The snow forgets its color—bleached by scarlet sins too loud for burial.
My Unholy Nails don't stab—they strip sin raw, baptizing the air in warm iron and sour flesh.
Death had already come for each abomination.
My blades are only a remembrance.
The abominations splinter into worm-wet earth. Copper syrup gnaws at my vision with a pleasure I gladly swallow.
One after another they fall—penitents of my reversed prayer, baptized in their own undoing.
Motion becomes subtraction as their rotten forms blur into one.
Bones snap loud enough to silence the blizzard of decay and silver.
But they don't hush the liquid inferno simmering through my skull, boiling thought into instinct.
The violence doesn't end when the bodies do.
It coils inside me—still gnashing, still naming everything I see as stained.
Even me.
Since birth, I've festered with sin.
No.
It wasn't birth, but blasphemy—a conception never meant to draw breath.
Every experiment was a Mass without mercy. Poison-eyed hierophants in white coats praying over my pain.
They broke my bones before I could walk. Nearly erased my soul before I finished a sentence.
And still, I return unbroken. My body forgets. I never do.
They see me as a miracle with teeth. A sacrament that bleeds on command.
I hate it. I hate all of it.
But hatred doesn't change what I am.
And it doesn't give me purpose.
The Church gave me that. A mission. A reason to keep standing.
If I can be perfect—if I can sanctify every sin inside me—maybe I'll finally earn what others are given by default.
Love.
A soul.
Something holy enough to call mine.
Something heavy pours into my eyes, blurring my sight. It fills my chest with the cold echo of footsteps in an empty room.
Through the wet static I see her—Henrietta.
She reacts faster than when we were ambushed earlier.
Henrietta doesn't move through time—she designs it. Her movements thread through seconds, thinner than time itself.
The creatures fall before the bullets fire. The Berettas sing after, a hymn trailing from her fingers. The muzzle's flash her signature. Reality signs after her.
The consecrated bullets whisper gospel into skulls. A whisper with teeth, stitched in blue fire—unmaking flesh like scripture.
"...this mission is an extension of your leash, not a removal of it."
The Church hierophant's red voice pierces my skull and heart.
Henrietta is proof of that leash.
My thoughts melt at the sound of sobbing.
Their weeping hands turn my body toward the source.
The world wrinkles around its body—pulled taut like cello strings made of skin. Too tight. Too tuned. Ready to snap with a thought.
Its tentacles unfurl like a choir of bruises, each one smearing a note of grief across the air.
Where a chest should be, three faces hang in a triangle of sorrow: a man, a woman, and a child…
"Mama?"
The child's voice stains the air with the taste of wet, iron lullabies.
The word doesn't sound—it feels. Like milk gone sour. A piano key pressed underwater. Warm hands on a coffin lid.
I try to hold it in, but it breaks me open in the shape of a question that limps out of my throat:
"What kind of world lets innocence rot into something like us?"
One of the creature's tentacles slices the air—darkness comes before it does.
My skull should be gone. I know that much.
But I'm still here.
I'm always here.
Some miracles are just mistakes with good timing.
My body aches like broken glass fingers clawing from the inside.
The creature crushes me in its grasp—but not for long.
The explosion tears the air like wet cloth. A grenade severs the tentacle.
I hit the ground, already healed.
So is the abomination.
But its wound doesn't knit. It composes.
A symphony of wet silk and splintered bells folds inside-out. Flesh sloshes upward. The air convulses in reverse.
What was mangled meat decides to be whole again.
Even the blood unbleeds.
Henrietta's gunfire follows—three shots, consecrated.
But each slug dies inside the thing. Absorbed like a prayer into a god that never listened.
"Noelia! Get away from that thing!"
Her voice cracks the moment—but it doesn't reach me.
I feel the cold bite of the rosary beneath my uniform.
I don't pray, not out loud.
But I need it near. To remember what I'm not.
I rise. Not like a person, but like a truth that refuses burial.
The creature screeches. Its voice tastes like snapped violin strings soaked in milk.
Its tentacles are sermons delivered by strangulation.
I charge.
The Unholy Nails bloom in my grip, two pointed shards of retribution.
Each one sings in sacred hunger.
I hurl the first like scripture torn from a prophet's throat.
It lands—direct hit.
Latin flares from the wound:
Corpus hoc non redimetur.
This body shall not be redeemed.
The creature thrashes. Screams like a choir coughing blood into a chalice.
Then, it splits itself.
No healing. No resistance.
Only rejection.
It peels away the limb wrapped in scripture. Discards it like sin-soaked skin.
I scream like a cathedral collapsing inward.
Then I'm flying.
The second nail-sword slices the air like a crucifix flung at God.
The creature dodges—
But I'm already there.
My heel caves in one of its jaws. The snow craters.
It strikes back.
My bones break.
Then rebuild faster than sound.
I taste blood. Steam rises.
Even my blood knows it doesn't belong in me.
See?
I tear through its body like a sacrament devouring its congregation.
My arm snaps at the elbow—
I ram it into the creature's eye. It implodes.
I pull it back, still limp.
Another blow—another break—another reset.
My rib punches out through my side, then re-sheathes itself.
Pain doesn't slow me.
Time doesn't see me.
I'm a storm wearing skin like a disguise.
My knees launch me into the air as the creature swings. It misses the moment, not the body.
By the time the tentacle reaches the place I was, I'm already behind it with both nail-swords.
I slam them into the creature's back with a howl of silver, piercing its heart. Scripture erupts again.
The monster spits out its heart.
Then it hits me.
A tentacle larger than a cathedral bell.
My spine folds. Legs rupture. Skull caves in.
But the next blink—I'm whole.
Too fast.
Too complete.
The creature hesitates.
And I grin.
Flesh doesn't repair—it rewinds.
Scars vanish. Cracks forget they ever split.
The creature lunges. I don't move—I decide.
One second is too small to hold me.
The air hiccups each time I move.
Reality trips over my name.
I blur into the monster. Fists like plagues.
Each strike a psalm of pain.
My body is scripture.
A gospel stitched in fury.
See? See?!
The creature falters, not because it's dying, but because it believes me. That what stands before it is no ordinary girl, but a beast wearing human skin.
Henrietta watches.
But I don't meet her eyes.
I'm not ready to see what's in them.
Not yet.
The first shot pierces the air while I'm still driving my fist into the creature's ribs.
No, not pierces.
It commands.
Reality snaps sideways. Not like it broke, but like it understood something truer and flinched.
Sound doesn't follow the bullet. It flees.
The air turns flat as if breath, decay, and even divinity had been evacuated.
I stagger back, teeth locked, vision slick with holy vertigo. My knees don't buckle from pain.
They kneel.
The bullet doesn't hit the creature.
It discloses it.
In one blink, the beast's torso unravels—not into gore, not into ash—but into irrelevance.
Like its existence was a mistranslation in the World's Soul, and the shot merely corrected the grammar.
Where flesh should be is absence. Where sound should ring is silence too complete to echo.
I taste copper.
No blood. Just the idea of it. Something leftover in the soul's mouth when belief gets exorcised.
The thing howls, but it's not in pain.
It's remembering.
Something primordial, something we all forget when we start calling things monsters and humans.
It remembers it was never meant to exist.
Henrietta stands with the Howdah Pistol in hand, arms locked in posture cleaner than most prayers.
The pistol is a reliquary—old, too real. The words etched onto its barrel—Ut in inferno taceas in aeternum—glow on the metal like scripture shining away sin.
Each barrel is a closed heaven. Each chamber a loaded commandment.
Her finger doesn't hesitate.
The second shot tears the moment open.
I don't see it fire.
I feel it exit history.
The world exhales in reverse. Snow stills. Color forgets how to breathe.
The creature doesn't fall.
It fails.
Not dies. Not burns. Not breaks.
It fails to be.
Its scream stops mid-vowel like God backspaced a sentence.
Where the bullet lands, there is no wound.
There is only the truth of what should have never been.
Flesh doesn't melt.
It recedes like a lie in the presence of fact.
The three-faced chest tilts, faces collapsing into themselves like wet paper in fireless heat.
Tentacles turn to glass and shatter into syllables I can't pronounce.
And then?
Nothing.
No remains.
No stain.
No divine stench clinging to the air like after other sacred executions.
Just absence shaped like victory.
I wonder if I could be erased the same way.
But sin clings harder than existence ever did.
Henrietta holsters the Howdah Pistol like she's closing a book that rewrote the chapter beneath it.
She doesn't say a word.
She doesn't need to.
The Dogma speaks for her.
And what it says cannot be answered—only obeyed.
I stand, the silence burning my soul. My eyes are like weights as I'm unable to meet Henrietta's eyes.
"I don't think I was meant to be saved. Just used until I break."
The words fall from me like teeth I didn't know I'd been clenching.
I take out the rosary. The crucifix doesn't bite anymore. It's cold. Weightless. Dead.
"Here. I only kept it to remind myself of what I could never become."
I toss it. She catches it without looking.
"You think a soul is something you earn? You already have one, Noelia. You just don't trust it yet."
I look away.
She's wrong.
If I have a soul, it's the part of me that chose to stay. That's not trust. That's punishment.
"If I do have a soul, then it's only a receipt."
She doesn't argue. She just tucks the rosary into her duffle then retrieves the thurible.
"I'll hold it for now, but I'm giving it back. Come on. We still have a mágos to execute."
And just like that, the world remembers it's not clean yet.