Chapter 232: Victory!
A few paces away from Eren’s clash, Alice was having her own death battle.
Alice’s vision swam with pinpricks of black and white, her muscles burning like salted wounds. Every breath scraped her raw throat, but she poured her divine aura into the weapon as she traded blistering exchanges with the Lord of Information.
Whisper moved without the typical weight or momentum of a living swordsman. His blackened blade traced unnatural, curving trajectories, snapping from vertical parries directly into horizontal thrusts without bending his elbows.
Alice gritted her teeth, her boots kicking up showers of gravel. She anticipated his angles by a fraction of an inch, ducking beneath a sweeping decapitation and driving the pommel of her blade upward to smash his wrist aside.
An opening.
Alice pivoted on her heel, executing a lightning-fast riposte that carved a diagonal gash across Whisper’s forearm, followed instantly by a reverse slash that tore through his ribs, drawing blood.
But before the blood could even pool, worm-like fibers of mutated flesh instantly knit the wound shut, leaving the skin smooth once more.
"Fuck you!" Alice snarled, her voice cracking with pure desperation.
Abandoning defensive preservation entirely, she gathered every scrap of divine mana lingering in her exhausted core. The golden-white light intensified into a searing, blinding flare.
Leaping into the air, she brought the sword down in an all-out, two-handed cleave straight through Whisper’s centerline, cutting deep through the collarbone down to the stomach, holy incandescence scorching the demonic marrow with a sickening hiss of pale steam.
Whisper stood, looking down at the deep furrow across his chest, then lifted hollow eyes back to Alice.
Alice dropped to one knee, the tip of her scraping the stone floor to keep herself from collapsing. Her chest heaved violently, her forehead dripping with cold sweat. Her mana channels felt like hollowed glass tubes packed with needles.
Empty. Utterly dry.
"Divine mana," Whisper murmured, the eerie, genderless whisper sounding entirely untroubled. "A curious weapon. No wonder Branagh fell. However... that was barely a fraction of the radiance required to purge my vessels. You depleted your reservoirs neutralizing the Lord of Flesh, little girl. What you possess now is nothing more than faint static."
"Shut... up..." Alice wheezed, forcing her trembling knees straight. She dragged the sword up into a ragged, two-handed guard, her amber eyes burning with unyielding, stubborn defiance.
"Defiance without energy is merely noise," Whisper said softly.
He blurred forward.
Alice reacted on instinct, snapping her blade up to parry, but her speed couldn’t match his unnatural acceleration.
The first dagger strike slapped the flat of her sword, jarring her grip. Before she could reset her stance, Whisper’s blade hissed downward, carving a shallow, stinging cut across her right shoulder.
Alice spun with the blow, attempting a sweeping roundhouse kick to break his footing, but Whisper didn’t bother dodging. He took the impact against his thigh like solid granite, grabbed her ankle mid-air, and twisted violently.
Alice hit the floor on her hip, the breath knocked from her lungs. She rolled instantly, narrowly evading a downward dagger thrust that punched three inches into the rock where her skull had just rested.
From the ground, she thrust her sword upward like a spear, aiming for Whisper’s throat.
Whisper tilted the neck with sickening, boneless ease, letting the cold steel slide harmlessly past the cheek. In the same motion, his left hand snapped down like a vice, catching the back of Alice’s wrist.
CRACK.
"Aaargh!"
A sharp cry tore from Alice’s throat as the joint twisted unnaturally. The sword slipped from her.
Before she could pull her concealed side-blade with her left hand, Whisper drove a boot flush into her stomach, sending her skidding ten feet across the dusty flagstones until she crashed hard against the base of a shattered sarcophagus. She curled inward, coughing violently, blood spattering across her lips as she struggled on trembling elbows to rise, her vision dimming.
***
The brutal cleave from Eren’s remaining hatchet sheared down with all the desperate weight of his broken frame, but Silas didn’t even shift his footing.
With a surgical movement, Silas snapped his left forearm upward.
CLANG!
The reinforced bracer beneath the silk of the greatcoat deflected the axe-head at an angle. In the same breath, Silas’s right hand caught Eren’s wrist, twisting the joint outward with a sickening, grinding torque.
Eren let out a sharp hiss between clenched teeth as his grip involuntarily failed, the hatchet slipping from his numb fingers.
Silas didn’t let it touch the ground.
His gloved fingers snatched the falling weapon out of the air by the grip, reversed it with a flick of his wrist, and buried the notched steel edge straight into Eren’s right thigh.
SHK-CRUNCH.
"Fuckk—!"
Before Eren could retaliate, Silas drove the heel of his boot straight into Eren’s kneecap, shattering the joint backward.
Eren collapsed forward, but Silas caught him by the throat.
"You possess raw kinetic capacity, boy," Silas murmured, his voice as steady as an accountant checking a column of figures. "A beast’s threshold for trauma. But your technique is unpolished, chaotic, and entirely reliant on momentum."
Silas swung his arm.
SLAM!
Eren’s skull cracked against the stone masonry behind him.
"Messy," Silas stated, pulling Eren forward and driving his face back into the rock with methodical, rhythmic violence.
SLAM!
"Reckless."
SLAM!
"Unacceptable in an open battle."
Blood sprayed across the wall. The third impact split Eren’s scalp from hairline to ear, blood flooding over his left eye, his vision dissolving into an explosion of blinding white static.
Silas finally released his grip. Eren crumpled to the floor on his knees. His chest heaved in shallow, agonizing gasps, each breath whistling through fractured ribs and drowning lungs. Blood dripped from his chin, forming a steady, dark puddle between his trembling hands.
"I believe his ledger is effectively balanced," Silas said, wiping a speck of blood from his cuff with a pristine handkerchief.
Across the chamber, Whisper walked over the rubble, stopping three paces from Eren’s kneeling form.
"They demanded the identity of both," Whisper’s genderless, hollow voice scraped against the silence. "But the contract never required two living specimens to confirm the source."
"Indeed," Silas agreed coldly, adjusting his monocle. "Maintaining two volatile beasts creates unnecessary problems. One captive is sufficient for interrogation and syndicate extraction. The other is merely redundant inventory."
Silas turned his sharp gaze toward the far wall, where Alice lay battered against the ruined sarcophagus.
She pushed her elbows against the stone, her teeth bared in a feral snarl as she reached blindly for her blade, but her fingers were trembling.
Silas reached down and grabbed her golden, blood-matted hair.
"Get off me, you piece of—"
He yanked her.
A sharp, breathless cry was torn from Alice’s lungs as Silas dragged her across the floor, leaving a smeared trail of blood through the dust.
He tossed her forward, dropping her onto her knees directly in front of Eren.
Alice hit the stone with a dull thud, her vision swimming, but she forced her head up. Her battered face met Eren’s blue gaze.