Chapter 294: Dropping out of nowhere

Liraya’s body folded the moment Ines withdrew the blade.

She dropped to her knees first, then toppled sideways onto the blood-soaked dirt. The cursed sword remained buried in her chest for a heartbeat longer before Ines released the hilt and let it fall with her. Dark mana still crawled along the steel in thin, hungry threads, but the damage was already done. There was a big hole in Liraya’s chest now. 

Her eyes found Lys’s.

He was still on the ground only a few paces behind her, one side of his face swollen nearly shut, blood running freely from a dozen cuts. His face was on the dirt, and his bare chest was mixed with dirt and his own sweat. 

Their gazes locked. A small drop of tear, small, clear, and almost out of place in the middle of so much violence, slipped from the corners of Liraya’s eyes and traced clean lines through the newly covered grime on her cheeks. She tried to speak. But no sound came. 

There was only the quiet, wet sound of her breathing, growing shallower as her life was fading away.

And as it was right in front of him, Lys’s mind just refused to accept what he was seeing.

‘She’s a goddess. She sent me here. She gave me a second chance. How can a goddess of her caliber die from a single wound? How does this make sense?’ None of this was making any sense to him.

He tried to push himself up, but his arms trembled violently and then simply refused. He still squeezed every remaining scrap of will into his hands, into his shoulders, into the muscles that had kept him standing against dozens of knights only minutes earlier. 

But nothing happened. His body had reached the absolute end of what his stubbornness and his willpower could give.

Ines shook her right hand as if it burned with the curse within the cursed sword she just used. She looked down at CorpseSlayer with open distaste.

“Fuck, this thing is not a joke.” Her voice carried genuine irritation for the first time. 

“Never would I have thought I’d actually have to use it to kill someone. Though it doesn’t affect me the way it does to everyone else, but it still sucks half my energy out just for touching the damn hilt. Fucker.”

Lys barely registered the words. His entire world had narrowed to the woman lying a few feet away and the impossible fact that she was dying. Whatever Ines was saying had barely registered in his mind.

Ines stepped closer. With one boot, she casually rolled Liraya onto her side, clearing space as if the goddess were nothing more than an inconvenient obstacle right now.

Lys forced air through his ruined throat.

“…Don’t…do that.”

Ines looked ahead at him. On the ground beside Liraya. “Don’t do what?” She asked him. 

“Don’t… step on her.” Lys barely said the words.

Ines paused and looked down at him. A slow, almost amused smile curved her mouth.

“Oh yeah? And why exactly should I do as you say, boy? Do you still think you’re some kind of hero in whatever story you’ve been telling yourself?” She crouched slightly so he could see her face more clearly. 

“Well, I hate to break it to you, but you’re not. I ended her.”

Her tone got a little dark. “And don’t worry, kid. I’m also going to send you to the same place right now.”

She straightened and flicked her wrist. A long, elegant staff of pale metal and silver filigree appeared in her hand, Rhuvia’s staff, taken after the guild master had been disposed of. Dark mana gathered at its tip, rapidly condensing into a sharp, glittering spike of ice.

The killing shot formed less than a meter from Lys’s face.

And he could only watch it.

Then out of nowhere, a sudden blur of motion cut across the edge of the circle.

Elara came in low and fast, body-enchantment flaring blue along her limbs, along with Mira’s enchanted sword, already in a rising cut aimed at Ines’s neck. 

The speed was startling even to the knights who were still covering the area, circling around Lys. She had crossed the final stretch of open ground in a single explosive leap that carried her over the outer rank of soldiers, right into the middle of this mess, almost like she landed here out of the sky.

Ines’s reaction was pure reflex as the sword was almost about to cut her neck entirely. The staff in her hand snapped up. The solid metal bar of the staff met the steel enchanted sword with a sharp, crystalline ring. 

The force of the block sent a visible shockwave through the air, but Ines held her ground.

Elara landed, slid back two steps to kill the remaining momentum, and settled into a ready stance. The blue shimmer of body-enchantment still clung to her arms and legs, incomplete and rusty from years of disuse, yet unmistakably present. She did not look at Lys. Her eyes stayed locked on Ines, who was fully unscratched.

For a long second, the two women simply stared at each other across the short distance.

Ines’s expression shifted from mild annoyance to genuine curiosity.

“And who the fuck are you? Attacking me out of nowhere?”