Tristessa had crashed back against the wall, but she never broke eye contact with Auron: she watched uninterrupted as his gaze filled with sudden pain, before the shadow that had fallen from above tackled him onto the floor.

"AURON!" the girl shrieked, seeing the small back of the hooded, female-shaped assassin. In deep silence, she pulled the knife from the gunslinger's shoulder with a hand that looked like claws because of those black, sharp nails of hers. Auron cried out in pain, and the assassin brought the knife down on him, determined to kill him. "NOOO!"

Auron was forced to drop his revolvers and immobilize both assassin's hands by locking his fingers around her wrists. The wound on his shoulder continued to spurt blood, and he slowly began to lose the battle, the tip of the knife getting closer and closer to his sweaty, pain-filled face…

"ATTRACTOR!"

Severus's roar charged with magical energy conjured two elemental gravity glyphs around the assassin. They halted her murderous intent, but not for long.

"ESCANT! Help him, Tessa!" the blood elf begged, struggling to maneuver the already weary Vilecross Milla and launching magical ice spears at the assassins to keep them away from the stagecoach. "Escant! Escant! Tessa, please!"

"I-I... I don't..."

Tristessa couldn't stop trembling. Her gaze dropped to her waist, where Jin's hunting knife waited, eager to be used. By just taking it out of it sheath and grasping it tightly between her fingers, the first echo of Viktor Emma bathed her in that small influence of inherited skill.

"Ah… I can't… I can't, I can't…" she sobbed, feeling her fingers melting around the knife handle and her bloodshot gaze fixed on the assassin's back. Her heart seemed about to stop on a halt, from beating so fast. "N-no…"

"Are you going to kill us? What, do you want to get even with us for your dead boyfriend?"

Tristessa began to hear a new voice in her head, feminine and youthful, perhaps the same age as her. A voice accompanied by laughter, mocking and filled with the impertinence of someone addressing her as if she were trash.

A voice that generated almost the same inhuman anger as when she heard Selene Irandell's voice.

"Go ahead, do it. Do it, pussy! You don't have the guts! Not you and neither that useless four-eyes loser! One less useless person in this world! Thanks for dying, Mr. Boyfriend!"

With her body flooded with rage, with every neuron in her brain burning with hatred, it was easy enough to throw herself at the assassin and plunge the knife into her back. The fabric of the tunic she wore gave way, and the protective plate beneath would have helped halt her advance if not for the force and firmness granted by Viktor Emma's echo, which helped Tristessa overcome even that barrier, without relying on her poor physical strength.

She felt the copper blade tearing through skin, slicing easily through the thin layers of muscle, cutting through the fibrous strands and grazing the hardness of ribs, scraping their sides. She even felt the assassin's body tense, wanting to move away from the danger, but the gravity glyphs wouldn't allow it.

They gave Tristessa clear path to pull out the knife, tearing flesh in its path as it returned to the surface, and plunge it back in near the same spot. And then again. Once more. More and more times, while countless drops of blood sprayed in all directions.

"...!"

The girl didn't realize at any moment that she was biting her lips to the point of bruising them. All that hatred stemming from memories trapped in the depths of the dark sea that was her mind made her insensitive to that pain, and any other emotion caused by all the wounds she was inflicting on the assassin. Since she had never started counting, there was no way of knowing how many times she stabbed her. But soon the effect of the gravity glyphs wore off, and Tristessa withdrew the knife for the last time, receiving a splash of blood on her face, covered in infinitesimal drops.

The assassin remained still in that same position, sitting on top of Auron's legs. Her head was bowed, motionless, and her back was completely wet from the dozens of lines of blood that flowed steadily from the wounds.

"Ah...ah..." Tristessa's breath came in ragged gasps, and she felt the ferrous taste of her own blood and the assassin's in her mouth. In the air, intoxicating, entering her lungs. She looked down and saw the knife, its blade completely covered in blood. Voices from the past were no longer influencing her actions, allowing her to react in the most logical way. "Ah!?"

She dropped the hunting knife to the floor, this time having fulfilled its purpose, and watched in horror as Auron let the assassin's body fall to the side, her poisoned knife still clutched in her two hands.

She was dead. The assassin was dead. Tristessa had just killed a human being.

Her mouth tasted like iron, and her throat held the flavor of something rotten that wanted to come out of her. The smell of Death, a smell so prevalent lately, only this time she had inflicted it herself. A sensation of filth, impurity, corruption, running through every inch of her body, every cell of her existence, and reaching the deepest corner of her tortured soul.

And worst of all, that unholy sensation was not unfamiliar to her…

"L-lady…hey, lady…"

Auron was calling her. Tristessa was able to emerge from the shock thanks to him, able to hear again the sound of the chaos unleashed around her, feel the wind against her face, and think more coolly than she could under the chains of that chaotic mix of emotions inside her.

"Auron!" She went to his side and wiped her bloody hands as best she could with her dress before trying to check the condition of the wound he'd received: in addition to the continuous expulsion of blood, there were clots accompanied by foam. The effect of the poison, rapidly destroying his insides. "What do I do?!"

"I-I don't think you can do...anything against...this," he said with extreme weakness tainting his voice.

A voice that was fading, and Tristessa had to grab the sides of his covered face to get him to react.

"Come on, don't you have poison antidote in your jacket or something?! Tell me!" Without waiting, she dared to reach for the folds of his jacket and open them. To her surprise, she found nothing but the vest and shirt he was wearing, covered in cold sweat. "B-but where is everything?! Your ammunition, the documents, the map..."

"It doesn't matter… It doesn't matter anymore…" Blind, the gunslinger searched for Tristessa and managed to grab her arm. "You have to… help Severus… The wraiths… You…"

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"What am I supposed to do?! I don't… I…"

Slowly, her outburst faded away, faced with the dark presence making itself felt thanks to her [Divinity of Accursed Existence]. She felt the assassin's corpse calling for her attention, as if it were sending her constant signals from the other side. Indications that it was ready to do her bidding...for a price.

That assassin was lost in darkness. Tristessa only had to turn on the false, dark light and project an imitation of Life within her.

"…Arise."

The assassin's body twitched, returning to life as, simultaneously, the burden imposed by her Divinity and the transcendental hatred of her victim's fractured soul fell upon Tristessa's shoulders.

"Ugh! F-fuck!" she moaned, forced to bring a hand to her temple as she felt the strain on her own soul, dozens of times more powerful than when she reanimated Katriel Strauss's corpse. A pain that went beyond flesh and bone, flooding her very being and drowning her in dread. It compressed her being to the very core, wanting to shatter her into a thousand pieces. "I-I can't... It's too much."

"..."

The wraith rose from the ground, her back gushing blood from all the wounds, and looked at her killer, turning her head. Her mask bore a drawing of a black raven across her right cheek, and the unnatural darkness no longer blocked her vision: Tristessa could see her yellow eyes stained with bloodstains, weeping unceasingly.

She couldn't growl, or scream, or speak. But she communicated to the gray-eyed girl a desire that transcended Life and Death. The desire to finish her work, with that poisoned knife stained with Auron's blood, clutched firmly in her right hand.

"Attack the other wraiths!" Tristessa commanded in her mind, her face reddening and clenching her teeth tightly to resist the strain. She could feel blood flowing inside her body from the wounds her soul manifested in the material plane as a sign of her spiritual agony, and soon all that blood would seek out holes to escape. "Kill them!"

"…"

Unable to refuse the command, subdued by the dark connection between them, the assassin—now a revenant—turned her back and walked straight toward the destroyed edge of the coach, which had already lost much of its speed.

"Escant! Ah…d-dammit! I can't take it anymore!" Severus warned, weakness marked in his voice. "And neither can Milla… I'm sorry, cutie."

The Vilecross dragged her legs, the poison coursing through her body and bringing her closer to the brink of death. Inevitably, the stagecoach stopped, and the bipedal demon let out one last roar of pain before falling forward, one knee to the ground, too tired to continue.

The other two remaining assassins had emerged from the forest, now that Severus had stopped using his thaumaturgy due to magical fatigue. There was no escape for their targets, and they dismounted from their aracrosses and advanced on foot, ready to meet their companion waiting for them atop the ruined transport.

But they stopped at the same time, analyzing the scene and the implications of what they saw with those eyes sunken into darkness that not even sunlight could break through.

"Stormcrow," said the assassin with the thorny net drawn on his mask, his masculine voice so guttural it was chilling to hear.

"Stormcrow," said the assassin with the spinnarak drawn on her mask too, her feminine voice just as monstrous as her companion's.

The two wraiths understood that there was something wrong and attacked the one called Stormcrow with inhuman speed, throwing the knives they were holding. She not only let the knives sink into her torso to protect her invoker but then leaped into the air and counterattacked in kind, throwing her knife straight at the assassin with the thorn-themed mask.

The man wasn't fast enough, and the blade sank into his chest, at the level of his heart. Stormcrow gracefully fell beside him, wrenched the knife from his chest, and used it to slash his throat open from end to end, beneath his mask. The assassin tried to raise his hands, but his entire body collapsed under its own weight, as the torrent of blood flowed from his opened neck.

"Kill the other one!" Tristessa mentally ordered the revenant, her brain on fire and liquid heat flowing from the inside of her nose. "Don't let her get away!"

She shouted the last thing with all her might when she saw that the assassin with the spinnarak-themed mask had deflected the trajectory of the blade Stormcrow had thrown at her with one of her own knives and had begun to run in the opposite direction, toward the two aracrosses waiting in the distance.

"The nerve…to turn your back on…a gunslinger."

Suddenly, a series of gunshots stunned Tristessa: Auron had stood beside her, his two pistols raised, smoke escaping from inside the barrels, and his partial face pale and succumbed to extreme tiredness.

The hollow-point bullets shattered the assassin's spine and several ribs, causing her to collapse, her body raising up dirt from the road and convulsing.

Until she stopped moving, dead at last. All the assassins were dead.

"Grr…!"

Without masters to command them, the aracrosses roared with bloodlust and began to run in the direction of the stagecoach. Auron readied himself with his pistols and Tristessa was going to command Stormcrow with the little spiritual energy that still emanated from the center of her chest, but something else happened: Milla passed by, trotting and letting out a roar of war, going intro crash course against the two beasts.

"That's my girl!" Severus celebrated, as the vilecross intercepted one of the beasts with its giant hand and threw it with all her might against a tree, turning the wooden surface into a mess of splinters and guts.

The other managed to dodge Milla's claws but did not expect the clever demon to use her foot to throw dirt in its snout, blocking both its sight and smell. Milla didn't waste the opportunity and, using the same foot, kicked the aracross so hard that it flew to the other side of the road with its head twisted at an abnormal angle.

When it fell, the beast never got back up, and Milla collapsed on her knees, weak and whining.

And she wasn't the only one in deep anguish….

"Ah, fuck! FUCK, it hurts...! It hurts so much! Stop it!" Tristessa screamed, ravaged by the pain emanating from her soul, which turned into blood that flowed relentlessly from broken capillaries and internal micro-tears of muscle fibers. "E-enough!"

She wanted to nullify the effect of her Divinity, but it no longer responded to her command.

"A-Auron... Sev... help me!"

She lost control of the revenant. The connection was cut, but that wraith was still standing, and now its focus was on its resurrector… Those yellow eyes, a reflection of Death in Life, desperate to kill.

"Plasmos!"

Severus had responded to Tristessa's call by summoning an excessive amount of blood from the dead bodies of wraiths and their mounts, and even his own after he puked under the painful spiritual strain. Dozens upon dozens of blood spheres floated and orbited around him, their presence making his hair shine like a waterfall of fire behind him.

"Fahreus Plasmos!" he yelled, pointing his wand at the assassin and manifesting a halo of crimson glyphs at his feet that allowed the division of the blood spheres into a myriad of lesser ones, yet deadlier thanks to all the kinetic energy they were gaining by spinning around Severus at even higher speed.

"…"

Stormcrow didn't move at all. She raised her hand in Tristessa's direction and pointed her index finger at her. For the first and only time, her eerie, grim voice made itself known, uttering a single word that all three could hear:

"Stranger."

In the next instant, the glyph of blood thaumaturgy collapsed over itself and the skies over their heads darkened before a lethal crimson rain that fell over the assassin.

Stormcrown's porcelain mask shattered into hundreds of pieces, followed by the skull in a bomb of atomized gore. Eyes, tongue, and teeth flew through the air, and then the rest of her body followed. Flesh and bones torn to shreds, pulverized alongside organs whose contents splattered around, mixing with the rain of blood.

The grassless earth to the nearest trees, all stained in dark red. Nothing was left of Stormcrow's body, not even her clothes. Not even her shattered mask.

Thus, after so much unexpected and deadly chaos, the silence of a peace plagued by Death and blood reigned.

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