"Auron Casimir…"

From the way Astoria pronounced his first and last name, there seemed to be no sympathy for him. She wiped the streaks of blood running down her face and spat on the ground to remove what had gotten into her mouth, still glaring at the gunslinger.

"Yes, that's my name, Blackguard. Don't waste it." Auron shifted his gaze to the Mercer-Archeos family, the three of them immobilized and nearly pinned against the side of his tent. "Are you alright?"

"Y-yes, thank you, sir."

Jin had managed to open his mouth to answer Auron, almost paralyzed by the terror that had gripped his heart. If what he had told Tristessa on a past occasion was true, he had never hunted a beast corrupted by the Evil Dream. Seeing his shot fail to kill the mark had eroded his resolve.

"And what about you?"

Tristessa jolted, anxiety exploding inside her. Auron was speaking to her, looking at her without any resentment or animosity. Words from a man who was alive, breathing, reasoning. Not like that other Auron from the last loop, taking his last breaths as a deadly poison killed him from within. That Auron who had died beside her, silent, burdened with remorse.

Holding that pocket watch with the photo of his love, bound to a cruel fate of never meeting her again.

"Lady?"

Tristessa didn't know how she managed to resist the urge to rush to him and lock him inside a bone-crushing hug. To cry all the tears her eyes demanded against his chest, to feel his heart beating, and to ask for his forgiveness. To beg for redemption for dying in her place, and for desecrating his soul with her [Divinity of Accursed Existence].

A miracle kept her still and able to respond with a certain calmness.

"I'm fine, Mr. Casimir. Thank you for asking." Tristessa gave him a smile manufactured by pure melancholy, filled with messages impossible for him to interpret. He raised an eyebrow in confusion. "Did you say you want to help us?"

"Only because I don't want a terrdrak to fall over my tent," he replied, taking the same number of bullets he had expended from inside his leather jacket and reloading both revolvers. The spent bullets fell onto the uncorrupted soil, splattered with the tainted terrdrak's blood. The gunslinger looked at Tristessa again, this time with curiosity. "Don't take this the wrong way, but there's something weird about that visage of yours... You have the charm of an eccentric woman, lady."

"…Ha!"

The gray-eyed girl couldn't contain the sigh that had built up in her chest upon hearing those words, creating a déjà vu effect that moved her. A reaction the gunslinger hadn't expected at all.

"Casimir! If you want to help, then stop flirting with Miss Irandell and prepare for the second wave of terrdraks!"

Irate, Astoria pointed with the tip of her sword beyond where the battalion of soldiers continued to fight the Fallen Militiamen. Indeed, a new dark cloud composed of more Tainted Terrdraks was approaching the city, visible against the reddish, black lightning-fueled skies.

"You heard the Blackguard, lady." Auron adjusted his hat then turned his attention to the approaching flying horrors. "Stay with your family while we take care of the coming plague."

The arrival of those corrupted flying beasts triggered a new wave of gunfire from the top of the walls. The heavy-duty shot from one of the mounted crossbows tore through them with a ridiculous amount of power and speed. As result, blood and dismembered parts of the beasts rained down for several seconds.

From the ground, Auron started to work. His shots were accurate, almost always hitting them in the head, and for the terrdraks who tried to dodge them, at the very least, he managed to disable their winged arms. Those who fell to the ground and managed to survive were finished off by Astoria or by the soldiers guarding the various points of the refugee tents.

"Astoria, out of ammo!" the gunslinger warned before firing the last bullets from both chambers. "What the hell are you doing there, Ivan?!"

Tristessa recognized him: Auron's friend, Ivan, emerged from a corridor formed by two rows of tents. Hooded and wearing tattered, holey clothes Tristessa remembered from the previous loop, he looked in every direction, terrified by the chaos of the Evil Dream and the bloodshed of shadowy creatures.

"A-Auron, I can't find my wife! She went out to get water before all this mess, and I can't find her!" he exclaimed, sober and desperate. He seemed to want to run toward the tents across the street, toward the murky river, but fear kept him paralyzed in place. "What do I do?!"

"Get out of there and hide, idiot!" Auron yelled at her as he diverted his attention to continue shooting at the flying beasts. His concentration was compromised, increasing the likelihood of him making a mistake. "No bullets again…! SHIT! ASTORIA, HELP HIM!"

Feeling her heart pounding, Tristessa focused her attention on what had scared Auron to no end: one of the terrdraks had managed to descend and focused its four glowing red eyes on Ivan. The man noticed it too, his gaze getting lost in the vortex of melancholic malice that shaped the beast's humanoid face. Soon, Ivan found himself at the mercy of that nightmarish mouth, which opened to reveal sharp teeth, moving toward him to bite his head off…

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But Astoria arrived just in time to intercept the terrdrak, jumping on top of it and diverting its flight path straight to the ground.

"Get out, you stupid old man!"

"…Y-yes!"

Ivan remembered how to use his legs and ran towards the river, past Auron, who was busy shooting at the terrdraks above.

Astoria struggled with the beast she had tackled, amidst a cloud of earth unaffected by the miasma, dodging its bites and resisting the scratches on her shoulders made by those long, bony fingers. Without her longsword at hand, she had no choice but to sink her fists into its head. Dozens of blows stunned the beast, allowing the knightess to move on top of its body and trap its neck in her arms. With a loud crack, the terrdrak's head was twisted into an abnormal position, its vertebrae shattered, guaranteeing instant Death.

"Ugh…ah, shit…" Astoria groaned as she got up from the ground and touched the fresh wounds on her shoulders, in the hollows that her white metal pauldrons failed to protect. With a grimace of pain fixed on her beautiful face, she adjusted her black cape and met the astonished gaze of Tristessa, who had witnessed that hand-to-hand fight. "Don't even think about it. Don't make me save you too."

With that warning, Astoria returned to support the gunslinger, but not before lifting her sword from the ground. Tristessa hadn't understood what she meant until she looked down and realized, to her surprise, that she was gripping the handle of her hunting dagger in her right hand. As if she had been about to draw it and join the fight.

"…how stupid." Cursing herself in her mind, Tristessa released the handle and stared at the terrdrak Astoria had killed for a few seconds, drawn both by the manner of his death and by the call she felt from within, captured by her [Divinity of Accursed Existence]. "What can I do with this dagger? I'll only get myself killed…"

She had barely imprinted into her muscle memory some of the techniques she'd learned the hard way while Katriel Strauss tortured her with an unwinnable duel. Its effectiveness was enhanced by her [Divinity of the Dark Room], but it was a paltry amount of experience. In a fight against someone with even a couple weeks of practice in the art of dagger combat, she was going to die. And in a conflict like this, in the midst of the Evil Dream, Tristessa had no chance of doing anything other than praying that Auron and Astoria would ensure her survival.

"I'm a liability here..." she thought, watching Auron throw one revolver into the air to reload it with a fresh round, while with the other he continued firing at the terrdraks trying to approach the wall. Watching Astoria run across the area, finishing off beasts the gunslinger managed to bring down, leaving splashes of black blood in her wake. "They are amazing."

The black-haired girl realized at that moment, admiring those two warriors, that she was in the wrong place, where she didn't belong.

But who chose to be in the middle of a conflict like this or not, if it wasn't a cruel twist of fate?

This was the closest thing to a war zone, where soldiers armed with long-range weapons fired from the city walls, and on the ground, the battalion led by the Commander of the local forces held off the pressure exerted by the shadowy enemy. Entrana's military forces were more than prepared to face such foes; they had done so for centuries.

The only question left to answer was whether they were prepared for the attack of a rare terror.

"Attention, a Vilecross is approaching with a wagon!" Tristessa heard the Commander shout. "Possible survivors!"

"What?! Are they…?"

Tristessa took several unconscious steps toward the shield wall. There were a distance of several dozen meters to the entire mass of soldiers who were constantly pushing Fallen Militiamen with their shields and stabbing them with their spears. Dead shadowy foes wouldn't stop falling to the ground, pilling up and expelling a rotten smell, while each soldier of Entrana who fell had to be rescued by the thaumaturges in the rear.

It was practically impossible to see beyond, since in addition to the visual obstruction of the shield wall, there was also the miasma of darkness that covered the land, like a fog in which one could become lost and never find their way home again.

"Stand back, now!"

The Commander's order caused the shield wall to break. The soldiers opened a corridor several meters wide, not only allowing several Fallen to enter, but also clearing the way for a red-furred, hornless Vilecross, which knocked the infiltrating Fallen into the air, turning them into atomized darkness.

"It's Gladioulus!" Tristessa exclaimed, grinning broadly at the Mercer-Archeos for a moment. "Melian and Lufreya, they…!"

As she returned her full attention to the newcomers, Tristessa's smile vanished as quickly as it had formed: losing momentum, Gladiolus released the wagon chains and fell sideways, his heavy body vibrating the ground below. He was breathing heavily, his bloody mouth open. A severe wound on his torso exposed broken ribs and critical amounts of blood that continued to flow.

But that wasn't the worst. Tristessa had covered her mouth with her hands and forgotten how to breathe or blink. Her gaze, gray and red from the number of capillaries protruding in her eyeballs, was frozen on those two mercenaries who had gotten out of the smashed wagon.

Lufreya removed her helmet, and for the first time Tristessa could see her face, though it was soaked in blood from a horrible wound on her side: her left ear was missing, and her lower jaw was dislocated, missing several teeth. Her helmet slid halfway down the street; it was clearly marked with scratches. Claws marks, the metal ripped like plastic.

And Melian… He was crawling toward the great gate, his head upside down and his legs missing: something had ripped them off at the height of the knees, with such savage violence that shreds of torn muscle strands stuck to the black-shiny floor as he moved forward, along with a trail of blood expelled from all the severed femoral arteries.

"…!"

Tristessa wanted to scream. To call for help, for anyone, to save those two mercenaries whose injuries were extremely grievous.

But the Commander's bellow would have overwhelmed her anyway:

"FALL BACK!"

And at that precise moment, in the blink of an eye, the wall of soldiers was indiscriminately destroyed in an explosion of red mist, twisted metal, and pulverized limbs.

A true spectacle of Death.

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