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Chapter 74: A Space Beyond Rage
🕑 Added 2025-06-18 19:50:43 +0000 UTCThe clash of blade and barrier roared in every direction, but Mirro no longer heard it.
His ears were ringing. His shoulders ached with the aftershock of failed sigil feedback. His vision danced between sparks and blurs, the outlines of soldiers too sharp one moment, too fogged the next.
And then, a voice cut through it all like lightning.
“MOVE!”
The soldiers hesitated.
Mirro’s gaze shifted.
Up on the hilltop, cloak trailing, blade unsheathed, aura flaring with violent clarity.
Shela.
She came charging like a thunderclap wrapped in steel, and the sight of her broke something in him. Not fear. Not pain.
Only relief.
“About… damn time.” Mirro croaked.
Nini was still crouched beside him, one hand on his back, stabilizing the sigil circle with her own flow. Her aura flickered, the sheer demand of keeping it from going wild taking it's toll.
Mirro grinned sideways, blood in his teeth.
“Heh… henchman… number three...”
And then he collapsed, falling sideways into her arms.
Nini caught him, barely, knees buckling under his weight. Her breath came in sharp draws. Her hair stuck to her neck, damp with sweat. Her hands trembled from exhaustion.
She looked down at him, his face pale but peaceful, and exhaled hard.
“That’s it,” she muttered. “We’re tapped.”
The summoning circle fizzled. The warped serpent, Yharox, vanished with a final hiss, its wings folding inward like paper. The construct, still shielding the wounded, let out one last pulse before collapsing in on itself with a deep, ethereal shatter.
It was all gone.
Their part was done.
Nini steadied Mirro in her arms and looked up, heart hammering, pulse roaring in her ears.
‘Please,’ she thought, ‘be enough.’
Because despite her [Mana World Body], she had no circuits, no internal system to weave the mana she controlled into her own casting. She was a conductor, not a spellcaster. A battery, not a blade.
The mana flowed through her like a river… but she had no well or dams to shape it.
So she had done everything she could.
Now it was up to someone else.
And as Shela crashed into the first wave of Norm’s soldiers, scattering them with precise, explosive swings of her sword, Nini knew, they might just live.
She clutched Mirro closer.
He was unconscious, but breathing.
“Number three,” she whispered, smiling bitterly. “You better live up to the henchmen name.”
The first soldier didn’t even see the blade coming.
Shela’s sword sliced clean through his shield-arm with a single upward arc, sending his weapon flying, along with the arm. Before he could scream, she pivoted on her heel and drove her shoulder into his chest, hurling him back into two more behind him.
The gap she carved wasn’t wide, but it was sharp.
Controlled chaos.
A front-line rupture.
Steel rang against steel as magic crackled in the air.
And through it all, Shela kept moving, a blur of white speed and crimson will.
One soldier leapt toward her, spear glowing with a purge-rune. She deflected it with the flat of her blade, twisted her wrist, and shattered his knee with a backward step-kick.
A second tried to flank her.
She dropped low and swept his legs out, slicing a shallow cut across his thigh, not fatal, but enough to send him scrambling.
A third blocked her exit, shield raised.
She drove her elbow into his helmet with enough force to dent the steel.
And still, she kept moving.
But what moved even faster than her sword was something inside her, something that had been coiled beneath her skin for years.
Her devil blood.
It stirred now, not fully, not yet. But enough to make her bones buzz and her vision burn sharper. Her muscles stretched further than they should have. Her grip tightened like iron wrapped in sinew. And her heartbeat, once steady with mortal rhythm, began to quicken to a rhythm more ancient, more… chaotic.
She hadn’t noticed it at first.
But now she felt it clearly, a thrum in her spine, a pressure behind her eyes, a growl in the very air around her when she exhaled.
‘Is this… my inheritance?’
The thought passed quick as a blade strike, but it lingered.
She was a hybrid, an imp. Born of bloodlines that shouldn’t mix.
And now, in this place, this scarred valley full of cracked symbols and charred stone, something inside her was answering.
She pressed forward.
Mirro and Nini were behind her. Defenseless. Burned out. Wounded.
The builders, scarred but alive, cowered behind broken wards and fractured runes.
They had held the line.
Now it was her turn to push it back.
A soldier raised a casting circle toward her, standard capital binding sigil, meant to stun or slow.
Shela moved faster than the incantation.
One step, a blur.
The circle shattered mid-air as she sliced through the caster’s forearm. He screamed, but she was already gone, spinning into the next enemy with a blow that sent his helmet flying.
High on the ridge, Norm narrowed his eyes.
He had seen her before, on the report scrolls, standing quietly beside Salitha at political dinners, serving as the strong but silent escort to the Sixth Luxuria.
He had not expected this.
The way she moved.
The way her presence was warping the battlefield, not through force of spell, but through will.
She was a warrior, not just in title, but in blood. He acknowledged that.
“Who is she?” one of his lieutenants whispered beside him, blade half-raised.
Norm’s jaw tightened.
“That,” he said, “is going to be a problem.”
The shield shattered under her swing.
Steel screamed. A helm cracked. Another soldier went down hard, rolling through dust and blood with his limbs flailing like broken clockwork.
Shela pivoted, swept under a sword’s arc, and drove her blade into the gap beneath another soldier’s arm. He gasped, frozen by pain and disbelief, before she pulled back and turned toward the next.
Faster. Stronger. Sharper.
Every movement was cleaner than it should have been.
Shela had trained her entire life, body and mind forged under discipline, honed in war camps, measured against the expectations of devils and demons alike.
But this was different.
This was something else.
A new heat pulsed in her limbs. Her balance felt like instinct rather than memory. Her strikes landed before her thoughts fully formed.
And that heat, it wasn’t just blood.
It was heritage.
Shela’s breaths came hard, but each one drew deeper than the last, her lungs expanding beyond their old limit.
‘What’s happening to me?’
She drove her sword into another attacker’s thigh and spun it free, glancing toward the edge of the valley.
Mirro and Nini.
Still holding, just barely.
Mirro unconscious. Nini on one knee, arms trembling as she braced him and watched Shela’s movements with wide, tired eyes.
They were counting on her.
‘I can’t stop.’
But then it clicked. The pieces finally fell into place.
The heat. The awakening.The ease.
It wasn’t natural.
It wasn’t sudden evolution.
It had started ten days ago, after that banquet.
The food from the mysterious chef Hannya had introduced.
He’d said only a bit of its ingredients, but every dish had shimmered faintly with layered enchantments. Delicate, refined, but charged with something more fundamental.
Growth.
‘That was it. That meal... It unlocked the next layer of me.’
Her devil blood had always been there. Quiet, waiting, pressed beneath the weight of restraint.
The banquet hadn’t created the strength.
It had fed it.
And now it was stirring.
Spreading.
Awakening.
Shela gritted her teeth as her grip flexed tighter than any swordmaster had ever taught her.
‘You planned this, didn’t you? Hannya... You knew what I could become.’
Another soldier charged.
She side-stepped, then cracked his breastplate with a twisting slash across his ribs. Before he could fall, she moved past him like wind, already reading the next movement.
From the ridge above, Norm watched her movements.
And then he stepped forward.
One long stride.
Then two.
He walked down the slope like a statue given life, a wall of armor, covered in sigils and judgment.
The battlefield split before him.
His soldiers parted instinctively, clearing the path as he moved with calm, merciless focus.
Shela’s senses screamed before she saw him.
When she did, her pulse kicked harder, but her grip did not shake.
“Finally,” she whispered. “The mutt comes off his leash.”
Norm drew one of his blades, a broad, a ritualized executioner’s weapon, engraved with six judgment seals that pulsed as he approached.
“You’ve delayed your deaths long enough,” he said evenly. “This ends now.”
Shela stepped forward, her blade raised, her breath even.
Something burned deeper in her chest now, not fear.
‘This is what I was meant for.’
Their blades met in a crack of sound that rolled across the valley like thunder in a metal shell.
Shela held the line, barely.
Norm was a wall of muscle and law-scribed steel, each of his blows forged from decades of battlefield dominance. His strikes were weighty, perfect in form, designed not just to defeat but to break.
But Shela didn’t break.
She flowed.
Twisting. Stepping. Reversing.
She deflected a crushing blow that sent cracks spiraling beneath her boots, then slid past Norm’s next sweep, carving a shallow cut along his side.
He grunted, surprised, not because she’d hurt him, but because she’d kept up.
Her eyes were fixed, clear and flaring crimson at the edges.
But inside, inside, her mind was louder than the clash of their weapons.
‘Salitha would’ve begged me to stay back. Again.’
That fight echoed still in her memory, her closest friend, practically her sister, speaking with soft fear and shallow conviction.
“They’re not our responsibility.”
And worse:
“You’re choosing them over me?”
Shela’s jaw clenched as she pivoted around Norm’s crushing overhead slash. Her blade skimmed the edge of his pauldron, sending sparks into the air.
‘I didn’t choose them over her. I chose to fight, to act, to stop waiting for the world to give us permission.’
She ducked under a swing, rolled to the side, and came up on Norm’s flank, her sword slicing through a strip of his outer armor, not deep, but disruptive.
His foot lashed back, but she leapt over it.
Her devil blood burned now. Buzzing under her skin like statically charged lightning.
‘The Love Faction talks about peace and unity, but they won’t risk anything real. Not when it counts. They speak of loyalty, but only if it keeps them comfortable.’
She had listened, obeyed, trusted. And in return, they’d asked her to wait.
To sit on her hands while others suffered and died.
She felt it again, that sick, angry knot in her chest.
The same one that had formed every time, a young love devil was taken to the pleasure palace, when an imp was taken to fight in the arena or purged in the streets, when she read a sealed scroll secretly from Neel… and saw another demon settlment marked as fallen.
The capital nobles tried to hide it. But she knew. They had access to information from the other side. And they said nothing of the events to the masses.
‘They’re being hunted. Like prey, slain by pantheon dogs and inquisitor blades. And here we are, fighting each other over titles and tribute.’
Norm’s blade crashed toward her, and she caught it with the flat of her sword, grunting with the strain. Her feet dug trenches into the ground as she held, refusing to fall.
The pressure was immense, but so was her will.
‘Hellnia should be united. But instead, the Dream Faction manipulates, the Pride Faction postures, the Pleasure faction corrupts, and the capital council plays at divinity while the real monsters tear our people apart on the other side of the gate.’
Norm twisted, bringing his elbow up.
It clipped her shoulder, jarring, but not breaking.
She rolled away, back into stance.
Her breathing deepened.
The heat in her chest reached a fever pitch.
And then she remembered Hannya’s voice, about her father, soft but cruel in its honesty.
She had hoped her father's settlement still endured, but...
“Gone…Slain in Neel. Bled out across a collapsed sanctuary, pinned under the blade of a hero from the Pantheon. The Inquisition struck first, without warning or mercy… And they all shared in that feast.”
Shela froze mid-step.
Only for a second.
But in that second, her blood roared in her ears.
Her wrath boiled… and then stopped.
Not because it faded.
But because it had finally crystallized.
A cold wrath.
She felt it settle in her chest, in the tight corners of her shoulders, along the veins in her arms. Not explosive like rage. Not wild like vengeance.
Just sharp. Still. Quiet.
A clarity like nothing else she had ever known.
She turned her blade back toward Norm.
Her stance shifted slightly, narrower, tighter.
Norm noticed it too.
He raised his sword, more cautious now.
“You’re not a soldier,” he said, voice grating. “You’re something else.”
“No,” Shela answered, her voice cold as steel. “I’m exactly what you people made me.”
And she moved.
Faster than before.
Cleaner.
Not fueled by adrenaline or desperation, but focus.
Her sword clashed against his once more, and this time, the sound didn’t scream, it rang.
Like freezing judgment.
The ground beneath their boots had begun to crack.
Stone splintered under the force of their clashes. Sparks rained down with every collision of blades, but Shela no longer moved with caution.
Now, she moved with calm intent.
The kind of cold resolve that unnerved veterans more than rage ever could.
She parried Norm’s latest swing with minimal movement, letting his full-bodied slash overextend. In the same motion, she stepped inside his guard and sliced a clean, shallow cut across his ribs, again, not deep, but precise. Intentional.
He hissed. “Not bad.” he said.
She said nothing.
Norm stepped back, reassessing her with new weight. “You’re not one of hers…” he muttered. “You were the Luxuria’s shadow. A tame little escort.”
Shela tilted her head, her eyes staring with an unsettlingly simple gaze. “You talk too much.”
He then swung, wide and heavy.
She slid under it, and this time, she let the hilt of her sword crack against his knee, buckling his stance slightly.
He didn’t fall, but the pressure built.
Shela felt it all over now, the rhythm of the fight, the space between breaths, the mistakes in his form. Norm was stronger. His aura heavier. But he wasn’t evolving. He was relying on what had already worked.
And what had worked... was starting to break.
She pressed forward, piece by piece.
Not overwhelming him, dismantling him.
And with every clash, every feint, she felt it grow sharper inside her. The cold wrath, humming like a string being tuned too tight, filling her blood with ice rather than fire.
‘oh, I see it now. This isn’t rage. It’s the space beyond it.’
And far away, something in the world shifted.
~~~
In the pavilion near the mountains northern border, Hannya paused mid-sentence.
The room was filled with silk-draped tables, faction envoys with law scrolls, and the dull sound of ceremonial platitudes. The Pride and Dream faction delegates sat on either side of the long, gold-inlaid table.
Her veil was down. Her voice measured. Her hands still.
But her mind had gone quiet.
Baku, sitting beside her, looming over her shoulder like a shadow, noticed it instantly.
“What is it?” he murmured low enough that only she could hear.
Hannya’s eyes unfocused slightly.
Then narrowed.
She didn’t answer.
Because she felt it.
A… pressure, no sound, no tremor, but a thread being pulled taut somewhere deep in the world’s weave… tethered to her own core.
Someone had awakened something.
A chill slid down her spine like water touched.
Because she didn’t need a sigil flare to know who it was.
‘Shela.’ She knew without reason.
But this time, there was more than instinct. Yet she couldn’t understand the cause of her confidence.
Tucked beneath her sleeve, her wrist pulsed once, a private communication sigil signaled.
She glanced at it and focused briefly. The rune shimmered and opened, displaying a soft blue line of hidden script:
[
Nini confirmed.
Reinforcement arrived.
It was Shela.
]
Hannya exhaled silently through her nose.
‘So you made your choice.’
She didn’t smile. Not quite. But the corners of her mouth curved, slightly.
‘Let’s see how long you hold it.’
Unbeknownst to the heart devil, shela wasn’t the only one awakening further this day.
The banquet experience was meant for all participants that consumed its meal.
The envoy from Dream finally cleared his throat.
“If the representative from the mountain is satisfied with our transparency,” he said, “perhaps we can move on to the proposed adjustments to the dream core allocation schedule?”
Hannya turned back to the table.
Voice smooth. Expression unreadable.
“Of course,” she said. “Let’s begin.”
But under the table, one of her fingers traced a small symbol into the hem of her kimono. A pulse ward, not to transmit, but to record.
This meeting was no longer about appeasement.
Now, she wanted names.
~~~
Back in Ragescar, Norm stumbled for the first time.
His boots skidded across ash-stained stone, and he had to plant his sword to keep from falling.
Shela stood across from him, shoulders rising with even breath, the cold glow in her eyes stronger now.
She wasn’t smiling.
She wasn’t furious.
She was awake. Her face in an almost innocently evaluating gaze. She was just simply watching him, waiting for the next clash.
He looked at her, really looked, and finally understood.
This was no escort. No ornament of the Luxuria name.
This was a devil bred from still fire.
“…Who are you?” he asked, chest heaving.
The wrath imp exhaled slowly.
The chill in her veins hummed like a forgotten bell.
“The answer to your mistakes.”
Comments
Wintermelody
Thanks for the chapter
Butch Perterson
It is and I was think it would be like a silver color, which reminds me about trying the epub thing in the next double chappy since the colors might be needed here
Butch Perterson
Thanks! ☺️
Butch Perterson
lol she’s gone postal 🫣
Butch Perterson
It’s all salitha all day for you huh? 🤣 but who knows? 🤭
ShadowTycho
Someone else awakening? Why do I feel this is pete teasing Salthia getting her shit together. Shela out here showing why you fear the queit ones. I wonder how long until here zero aura has made this a frozen wasteland.
Prent
Ah, I see that years of being held back and controlled by people who and don’t care about her have made Shela into the scariest kind of wrath demon. How terrifying Also, lol get fucked Norm
Sanetless
Beautifully done
Benjamin
Is Shela's text supposed to be in color. If so, what color?
