Chapter 63: The Sins of Kindness and the Endless Library
Location: Base of the Black Spire, The Eastern Valley
Patience was a virtue, and the Immortal Witch had spent two centuries discarding her virtues one by one.
Standing on the jagged overlook, Gemina tapped her pale finger against her chin. The vanguard of demons had already breached the tower. The thrill of the hunt, the intoxicating prospect of tasting a Divine Guardian, was making her cursed blood boil. Her curiosity had officially overwhelmed her patience.
"Change of plans," Gemina announced, her voice dropping its playful lilt. "We are going in now. Granger, Sulia—return to the vessel."
Granger sighed, a puff of steam escaping his lips. "As you command, Lady Gemina."
Sulia simply cheered. "Yay! Going home!"
Because they were physically frailer than her immortal frame, and because Gemina’s inherent 'Sloth' made the prospect of reviving them from a lethal blow terribly tedious, she preferred to carry them inside herself. Sulia leaped forward, her blue gelatinous body losing its humanoid shape and splattering against Gemina’s chest, instantly sinking through the fabric and into her skin without leaving a drop of moisture.
Granger stepped close, his mechanical eye whirring. His body began to deconstruct—flesh turning to shadow, clockwork gears unspooling into fine metallic dust. Like a reverse exhalation, the dust was drawn into Gemina’s open palm, fusing back into her nervous system and spine.
She rolled her shoulders, feeling the comforting, familiar weight of her subordinates occupying the dark corners of her mind. With a swift leap, the Immortal Witch descended toward the valley floor.
The scene at the base of the tower was organized chaos. Hundreds of blue-skinned demon troops were hauling the Brume Whale’s gargantuan corpse. But as Gemina’s boots touched the frozen earth, a wave of palpable, suffocating dread rippled across the encampment.
The demons stopped pulling the iron chains. The soldiers carrying their dead froze in their tracks.
Gemina did not draw a weapon. She merely walked. But the aura radiating from her was so dense, so obscenely dark, that it felt as though gravity itself was increasing around her. Shadows clung to the hem of her midnight dress like desperate hands. Beneath her ash-white bangs, her right eye pulsed with a crimson, reptilian glow that seemed to pierce straight through the demons' souls.
<They are terrified of you, Master!> Sulia’s childish voice echoed gleefully within Gemina’s mind.
Sulia was no ordinary slime. Early in her long life, Gemina had desired an assistant who was light, malleable, and easy to transport. Ordinary slimes lacked the intelligence for complex tasks. Gemina’s solution was grotesque but effective: she harvested the wandering spirit of a human child who had died tragically young, forcefully grafting the soul into an arcane slime core. She had given Sulia a second chance to observe the world—provided she served the Witch for eternity.
<Of course they are afraid,> Granger’s mechanical voice chimed in her head, analyzing the biological responses of the demons. <Heart rates elevated by two hundred percent. Magic circuits constricting. Our presence here is a calculated intimidation. It prevents unwanted engagements and conserves our mana.>
The Demon Commander, a towering brute covered in spiked armor, stepped forward. His hand hovered over his broadsword, trembling slightly. Every veteran of the Abyss knew the rumors of the Immortal Witch. She had roamed Cascadia for over two hundred years. Whispers claimed she had once been a human, but the cruelty of her own kind had twisted her into an undying monster.
The Commander swallowed hard. There was no positive alliance between the Abyss and the Witch, but there was no negative blood feud either. To engage her was to invite a massacre.
"Hold your positions," the Commander barked, his voice straining. "Let her pass."
Gemina offered him a polite, chilling smile, her emerald eye crinkling with faux warmth. "You have such lovely manners. Don't work too hard, boys."
She glided past them, stepping toward the towering, featureless entrance of the Black Spire. There were no doors, only an archway filled with absolute, impenetrable darkness. Without a hint of hesitation, Gemina stepped into the void.
The sensation was bizarre. It felt like walking through a wall of thick, freezing water, yet when she emerged on the other side, her dress and skin were perfectly dry. She had crossed a spatial threshold.
Location: Inside the Black Spire - The Endless Library
While the Immortal Witch was just breaching the perimeter, Kyouya Kusanagi and his companions were already deep within the Spire's belly.
Or rather, they were somewhere else entirely.
The interior of the tower was not a spiral staircase or a military keep. It was a library. Towering bookshelves carved from obsidian stretched upward, disappearing into the darkness. Massive, floating crystal chandeliers bathed the aisles in a warm, golden light, illuminating millions of ancient, leather-bound tomes. Yet, no matter how far the light stretched, there was no end in sight.
"Spatial expansion magic," Sebastian noted, adjusting his spectacles as he walked alongside Sofia. "The interior dimensions far exceed the exterior structure."
Kyouya walked in the center of the formation, his golden-ringed eyes constantly analyzing his surroundings. He felt no awe, only a clinical need to understand. Scarlet walked close by, her scythe unsealed, grumbling under her breath about the musty smell. Sylas, Xaroth, Malakor, and Vane formed a protective diamond around their Lord and the memory-wiped anomaly. Zephyra glided through the shadows cast by the bookshelves, scouting ahead.
Suddenly, a voice echoed through the vast expanse. It did not come from a speaker or a person, but seemed to resonate directly against their eardrums. It was a female voice—young, cold, and utterly devoid of emotion.
"Trials and tribulations, Number One: Kindness."
The group halted. From the dark space between two massive bookshelves, a figure stumbled into the golden light.
It was a little girl. She was dressed in rags, her knees scraped and bleeding. She rubbed her tear-filled eyes, looking up at the imposing demons with absolute terror. "H-Help me..." she whimpered, reaching a tiny hand toward Kyouya.
Kyouya paused, his analytical mind immediately trying to process the variable. A human child? In a sealed divine tower? The statistical probability is...
He didn't get to finish the thought.
Before Kyouya could take a single step, Sofia raised her hand. A spike of condensed crimson blood shot forward, piercing the little girl straight through the chest. Simultaneously, a blade of solid shadow dropped from the ceiling, summoned by Zephyra, cleanly decapitating the child.
The little girl collapsed, her body instantly dissolving into a puddle of foul-smelling, acidic black sludge that sizzled violently against the obsidian floor.
Kyouya blinked. "Why did you terminate her without a proper threat assessment?"
<Negative, Host. Their threat assessment was merely faster than yours. Magical analysis indicates the entity was a highly condensed mana bomb disguised via illusion magic. A delay in execution would have resulted in lethal area-of-effect damage.>
Zephyra stepped out of the shadows, wiping imaginary dust from her dark robes. She offered Kyouya a playful, yet dangerous chuckle. "You must focus, Kyouya. Do not let your human instincts betray you here. If you hesitate out of misplaced pity, you will likely die before you can regain your memories or achieve whatever ambition lies buried in that blank mind of yours."
Kyouya looked at the sizzling acid on the floor. The Trial of Kindness. To show kindness was to hesitate. To hesitate was to die. A logical, albeit cruel, parameter.
The young, emotionless voice echoed from the void once more.
"The Tested Subjects passed Number One."
A brief pause.
"Number Two: The Death."
The golden light of the chandeliers violently flickered. The spatial fabric of the library warped, folding inward like crushed paper. Kyouya felt a sudden, intense vertigo. When his vision stabilized a microsecond later, the endless bookshelves were gone. The golden light was gone. Sofia, Sebastian, Zephyra—everyone had vanished.
Kyouya stood alone. His polished shoes were no longer resting on obsidian tiles, but sinking into the damp, rotting earth of a dark, fog-choked forest. The Spire had separated them.
Location: Inside the Black Spire - The Endless Library (Alternative Instance)
Gemina stepped out of the watery threshold and found herself bathed in the golden light of the Endless Library. She looked around, her emerald eye scanning the towering obsidian bookshelves.
"Fascinating," Gemina murmured. "A pocket dimension. Granger, Sulia, do you sense the anomalies?"
Silence.
Gemina frowned. "Granger? Sulia?"
Still nothing. She reached inward, probing the spiritual links that bound them to her soul. They were there, asleep, but a thick, oppressive layer of divine magic was blanketing her mind, cutting off her internal communication with them. The Tower was isolating her consciousness.
"How terribly rude," she sighed, smoothing her black dress. "I suppose I must entertain myself."
"Trials and tribulations, Number One: Kindness."
The cold, young voice echoed through the aisles. Gemina stopped walking. Her lips curled into a delighted smirk. "A game? Oh, I do love games."
From the shadows between the ancient tomes, a figure stumbled out into the light. It was a little girl in a tattered dress, weeping softly, her knees bruised and scraped. "Help me," the illusion whimpered, looking up at the Immortal Witch.
Gemina didn't attack. She didn't summon a blood curse or snap the child's neck. She merely tilted her head, her ash-white bangs shifting slightly. She waited, letting the girl step closer into the light.
As the golden illumination hit the child's face, Gemina’s body went completely rigid.
The delighted smirk vanished. The unhinged, monstrous excitement evaporated. For the first time in decades, the Immortal Witch’s expression was completely blank—a mask of absolute, chilling emptiness.
The little girl looking up at her had ash-white hair. She had a vibrant emerald left eye, and a right eye that was a soft, innocent brown—before it had been cursed, before it had turned red.
It was Gemina’s own face. The face of the fragile, trusting human girl she had been over two centuries ago.
The illusion reached out, mirroring the Witch's tragic past. "Please... save me."
Gemina stared at the ghost of her humanity. Without a word, without a shift in her blank expression, she smoothly drew the ornate pistol from the holster beneath her dress. She didn't aim. She simply pointed the barrel downward.
Bang.
A hyper-accelerated projectile of cursed blood tore through the air, striking the illusion perfectly between the eyes. The little girl's face shattered like fragile glass, the entire body dissolving into a puddle of hissing black acid.
Gemina lowered the pistol. A thin wisp of smoke curled from the heated barrel, mixing with the scent of ozone and burnt magic.
"I never liked that face anyway," she whispered to the empty library.
She holstered the weapon, the sharp clack of her leather boots echoing against the obsidian floor as she walked deeper into the dark, leaving her past behind.
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