Chapter 3: The Goddess's Retribution

"Mary, you're so good at painting!"

"It's nothing," she muttered, her eyes hollow and distant. "Just a useless skill."

"Useless? Your mother was a painter! It means something to you."

Giving her a soft smile, I hugged her tight.

"Ignore them. Paint me a self-portrait instead—wouldn't that be fun?"

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"Kill me with all your might," she whispered.

Her voice was barely audible over the deafening roar of the inferno, but the words cut through the chaos like a jagged shard of glass. She raised the burning blade between us. Its mystical crimson fire didn't cast a warm, ambient light; it radiated a violent, supernatural pressure that seemed to devour the surrounding air.

Around us, the ancient woodland was dying. High above, the dense canopy had turned into a web of blinding red and gold lattice, showering us in embers. Thick, acrid smoke stung my eyes until tears blurred my vision, and every breath I pulled in burned down my throat, starving my lungs of actual oxygen. My skin prickled with unbearable heat. To survive this long, I'd resorted to smearing thick, wet mud across my face, arms, and exposed neck, letting the damp earth ward off the blistering ambient temperature. But the trick was running its course. The mud on my skin was already baking dry, cracking like desert clay. If we stayed in this dying grove for another two minutes, asphyxiation would claim us both before the flames even touched our clothes.

I looked into Mary's eyes. They were hollow, drained of the vibrant spark I'd known since childhood. The divine mark on her forehead throbbed with a sickly, rhythmic glow—the tether binding her mind to the will of a higher power.

Would dying ease her burden?

The thought surfaced without permission, born from sheer desperation. If I died by her hand right here, the forced contract on her soul might break. The tragic sacrifice would be over. She could walk away, free of the guilt, free of the puppet strings.

Without thinking, I lunged forward.

I didn't draw a weapon. Instead, I reached straight for the burning blade, wrapping my bare, mud-caked hands tightly over hers on the hilt. The supernatural heat seared through my palms, the smell of burning skin instant and sharp, but I tightened my grip. The mystical crimson flame coating the steel sputtered and flickered under the shock of my force. With a hard, sudden yank, I drove the point of the knife straight toward my own chest.

Mary gasped. The sudden realization of what I was doing pierced through her trance like a splash of ice water. Her dilated pupils shrank.

"No!"

With a surge of frantic strength, she planted her boot into my stomach and violently shoved me away.

I tumbled backward into the ash, rolling to absorb the impact before springing back to my feet. When I looked up, Mary was breathing heavily. Her chest heaved, and for the first time since the summons began, the dull, mechanical emptiness in her eyes was gone. In its place was a sharp, furious spark of life.

"If you want me to kill you," she snarled, her knuckles white as she readjusted her hold on the knife, "then fight me."

A slow grin spread across my soot-stained face. It wasn't a cheerful smile, but a relief born of battle. If a life-or-death fight was what it took to keep her conscious and snap her out of that divine puppet-trance, then I would give her the fight of her life.

"Then I'll fight you like my life depends on it!" I shouted.

I kicked off the earth, channeling my mana into my legs, and vaulted upward into the burning canopy. The air near the treetops was suffocating, a furnace of rising heat, but it offered mobility. Behind me, a sudden burst of heat announced her pursuit. Mary wasn't just following; she was hunting me with a terrifying, lethal focus.

My mind raced through the strategy as I leaped from branch to blazing branch. I couldn't defeat her with raw magic while she was powered by a deity, nor could I afford to hurt her permanently. My plan had to be precise:

Lead her away from the fire's epicenter to prevent us both from suffocating.

Move downwind to clear our lungs of the thick, lingering particulate matter.

Find an opening to sever her connection to the Goddess by knocking her out cold.

"Ellaine!" her voice echoed from behind.

I tilted my head back just as a concentrated sphere of compressed fire scorched the air where my head had been a microsecond prior. The heat of its passage singed the tips of my hair. The fireball slammed into a massive, century-old oak branch behind me, reducing the three-foot-thick timber to glowing ash instantly.

I didn't slow down. I weaved through her relentless barrage, letting instinct take over as fireballs, flame-whips, and razor-sharp cinders rained down around me. We moved like two blurs through the dying forest, bounding from branch to trunk to falling timber. Gradually, the oppressive heat began to break. The roar of the forest fire receded into a distant rumble, replaced by a cool, moist breeze that smelled of damp earth and moss.

Below us, the sound of rushing water grew louder.

I dropped out of the trees, landing heavily in the soft mud of a wide riverbank. The mist rising from the rapids felt like pure ice against my feverish skin. A second later, Mary landed twenty paces away.

She dropped to one knee, panting heavily. The crimson aura surrounding her was flickering erratically, pulsing out of sync with her heartbeat. "You... led me to water," she gasped, wiping sweat and ash from her brow. "It's not like... you can summon an element to beat me..."

Before she could finish the sentence, I exploded forward, kicking up a spray of river mud to blind her.

I tackled her from the flank, using the sound of the rushing rapids to mask my approach. "Don't get distracted. I'm still trying to kill you," I hissed near her ear as we hit the ground.

Her combat instincts were terrifyingly sharp. Even taken by surprise, she managed to bring the flat of her blade up, parrying my strike at the last second. Steel struck steel with a sharp ring, but the sheer momentum of my body weight sent her stumbling backward into the shallows.

She scrambled to her feet, but I could see the truth written on her face. She was growing paler by the second. Her skin was turning a sickly gray, the veins along her neck standing out in dark, unnatural violet hues. The ancient magic borrowed from her deity was a parasite, draining her vital life force to sustain its power. If I didn't end this now, the contract would consume her from the inside out.

She raised her hand, trying to shape the air into one final, decisive spell, her fingers trembling violently.

I closed the distance in a heartbeat. I stepped inside her guard, using my left forearm to pin her knife hand against her torso, preventing her from swinging the blade. Before she could complete the incantation, I raised my right hand and delivered a sharp, precise chop to the nerve cluster at the base of her neck.

The fire in her hand vanished. Her eyes rolled back.

"You... really live up to your name, Grim Reaper..." she breathed, her voice barely a whisper as the force vanished from her limbs.

She crumpled forward. I caught her before she hit the water, gently lowering her down onto the dry bank. My own strength was completely spent; the adrenaline that had kept my body moving flushed out of my system all at once. My vision swam with dark spots. The combined weight of smoke inhalation, magical exhaustion, and physical strain dragged my eyelids down. I collapsed onto the mud beside my friend, the sounds of the night fading into a profound, heavy silence as blackness took me.

"Ellaine... The King is calling you." "Ellaine... wake up..."

A soft voice echoed in the deep, dark void of my subconscious, distant and distorted, like sound traveling through thick glass.

"Ellaine..."

"Miss? Excuse me, miss?"

A sharp, firm voice dragged me back toward consciousness. I jolted awake, coughing violently as my lungs reacted to the lingering scent of soot. I blinked away the grime coating my eyes, trying to force my blurred vision to focus.

Standing directly over me was a tall man clad in polished silver plate armor stamped with the royal crest. He had the rigid, uncompromising build of a high-ranking military officer, with striking blonde hair cut short in the fashion typical of the capital's noble houses. The forest fire in the distance had died down to a smoldering, hazy smoke, but the atmosphere on the riverbank was colder than ever.

His drawn longsword gleamed menacingly in the pale twilight, its tip pointed directly at the chest of the unconscious Mary beside me.

"Is that her?" the knight demanded, his voice devoid of warmth.

Instinct took over before my mind could even process the danger. I scrambled across the mud, throwing my body over Mary to shield her from his blade. I glared up at the knight, my heart pounding against my ribs. "Please, put that away! It's a mistake!"

The knight's eyes narrowed, cold and calculating. "A mistake? This girl breached the outer sanctum and tried to assassinate Lady Amelia. The entire garrison was mobilized to hunt her down. And you—why are you protecting her? It is as if the two of you have known each other for a long time." He lowered the sword an inch, his grip tightening. "Are you a fellow conspirator?"

"No! She was forced to do this!" I yelled, my voice cracking from the smoke damage. "She's not a murderer! I know because she—"

YOUUUUU.

The word didn't come from the knight, nor did it come from anywhere on earth. The sky above us seemed to crack open like fragile glass. The ambient temperature skyrocketed in an instant, the gentle river mist evaporating into dry steam. The air grew impossibly heavy, a suffocating aura pressing down on us with the weight of a falling mountain. It was an ancient, violent wrath—the terrible presence of a divine entity whose authority had been defied.

YOUR LIFE IS MINE. HAVE YOU FORGOTTEN THE PLEDGE?

Beside me, Mary snapped awake with a horrific, blood-curdling scream. She didn't rise; she arched her back in agony as violent, ethereal crimson flames erupted directly out of her skin, burning from the inside out.

The Vigilant Goddess was a wrathful, unforgiving deity. A summoning contract was not a simple spell; it was an absolute surrender of spirit and flesh. By forcibly knocking Mary unconscious and severing her mental tether, I had broken the sacred pact mid-summoning. And a broken contract demanded a brutal, immediate toll on the mortal host.

"Goddess, please!" I screamed, throwing my arms over Mary's writhing form as the heat scorched my face. "Take me instead! Punish me! Give me her retribution—she summoned you because of me!"

The pressure in the air consolidated into a blinding, spectral face above the river, burning with terrible light.

FOOLISH CHILD. YOU THINK YOUR PITIFUL EXISTENCE HAS VALUE? SHE KNEW THE CONSEQUENCES OF HER ACTIONS WHEN SHE CALLED MY NAME. HER ANCIENT BLOOD IS FAR SWEETER THAN YOURS.

"I beg of you—" I wept, pressing my hands over Mary's burning shoulders, trying in vain to absorb the divine fire. "Take my life!"

ANNOYING FIEND.

The entity didn't bother to negotiate. A concussive blast of pure, radiant fire erupted from the air above, striking me squarely in the chest.

The force was astronomical. The impact snapped my breath from my lungs, lifting my body into the air and launching me backward like a stone from a catapult. I flew over the muddy bank and plunged violently into the middle of the river.

The freezing, turbulent water swallowed me whole. The shock of the icy cold hit my burning skin like a hammer strike. I choked, trying to hold my breath, but the shock caused me to inhale deep gulps of water. The powerful current seized my battered body, spinning me out of control and dragging me down into the black depths of the riverbed.

I can't swim...

The realization washed over me as my strength completely failed. The roaring sound of the current slowly began to fade, replaced by a quiet, muffled stillness. My vision darkened from the edges, the sunlight filtering through the churning water growing dimmer and dimmer.

As the crushing darkness closed in to swallow me completely, a bright flash pierced the murky surface above. Down through the cold, rushing water, a large, calloused hand wrapped in a ruined leather gauntlet pierced the current, reaching frantically down into the abyss toward me.