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Chapter 95: Second Petal of Profanity
🕑 Added 2025-07-23 13:00:18 +0000 UTCLazmer’s nerves tattered more with every second he sat beneath the weight of Baku’s shadow.
The sky above Hazy Mountain remained broken, heavy with monochrome clouds. But beneath them, something else crept in. Small, invisible threads unraveled through the cracks, unseen by most but undeniable to one man standing there.
Baku’s eyes lowered. Not to Lazmer’s face, but to something floating above his chest.
Lazmer couldn’t see it. But he instinctively felt it.
Something cold. Something sharp. Wrapping tighter with every breath he took.
It felt like a noose. Or a needle sewing itself into his bones.
With the subtle stitch of… [Delirium].
Baku sighed. His fingers moved to his sword with the ease of familiarity.
Click
The half-draw was silent, but the world responded. The unseen thread snapped, gone without a trace.
Lazmer gasped. His vision swam as the pressure lifted all at once. Whatever was coiling around his soul… retreated.
Baku sheathed his sword again with another quiet click.
Noh never stopped playing her shamisen. Her fingers drifted lazily across the strings, coaxing idle melodies from the wood. “You drew your blade for nothing.”
Baku snorted. “Not nothing.”
His heel pressed harder against Lazmer’s chest, grounding him into the dirt as though reasserting the order of things.
“One of Hannya’s threads.” Baku said the words as if they were obvious. “Her Tenet’s touching everything alive on this mountain, connected to whoever is stuck in that nightmare of a domain. That was meant for him.”
Noh’s painted smile tilted. “A little quick to cut it, aren’t you?”
Baku grunted. “You know we need him breathing. The kid’s strings are for tying up loose ends. This one’s still useful.”
Lazmer’s lungs strained beneath Baku’s weight. His mind reeled.
Threads? Tenet? Strings?
Was that what he felt? The suffocating grip around his chest moments ago?
And… if Baku hadn’t cut it…
His stomach turned.
Baku stepped off him without warning, letting Lazmer curl into the dirt, coughing. He crouched beside him next, arms resting lazily on his knees.
“Alright. Noh.” Baku’s tone shifted. “You’ve been watching this longer than I have. What’ve you figured out?”
Lazmer blinked up at her, mind struggling to keep up. Why ask her?
Noh smiled as she tilted her head.
“Well, Acedia went rogue.”
“That much was obvious.” Baku waved a hand.
“Oh, sorry. Acedia didn’t go rogue.”
Noh corrected herself with a soft chuckle, turning her gaze to Lazmer. “Just you did.”
Lazmer’s blood ran cold.
“You went rogue from within,” she continued, fingers never halting their lazy plucking at the shamisen’s strings. “The Dream Faction agreed to your earlier ambitions, didn’t they? In theory. Take the fissure, monopolize the cores, use them to push your experiments on Somnus and his mythical blood. A fool’s errand, but desperate factions often humor ambitious men.”
Her smile deepened as Lazmer’s lips pressed thin.
“But this mess…” Noh gestured lazily to the mountain bleeding smoke behind them. “All of this wasn’t on their orders. This was you. Trying to corner the market, as it were.”
Baku’s grin didn’t fade.
“You wanted to carve off your own little piece of history. Build your future, your own personal devils from stolen cores and the blood of a sleeping supreme.”
Lazmer said nothing. The truth hung too heavily between them now.
Noh sighed as if disappointed in a poor student.
“But there’s a hand behind all this, isn’t there? This wasn’t born from your ambition alone. Someone whispered this dream into your ear. Like they did to the others that joined you on your first failed mission.”
She tilted her head, letting her hand drift across her instrument. She was right, shadow demons weren't the only participants in the original plan to take the mountain. Other factions had been present, strange for so many to work together against a senile old devil and a humble mountain.
And stranger still, none had pursued further investigation, and no others backed his actions now.
Though Caldeon had suggested this maneuver, what pushed him to accept and gamble was the encouragement from them.
“And I can guess why.” Noh continued.
Baku quirked a brow. “Oh?”
Noh gave a soft hum. “Because of what the Dream Faction did to half their own Archons. To their elder council...And to little Lazmer here.”
Lazmer’s heart seized.
She didn’t say what had been done.
But his silence was answer enough.
Baku’s laughter rolled beneath the clouds like distant thunder.
“Ohhh… now it’s starting to get good.”
Lazmer swallowed hard. “How? How do you know…”
Her finger snapped with a soft pluck of strings. “Because I saw it myself.”
Lazmer’s mind recoiled. Memory clawed its way up from dread, the unsealed black scroll in the vault. The strange seal seamlessly re-applied. The faint haze of dream pollen leaking from its edges.
He’d thought Hannya. Of course he had. She was the most suspicious, the last visitor.
But he’d been wrong.
The quiet musician before him had been there too, and she was the one.
The Painted Devil.
Baku’s grin widened as understanding dawned on Lazmer’s paling face. “Ohhh… You didn’t even suspect, not even a bit?”
Lazmer’s mouth turned dry as sand.
He wasn’t just trapped. He’d been dancing to a tune written before this siege even began.
Baku rose again, hand resting casually on his sword. Another soft click.
“Relax. You’re not dying yet.”
Lazmer’s throat burned. “Why?...” If they had so much information on the dream faction, what use was he?
“Because I’m curious.” Baku’s smile bared teeth this time. “About who you’re really working for.”
Lazmer’s chest constricted.
No one would be coming to save him now. Not from this mountain. Not from these monsters.
Lazmer began to wonder if even his mysterious masters had misjudged who, exactly, they had decided to provoke.
And somewhere high above, unseen threads began to weave tighter across the battlefield.
~~~
Within the burning halls of Hazy Mountain, Sawyer stood alone, bloodied and breathless. His sword trembled in his grip, body aching from wounds he no longer felt.
Twenty Dream Faction soldiers surrounded him, men who had kicked in his door without warning, catching him without armor, forcing him to fight in nothing but tattered clothes and Iron will.
Behind him, crouched behind a flipped table, his wife, nine months pregnant, watched in terrified silence. Her swollen belly pressed tight against her dress.
Sawyer couldn’t falter. Not while she watched.
He raised his sword again, ignoring how his knees threatened to buckle. His breath was iron in his throat.
“Come then.”
…
But they didn’t move.
One by one, the soldiers’ blades lowered.
Faces slackened. Eyes lost focus.
They simply… stopped.
“What the hell…”
Sawyer stepped cautiously forward, sword still raised. He looked at the nearest soldier, vacant, slack-jawed, unmoving.
But behind those blank eyes… he saw something.
A glimmer of life and a flicker of… terror?
Their Consciousness’ still screaming, trapped somewhere beneath the surface.
It sent a chill down his spine.
This wasn’t mercy. This wasn’t sleep.
He looked around. Every soldier was the same. Frozen. Breathing. Terrified somewhere deep inside.
Slowly, he lowered his sword. His heart thumped hard in his chest.
“This… is one of the Young Miss’s abilities, isn’t it?” he muttered, half-relieved, half-dreading the answer.
He almost laughed… Almost.
But some instincts ran deeper than relief.
Somewhere high above, invisible threads pulled these men like dolls, soft strands, delicate as silk, tying them to something vast and unseen.
He couldn’t see them. But he could feel them. The similar laws within his shade demon blood whispered of it.
And from the other end of those threads… something watched.
Something laughed.
Sawyer swallowed hard… before his attention shifted to his wife’s trembling breath behind him.
No. He would not run. Not from this. Not while she still lived.
He lowered his sword fully.
The soldiers didn’t react. Couldn’t react. Not anymore.
“Sleep, then,” he whispered. “If you can.”
Above, petals unseen folded tighter. Threads pulled cruelly taut.
And one by one, the mountain grew silent.
~~~
When Dozeuff awoke, he realized something was wrong immediately.
The sky was too pale. The trees were too symmetrical. The ground beneath his feet held no imperfections, no cracks, no texture of real stone or soil.
An illusion, a crude one.
He scoffed aloud, shame rising bitter in his throat at the memory of his defeat. Not even beaten cleanly, humiliated, toyed with by that woman and her ridiculous puppet.
Still, this? This was insulting.
He flared his chi, letting it explode out of him like a wave meant to rupture the seams of false reality…
But nothing changed.
The trees remained. The air stayed still.
“Fine. Magic then.” He gathered his mana, circulating it through his core in practiced patterns meant to disrupt illusion fields. Break the seams. Find the cracks...
Nothing.
His brow twitched.
Illusions this poorly made shouldn’t stand up to a novice’s attempts to break free, much less his. He had been trained in the Acedia main estate’s advanced dreambreaking arts. A thousand methods existed to tear through false worlds, to claw back to reality.
Why wasn’t this one breaking?
A flicker of unease wormed beneath his pride.
He began walking, trying different techniques, switching between mana and chi.
The forest stretched quiet around him. The pale sky above remained fixed, clouds unmoving. His footsteps felt light, his breath shallow, like he wasn’t quite filling his lungs.
The further he walked, the smaller he began to feel. Not metaphorically, physically.
He paused at a slow-moving river, its water clear enough to reflect his face.
Except it wasn’t his usual face.
A boy stared back at him.
Pale skin. Hollow cheeks. Sickly limbs too thin for strength or pride.
Him. At twelve years old.
Weak. Disgusting. Forgotten, a disappointment too frail to be considered a proper heir.
Dozeuff recoiled, snarling at the reflection, but the boy moved with him, mirrored him, mocked him with hollow, terrified eyes.
“What is this?”
His voice sounded wrong now. Higher. Fragile.
Rage boiled up fast, quick to replace fear. How dare she show him this. How dare she dredge up something so useless, so meaningless from his past.
He turned from the river, fists clenched, steps heavy. He would find the seam of this illusion and tear it apart with his bare hands if he had to.
Then a branch snapped behind him.
He froze.
Slowly, he turned.
There, emerging from between the pale trees…was himself.
His adult self.
Tall, pale, powerful. His scythe rested lazily on his shoulder, teeth bared in a grin too wide, too eager. His eyes gleamed with something sick, something hungry.
“You look better this way,” the older version said, voice slick with cruelty. “Smaller. Easier. Hehe.”
Dozeuff’s heart punched against his ribs.
He didn’t take a single second to think. He knew himself.
So he ran.
Instinct took over. Move, escape, find a way out, any way.
But no matter how fast his small legs carried him, the distance between them never grew.
His older self didn’t even rush. He just walked. Leisurely, patiently.
Knowing he would catch up in time.
Dozeuff’s breathed hard. His lungs burned. His muscles strained beneath a body too young, too weak for this terror.
Behind a large tree, he collapsed to his knees, gasping.
But this false world gave him no respite.
Because above him, something moved.
Clicking. Chittering.
He looked up.
A spider, massive, black, with eyes like dull amethysts and a golden pattern stretched across its swollen back. It loomed over him, it hung upside down from a single, quivering thread, its too-long legs twitching in rhythm as it studied him.
Eight eyes, glimmering with a cruel intelligence, focused on his small, terrified form.
Dozeuff felt his stomach churn. This wasn’t some mindless beast. It understood, and it enjoyed this.
The spider seemed to laugh, a screeching, broken noise like tearing silk.
“Screee! Screee!”
Then it dropped.
Weight crushed down on his chest as its fangs punched through his shoulder without hesitation, sinking deep, pumping venom cold and thick directly into his veins.
Pain flared bright, then numbness rushed in faster, sweeping down his arm, his chest, his legs.
He tried to scream. Nothing came.
Tried to move. Nothing obeyed.
As suddenly as it had come, the spider was gone. Vanished, as if it had never been there at all, leaving behind only the spreading paralysis in its wake.
Dozeuff slumped sideways onto the dirt, breath shallow, heart pounding against ribs that felt too small for terror this big.
Slowly, painfully, his gaze shifted.
The adult version of him knelt beside his paralyzed form now, scythe discarded, fingers brushing his cheek with mock tenderness, smiling with slow delight.
“You should’ve known,” the man whispered, leaning close enough for breath to ghost across his ear. “The hierarchy never changes. You are nothing, We are nothing.”
But his adult version didn’t look disappointed, only pleased…excited even.
Dozeuff’s world shrank beneath the weight of horror.
No power. No pride. No laws of his precious bloodline could save him here.
He knew that now.
The forest leaned in, a silent witness.
And somewhere distant, inevitable, soft laughter cruelly curled through the roots of this place.
“Kiki…nothing.”
~~~
The mountain began to fall silent.
Where once the roar of battle and bombardment echoed across the blackened and colorless sky, there was now only the soft rustle of the narcotic rain thinning to mist. And beneath it… the stillness of corpses.
Or something worse.
Sawyer, sword still gripped in his tired hand, stood frozen in his ruined home. His wife trembled behind him clutching her swollen belly with one hand and his sleeve with the other, breath held as though fearing even the sound would summon death.
But death had already come and went.
The Dream Faction soldiers that had cornered them, 30 strong, slowly reduced to 20, armored and hungry for blood. But now stood like statues around the wreckage of his house. Their blades lowered, their faces vacant. Eyes staring forward but seeing nothing. Mouths agape but making no sound.
He recognized the signs too late.
They weren’t dead. Not yet. But their souls had already been claimed.
One soldier let out a soft, pitiful laugh. A gurgle, more than anything human. Another began to weep, clawing at his face with fingers that peeled away flesh as though searching for something beneath. Bones cracked. Skin tore.
Sawyer stepped forward without realizing it. Horror creeping cold into his marrow.
“What… in the Platform’s name… did that girl… do?”
His words were meant for no one. A prayer to absent gods.
One by one, the soldiers collapsed. Some with quiet sighs. Others screaming. A few simply fell over, still breathing but hollow.
There was no respawn essence from the devils. No swirl of devil core energy to mark their departure. The demons didn’t die normally either. None of their existences ended cleanly, it unraveled as if never properly written into the world’s ledger to begin with.
All across the fractured fortress, it was the same. Reports stammered over comm-crystals, broken, terrified. Devils turning to ash. Demons collapsing in place. Some froze in their final moments, their expressions locked in terror, or bliss, or confused, even mindless awe.
No enemy survived contact with the invisible threads now wrapping the mountain, extended from the source, the soul shattered Dozeuff.
And among Baku’s forces, a single name began to form in whispers. The one behind this sweeping judgment.
Followed by a new title to reflect that might.
The Pink Horror.
A suitable description.
None of them understood the spell. None of them even saw the activation. Only the creeping mist, the black roots, and the shimmer of large, red petals sitting higher up the mountain looming over the evolution chambers.
It wasn’t Baku’s doing. Everyone knew that. His techniques were brutish, direct, cruel in a way that at least made sense. This was something else. A horror wrapped in beauty, smiling while you bled slowly.
To the Dream Knights, only one devil on the mountain fit. Though they would never say it out loud. She had made it clear her image was a priority.
Hannya.
Some began to whisper that she had claimed a forbidden art. Others said she had formed a second Tenet. Some, less informed but no less fearful, believed she had simply awakened what she always was beneath the veil of her rank, a devil born wrong, twisted from the start.
But the name stuck. The Pink Horror. Sweeping silently through the ranks of the Knights cleaning the fortress rubble.
And Hannya?
She laughed a bit.
Softly. Amused. Watching from her seat atop the ruined sanctum steps where she perched like a queen surveying the aftermath of a festival, legs crossed, sword balanced across her lap.
“You hear that?” she mused aloud, though, no one was near enough to answer. “Pink Horror. Hmph. Unimaginative.”
She could hear them all clearly from the spot she sat. Her hearing now beyond the limits of mere mortals.
Her gaze slid over the battlefield, savoring the results. The threads snapping one by one as their anchors expired. Her expression relaxed, content, faintly smug in a way that bled through her usual regal facade.
She felt Body and Soul closer than ever now. Their whispers blending into her own.
‘Pink suits me.’
‘Terrible name though.’
‘Well, either way, they’ll kneel to it in time.’
Their thoughts threaded through her like silk through a needle’s eye. One opinion popping up one after the other.
Slowly, she leaned forward, exhaling through parted lips, watching a last soldier claw himself into ribbons in the distance.
“Oh well… It’s not the worst title I’ve earned.”
She pressed her palm against the damp stone beneath her, feeling the warmth of blood not her own seeping into her skin.
The battlefield was hers now.
Not through strength or force alone. But through mystery. Through the slow, creeping truth that none of them could understand what she had done, only that it worked.
Through Terror.
She would let the rumors fester. Let them paint her in whatever colors they pleased.
Her prestige would only rise.
A soft click sounded as she resheathed her blade.
Soon, Salitha approached. Stepping carefully across the ruined stone.
“Lady Hannya,” she whispered, her voice cracking. “Thank you. You didn’t have to come, but you did. You didn’t have to fight like that. But you did.”
Hannya turned her head slightly, one elegant brow raised. “Fight like what?” she said flatly, tone cool as the winds around them.
Salitha took a breath, as if steadying her heart. “Like we mattered.”
Hannya paused. Her pink eyes flicked toward the former Love Faction devil’s face, studying her expression. Raw, vulnerable, open like a flower in bloom’s final hour.
Her fingers twitched, as if restraining the urge to rub her temples.
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’ Hannya thought.
Her sword had gleamed not with righteous fury, but with the bitter malice of someone whose debut had been thoroughly, utterly ruined, yet again.
She wasn’t mad for them. She hadn’t emerged from her chamber in such a blaze to defend the sisterhood.
No. Her fury had flared because she was still reeling over the fact that her evolution had left her at a 'merely' 5’9". She had not choreographed her reentry into the world to be interrupted by poison rain and an ugly scythe-waving noble throwing a tantrum in her garden.
Yet here Salitha was, staring at her as if she were a martyr draped in divine cloth.
“Let’s not make this dramatic,” Hannya said with a soft exhale. “If you must thank me, make it a handwritten letter. Embossed parchment. Maybe perfume it a little. Strawberry is fine.”
Salitha smiled, a trembling, radiant smile that mistook mockery for distance, sarcasm for affection. “You don’t have to pretend with us… Hannya.” she said, dropping the formal title.
“I’m not pretending. I have very high standards.” She replied, her chin high.
Salitha stepped closer and gently, without warning, placed a hand over Hannya’s.
Hannya visibly twitched. Her sword hand trembling as she held down the bile in her throat.
In the end, she said nothing. Elegantly sighing in reply.
Salitha gave her one last, teary smile and grateful squeeze before pulling away. “I think you care more than you want us to know.”
To that, Hannya continued her silence with unmatched restraint, which in turn, only made it worse for Salitha’s rose-tinted perspective.
A few steps back, Shela stood stiffly, her gaze fixed on the broken stone at her feet.
“Shela,” Hannya called lazily. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
The young woman didn’t answer. She raised her head slightly, only to quickly avert her eyes again. Her cheeks were flushed red with a quiet, rattled confusion.
Hannya furrowed her brow. “You good?”
No answer.
Then realization hit. Her hand snapped to her bare face. “Tch!”
She dug into her spatial ring, muttering curses under her breath. With a flick of her wrist, she pulled out the black veil Left Direction had gifted her and quickly fastened it around her face with tense fingers.
She muttered under her breath, “He told me to keep this on…”
Salitha, watching the movement, smiled softly. “You’re really kind, you know.”
Hannya blinked at her from behind the newly restored veil. “I… what?”
“You didn’t want Shela to feel overwhelmed. That was sweet.”
“I did it because she was peeking at me like I’d grown a second head.”
“She was just stunned. You looked… divine.”
“I know that, and that's exactly the problem.”
Before Hannya could roll her eyes so hard they inverted into her skull, Shela took a step forward, still flustered but slightly more composed, and cleared her throat. “So… what do we do now?”
Salitha nodded, stepping beside her. “Are we striking back at the Dream Faction? After what they pulled?”
“No,” Hannya said, turning her head slightly toward the rising mist beyond the mountain. “Baku will most likely deal with this personally, we do something more important.”
The two devils looked to her, expectant.
“In six months,” Hannya said, eyes narrowing, “we’ll be ready for a real war.”
“What war?” Shela asked.
“Don’t worry,” Hannya murmured, her expression unreadable. “We’re not the only ones preparing.”
As the haze rolled off the battlefield and the last of the fallen disintegrated into silence, Hannya’s thoughts traveled far from the blood-slicked mountain and the broken, rogue faction that dared interrupt her moment.
Far below, deeper in Greed’s domain, in a ‘pocket’ where even time curled away in confusion, a single presence remained trapped in a spatial wound.
Her darling Vainglory.
Trapped.
Forgotten.
The one she had never stopped circling.
A crooked grin touched her lips beneath the veil, forming something strange and fond and angry all at once.
“Six more months…on [Tax Day].” she whispered to herself.
And the mist shuddered in reply.
Comments
Butch Perterson
🤭
Butch Perterson
😉👍
Butch Perterson
😂🤣😂 I thought it’d be hilarious that a devil so in tune with their emotions would completely misread Hannyas emotionally crippled self at every turn.
Butch Perterson
lol good catch, thank you! It’s supposed to be rogue 😂
Fezrew Dyserk
Rouge is a colour. I think you meant "rogue faction" instead. Unless the faction was coloured rouge.
Prent
Salitha’s continued inability to read Hannya in any capacity is great and I love it.
Wintermelody
Thanks for the chapter
Cosmoros Subs
Where are my damn taxes?
