For the first time, Tristessa saw that reaction as something positive, not the beginning of a traumatic nightmare.

For the first time since discovering the Divinity she had so desperately wanted to reject, she saw the rising of the dead as a glimmer of hope.

Small spasms ran through Katriel Strauss's body, starting with his fingers until it covered his entire body. His eyes opened wide, and like the other corpses Tristessa reanimated, they began to ooze semi-transparent liquid tainted with blood from the edges.

"...Ahh...Grrr..."

Tristessa could feel the corpse's guttural voice inside her head, hating her to no end. Whatever her Divinity was doing was wreaking havoc inside the bandit's body to give him the power of mobility.

"Hate me all you want, but get up!"

Her voice was a command impossible to refuse. It strengthened his dead muscles, allowing him, before the surprised eyes of several of those present, to lift his own body with both hands and kneel.

"Impossible..." She heard Auron say in a faint voice. She couldn't break her focus enough to give him her attention, but it was easy to recognize his astonishment, his lack of understanding in the face of the unknown. "A-are you doing that, lady?"

Tristessa couldn't respond. She was afraid of interrupting that dark, spiritual thread. That connection created with the corpse of Katriel Strauss, who had just stood up.

"What the hell...?! S-Sylvia...!"

One of the assistants pointed with a trembling hand behind his companion. The woman turned around, and before her was the bandit's bloody face covered by a shadow casted by his hood. His neck was twisted in an abnormal position, exposing the fractured vertebrae that had caused his Death.

"Grrr...!"

The corpse's unearthly growl made the attendant let out a scream of terror and fall backward, crawling until she stopped at her companion's legs. Both of them, and almost the entire crowd, witnessed how the undead man took his own head in both hands and snapped it, forcing the still-shattered spine to reposition itself.

The sound of bones breaking even more reached Tristessa, who no longer felt unbearable pain per se, but rather a kind of burden. An effort within her, working and moving an ethereal mechanism that was the cause of what was happening.

"I feel like it won't last long...!" she thought, still with one hand on her temple and her jaws clenched tightly together. Her mind was clear, enough to understand one thing: this was her chance. "Distract them!"

An order that Katriel Strauss's corpse carried out perfectly:

"GRRAAAAAAAAAAA!"

A monstrous roar, so dark and deep that it startled even Tristessa. Not to mention those present: the poor homeless people fled, screaming in dread and wanting to save their lives from a monster that wasn't actually going to hurt them.

"Step aside, move!" shouted one of the guards, rushing toward the audience with his companion and forcing them to take cover behind them. Swords drawn, gripping the handles with obvious uncontrollable trembling. Fear. "Didn't Silverthorn kill him?! Damn useless bitch!"

"Look at his neck, Baek! He can't be alive!" exclaimed the crossbowman, whose attention had shifted now that the audience was scattering in panic, and he was aiming his weapon at the undead's back. "What do I do?! Do I shoot?!"

"Yes, fire at will!"

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The crossbowman opened fire, but the living corpse threw itself to the ground with the same agility it had possessed in life, sending the arrow flying straight toward one of its allies: the impact was direct in its right shoulder, protected by its armor, but still brutally painful.

"You idiot! What the hell are you doing?!" the soldier shrieked, no longer able to raise his sword arm.

"Watch out!"

Katriel -now a revenant- caught the soldiers off guard by moving across the ground like a snake, so swift that he was able to retrieve his two dark mineral daggers. With a swift movement of his legs, he stood up in a dynamic defensive position, never standing still and ready to fight.

"Don't hurt them! Just defend yourself!" Tristessa ordered, and in her mind she felt that heavy, chilling darkness, substantial with deep hatred for the false life she had just created. "Make sure they don't take their eyes off you!"

"Grraaa!" Katriel snarled, and with his hood up and weeping tears of blood, he opened his mouth and said, in a voice worthy of the abyss. "Weaklings… Attack, maggots!"

That mockery made the only soldier skilled in close-quarter combat lose his temper.

"You son of a bitch!" Ignoring the screams of his allies and falling right into Tristessa's trap, the soldier attacked, and the undead defended itself with great efficiency, parrying the blows when it suited him, or dodging and distancing himself when it didn't. "Stay still! Maxis, shoot him!"

"But I might hit you!"

Tristessa allowed herself the luxury of smiling, even if only a little. She briefly looked away from all the chaos and confusion of screaming people and deeply concerned soldiers, focusing on the top of the walls: the fire from the braziers showed her the confusion of the riflemen, aiming and arguing with their own comrades, most likely due to the risk of friendly fire.

There was no better opportunity than this to accomplish what seemed impossible minutes ago.

"Wait, Tristessa!"

She heard Auron shouting behind her, but she was already running. Only a shot in the back—something she knew about very well—was going to be the only thing that would stop her. There was no way she could stop on her own. Not with her Baptism in Ruins causing that terrible, frostbitten feeling when she breathed.

This was her last chance to make sure all her efforts and the Deaths she had caused weren't totally in vain.

The shadows cast by the blue light of the lamps rose, giant shades threatening to cover everything. There was something supernatural about them, something that shaped them and slowly devoured the light...

"You're not going to catch me, Dullahan!" the girl bellowed, her torso still covered in ethereal permafrost, still with the weight of her [Divinity of Accursed Existence] resting on her shoulders and skull as the cadaverous Katriel Strauss struggled to give her time. "Find me if you can, bitch!"

She went through the open double doors like lightning, running as if pursued by a demon, in the most literal sense of the word.

With every passing second, the burden her Divinity was depositing on her soul was turning unbearable. Threatening to crush her from within, a compression that manifested on the material plane in the form of muscles being strained to the limit, blood vessels about to burst…

"Ufff…ufff… Ugh, shit!"

Still, she ran without stopping. She was so short of breath that her blurred vision barely allowed her to see that there wasn't a single person on that vast, narrow and smooth, urban stone street.

"…!"

Suddenly, the connection she'd had with Katriel Strauss's corpse was severed, manifesting as a temporary stabbing pain in her head that nearly made her stumble. She stopped feeling the weight of her Divinity projecting into her soul, telling her two things: either she had strayed too far from the revenant to impart its influence, or the soldiers had managed to kill him again.

"Don't think! Don't think, and keep running!"

From the buildings on either side, tall, indescribable blurs, she could barely see lights emanating from the windows of the multiple floors.

Lights that were devoured by the shadows that relentlessly pursued her, covering everything.

"My Nemesis," she heard the Dullahan's voice, whispering in her ear and frostbiting her soul with a dark ice that made her regretfully recall the lifeless body of the mercenary Reiden. "Defeat me…"

"NO, LEAVE ME ALONE!"

Tristessa kept running, expecting at any moment to be struck down and killed. She ran and ran and kept running, not seeing where she was going, not seeing who crossed her path. Not caring about the lack of air, not caring about the burning sensation rising from her tired legs.

Entrana was a city of shadows at that moment, its silence interrupted only by Tristessa's desperate footsteps as she plunged deeper and deeper into the darkness...

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