Crimson maple leaves trembled in the autumn wind.
"Of everyone in this world... you are the one I loathe most."
La Signora froze.
She did not know why those words sent a strange pang through her, as though something had lightly pierced the soft chambers of her heart. She did not know what it was. She knew only that it hurt.
But there was no time to dwell upon it.
Kiyo's next strike had already arrived.
His attacks fell like lightning, appearing and withdrawing in the same instant, leaving behind only brilliant flashes beneath a clear sky.
That lightning seized upon La Signora's moment of distraction.
"Hah..."
The boy slowly exhaled. His breathing steadied, and his mind became lucid.
Judged only by their levels, ten Kiyo Seigans would still be no match for La Signora. Even without the Tsaritsa's blessing, her strength approached that of a god.
But Kiyo possessed things that La Signora did not.
Bosacius's sword and Raimei's Fudoshin.
He had inherited the swordsmanship of Liyue's mightiest Yaksha, an art that had already approached the divine through technique alone. Kamigiri, meanwhile, guided him into Fudoshin: a state of pure, lucid awareness of which it was said, "Let the mind arise without dwelling anywhere." It moved without conscious thought and answered every opening as it came, drawing near to Narukami's own state of Musou.
This body had been born without limits. Since his previous battle with La Signora, Kiyo had grasped Fudoshin and begun improving at a terrifying rate. With the Great Tengu's instruction at the Pillar General's mansion, the separate pieces were gradually coming together.
When Bosacius's sword and Raimei's Fudoshin joined, guided by the Gnosis, the world before Kiyo's eyes began to change.
In his lucid vision, Tenshukaku became perfectly clear. Everything lost its outward form until only lines and points remained. The points were weaknesses. Kamigiri touched them lightly, and the lines broke one after another. When the lines broke, the forms they supported collapsed with them.
Across the frozen plain stretching a hundred meters around them, each supporting point gave way with a thunderous crash. Cracks spread over the surface, one collapse triggering the next like a line of falling dominoes.
In the space of a moment, the entire expanse shattered into countless chips of ice, each reflecting the autumn sun.
La Signora had not expected a mortal with such a feeble presence to prove so troublesome. Her brief distraction gave Kiyo the opening he needed. The instant Kamigiri shattered the frozen plain, its edge swept toward her face.
La Signora instinctively turned aside, but she was too late.
Kamigiri skimmed across her pale cheek and drew a fine spray of blood. The thunder carried upon its blade erupted with a deafening roar.
Her mask shattered.
The Funerary Mask broke into fragments, revealing the scorching patterns beneath it and an eye drawn tight in shock.
Kiyo did not relent.
Only La Signora's momentary lapse had given him this precious opportunity. If he let it pass, he would never again have a chance to seriously wound her in a direct fight.
Kamigiri turned. Its blade traced a smooth, radiant arc through the air, reversed, and slammed into La Signora's chest. The strike fell so quickly that it seemed a bolt of lightning had struck her body head-on and hurled her out of the sky.
La Signora crashed onto the long stairway below. Thunder followed her down, blasting apart a thousand steps beneath its light. Broken stone flew upward as a wall of dust filled Kiyo's sight.
"Hah..."
The strike had drawn upon all his strength. The webbing between his thumb and forefinger had split, and his entire arm throbbed with numbness. He stared into the cloud of dust without blinking.
He saw blood.
There was no doubt.
La Signora was wounded.
Crimson blood ran from the corner of her mouth and fell upon the shattered steps. Without her mask, La Signora stood with her head bowed, protecting something against her chest.
Kiyo narrowed his eyes slightly.
It was a broken Hydro Timepiece.
Its wooden casing had cracked, forcing the sand within to stop flowing.
The glass that held the sand was already damaged. If the sand continued to fall, it would spill through the opening. The faster it flowed, the more it would lose, until not a single grain remained.
La Signora had shielded it, but a few stray threads of Kiyo's swordlight had still struck the timepiece.
They were no more than faint glimmers.
But to a vessel already broken, even that was enough.
Crack. Crack.
The glass splintered. The opening widened as hairline fractures spread across the Hydro Timepiece like a spiderweb.
The sand slowly began to leak out.
"It's for you."
"A Hydro Timepiece. It will complete one cycle in the time it takes for you to finish your studies at the Akademiya. When the timepiece runs out, I'll come to see you."
...
It was broken.
No.
La Signora lowered her eyes. Her shoulders trembled. She could no more stop the sand from spilling than she could stop time itself.
She held the Hydro Timepiece in both hands and bit down upon her lower lip.
La Signora set it upright and turned its mechanism. The sand began to fall.
She had not allowed it to run once in five hundred years. The more the sand descended, the more it would escape through the break. Eventually, it would all be gone.
Nor had she ever repaired it. She had needed the time of the past to remain still so that she could bury her heart alongside it.
But there was no need for that now.
Even if she did not start the timepiece, the sand would continue to spill.
Grain after grain fell. Time, frozen for five hundred years, began to descend once more.
She had spent three years at the Akademiya, and the sand had flowed for three years. Only three days remained before it completed its cycle.
Only three days.
Three brief days—and yet an eternity she could never reach.
La Signora lost control.
She raised her eyes. With no mask left to conceal them, the cursed witch's eyes were cold, empty, and lifeless as she stared at Kiyo with near-madness.
"I will burn you."
"I will burn Lumine. I will burn Kunikuzushi. I will burn every piece of kindling that stands in our way."
Kill.
Kill.
Crimson fire butterflies rose into the air. Uncanny flames rolled backward, bearing the purest curse and malice in the world. Amid the dancing butterflies, La Signora spoke in an empty, indifferent voice.
"Before the last of the sand is gone..." She bit down upon every word as though grinding the ashes of the old world between her teeth. "Within these final three days, I will burn every one of you to nothing. And then..."
She felt the heart beating against her chest.
"At the pure-white dawn, I will meet him again!"
The fire butterflies swept upward, carrying the sea of flame toward Kiyo.
Kamigiri cut them down one after another. Thunder and flame collided, consumed one another, and vanished together. Each time a fire butterfly died, lightning and fire blossomed beneath the leaden sky.
"Hah..."
The heat scorched Kiyo's lungs while the cold buried within his organs began to run rampant. He exhaled heavily, feeling as though every drop of blood in his body were about to boil away.
The air itself twisted beneath the heat.
Overwhelming force breaks every technique.
Crushed beneath the sheer weight of her elemental power, even Bosacius's sword and Raimei's Fudoshin could scarcely resist.
Kiyo struggled to hold his ground within the sea of flame.
Hah...
La Signora had lost control. Power poured from her without restraint.
Kiyo narrowed his eyes.
He had almost achieved his objective.
He could feel the number of fire butterflies slowly dwindling.
From the beginning, he had known that he could never defeat La Signora alone. His only goal had been to exhaust her.
Now that he had genuinely wounded her, should he withdraw at once?
The thought turned in his mind.
He could still hold on a little longer.
The longer he endured, the better Lumine's chances of victory became.
They would win together. Together, they would sever the entanglement that had followed them through three lifetimes.
He would not reveal who he had once been. He would not reconcile with La Signora. The moment he confessed the truth, that tangled fate could never be cut away, and none of them would ever know peace.
He was Kiyo Seigan.
He was no one's continuation.
If he had incurred a debt in his first life, then he had repaid it with his life in the second, when he was named Kiyono Fugin. Now his name was Kiyo Seigan, and he would inherit no one else's debts, sins, or fate.
To Kiyo, La Signora was merely a Harbinger who treated human lives as worthless. He would never accept the road she had chosen.
He would cut that road apart—along with their past.
Within Fudoshin, every fire butterfly followed a discernible path. Faced with danger unlike anything he had known before, the potential of the Steps of Ascension was being driven to its absolute limit.
Kiyo closed his eyes.
The flow of flame, the beat of wings, the movement of elemental energy—all of it lay before him with the clarity of a diagram.
All Kiyo had to do was use Kamigiri to cross out the butterflies' wings, obstruct the circulation of their elemental power, and sever the course of the flames.
The blade that had once bathed in a god's blood rang without cease. Fire butterflies fell, and thunder rose around him. Flames covered Kiyo's entire body, yet his eyes only grew clearer.
Mikoshi Chiyo was at her weakest. The remaining corruption made one final struggle within her, pushing her toward another loss of control. The wounds La Signora had inflicted had not healed and still burned through her body. When Chiyo stopped the frozen plain for Kiyo, those wounds tore open once more.
Now she looked upward, the boy's sword dance reflected in her golden eyes. Something stirred faintly within them.
She still retained one final measure of strength and reason.
She was Kiyo's final safeguard. The moment he could no longer continue, he only had to signal, and Torachiyo would spend her last strength carrying him away.
But Kiyo never gave her the signal.
In this contest of elemental power and endurance, Kiyo was the first to reach his limit.
Even so—
Even when he could barely summon another trace of elemental energy, Kiyo did not retreat.
Kamigiri moved as lightly as the wind, as though cutting one fine raindrop after another from the air. It felled the fire butterflies with the grace of a breeze, the speed of lightning, and the steadiness of stone.
Hold on...
Most of the fire butterflies had already died beneath Kamigiri, but La Signora seemed not to notice. Nothing remained in her eyes but hatred and loathing.
She would burn away everything before her. She would burn the old kindling. She would burn every obstacle standing between her and their reunion.
The heart was beating.
Beating.
Rostam was watching her.
Watching their path.
She was right.
She would prove it. She would prove their path to everyone.
The sand within the Hydro Timepiece was falling too. Whether it completed its unfinished cycle or scattered entirely upon the wind would be hers to decide.
The fire butterflies surged forward and finally consumed the last of Kiyo's lightning. They pressed all the way to him, biting into his skin and devouring his flesh.
In the next instant, Torachiyo dropped low and swept her final crimson stroke upward toward the sky, briefly cleaving the sea of flame apart.
The corruption began eating into her mind once more. Crimson swordlight danced with Kiyo's thunder amid the flames.
Torachiyo and Kiyo looked at each other through the fire.
She smiled softly.
"Beautiful. That was a beautiful sword dance, Seigan. You kept your word."
She could speak a complete sentence now.
Under La Signora's gaze, the catlike girl pressed her cheek against Kiyo's and nuzzled him gently. Her pale arms wrapped around his body.
Then, carrying Kiyo, the oni girl spent her final strength and raced toward the summit of Tenshukaku.
"I'm so jealous of you, Lumine," Mikoshi Chiyo whispered.
——
Kiyo's clash with La Signora had seemed long, but in truth it lasted no more than a dozen flashes of lightning.
Brief though it was, Lumine still noticed the commotion below Tenshukaku. The disturbance of elemental power was far too obvious to miss.
She watched the faint lightning racing across the sky, and its familiarity touched something in her heart.
That was Kamigiri...!
It did not take her long to realize what was happening below.
Idiot.
Was that man an idiot?
Bastard.
Bastard, bastard, bastard...
Of course Lumine understood Kiyo's purpose. Of course she knew he had chosen to exhaust La Signora in order to protect her.
But that only made him more of a bastard.
What gives you the right?
Why is it always you protecting me?
That's cheating. It's not fair.
I want to... Even if it's only once, I want to do the same for you...
She had challenged La Signora to a Duel Before the Throne precisely because she did not want to involve that idiot again.
She was terrified that, just as he had one year ago, he would die at La Signora's hands once more—die to the fate of their past while she stood by, unable to do anything.
She was deeply, utterly afraid.
After Mondstadt, she began training with a sword and cast aside the indolence of an easygoing traveler. Her strength grew at a terrifying rate—or rather, she was gradually reclaiming the power she had lost. Her progress was no slower than Kiyo's.
She had done it all so that one day she would no longer be helpless. So that one day she could finally do something.
So that she could take—
Revenge.
The Raiden Shogun stood expressionless at the summit of Tenshukaku. She seemed entirely indifferent to the flashes of thunder below. Who lived and who died had nothing to do with her.
The thunder went out.
But Lumine could not remain still.
She left the upper hall and descended the stairs. Her pupils tightened when she saw Mikoshi Chiyo carrying Kiyo toward her.
He could barely keep his eyes open. Burns covered his entire body.
And pursuing them from behind was La Signora.
The heart was beating.
The Hydro Timepiece was running.
Most of the fire butterflies had been destroyed, and the once-boundless sea of flame was beginning to wither. Yet the feverish obsession in La Signora's eyes had not faded.
It burned only hotter.
She would burn everyone to nothing. She would burn away all the turmoil of this world. She would burn even herself—burn Rosalyne herself—to nothing.
Burn it.
Burn it all!
Lumine stared at the unconscious Kiyo with empty, lifeless eyes. Then her rigid gaze turned toward La Signora, and her voice emerged as cold as something dragged from beneath a glacier.
"Rosalyne-Kruzchka Lohefalter."
She spoke again, cold and hollow.
"What have you done now?"