The Reborn Witch had a nice 'Tea Time' with the Dragon Queen today
Chapter 64: Bloodfall Requiem

Chapter 64: Bloodfall Requiem

Manasseh clutched the black-root ball at her hand to her chest as she stumbled herself through the street, the marbles on her step indicating her closeness to the mansion, as the vampire’s sought of an end was finally, finally within sight.

The gate was a taunting metaphor for humanity’s purge on vampires and for vampires’ humiliation as a predator being cast out. Manasseh chuckled, finding it funny that she would retain rooms for sentimentality.

If only Alice had attacked sooner...would she have embarked on this useless journey for her clan’s recovery? If the anomaly that is the hero’s boundless strength was readied against her clans before she was born, would she still witness the rosery reds of her mother’s coffin, here to release her people’s corpses to rest a proper death, here to only awaken them again for her selfish desires not to ’waste her sacrifices’?

Yet her lips merely curled up, each tissue of her cheek’s movement smiled a hatred that no longer burns but instead embers in desperation, each fribre of her muscle creaked a disgust that no longer coils but boils a comfort she has grown tired of despising.

Perhaps this is what humans call fate. Manasseh sighed as she grasped open the gate, to avenge, to end, to cower before her despair caught up to her.

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I never learn a mansion could be so peaceful, even under a catastrophic disaster. Adrei remarked as she tapped the hallways with her scepter, each step sinking her plump waist further, yet her bones cackled with newfound vigor as her hair was stranded grey-green instead of pure whiteness, signs of corruption leaving behind the elder, as an avenger within an empty husk.

Each step was a measured delay for the inevitable, yet also a precise hurriedness as a protector of Rouen. She knew she was coming, from the benigned’s whispering in the gust, flowery sweetness ever licking at her lips, even with the drippling malice and promise of vengance souring her numbness of the mind.

And so, she arrived before the backdoor. Opening it revealed not a garden, but a mere wasteland of forlorn ashes and ice glitters, small arcs of ungrown flowers tinting a small hint of return to life on the ground, even after witnessing divine destructions, as a particular rune still pulsed red on the dead soil, weeping? No, it didn’t weep, it merely waited, not for assurance, but for acceptance of whatever the result might be, just as Adil did now, and....

Adi’s slitted eyes darted forward, a familiar red-head crawling her exhausted steps among the wasteland, her figure charred as her guts steamed a sign of burning, a survivor against the onslaught of the Dragon Queen. The Ice-witch’s old friend, Adil, found a strange sense of kinship from the red-haired, the redness once again pulling her into an abyss that has yet to be fully cast away, as the protector of Rouen stepped away from her mansion’s parchment, her step on the dead soil a declaration to enter the sleeping grounds of collesium.

"You have arrived." The protector merely stated, her disgraced plump figure wobbling, bandages’ gaps showing signs of cuts and holes unrecovered, yet they were but a mere inconvenience, compared to her family’s haunting smiles were staring right back her.

"I have, Disgraced Druid of the Evergreen. I indeed...have." Decades of findings, the shock of learning about her family’s massacre, and the taboo of dissecting her own kins’ corpses....it all arrived before this point, facing the Druid in her entirety, vessals embedded with her enemy’s mana in a harmony she oh-so despised. The gargolyte’s distraction was her last chance, for sacrifice, for her kins, for her mother.

Adil frowned at the sight of veined blues, leylines that crawled from the vampire’s pupils, corrupting her in her vampirity. She sighed as she called for the roots from the soils, signs of lushness returning among blackened barks. A coated happiness tinging at her soul, as the redness begged her to mock at the tainted blue that sullied the vampire’s red, yet no more strengths could be found, but instead merely silence.

Two Avengers. Two marches for their families. Two are united under blue tints of fogs tailored for a stage. Two are shared under the taints of reds sullied for a weep. And only one...may remain, only one may be called true justice if the other dies, only one could sink further into emptiness that is now their meaningless, hollowed, undeserving revenge.

And so, there is no longer needs for any exchange, as roots and silked claw dashed for one another, the Druid’s slit eyes met tainted blues, as root impaled into into the vampire’s shoulder, only for it to curl into silks as the blue eyes dashed forward, ever staring a bottomless abyss that is not even her target of revenge.

The vampire bolted as a silken claw sunk into the rooted wall, cracks of bark flew just as she lowered her hip for the other root’s swing before curling further into a summersault on the ground, her palms hurling iced nets.

Adil narrowed her sight as her root slapped away the net. Roots meet iced silks for a right swing, only for Adil scowling at her root now iced with another as the net stretched on and latched on another bark. Her ears echoed of another dash as she glanced back at Manasseh’s outstretched claw, at a hair’s breath for her eye, but a simple thud on her chin by a root underneath interrupted, along with the ’webbed roots’ swinging that met her waist to send her flying with a gasp, neons of blue flowing as if to retell a the party trick that failed to hinder the druid’s roots.

Orchids, not of teeth but of unborn blooms, flew for Manasseh as the vampire swiped them out mid-air before landing, before dashing again to meet roots. Right claws meet left swings then a left meets right. A balanced duel of dancing claws and roots, both left with what remains they could scatter in their abyssal hatred to fight, both exchange of wills pierced into skins and barks.

Admist the swarms of swings and claws, however, Manasseh’s lungs burned of exhaustion, her muscle tore through another bark as her arm...quivered, that single quiver was judged by a clentch from coiling barks on her skin. Her lungs twiched against her drumming heartbeats as her other arm braced herself before she was hurled into the air, with several spiked roots darting out to impale her. Manasseh gritted her teeth as silks coiled into her body, yet Adil has waited for it for a long time before branches springing up from the spiked woods, leaves falling as the spikes stabbed through the silks.

Yet the silks stilled, as the disguised leaves toiled into vines that bound the silk together in a bundle. Trembling, the silken body slipped away and reformed Manasseh, only for her back to meet another impaling.

The blood soaked from Manasseh’s stomach as she gasped, her regenerative ability already at its limit when against the Dragon Queen, as she was slammed back down to the ground. Her lungs once again seered into her the limits of a half-human vessal. Adil’s slit eyes merely sighed, an unbefitting end for the last vampire, crawling on the ground not in defeat but struggles, yet never in tune with her lost purity as a noble.

She recalled the autopsy reports, remembering she found no sympathy or disgust behind the vampire’s act. Yes....the druid merely read. As if they were duties to be fulfilled, yet the very mundaneness puzzled the druid, for she found herself no longer bound to the hatred that once defined her and her entirety as Rouen’s founder and protector, so...even Manasseh’s writhing on the ground yielded no flames in her heart, nothing but a hollow, necessary work for another day as a protector, even with the tinge of salt at its edge.

But not everyone can let go of hatred that once throughly defined them, as Manasseh’s disgustingly pulsing heart urged her to breath a human’s air, a human’s pity, a human’s...mercy. This....this half-human body was all that she was left with, and if it means the layered costs finally had a deserving revenge, liberation, and destruction against Adil’s town, the merchant would grasp at the deal without a single doubt. That is her final duty as a fallen noble without even a sliver of vampirity, and her final act before she succombed to Alice’s mana entirely.

So, she allowed the damning, despairing heartbeats swelling once again, Alice’s mana consumming all in her entirety. Bones marrowed and screamed, as her eyes saw only blue tears of scorching pain. Every fibre, every skin, every drop of blood pumped of Alice’s power, as the leylines casted from her pupils answered to her.

And, as if on instinct, a <tale> was sung from her lips, for the chorus of pain and cycle of hatred ever taunting.

"I wept a bloodfall of ashes and skins."

And so the ground tremored, not in hope, but in desperation for a release from hell.

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