Breathing heavily on the battlefield, she stood—eyes hazy, blood in her mouth, chest rising and falling like something barely alive yet too stubborn to collapse. The air stank of iron, smoke, burnt skin.
Her boots sank into the flesh of fallen men, sword dragging behind her, leaving a trail through blood and mud as she moved between twisted corpses, not with purpose, not with rage, but with one desperate hope burning in her mind—that she would find him. A body. A scent. A scrap of cloth. Anything.
The thunder of horses echoed in the distance—enemy reinforcements—and still, she moved. Uncaring. If death was on its way, then let it come. Let it break every bone in her body, poison every last drop of blood—but let it happen near him. That would be enough.
Her eyes scanned the mess of limbs and armor, not even blinking anymore, just searching—any sign, even a broken strand of his hair, something to hold, something to die with.
Her fingers trembled, but her jaw stayed locked. Her body wanted to fall, but something inside her refused. That something had his name etched on it.
"Haa… wh…ere…" Her cracked lips parted, the sound more a ghost than a voice, her breath leaving a mist in the cold. Her sword's tip screeched against the ground, dragging along the blood-soaked soil, as if it, too, was tired of the weight it carried.
Her eyes burned from the smoke, but she forced them open. The pain in her limbs was sharp, but her mind only knew one thing now—keep moving, keep breathing, until she saw him.
Swish
The arrow came without warning, punching into her back with such force her body staggered forward. Armor caught it, but the blow shook her lungs.
She spat blood, lips painted red, hand instantly going to her abdomen as another rush of warmth spilled out. She turned—slowly, like something rising from the grave—eyes locking onto the direction the arrow had come from.
Thk
A second one, straight through the shoulder. She jerked, stumbling back, but refused to fall. She had stood alone against three thousand men; what was one more arrow? Her legs shook, vision dimmed, but the hate in her chest kept her alive.
No, not hate—love, twisted into something so desperate it burned like fury. She didn't want to survive. She wanted to see him. That was the only reason she was still standing.
She blinked slowly, eyes landing on three men standing ahead of her, behind them at least a dozen soldiers, and those towering green flags—mocking her, declaring the end.
One of them held a bow. It wasn't just a weapon—it was something cursed, dark. The arrow already strung gleamed unnaturally, tip laced with a blue stone she knew too well.
Arcanic poison. Ranwin Valley. A single graze was enough to kill hundreds of elephants.
"What the hell is this bitch made of?" the archer muttered, eye squinting, voice cold, too calm for a man standing in a field soaked with the blood of his own soldiers.
He looked at her like a mystery, like something wrong, something impossible. The battlefield had gone still.
No groans. No wounded calling out. Just corpses. Too many. All theirs.
He exhaled, then let the string go. No hesitation.
That arrow alone cost more than a kingdom's treasury, but none of them cared anymore.
She wasn't someone they could measure in gold or blood. She had become something else.
Thwack
"Cough… haah… haah… Aven…" His name ripped from her throat as the poisoned arrow sank into her other shoulder. Her body recoiled, lungs catching fire from the inside, and she knew—this was it.
This was where she'd fall.
But still, she clung to that name like it was the last thing she had left.
Her legs gave in. Her body crumbled. But there was no shame in the way she fell—it wasn't weakness. It was weight. Too much of it.
She hit her knees, sword still clenched, the blade digging into the dirt to keep her from collapsing fully.
Blood dripped from her wounds, dark and turning green, veins on her face pulsing with that cursed blue.
Her body was losing. The poison was spreading fast.
The nerves beneath her skin lit up like fire, but she didn't scream. Didn't cry. She just stared ahead, face pale, lips barely parting.
'No... not now... not until, I see him...'
Her crimson hair whipped in the wind, dirt and blood streaking her cheeks. Her jaws were clenched.
Canines poking out. Her body was breaking, but her soul wasn't done.
Not yet.
Then a laugh cut through the silence.
"Oh… haha… so that's why that bastard can't manifest his bloodline when I plucked off his head."
She looked up slowly, and there he stood. One of the three. Armor hiding his face, but golden eyes gleaming like fire behind steel.
The emperor of Rowleia. His presence stung. She recognized that voice. That tone. That arrogance. Her mind blinked—and everything inside her froze.
Her canines retreated. Jaws loosened. Eyes locked. And when the man stepped off the horse, she didn't blink. Didn't breathe.
'Huh?' She just listened again to those words echoing in her skull, twisting through the poison, through the pain.
Because she knew he wasn't talking about anyone else.
He was talking about him.
Her husband.
"Tch… tch… haah…" the Emperor exhaled slowly, a mocking little rhythm in his breath as he tilted his head to the smoke-choked sky, grin forming like it belonged to someone who hadn't lost anything, yet deep inside he knew—something had slipped through his fingers.
"Never thought I'd be impressed by a woman holding a sword rather than her legs…" he muttered, not to her, not to anyone, just to the wind, to the fire still crackling from the half-burnt tents around them.
He wasn't speaking victory. He wasn't tasting triumph. He had taken the duchy, claimed the land, slaughtered armies, but there was something about the way she still knelt—poisoned, bleeding, broken—but not gone, that made the victory feel like ash in his mouth.
He looked at her like a man trying to understand a flame that refused to die out even after being drowned in blood and time. She shouldn't have been there. Her clan had been defeated. She had been branded. Sold.
Her fate written like all the others from the fallen bloodlines—Arcadia's exiled races, nonhuman remnants, born with too much power and too little privilege.
Women like her were never meant to rise. They were meant to be broken. Trained. Bred. Sold into pleasure camps or shackled to thrones as breeders for warriors who could awaken the rare strains of Kundlini through bloodline crossing.
That was the system. That was how things were done. And yet here she was, her own blood betraying every expectation they had.
She hadn't become what they sold her as.
She had become what they feared she could be.
And as she knelt there, sword stuck into the blood-soaked earth like her spine had fused with it, crimson hair curling in the ash-laced wind, her face pale and veins glowing blue from the poison inside, she didn't look like a woman. She looked like memory, rage, and prophecy made flesh.
The Emperor's breath caught in his throat as he took a single step forward, fingers curling around the edge of his helmet. It hissed as he unlatched the locks, one by one, slow and unbothered, the smirk never leaving his lips.
When he pulled it off, his face was carved like a weapon—sharp lines, eyes golden like fire behind obsidian, his skin a deep bronze, sweat streaking through the dust on his cheeks.
His gaze wasn't lustful.
It wasn't even victorious. It was studying her, tracing every cut, every wound, every trembling breath as if trying to memorize what defiance looked like when it refused to die.
"A woman like you…" he murmured, letting the front plates of his armor fall loose, one by one, fingers undoing them like he was undressing not for war, but for something colder. "To be ravaged on a battlefield she won... might just satisfy my taste."
But she didn't flinch. Her arms trembled, her breath rattled, but her spine didn't curve. Her eyes—bloodshot, glazed, yet unblinking—stared straight through his skin, as if she was looking past the man, past the moment, beyond the battlefield itself.
"Haa…" her voice scraped from her throat, low, nearly broken, but steady, "Where is he?"
He blinked once, then let out a low laugh, the kind that held no amusement. "Again? That nerd?" he scoffed, eyes narrowing slightly, and in the space between those two words something shifted in the air. His grin didn't fade, but his body stilled. He closed his eyes for half a breath and inhaled.
The scent didn't belong to the corpses around them.
It was hers.
Her blood.
And it hit him like lightning splitting down his spine. His throat dried. His heartbeat faltered.
Something ancient inside him stirred, rose, and coiled in his chest before sliding downward, tightening in his gut. He opened his eyes fast.
His golden irises glowed as something primal snapped inside him—not lust, not hunger—need. A clawing need that told him what stood in front of him wasn't prey. She was the storm that unmade the order of things. And he had mistaken her for a toy.
She was not something he could have.
She was something he would never be enough for.
But his arrogance still held his tongue. "If you want him that much," he said, reaching into the pouch at his hip with a smirk curling at his lips, "then let's become one… in front of him."
He pulled out a small bag, thick and dark, then tossed it forward. It arced through the air lazily, like nothing important, nothing heavy—but the moment it hit the ground, her breath caught.
The bag moved.
Just slightly.
Enough.
Something slipped from its half-open mouth, a silvery strand fluttering out, light as air but screaming louder than a war horn in her head.
Her blood froze.
Her bones stopped aching.
Her heart cracked open.
"Haah… my Aven…"
His name came out not as a whisper but as a collapse.
Her hands tightened on the sword once more, but before the mind could register it, before any soldier could understand what they just saw, she was no longer on her knees.
Nobody could process it.
Not the soldiers holding their bows, not the generals standing behind the flags, not even the Emperor himself.
One second she was kneeling, poisoned, half-dead.
The next—she was there, a breath away from him, holding the bag with both hands, hugging it like her life, eyes locked on it like the world had narrowed to a single point.
'!?!'
"HIS MAJESTY!"
"Kill her!" someone shouted, and it cracked the silence like thunder tearing the sky.
The horses jolted. Bows raised. Orders flew. Arrows strung tight, a hundred points aimed at her, all ready to release, the instinct of every man on that field screaming the same thing: stop her, kill her, bury her now.
But the Emperor didn't move.
His breath caught. His eyes fixed on her as if he had just seen death itself climb out of its own grave.
She was barely breathing, her body marked with black veins, blood trailing down her arms, poison still crawling through her flesh—but none of that mattered.
"STOP!" he roared, his voice not coming from his throat, but from somewhere deeper—bone, blood, memory. He realized very late that he had fallen for this fire that was flickering near closure.
But it was late... too late; the sky was filled with thousands of arrows.