That wasn't all — the ice lance buried in the ground immediately began to spread and extend, freezing everything in its path.
Both men had chosen to stay upright rather than roll, worried about being shot mid-movement. It hadn't occurred to either of them that this thrown weapon, while not a grenade, had delivered a similar problem.
The Assassin, with clear enough vision to see what was happening, stepped back in time. But the scarred man had only the sound of spreading ice to go on. His reaction came half a beat late, and the frost caught his leg — the numbing cold left it sluggish and unresponsive.
"She's getting closer!"
The scarred man called out the warning — he'd caught a faint feminine scent beneath the smell of grass and wood.
The Assassin who heard it immediately felt a powerful, sudden surge of danger — purely instinctual — and rolled without thinking.
Bang!
A bullet landed precisely on the rolling Assassin. And at his original position, a patch of black flame burned quietly in the grass, casting no light — and in the dimness, not illuminating the figure who had just stepped out of concealment a short distance away.
What had triggered the Assassin's Danger Intuition a moment ago wasn't the incoming bullet. It was this black flame — a flame she could guide with no physical action required. In game terms, this would be called a "projectile skill." That was what had given her the opening to land an accurate hit on a fast-rolling target.
Premonitions could be deceived. And for Extraordinaries like Witches who had skills they could release and control at a distance, the deception was especially easy.
After dodging the scarred man's shot and extinguishing the still-burning black flame eating away at the vegetation, she scooped up some soil mixed with the Assassin's blood and cast the Curse again.
Her clear voice rang like a pronouncement of death. The second Assassin's cry joined the first. By now the first Assassin had fallen silent — not yet dead, but no longer capable of making any sound.
This was the black flame's one weakness: it would keep burning as long as it had spiritual energy to feed on, and wouldn't extinguish unless the Witch chose to end it. But unlike ordinary fire, it couldn't grow stronger — it couldn't kill a living creature quickly on its own, unless the Witch added more.
Bang!
She shot the second Assassin in the head — barely able to dodge anymore, wracked with pain — then patted her chest, deactivated Aura Vision, and walked over to extinguish the black flame still burning on the first body before turning her gaze to the last survivor.
"He wasn't wrong. I am the person you were trying to kill."
Her beautiful voice couldn't quite mask the icy killing intent beneath.
"Impossible!" — Bang!
The scarred man roared and fired. No effect. A cold, melodious taunt drifted to him from a different location entirely:
"So now you understand? Idiot. You were nothing but a tool to force me into advancing to Sequence 7.
Haha! You think the mirror failing was an accident? Fool.
Pleased with yourself? You piece of garbage — whether you ever got to take revenge on me depended entirely on whether I could make up my mind to become a woman."
The words hit the scarred man somewhere he hadn't expected — and the fury and malice he'd been suppressing under shock and fear suddenly welled up. Her sex gave him a reflexive feeling of psychological advantage, and he let it goad him into calling back:
"Come out, you —! Stop hiding like a coward…"
She'd already been braced for the provocation. That disgusting voice didn't break her composure — she simply summoned an ice lance under cover of the leaves, took aim, and hurled it with a Full-Force Strike, carrying the full weight of her rage.
The scarred man was still mid-taunt, already letting himself imagine what he'd do to this woman once he got hold of her.
Because of Mislead and Persuade, the scarred man had taken the bait completely — genuinely believing her taunts and finding nothing wrong with his own line of thinking.
So when the ice lance came flying in — noticeably faster than the last one — he barely threw himself sideways in time, saving himself from a direct hit. It wasn't a clean miss, though: the lance grazed him as it passed, leaving his body stiff with cold.
The shock of the biting cold jolted him back to his senses. Realizing things had gone badly, he tried to roll upright — but another lance came immediately, cutting off his path forward. With his body sluggish in this position, he couldn't put enough distance between himself and the embedded lance in time. Though it didn't strike him directly, within seconds the scarred man was completely frozen in place, frost covering him from head to toe.
Only then did he hear the soft sound of feet landing.
"You—"
Bang!
A bullet stopped whatever he'd been about to say. Immediately after, a patch of black flame descended on the dying man's body.
She had no intention of letting him spew anything further, and no interest in any confession or begging for mercy he might have offered. From the moment they had failed to find and stop her from advancing to Witch, their fate was sealed.
The taunting had only been to test whether the Instigator's Mislead and Persuade could be used against hostile Extraordinaries, provoking them into making mistakes. Not because she'd wanted to watch someone lose their composure.
Useful conclusion: given the right words, a sufficiently unguarded Beyonder would take the bait and misjudge the situation. She filed that away as she holstered her revolver and walked over.
The three deaths had taken enough of the edge off her anger that she could think about other things. But approaching the body and looking at that odious face, she found that even with the worst of her rage spent, she had no interest in restraint. She summoned an ice lance and started hitting.
She beat the body until it was unrecognizable and her hand had started to ache. Only then did she stop and extinguish the black flame still burning on the body.
"No wonder they included javelin-throwing technique. The ice doesn't make for a comfortable grip compared to wood — too rigid."
No one was left to hear her, but she kept it to herself anyway. She didn't want to hear her own voice right now, pleasant as it was.
She remembered there was still one unfinished matter. She picked up her ice lance and turned to find it.
The body she found was slumped against a tree, completely silent, but still with black flame quietly burning on it. She studied the parts the flame had already consumed. The surface showed no obvious changes — but her now-heightened inspiration caught something subtly wrong, as though a certain kind of vitality had slipped away from that portion of the body.
When she activated Aura Vision, she could see clearly that those sections were profoundly dim — lifeless, without even a trace of spiritual luminescence. She approached, drove a lance through the skull, and then extinguished the flame.
It wasn't entirely about preventing environmental damage — she was also a little concerned that black flame consuming spiritual energy might interfere with the experiment she had in mind next.
Based on the knowledge the Witch potion had packed into her, occult study divided a person's non-physical self into four layers. The outermost was the "etheric body" — representing life energy and physical condition, the most closely connected layer between a person's spiritual and physical forms. And it was the spiritual energy composing the etheric body that the Witch's black flame burned.
So in principle, this should have little effect on the Mirror Necromancy she intended to attempt next. But it was only a hypothesis — better to reduce variables where possible.
In a world where the dead could get back up, getting a dead person to speak was hardly surprising. One application of necromancy was exactly that — letting the dead speak — though the "spirit" contacted was not the soul but the residual spiritual energy left behind in the corpse, using it to access fragments of the deceased's memories. Which was functionally the same as making the dead talk.
This was also why she suspected the black flame's spiritual energy burning should have no effect on the necromancy — the etheric body had no direct connection to memory.
As for the residual spiritual energy of the dead — the potion's knowledge hadn't spelled it out, so she could only hypothesize: after the body died, the spiritual form lost its anchor and began to break down, dissolving back into spiritual energy and slowly dissipating.
Which was also why she was a little worried the black flame might interfere with the necromancy. She couldn't be certain of the precise relationship between the spiritual body's dissolution and the moment of death — the textbook hadn't covered that. If the flame had damaged that part, it could ruin the whole attempt.
Author's Note (this chapter): "No wonder they included javelin-throwing technique. The ice doesn't make for a comfortable grip compared to wood — too rigid."
灰色野草🌱 · Beijing · 04-08 12:24 Used on yourself you don't feel the cold anyway, so a little rigid isn't that bad.
叒叕是我 Chique's actually pretty good haha. 😂