"ASTARA!" The Emperor's voice tore from his chest, not as a command, not as an order, but as something instinctual—a scream clawed from the depths of a man who, for the first time, realized what he was about to lose.
His eyes flared with something not even he had felt before—a pulse of terror laced with want—and his hand shot forward as the golden insignia of a lion embedded at his throat shimmered, awakening the dormant beast within.
The air split.
A distant hum pierced the battlefield as his aura spiked, thick with predator instinct. From the sky, as if summoned by the pulse of his bloodline, a sword came hurtling down—its black blade tearing through clouds, air, and smoke before it struck the earth with a weight that shattered the ground beneath it.
The impact cracked open stone and bone alike, dust rising like a wave around him as he caught the sheath mid-surge, fingers curling around it with a grip that rippled through the broken earth.
Without hesitation, without thought, he spun, his momentum so raw and fast it seemed the ground beneath him lifted with the sheer centrifugal force. His thighs tightened, legs coiling with kinetic energy, and then he leapt—not to escape, not to attack—but to defend.
Arrows rained toward her like black feathers of death, too many, too fast, but he didn't care. He would cut them down, each one, even if it tore his body open.
The woman he never thought he needed… the one whose scent alone now made the blood in his veins crackle with lightning… had just fallen.
Not just fallen—something in her had collapsed. And it wasn't physical.
He had thought she was fire the first time she appeared. But now, watching her like this, holding that cursed bag to her chest, her head lowered, shoulders still, no scream, no cry—only silence—he realized he hadn't seen the real fire at all. Until now. Now he understood what it meant to fear needing someone more than conquering them.
And just as he raised the blade—
He heard it.
Not a scream.
Not a word.
Just a sigh.
"Haah…"
A soft, exhaled breath from her lips, filled with such hollow weight that his entire body froze mid-movement. His ears—sharp enough to catch the stretch of a bowstring, the tremble of metal through wind, the breath of his men in armor—registered nothing else.
Because that single sound, so low and broken, came not from lungs, but from her soul unraveling.
His head turned.
His golden eyes widened.
And there she stood—Astara—holding that blackened bag against her chest as if it were the last warmth left in the world, the silver hair peeking from the bag stained with splashes of blood, her eyes fixed on the ground.
Yet around her, the battlefield changed. Something unseen stretched outward from her skin, like the space around her began to pulse, thicken, fold into silence.
Her breath shuddered again.
Just once.
And with it came a crack in her being.
Her eyes, the same eyes that hadn't flinched while slicing limbs, while carving through warriors who begged for mercy, now flickered—not in fear, but in something far worse.
A flinch—not physical, but emotional, as if her entire soul jolted awake with the unbearable weight of what was gone. And then, a red streak fell—not a tear. Crimson. Thick. Slow. Blood.
Drip
It slid from the corner of her eye and struck the silver strands of the hair in her arm, staining it instantly.
Another threatened to follow, but her jaw clenched so tight it looked as if she was trying to crush grief into rage.
Her breath stopped. Her nerves stopped.
Her entire body became one single emotion—boiling anger that came not from vengeance but from complete, soul-twisting loss.
She blamed herself.
If he hadn't sealed his own power for her...
if he had fought at full strength...
if she hadn't been there carrying the disease for which her husband had to give away his bloodline seed...
He would definitely have survived... no, even conquered everything.
This battlefield would have looked different.
The blood might have belonged to someone else. Not him.
Not the man whose head now lay in her arms like a dream shattered mid-sentence.
And then the air changed.
Swoooosh
The wind didn't just shift—it collapsed inward. Like the battlefield had been vacuumed toward her.
Arrows that had nearly reached her body began to warp, slow, hesitate.
The Emperor lunged forward, his body already mid-sprint, golden aura blazing as his hand reached toward her. But it was too late.
Time froze.
And then she screamed.
A sound unlike anything the earth had held before, born from a grief too deep for words and a rage too ancient for language. "Aaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhaaaaaaaaaaa—!"
It wasn't just a scream. It was rupture.
Her ribs bent under the force, neck veins burst, green-lined vines snaked across her skin and exploded in bursts of blood.
Her mouth, her ears, her eyes—all bled as her soul let out a roar it had held for far too long.
She didn't scream with her voice. She screamed with everything she had ever been. Everything she had ever lost.
Everything she held in her arms.
The scream ripped through the air.
And it ripped through her life, too.
"Kurghhh—s-stop—!" The Emperor's voice cracked as his body was thrown backward like a ragdoll.
His heels dragged across the dirt, smashing through the bodies of the dead, shattering bones beneath him as the ground itself split in the wake of the sound. Muscles tore.
Tendons strained. Even his sword—the legendary black-forged blade he'd summoned from the depths of the ocean's abyss—shivered in his grip. The metal trembled like it could break.
And if he was thrown ten paces back—he who was supposed to be the apex—
Then the army behind him was already gone...
"Haaah... haaah… A-Astara…?" Emperor Rudwick's voice cracked like a broken bone, breath collapsing in his chest, and for the first time since he had awakened his beast lineage, he felt fear—not from outside, but within.
Something inside him was recoiling, spasming like a wounded animal retreating from flame.
His breath wouldn't steady. His heart—so trained, so brutal—beat erratically, as if trying to escape his own ribcage.
And the insignia carved onto his neck, that lion-shaped glyph symbolizing royal beast inheritance, pulsed once—then dulled.
It had stopped responding.
He could feel it—his Kundalini, the power that ran through every warrior of the beast race, the primal force that made his people rule over kingdoms with tooth and claw—it wasn't listening anymore. It wasn't following him.
No. Worse—it had turned its back. Like a bloodline rejecting its heir.
The energy he had mastered, tortured himself to command, was now squirming out of reach, slipping through his spine like smoke he couldn't hold.
His chakras, the very source points he had opened through agony and triumph, were closing down, one by one, like iron gates slammed shut by an unseen hand.
The flow that had always bent to his roar, that had fueled wars and bred fear in ten thousand men, was shutting him out.
And deep down, instinct screamed the reason.
Her.
Her scream.
Her vibration.
That sound—born of love, wrath, despair, soul-collapse—it hadn't just echoed across the battlefield; it had short-circuited the very foundation of power in this realm. It was deeper than voice.
It was frequency. It was command carved into the bones of existence itself. And it tore through his energy reserves not like a storm—no, storms he could resist.
This... this was annihilation coded in feminine grief. It didn't destroy with fury.
It unmade.
And then came a voice, not of Astara, but from her body.
"She is already dead."