"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 fool?" 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.