CH 18. Before the Ash Falls Pt 2

18. Before the Ash Falls Pt 2

She reached for her blade but didn’t rise—just tilted her head toward the voice, eyes narrowing enough to register the silhouette: tall, lean, overly confident. There was a smirk beneath the shadows.

“Oh,” she muttered. “It’s you.”

“I was kind of hoping you wouldn’t show up.”

He grinned and shrugged, already working his belt loose.

Stone slithered upward behind him like roots finding shape, forming a crude privacy wall disguised as spellwork.

“Look,” she said, pulling herself upright. “I’m going through a lot right now. So if you could just—oh, I don’t know—behave like a loving, law-abiding citizen of the Dominion for two minutes?”

He chuckled. Not loud. Almost private, like he was amused she still pretended the rules mattered.

“You don’t seem excited,” he said, eyes glinting.

“About what?”

“Me. Come on, can’t you feel the stain on my mana? I’m Awakened now.” He puffed up his chest and slanted his eyes like he was waiting for applause, but she only raised a brow.

“Really?”

“Most truly.”

“Sir Duke Von Ludiwik was so generous as to allow me to join his party. Took the long path—first wave recursion. It was so—”

He exhaled, eyes half-lidded, like someone reliving a fever dream.

“So pure. Not the trial in the Wildworld, but I was just focusing on how amazing it was, and then—cracks. Cracks spreading out through the sky. Like the world was peeling just for me.”

Alice stared at him.

Blank. Flat.

Her forehead creased slowly, like a smile trying to remember how it used to work.

“I don’t care.” She was ready to move, but the words that followed froze her mid-step.

“Don’t try it if you don’t want your body broken in two.”
Then he kept talking like he hadn’t just threatened her.

“I know, I know, the elemental branch is everywhere, but come on. How many people even Awaken at all? Most die in the first loop. Me?” He thumped his chest proudly. “I made my tether in minutes.”

His words started to slur, but he still wouldn’t shut up. He had to be drunk—drunk on his own ego.

“Do you know how good it feels? I mean, most people would beg to—”

A knife flew.

No warning. No tell.
Just silver. Airborne. Intimate.

He barely raised an earth wall in time—it burst from the stone like a reflex, shielding his chest, but the scream came anyway.

Because a second dagger was already buried in his right eye socket, smoke curling from the point of impact.

“AAAUUUUUGH!”

A surge of mana exploded in all directions—enough to knock a normal human unconscious, maybe even forcefully pull them into the Wildworld.

Shards erupted from the floor. Jagged, wild. A blind rage carving the air into weapons—but Alice was already gone.

He spun, searching.

Too slow.

She landed behind him, between the wall and his escape.

Her boot slammed into his shoulder, sending him sprawling—his wounded face grinding across the gravel. He rolled hard and fast, coughing blood, casting another wall from sheer instinct.

Stone obeyed, folding around him like a cage.

Too slow again.

The wall cracked inward before it could form—an invisible force tearing through it like paper. Alice’s dagger sliced through the edge of his defense with surgical precision, severing its spell-thread mid-cast.

He gasped. Staggered. Retreated.

She didn’t follow.

She predicted his next move and was right. He swung wide, earthspikes erupting from the side.

She vanished.

And reappeared—above him.

He raised both arms only to learn she had let him, just so she could break those hands. Dust settled to reveal a man trying to stand and a woman waiting for him to do just that.

Then, as he made one final attempt to rise, a blade kissed the air near his throat—close enough that he could feel it humming.

She crouched just enough to look at him—his face twisted in shock, one hand over his ruined eye, lips trembling between rage and terror.

“Next time,” she said, voice low, velvet-dark,

“try a compliment before the belt. Works better.”

---

A winged chariot flew past at full speed as she wiped her hands on her trousers.

“Unauthorized high levels of mana in use! Engage?!”

Everything was so interesting. So unexpected.

It seemed she had carried back a good amount of her mana points. She pulled down her cloth at the wrist to reveal the number orbiting around it. It was well past the amount a beginner adventurer should have.

“Pain in a loop?”
Tharozh would see her change that.