Chapter 410: Flames Meet Darkness (4)
After Serah and what remained of her cohort had taken in the full, gut-churning sight of the massacre wrought by the unknown dark mage, they finally called for backup to rendezvous at their location. The transmission had barely gone through before a team of Solara Knights responded—arriving in force within ten minutes, their silver-plated armor shimmering faintly in the re-lit chamber, weapons drawn and ready, only to be greeted not by battle... but by butchery.
Like Serah and her team, the backup squad was stunned by the overwhelming carnage. Blood painted every corner. The sheer magnitude of it left even seasoned veterans wide-eyed beneath their helms. The chamber reeked of copper and death.
Once the initial shock wore off, Serah gave a full debrief—her tone precise, cool, and clipped despite the lingering exhaustion. She reported everything: Blan’s betrayal, the unnatural darkness that swallowed the chamber, and the emergence of a second dark mage—an unknown entity, swift and untraceable, responsible for the devastation now littering the floor. Her words were transcribed, recorded, and transmitted to command. Every detail was locked down for further investigation.
Solara’s elite archivists began collecting bodies with solemn precision. Dimensional storage scrolls flickered as one corpse after another was sealed away into secured vaults—every Bleeding Smile member reduced to trace data, catalogued, and disappeared into flickering blue light. The caged victims—half-starved, dazed, eyes sunken from days of torment—were rescued and immediately treated by healers, their sobs echoing against stone.
Meanwhile, Serah’s cohort was ushered to the side and treated for their minor wounds—scrapes, shallow gashes, bruises earned in the chaos. They resisted fuss, but none argued. Their eyes kept straying to the corpses, as if expecting them to rise again.
As the chamber buzzed with quiet activity, Serah wandered through it all, silent amidst the noise. The thick coat she wore earlier was gone. Now she was clad in just a form-fitting dark shirt—its sleeves rolled up to her elbows—and black tactical pants tucked into worn boots. One button of her shirt was undone, revealing a glimpse of her collarbone.
In this lighting, she walked like a flame given shape—her wavy crimson hair cascading behind her in loose locks, eyes sharp as razors. With her lean build, masculine-cut clothes, and hard-set jaw, she might’ve been mistaken for a soldier prince rather than a Solara knight—if not for the striking grace of her movement and the beauty that clung to her like a second skin.
’No matter how I turn it over in my mind... how could a single person do all this?’ she thought, gaze hard as obsidian as she stared over the battlefield. This wasn’t just slaughter... this was art. Precision. Power. Speed. And they left no trace—nothing but ruin.
It burned her. Not just the destruction—but how thoroughly outclassed she had been. The enemy hadn’t even hurt them. Hadn’t touched them. They’d toyed with her in the dark, danced around her flames like they were nothing, then vanished before she could land a blow.
Her fist clenched unconsciously.
"I’ll catch that bastard," she growled under her breath, the words leaking from her lips like heat through cracked stone.
She continued walking, boots splashing softly through shallow pools of blood. Eventually, she came to a halt—standing in front of a familiar corpse.