Astoria Silverthorn was in shock. She brought her left hand to her face, her fingers trembling as she felt the warm, moist spot where Tristessa had left her kiss.

She was so stunned that it seemed like it was the first time anyone had ever shown her even a hint of affection like that.

"W-well, this is a bit cliché... But yes, you're the one I've been looking for!" Blushing bright red, Tristessa didn't want to waste the moment and grabbed Astoria's hand, not giving her a chance to reply. "Your last name means nothing to me! Only you can help me, Astoria!"

Nervousness took hold of the knightess, making her swallow hard. Her gaze was one filled with vulnerability, of defenses being torn down. It was a moment of sobriety, of clarity in that look filled with surprise and doubt. Tristessa could see it, that uncertainty about trusting the words of someone she had no idea who she was...

Or she knew? Since in that second of lucidity, her red eyes opened in realization.

"I-It's you... That girl from yesterday…!"

But Astoria couldn't continue, interrupted by the laughter of the customers closest to her and Tristessa's booth.

"Do you really need the service of a young lady, Blackguard?!" shouted a man who was hugging his hostess with his arm behind her shoulders. "She doesn't even work here; the girls don't know her!"

"Since she spent all her money and knows she can't afford a hostess, she brought a guest with her to not be alone!" another customer added, her hostess giggling. "Seriously, Lily, it's so pathetic it's starting to be embarrassing."

"Well, I can't deny it. If you already have someone who can give you the sympathy you're looking for, Silverthorn, what are you doing here?" that hostess, Lily, asked her with honest sincerity, even if her words where sharp and cut like a knife. "It's disrespectful to us if you don't hire the house."

Such aggression, aligned between the customers and the cabaret staff, all aimed at a single person. Tristessa saw it as a conspiracy, aiming make the now silent knightess miserable.

Were her family's sins so deep as to deserve such hostility?

"Hey, you!" Tristessa shouted, putting her feet on the floor to stand up and address all those busybodies. "Stay out of our business...! Hey, Astoria!"

Interrupting her, Astoria got up from the chair and almost pushed Tristessa out of the way. Without saying anything, she took the beer bottle with her, walking quickly toward the stairs, and receiving taunts and mocking from those people.

"No..."

Amidst the cruel laughter, the girl watched her walk away, and with her, her hopes of saving the family who lived at the entrance to the Sea of ​​Trees.

"Wait, Astoria!" she shouted, starting to run after her, with difficulty due to the dress and high heels. "WAIT!"

The blonde knightess wasn't running, but her stride was swift, steady, and without a sword to give her extra weight. A march that waited for no one, ignoring Tristessa's screams over the music.

The desperate girl ran as fast as she could, leaping down the few remaining steps to reach the first floor and crossed the great hall and the foyer, reaching the outside.

"Hey, you! Where did she go?!" she asked the stunned gunslinger, who had to move out of the way so Tristessa wouldn't crash with him. "Silverthorn! Where?!"

"She went that way…" The man pointed his finger toward the end of the busy avenue, heading for an area of ​​the city Tristessa hadn't yet visited. But that didn't stop her from taking off her shoes and resuming her pursuit. "Miss!"

Leaving her shoes and Roundtable behind, the girl in the blood-red dress ran at high speed, pushing aside every passerby who crossed her path without caring at all about the maelstrom of insults directed to her.

"Watch out, you crazy bitch!" a daemonion demi-human yelled at her.

"What are you doing?!" A driver yelled from the top of a carriage, along with the savage growls of two Vilecrosses. "Get the fuck out of the street!"

Tristessa didn't care. Not even if the soldiers patrolling saw her causing a commotion or crossing the street seconds before a thaumaturgical barrier rose to prevent her passage. Not even the fall of night, and the unnatural chill that slowly began to take hold of her chest, emanating from her Baptism in Ruins.

She had to reach Astoria Silverthorn. In her heart, she felt that the lives of Jin, Lucahn, and Tiara depended on her participation in the mission. She couldn't fail.

"ASTORIA!"

Her scream should have reached the silver-haired knightess, as she saw her entering an alley between modern, flat-style building in the city's industrial center. They were all the same four brick-walled apartment complex, differentiated by numbers in the lexicon of glyphs, and formed dimly lit corridors saturated with steam emanating from the relief valves of the underground pipes.

A labyrinth enclosed by homes and, at the end of the streets, factories that occupied entire blocks. Colossal structures with towers emitting puffs of smoke, and machinery driven by gears, heat grids, electrical components. Every system powered by innumerable quantities of thaumaturgically stabilized power crystals, the core of such artificial life.

Tristessa darted into that alley with vandalized walls, running through the sea of ​​fog, uncollected garbage bags, and broken cobblestones that hurt her fingers and nails to the point of bleeding.

"You're not going to escape... YOU'RE NOT!"

She turned at forks, climbed stairs, but never stopped running. She opened a dilapidated barred door that led her underground, toward one of the many entrances to the city's sewage system connected to the underground section of the Maturin River. A place that shouldn't be accessed by civilians, dominated by rats, with the cisterns made to hold the water of the river so close and not many safety barriers to prevent one from falling into the dark...

Soon, between grey brick walls saturated with moisture and mold, Tristessa began to hear a sound. Someone crying, which forced her to slow down and walk quietly, although the strong beats of her adrenaline-saturated heart seemed like a percussion that anyone could hear.

She peeked around the corner of the alley, and what she saw broke her heart: Astoria was sitting against one of the walls, which had its own lighting at the top, her head down, and holding the now-empty beer bottle.

Astoria was sobbing. Weak, muffled, suppressed moans. The cry of a woman who didn't want to express the immeasurable pain that overwhelmed her, and yet she couldn't prevent that cup saturated with murky waters called soul from overflowing with the fall of a final drop over its fragile surface.

"Knightess Silverthorn..." Tristessa whispered, unheard.

Astoria brought the tip of the bottle to her mouth and raised her head, half-hidden by her disheveled hair. To drink, forgetting that there was nothing left for her. And she knew it. A futile effort that ended with her throwing the bottle in angry frustration into the darkness of the viaduct, the sound of breaking glass echoing in the distance.

"Shit! Shit..." The silver-haired woman cursed at the dark stone ceiling and brought her right hand to her face, covering her gaze in shame. The grimace forming across her mouth was one of utter agony, her lip and lower jaw spasming.

Seeing her like this, so defeated and exhausted, an image came to Tristessa's mind: a painting from Earth, of a fallen angel lamenting his fate, cursing the Heavens while weeping tears of burning tar and fire.

"No… Raise your head."

She couldn't see her like that. A deplorable sight like that belonged only to people like herself: pathetic, useless, and without a shred of strength to fight any battle.

"Astoria Silverthorn!" Tristessa's voice echoed throughout the dark corridor, causing the woman in question to suck in her breath and look in her direction, like a frightened child. "Raise your head!"

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Advancing toward her, Tristessa demanded something from someone she didn't know, sustained by a vision manufactured by her imagination. She hoped her words would comfort her, as a reminder that she was that dashing knightess who single-handedly defeated the Ghost Daggers and helped those in need.

She so desired to see her rise from the ashes, to see her spirit restored, and those red, tear-filled eyes filled with determination.

Desire, desire, desire… Just a shellfish desire that overshadowed the cruel reality.

"What the fuck are you doing here?! How dare you follow me?!" Astoria's powerful, rage-filled scream stopped Tristessa in her tracks, her senseless audacity tested, her very foundations shaking. "Who the fuck do you think you are?!"

Astoria had gotten up and was marching toward her, her teeth gritted and those fiendish red eyes bared, like a bloodthirsty predator. Any person with common sense would have sensed the danger; no one would have stayed there; no one who feared for their life.

Or none who was naive enough to believe they weren't in danger. Or stupid enough. And Tristessa was both.

"Astoria, I…?!?"

By the time Tristessa realized what was happening, fingers as strong as steel pincers grabbed her by the neck. She got lifted in the air as if she weighed no more than a feather.

With inhuman strength, Astoria carried the girl without letting go of her to the opposite wall. She cornered her against it with a hard blow that made the bones in her back and the back of her skull crack.

"Ugh…!" A warm flow began to run down her back, from her head to her hip. "A-Astoria!"

"Be silent!"

The next second, her windpipe closed. Her lungs, deprived of oxygen. Between the stabbing, localized pain she felt and the lack of air, Tristessa started to see everything darkened, upside down. But even in that dangerous circumstance, where lines of blood were beginning to flow down her back, she didn't lose hope of making that woman see reason.

To make her see that she was her heroine. She had to be. Because good people were heroes. They were perfect. They were beautiful, angelic beings, with souls full of light, with Grace…

Without Discord, without Darkness, without despairing in the face of adversity, without fearing Death even if it was staring you in the face.

"Don't even think about opening your mouth about what you saw! Do you understand?!" the violent woman bellowed, squeezing with such strength that her fingers were beginning to pierce the skin of his neck. "Don't tell a soul! Don't you fucking dare, or I swear I'll kill you! Come on, swear on your miserable life!"

For that, Astoria released Tristessa's throat, allowing air to flow and her to cough violently, but she locked her fingers around the neckline of her dress to keep her in place. The grip hurt, the fabric cutting under her armpits and into the nape of her neck, forcing her to grab Astoria's wrist with both hands and try to wrest for her freedom.

But irrationality was predominant there, underground. Drunk, the blonde woman wouldn't allow her to escape until she swore she'd never seen her cry, and Tristessa's delirium seemed to have no end: even there, she didn't fear for her life, and only for the wrong reasons. She still believed that behind that face so overflowing with hatred, there was an honorable and kind person.

"W-why the fuck do you care about some tears and what some assholes could say about you?!" She asked after finishing coughing, testing the patience of the already impatient Imperial knightess. "Your name is on the mud already, so forget about that!"

"Bitch, I'm so fucking mad and you're giving me every reason to break all your teeth," the woman threatened, her eyes so wide and wild that she looked like someone who had lost her mind. "Swear you won't tell anyone that…"

"Stop talking nonsense and help me, will you?! The Coven is going to murder the Mercer-Archeos family if you don't help me stop them! Or don't you feel sorry for defenseless people?! Don't you feel sorry for a child like the one you saved this morning?!"

Tristessa's screams echoed throughout the sewer system, losing strength and intensity before reaching the ears of anyone paying attention on the streets.

This place offered those two women the privacy they hadn't had at Roundtable. Only, instead of beer and wine, there were tears and blood. And instead of affectionate caresses and sweet words, there was indiscriminate violence and threats of Death.

"You're... You're ridiculous! Mercer-Archeos? Do you think I can feel pity for the fate of an exiled family?" the knightess asked in a small voice, holding back the fire of hatred that sought to turn her to ash from within. "Feel pity for a family that gave birth to the perpetrator of the Massacre of the Endless Night?!"

"Y-yes, I know you can!"

"You don't know shit about me!"

"N-no, I don't... But there has to be a reason why you help those in need. Why you helped that wounded child, or that starving woman with her sick child... Or myself."

Speaking of all those beautiful, gentle, and selfless actions made Tristessa stop struggling to break free and bring her hands to Astoria's face. She stopped her tears with her fingers, trusting that this gesture would transform all that lack of understanding and pain into the courage of the heroine she saw…

A heroine that doesn't exist.

"Fuck you." Astoria rejected her, shaking her head to remove her hand and pressing harder against the wall, stimulating the open wounds on Tristessa's back that made her moan in pain. "Getting all sweet to make me drop my guard… Honestly, fuck you, you illegal little bitch."

"A-Astoria!"

"I don't know what fantasy you have inside that head, but you have no idea who I am," she told her, wanting to shatter her illusions with cold and hard words. "You don't know why I do what I do. You don't have the slightest fucking clue about anything, and if you really believe that, then you're fucking insane!"

Her words were daggers, cutting through all the hope Tristessa struggled to keep from crumbling. Astoria was making it so difficult… So difficult it was even irritating.

"Stop saying that! I can see you're a good person!"

"Shut up…"

So much insistence on denying her perfect vision. Going against her when she was so sure she was right because there was an ideal example of the antithesis of what Astoria Silverthorn represented, right there, right now.

No better example of a woman as despicable and useless as herself.

"Or are you going to tell me you help everyone only to feel good about yourself?!"

With her shouted question, Tristessa spoke from the depths of her heart. Words she had been afraid to say, but now, in that small corner of Entrana reserved for them, she could get them out of her chest, without thinking about the possible consequences.

"You want to save people so you'd stop feeling like a piece of shit, like me?! Are you like that too?!"

"SHUT UP!"

This time, the entire fairy tale Tristessa had created out of pure delusions went up in flames when Astoria's right fist sank into her abdomen. Her inner muscles twisted upon the massive pressure, to the point of getting almost ripped apart and stimulating vomiting.

"Agh...!"

Tristessa leaned forward to throw up the mixture of vomit and blood that had accumulated at the base of her throat. She had no way of seeing beforehand that the same fist was being directed towards her face, slamming into its center.

The dream castle where that honorable and heroic blonde knightess ruled collapsed. Demolished and broken, like Tristessa's skull before the impact of such a strong punch and the counterforce of the wall behind her.

That powerful, opposing combination caused her nose to turn into a spray of particulate blood. Astoria's knuckles turned her gums into oversaturated sponges of blood and soon flooded her mouth with an iron taste.

And her right eye partially popped out of its socket, not in its entirety by a miracle.

"Ha...ha…bitch...!"

Blood and vomit bathed Astoria's face, infinitesimal red and brown drops that boiled like the most repulsive and disgusting rain. And the worst part was that this knightess —that example of an honorable person who sought to protect the citizens of the Empire— was smiling with satisfaction. As if she had finally given that annoying and stupid girl what she deserved…

"…"

Tristessa hadn't even had time to scream before the avalanche of agonizing pain that descended upon her. Threads of blood trickled down the wall, the source of that deep cut on her head, the source of the concussion that altered her perception of everything. Astoria had let go of her, and she fell almost unconscious, her already badly injured head hitting the cold, wet floor.

"Uhh... ugh..." Blood and bile bubbled from inside her half-open mouth. Noxious foam finding their way to the outside. In the same way, thin lines of blood ran from inside her nostrils. Also from around her nearly popped-out eye, completely red and swollen, through which she could only see a dark blur. "Ahh..."

Her body was seized by spasms, from her feet to her arms. She couldn't move anything at will, could do nothing to ease the unbearable agony that coursed from her abdomen to her entire head. And the little reasoning ability she had left was only focused on the eye that was intact: she saw the blonde knightess take several steps back, moving away from her and her countenance changing radically.

"Ahhh…ahh…!" Between babbles that were meant to be screams, Tristessa trembled nonstop and felt a constant sense of vertigo. Her head wouldn't stop bleeding, as her face did. Her mind tricked her into vanishing into nothingness and staying awake, amidst so much pain flowing from all sorts of confusing directions. "…"

Illuminated by the artificial light on the wall, she saw Astoria's satisfaction fading along with the intoxication, giving way to a sense of awe and a lack of understanding of what had just happened.

She ran her hands over her face and saw all that blood and drops of puke staining her trembling palms.

"N-No…no, no, no…" Astoria muttered repeatedly, indescribable terror washing over her. Now that she was aware of her actions, without the influence of alcohol, she saw without barriers what she had done to that girl. That civilian, reduced to a semi-conscious body and gravely injured because of her. "I-I didn't want to…! I swear I didn't want to!"

Fear of herself drove Astoria further away, into the darkness, until she turned and fled, toward the entrance to the sewers, leaving Tristessa alone, to her fate. With what little consciousness she had left, she tried to reach out a hand toward her fleeting figure, which was soon lost from sight…

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