation. Her hands burned on the heated ground as she recovered from the pressure she had been under.

She cared little. Instead, Tristessa clenched her fists tightly and pounded the ground with her knuckles.

"That damned Daiana and her eye! How the fuck can I save the Mercer-Archeos if she has omniscience over them?!" she bellowed, pounding the ground again and again, until her knuckles bled. "It's impossible! IMPOSSIBLE!"

"T-Tristessa… There's nothing we can do now," Severus tried to point out, sobbing into the ashes covering his hands. "They're all dead!"

"Ah…?!"

The moment she opened her mouth to reply, to release from her chest all that bitterness and selfishness that abounded within her and wanted to come out, she felt it:

Her Baptism in Ruins, beating and spreading like a malign cancer, freezing her heart. Night had fallen, the supernatural cold taking hold of Tristessa's soul and weakening her rapidly.

"S-severus!" she tried to shout, but the elf was quicker, noticing something above their heads.

"Tristessa, up there!"

Pointing his finger toward the ruins of the second floor, the elf indicated a column of darkness that rose from the smoke and flames. It was devouring all light around like a black hole.

Soon, from all that darkness that spread everywhere, that dark knightess emerged, brandishing her sword and holding her head in her other hand, the shadows eventually becoming her cape.

"My Nemesis…"

Coming out of that dark steel full-helm, the Dullahan's voice was unparalleled, casting an aura of extreme cold that managed to extinguish the fires around in an instant. A voice worthy of a daughter of Vel'Moran's angels, at her most unholy. So powerful and imposing that Tristessa felt, deep in her heart poisoned with extreme fear, that she was not worthy of being considered her rival.

"Tonight, you will defeat me, or die."

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