The Useless Prince Is A Gangster

Erin didn't bother to turn towards the beast, gaze still on Ashtarya's blood-smeared grin.

"You never learn," she murmured, almost disappointed.

A sphere of transparent light manifested around the creature's head. There's no flashy blast or sound; the sphere just vanished with the creature's head.

The headless body of the shadow beast took one more step before collapsing onto the ground.

Seeing their friend obliterated in a second, the single-headed Cerberus and the rotting griffith charged in unison from each side, their roars shaking the clearing.

Erin finally turned toward them.

"Threatening Death with death," she said, soft and conversational, taking a single step forward. "How adorable."

As she said, the ground where the Cerberus stepped erupted with a pillar of pure white flames. The beast didn't scream; it ceased to be, vaporized into atoms. All that remained were its perfect, bleached bones as the fire faded.

At the same moment, the rotting griffith aimed its razor-sharp claws for her back.

Erin didn't even move from her spot. As the creature approached, she smiled, a calm, chilling smile that didn't suit a child's face.

As the creature's claws were about to grab the little girl, she vanished in a blur of white. The creature crashed into the dirt where she stood.

It scrambled upright, its hollow eyes scanning the clearing frantically.

Then it spotted her.

At a distance, a few feet away, Erin stood calmly. In her small hand was a katana, an exact replica of her father's, but with divine energy passing through it. Black blood dripped from its edge.

The griffith screeched loudly and launched itself into the air for another dive.

Well, it never made it.

Because as its wings flapped downwards, they cleanly separated from its body. The cuts were flawless, as though reality itself had been rewritten to declare those wings had always been severed.

The body hit the dirt hard, thrashing in blind panic.

Erin walked past it without breaking stride.

The head came off mid-scream, rolling across the clearing to stop at Ashtarya's feet with a wet thud.

For a long moment the witch could only stare at the slack, horrified expression frozen on what had once been Griffith's face.

Desperate to escape, Ashtarya tried to slam her palm to the ground once more, to summon a horde and escape in the chaos.

But she couldn't press down.

A small, pale hand had grabbed her wrist, stopping it mid-air with an iron like grip.

"Not so fast, Miss Ashtarya," a sweet yet chill voice whispered right beside her ear. "Let's talk. One on one."

With a flick, she snapped the witch's wrist, crack echoed like thunder through the clearing. A guttural scream was torn from Ashtarya's throat.

"I only have ten minutes left in this form," Erin mused. "Unlike you, I'm the real Goddess of Death, you know? I have to be efficient."

She seized the witch by the collar and dragged the limp body to the center of the clearing, then let her drop like discarded laundry.

"I could play longer," she chirped. "I really do love how you shake."

Before the witch could even move, Erin stomped her bare foot directly on her chest with impossible weight.

"This vessel tormented my father for three months, didn't it?" A small knife— the same knife she obtained in that cave.

Ashtarya's green eyes widened in recognition and terror. It's the same knife that destroyed her original body centuries ago.

Erin tapped the tip against the witch's heart. "You remember it. Good."

"I can't kill your true soul yet," she whispered, leaning close enough to tremble her. "But I can take back every second of Time you've hoarded in this body. Consider this a preview."

"No—!" Ahstrya gasped in panic.

Erin grinned with teeth. "Yes."

She drove the pulsing knife straight down, piercing through cloth, flesh, and bone, burying it deep in Ashtarya's heart.

There was no blood, but a bright golden light—the essence of time—began to suck up from the wound, snaking through the air like glowing veins before being drawn into the blade.

Ashtarya's body arched violently in the agony of irrevocable loss.

The earth shook. A shockwave detonated outward, splintering hundred-year-old trees into matchsticks, hurling boulders skyward like small stones.

Erin did not blink throughout the chaos. Her silver hair whipped around her face of absolute concentration. Her cold red eyes locked on Ashtarya's.

The witch's screams were dissolved in that chaos.

Then the violent energy gathered inward, and it was silent. The knife in Erin's hand now glowing with pure golden light. Beneath her foot, the borrowed body petrified and crumbled to grey dust, scattered by a wind that Erin created.

Erin stared at the empty space, lips curling. "Fucking witch. See you soon."

The gathered little energy in the knife started surging up into Erin's arm. She closed her eyes, the feel of the energy not being hot or cold was flooding into her veins.

She gasped, her small body trembling as the authority writing itself into her very essence.

When her eyes opened again, faint golden spirals flickered once in the red, then vanished.

She finally took back what hers, the power which belongs to her mother, the power that should be passed to her.

She took a slow, deep breath, steadying her body. She looked around the utter destruction she caused — the scattered ground, the scattered forest.

"I have to clean up all of these things?" She wined, like a kid who refuses to clean her room.

She raised her both hands to test the new powers. Her veins started glowing in gold, spilling over the clearing in a wave.

In less than a minute the forest rewind itself whole again—shattered trunks straightened and alive, craters filled and sprouted with fresh grass, every trace of cult battle and witch erased.

Only the remains of the summoned beasts left as they're useful for fake scenarios.

She sighed, her work was done. Her eyes finally fell upon her parents laying there unconsciously next to each other.

A soft smile widened on her face as she looked at mother, Rin, sleeping peacefully. Then, she looked at her father's burnt vessel. Leonhardt's body was not in condition to live.

Erin knelt beside him and placed a small hand on his burnt chest and rewinding his body back to before he fought Draven.

Shattered bones came back to its place. The burnt skin turned back into the pale skin of a nineteen year old noble. Leaving only a few injuries on him.

She smiled, a true child-like smile of pure happiness.

She carefully lay down in the small space between her mother and father. She wobbled closer to her father, then reached out to lay hand on her mother's arm.

Curled between her peacefully sleeping parents, in a forest she had restored with her own hands, Erin, I mean Aria closed her eyes.

For the first time in eighty years, surrounded by the two people she had crossed lifetimes to protect, a perfect smile graced her lips as she drifted into sleep.