Three Divine Wishes: Yes, I'm OP!

"Y... you again..."

Liliana’s voice was barely more than a broken whisper.

Tears still streaked her pale cheeks, mixing with the radiant blood that had sprayed across her face when Akasha severed the Cosmic Union warrior’s head.

Her crimson eyes were locked on him, wide and disbelieving, as if she could not yet accept that the man standing between her and certain death was real.

Before Akasha could speak, another voice cut through the chaos—rough, wet, and filled with sudden, aching recognition.

"L... Lily?"

General Salvatore’s remaining crimson eye widened.

For the first time in what must have been eras, the ancient Vampire’s attention fully left the enemies surrounding him.

His broken body still leaked black ichor, his shattered armor hung in pieces, but a trembling smile broke across his bloodied face as he looked at the woman in the blood-red cloak.

"You’ve...fi...nally made it."

That single moment of divided focus was all the Celestial Sun forces needed.

HUMMMMMM!!!!!!

SWOOOSHH!!!!

A few hundred kilometers behind Akasha, the Sun Kami General’s blazing greatsword of pure sunlight came crashing down with a deafening roar of solar fire.

At the same time, the remaining Cosmic Union Elf’s spears of condensed life-force shot in from the side.

Both strikes closed the final gap in the same heartbeat—mere inches from ripping the already broken General Salvatore apart.

While... two hundred kilometers in front of Akasha, Liliana was still fighting her way forward.

Enemies swarmed around her in the blood-stained sky, trying to cut her down before she could reach the center of the battlefield.

She weaved through them with frantic speed, her blood-red cloak billowing behind her as tears streaked down her cheeks.

Her crimson eyes were locked past Akasha, past the headless Cosmic Union corpse floating in front of him, fixed solely on the dying figure of her father in the distance.

"Father—!!"

The scream tore from her throat, raw and broken.

For a moment she glanced at Akasha... the man who appeared and saved her yet again.

In that instant, it was as if her gaze went right through him.

He was only standing in her way, and every fiber of her being urged her to get past him, to put herself between those deadly strikes and the man she had finally found again.

"No!! I won’t let you die!" she cried, voice cracking as she pushed herself even faster. "Not after I finally found you!"

HUMMMMM!!!!!

In a heartbeat, she lunged toward Akasha, both hands pushing at him in a desperate attempt to shove him aside—even though she knew those incoming strikes could have wiped her out along with her father in the blink of an eye.

"Move! Get out of the way—please!"

Her voice broke on the last syllable, trembling with urgency.

But Akasha stayed rooted where he stood, as immovable as a mountain, not that anyone could have forced him to budge in the first place.

Without a word, he simply lifted one hand.

[Absolute Dreams (Above Origin)]

HUMMMM!!!!!

Instantly, a soft, almost gentle pulse of power expanded outward from his body, covering most of the vast Star Union battlefield in an invisible tide.

Then... every being present—whether they belonged to the Celestial Sun or the Dead Sun—was cast into a fractured dream state.

Their divinity sealed away, they stood frozen mid-motion, every muscle locked in place.

A vacant glaze settled over their eyes as their awareness was softly, yet completely, drawn into the depths below.

The only ones left unaffected were Yume, Luna, General Salvatore, Liliana herself... and the distant, earth-shaking clash between Amaterasu and Izanami far above in the tiered skies.

The blazing great sword and the spears brimming with life force... both hung motionless in midair, their wielders standing frozen like statues, eyes vacant and lost in some unfathomable dream.

In that moment, silence—real, unbroken silence—settled over the blood-red sky for the first time in ages.

Akasha slowly lowered his hand, abyss-black eyes steady and unbothered, as if he had only brushed away a few bothersome insects.

All across the vast Star Union battlefield, bodies began to fall.

One after another, warriors from both Pantheons dropped from the sky like lifeless dolls.

Liliana skidded to a shaky stop mid-flight.

Her hand hung suspended in the air, unmoving, while tears carved clear paths through the blood and dirt streaking her pale face.

Her crimson eyes flicked once toward the distant, broken form of her father—still alive, still breathing—then snapped back to Akasha with almost painful intensity.

’Heh... he’s done it again,’ she thought, her chest rising and falling in sharp, uneven breaths.

That familiar, overwhelming pull toward him surged so hard it made the edges of her vision blur.

She dug her nails into her palms hard enough to draw blood, trying desperately to force the feeling back down, to keep herself from shaking apart right there in the open sky.

’... Husband, you just keep appearing when I’m about to break? ’

In that moment, her lips quivered, and a faint, fractured sound slipped from her throat before she could hold it back.

Part of her knew that everything he had done—from saving the Academy to the ruins and now—had nothing to do with her.

Most of the time, he hardly spared her a glance.

Yet, a bigger, wilder part of her couldn’t help but believe, against all reason, that somehow it had all been for her.

’I... don’t care if he didn’t mean it for me. In my heart, he did. He’s mine—he’s always been mine,’ she thought, as she could no longer hold back.

In a flash of blood-red cloak and aching, desperate longing, she closed the final distance between them.

Her hands reached for his face, fingers trembling, as she leaned in to claim his mouth with everything she had been holding in for so long.

’Just one taste... just one moment... I need it...’

Akasha’s eyes narrowed a fraction.

In that moment, he got all the confirmation he’d ever needed about who Liliana truly was and her whole... problem.

’No wonder her favorability is so damn high...’ The thought came almost like an observation.

Then another truth hit—older, deeper, and far more binding.

The bloodline connection clicked into place like a lock snapping shut.

’She’s... calling me her husband because of some ridiculous bloodline link?’ he thought, seeing not just that but everything else about the woman who flaunted herself as the Red Lady.

His expression stayed unreadable, but as her face came within inches of his, he... disappeared.

[Space Affinity]

As he left, Liliana’s lips closed on empty air.

Her hands closed on empty air.

For a moment, she lingered in the stillness, suspended in the quiet, her fingers frozen in their curve as though they could cling to the fading warmth that had already slipped away.

"... Bastard."

The soft curse left her lips like a breath, half-bitter, half-aching. Then a rough, familiar voice cut through the sudden silence of the battlefield.

"Lily...?"

General Salvatore’s remaining crimson eye was wide with disbelief as he looked around at the falling bodies of both Pantheons.

His broken frame trembled with the effort of staying upright, black ichor still dripping from his wounds, but the moment his gaze found his daughter again, something raw and desperate broke open across his bloodied face.

"Lily!"

The sound of her nickname snapped Liliana out of the haze.

Her head whipped toward him.

In the next heartbeat, she was already moving, blood-red cloak streaming behind her as she closed the distance in a blur.

She crashed into him without any care for his injuries, arms wrapping tightly around his broken body, face burying against his chest as fresh tears spilled freely.

"F... father!"

Her voice cracked on the word. She held him as if she were afraid he would vanish the moment she loosened her grip.

Salvatore’s remaining arm slowly rose and settled around her shoulders, trembling, the gesture clumsy and weak yet filled with decades of longing.

They stayed like that for a long time, surrounded by the eerie silence of an entire battlefield locked in dreams.

Eventually Liliana pulled back just enough to look up at his face. Her crimson eyes were still wet, but a new, urgent question burned behind them.

"Where is Mother?" she asked, voice quiet but tight. "I... figured she would be with you."

She had never tried searching for her mother directly through Divinity, simply because the combined cost of both searches was far too high.

Still, it seemed only natural to assume that a married couple would be together—or at the very least know each other’s whereabouts.

Salvatore’s face changed, the happiness of seeing each other again fading under a weight of mixed, uneasy emotions.

His remaining eye drifted away from hers for a moment before he forced himself to meet her gaze again.

"Your mother..." he began, voice low and rough, "was taken a long time ago. More than forty eras."

Liliana froze in his embrace, the color slipping from her already pale cheeks.

"...What do you mean, taken?"

Salvatore exhaled a slow, pained breath. When he spoke again, the words came out heavy, as if each one cost him something.

"Our clan is not from the world of Kalpa," he said quietly. "We come from the first world of the Orin Star System... Loreua."