"The rune must be about to run out of thaumaturgical energy," Zephyr warned, in the absolute darkness that dulled all the senses. "Get ready."

Tristessa saw and felt nothing but the petrichor scent of the earth erected with magic. Damp and brittle, it was breaking off into mineral particles that made her throat sting. Even the gunpowder smell she always detected around Auron was diminished in intensity by the raw power of Nekrom's nature spirit manifested.

That smell that did nothing, neither positively nor negatively, to quell the dread coursing through her veins.

"Now!"

The earthen barriers cracked once entropy stole all remaining magic, and the structure crumbled right away. Zephyr shielded their heads, and when the falling debris stopped, he took up a defensive position, his spear pointed forward. While Auron drew his revolvers and stood back-to-back with the General, Tristessa crouched down, hunting knife in hand.

And it was then, at that moment when the dust had settled, that she received the full force of everything the magical earth barrier had held back on the other side.

A deep breath that met foul air.

A disturbing silence that had taken hold of the surroundings of the Crossroads.

A glance that found red everywhere.

"Uh…?"

A convergence of stimuli that made Tristessa vomit.

"Huuuaaargh!"

The strong metallic smell of blood mixed with a sickly, cloying aroma was a combination that invaded her mouth unbidden. Saturating her senses of smell and taste, making her eyes water. Triggering the gag reflex instantly, not even giving her a chance to hold the contents of her stomach back.

"Gak…!" Doubled over, feeling her insides burning, watching the mud-colored stream of stomach fluid spurt from her mouth, splashing through pools of blood that kept spreading. "Ah…Ahh…!"

So much blood that the earth couldn't absorb, reaching the soles of their boots. Dragging hundreds upon hundreds of infinitesimal pieces of flesh and skin. Pulverized metal from armor was scattered everywhere, having shattered trees and tents in the shape of deadly splinters. Bone fragments with remnants of sinews and shredded muscle tissue, diverse shape and forms of entrails oozing fluids with repugnant aromas, fingers…

"F-Fuck!"

So many fingers, toes, nails, teeth, floating on that sea of ​​dark crimson liquid that covered the Feydra Crossroads in its entirety. Not a single tent remained standing, all traces of them buried beneath human remains. Blood that had stained the trees red, their leaves, and dripped from the branches like a quiet, unholy rain worthy of the Evil Dream.

The desolate panorama of the outpost, reduced to a graveyard. More than thirty lives extinguished in a few seconds, leaving behind a landscape of entrails, Death...and void-sent signals detected by Tristessa's [Divinity of Accursed Existence].

"S-So many corpses… Ugh, my head!" The young black-haired woman groaned, battling nausea and a migraine at the same time. Spiritually assaulted by all those mangled bodies that made it clear they were available to serve her in exchange for perpetual hatred. Dozens of calls to the necromancer that she was. "Fucking shit!"

"By Kantrus… What kind of nightmare is this?" She heard Auron murmur, more terrified than ever before. Still trembling, she looked up and saw his eyes wide, flooded with traumatic fear. Cold sweat trickling down his face, dampening his handkerchief. "Damn it…"

"Don't let your guard down, Auron," the General warned, impassive in the face of the aftermath of a massacre that lasted seconds. The cool head of someone who had already faced mind-breaking horror head-on. "There's movement ahead."

Zephyr was referring to the agglomeration of unrecognizable human remains, meters in front of him. Something was moving beneath that bloody mass, with deformed bones compacting that morbid organic mixture of gore.

"…"

Covering her vomit-stained mouth with both hands, Tristessa felt a morbid sense of familiarity as she watched the person beneath that corpse-made mountain making their way out. Tearing apart that jumble of bones, tendons, and muscle tissue with their hands, tearing with their fingernails, if necessary, just as she had done when she returned from Death for the first time.

But this wasn't like the first activation of her [Divinity of Death and Resurrection]; what they were witnessing was the sole survivor of the witches' mass suicide performed with dark thaumaturgy. Her torso and head, wet with blood, straightened, and she gasped for air, something she had undoubtedly been struggling to get.

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"Phew…! Ah… Looks like I didn't die!" they heard the witch celebrate, as she looked around. "Oh… Oh, how beautiful… Ah, so beautiful, so poetic… Si inspiring!"

Standing up, the woman who had emerged unscathed from the suicide kinetic explosions revealed herself to be the witch with the mutilated face and bandages covering her entire body. The difference now was that these bandages bore countless glyphs on their scorched line surface, as if branded with fire upon activation.

The thaumaturgy that had been energizing those glyphs was now gone, having served its purpose of protecting the witch. Blood and bodily fluids had taken its place, saturating the bandages and giving that woman an even more disturbing and terrifying appearance than she already possessed.

"How dare you consider such things as possession or mind control? Nonsense! This fateful meeting was the product of research on how the human heart operates! Blinded by doomed hope, guided by threads of insanity and united in a single moment immortalized on the canvases of time…!" the witch shouted to the four winds, laughing like the lunatic she was. A laugh Tristessa knew, one that had haunted her since the first time she heard it, in past loops. "Truly, a lesson in the machinations of love! A new page in the book of knowledge, and all thanks to the blessed benevolence of our Lord Moebius!"

"It can't be… How…?"

Her mind was still drowned in blood and entrails, her vision tainted deep red, making Tristessa don't understand.

That witch with the face so deformed it was repulsive to look at was not the same as the monster that occupied a place of honor in the Room of Knowledge in her mind palace. That one had damp black hair falling in strands down the sides of her head; exaggeratedly wrinkled skin, a broken and sunken nose, split and cut lips, and eyes so pronounced they made one wonder if that face was even human. Or, rather, if that wasn't…

"…a mask," Tristessa reasoned, loud enough to be heard. "That's not her face. It's a mask."

Her theory also reached the witch's ears, who let out a mischievous giggle.

"What a perceptive child! And with such a dark soul!" she exclaimed, then took an exaggerated, deep breath, as if she wanted to feel the very essence of Tristessa's spirit and fill her lungs with it. "Such abundance! The God of Chaos must love you dearly, missy!"

"Don't speak to her, witch. You will address me from now on, do you understand?" Zephyr took a step forward, without lowering his shield and holding his spear with perfect poise. He pointed it at the woman whose smile was barely visible between those protruding lips that clearly didn't belong to her body. "Show me your true face, now."

"Oh, you are quite the gentleman, General Nostromos! Asking a lady as immaculate as myself to undress, I feel as if my face will burn of shame…!"

The witch brought both hands, with their long, sharp nails, to the base of her neck and began to tear off that human mask. The skin yielded with almost no effort from her part, and beneath that facade, the witch's true head was revealed.

A face stained with the blood of her sisters from the Coven, male victims used as puppets and Imperial soldiers, consumed by the most malevolent madness. Madness manifested in a moist smile formed by lips that dripped heavy saliva, thick with the blood of others, revealing crimson stained teeth. Her skin wrinkled at the sides from the deformity of her facial grimace; hairless head, and silver eyes so wide and devoid of morality and empathy for others that they were terrifying.

"…Why are you looking at me like that? Aren't I beautiful, handsome?! Don't you like me?! Y-you…you don't?! AH, WHAT A DISGRACE, WHAT A TRAGEDY, WHAT A MISFORTUNE, WHAT UNHAPPINESS, WHAT…WHAT…WHAAAAAT!?"

Weeping and clawing at her face with nails that could no longer contain any more human flesh beneath them, the witch threw a tantrum like a little girl. She hurled the human face she had stolen into the air, which made a disgusting, wet sound as it hit the pile of gore.

"WHY AM I SO UGLY?! WHY DOESN'T ANY MAN WANT TO TAKE ME IN HIS ARMS AND MAKE ME HIS?! WHY DOESN'T ANYONE WANT TO FILL MY WOMB WITH LOVE?! WHY IS IT NEVER ENOUGH?! WHY?! WHY?! WHY?! WHY…?!"

Out of nowhere, the woman fell silent and blinked several times. Her wretched gaze was lost in the vortex of madness into which she had fallen long ago.

"Oh, that's right. I can't have children. And even if I did, surely the temptation to eat their brains would be too strong to resist… OH WAIT! YOU, YES YOU! TELL ME ONE THING!"

With the index finger of her right hand, the witch pointed at Auron, sending him a terrifying smile and a kiss of doom.

"Am I pretty, gunslinger? What do you say? Hmm… Your eyes are lovely and mysterious. I want to see what you're hiding under that handkerchief…"

"There are some things that are better left unknown, lady," he retorted, having moved to Zephyr's side and pointing his revolvers at the witch.

"Ah, how bold of you to blaspheme against knowledge…!" Far from being annoyed, she bit her lower lip so hard it bled. Sadistic lust, overflowing with imagination about what she wanted to do to Auron. "I'll forgive you this time, only because I like you. I want to play with you until your bones break and you can scream no more…"

"…!"

That disgusting comment made the gunslinger tremble like never before, enveloping him with a shadow of terror that Tristessa noticed and got very worried about. Mostly because he was lowering his revolvers, as if gravity was pulling them down harder than seconds ago.

"Auron…?"

Tristessa saw the light inside his eyes wander into a distant past, shrouded by that deep fear that only he knew, hidden inside. Daydreaming in the worst circumstance possible.

"…Who are you?" On the other hand, Zephyr was facing this dangerous enemy for the first time. A common and yet unknown foe, of many faces and many voices, that had plagued the land for centuries.

"Me? I'm a humble witch of the Coven… And much more."

That sadistic monster who made the blood in Tristessa's veins boil with rage and paralyzed her soul as if polluted with snake's venom.

"I am a Priestess of the Black Eye, faithful servant of the great Lord of Forbidden Knowledge, Moebius..." she introduced herself, bowing with the grace of a lady, standing atop a mountain of dismembered and pulverized corpses. Rejoicing, proud of her prominent role in fulfilling the will of that dark lord. Submissive, obedient, and savage as a rabid beast, she raised her cruel gaze. A gaze that promised chaos, directed at the three of them. "Daiana Mercer-Archeos. A true pleasure."

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