Aeliana exhaled.
Slow. Soft.
Her body was fading.
She could feel it—the end.
The storm inside her had raged, fought, burned with everything it had, but it wasn’t enough. The black mass within her veins still pulsed, still consumed, still won.
It was over.
And she—
She accepted it.
Her lips barely moved as she forced out one last whisper, her voice fragile, weak—on the verge of vanishing entirely.
“If we meet in another life…”
A slow blink.
A small, tired breath.
“I will make sure to pay you back… for everything.”
She let herself sink into the feeling.
The weightlessness.
The surrender.
And in those final moments, as the last threads of her awareness unraveled, she thought of him.
Lucavion.
The arrogant, manipulative, infuriating bastard.
How he had somehow intruded into her life, forced his way past her walls, shoved himself into her carefully built barriers without permission.
How he had looked right through her ugly, bitter, broken self—
And did not turn away.
Did not flinch. Did not recoil. Did not wear pity in his eyes.
How, instead—
He had grinned.
As if he had known what lay beneath all along.
As if it had never mattered.
She thought of the first time he had caught her interest.
That damned smirk. That casual arrogance. The way he made everything a joke—until it wasn’t.
She thought of his cooking—gods, his horrible cooking—and how he had insisted on making tea, even though she had mocked him for it.
She thought of his blade.
The black starlight. The way he fought—not like a man, not like a knight, but like something other, something untamed, something free.
She thought of all their conversations.
All the moments between the battles, the endless walking, the quiet pauses by the fire.
How—without her even realizing—
He had become the final entertainment in her life.
A ridiculous, frustrating, unpredictable force of chaos.
And yet—
In this cursed place, in this cruel moment, on the edge of death—
She could only think of one thing.
How glad she was… that he had been there.
Even now.
Even at the very end.
Her breath hitched.
Her fingers twitched weakly against the stone.
And then—
She let go.
“LITTLE EMBER!”
The shout pierced through the void.
Aeliana’s fading awareness snapped—not fully back, not yet, but enough to hear it.
That stupid nickname.
A name he had given her, thrown so casually, so mockingly, when he teased her about her hair, about her temper, about the fire in her eyes.
And yet—
It reached her.
It was his voice.
His voice—cutting through the nothingness.
She could barely see. Her vision was a shattered thing, flickering in and out, her mind slipping, drowning, dying.
But she forced herself to look.
And then—
Her breath caught.
“WATCH THIS!”
There it was.
That smile.
Not a smirk. Not a half-lidded, knowing grin.
But something pure.
Something unfiltered.
Something real.
That genuine, excited expression—
Like a child eager to show off a masterpiece they had just created.
“I PREPARED THIS SOLELY FOR YOU!”
His voice roared across the battlefield.
And then—
Lucavion moved.
His long estoc shifted, its tip pointed to his right side, his right arm raised at a sharp 90-degree angle—
And then—
BOOM.
His left side ignited.
Real flames.
Actual fire.
A violent, raging inferno erupted from the left half of his body, flickering with deep pitch-black embers. The heat was unnatural, distorting the air around him, burning with something more than just fire.
And then—
His other side.
The right half of his body—his blade arm—
Began to swirl.
A vortex of pure void.
Not just darkness.
Not just absence.
Something deeper.
Something endless.
The two forces clashed, spiraling around him—fire and void, light and collapse, as if reality itself struggled to contain what he had become.
And Aeliana—
She felt it.
Something inside her clicked.
A realization, an enlightenment.
As if the world had cracked open before her eyes, revealing something more.
Something—
A lot more.
Everything clicked.
The light—blinding, obscuring—vanished.
And the memory shifted.
Not in words. Not in meaning.
But in what she saw.
She had thought his expression had been unreadable. Detached. Indifferent. She had thought his smirk had been cruel, his amusement nothing but mockery.
But now—
Now she saw the truth.
His eyes—
They weren’t pitch black.
They were red.
And—
There was a tear.
A single, silent tear falling down his face.
Her breath caught.
Everything slotted into place.
She saw it clearly now.
The way his lips had trembled—not in amusement, but in strain. The way his smirk had twitched, as if forcing itself to stay in place. The way he had pushed himself to say those words, as if every syllable was agony.
The way—
He had needed her to hate him.
Right…
She let out a slow, shaky breath.
‘You bastard…’
Her fingers clenched.
‘You’re not good at lying at all…’
Because in the end, he wasn’t indifferent.
He had never been indifferent.
He had felt every single moment of it.
The silence between them stretched, the realization settling over her like a weight she wasn’t prepared to carry.
And then—
Her voice, soft, hoarse, but steady.
“Did you know all of this beforehand?”
She lifted her gaze, locking onto him.
Onto his expression.
Onto his truth.
Because now—
“What is this?”
Aeliana’s thoughts collapsed into chaos.
This was supposed to be her end. Her last moment. The moment she finally let go.
So why?
Why did she feel this lump in her chest—this ache that wasn’t pain, that wasn’t rage, that wasn’t hatred?
“Why?”
Why did it feel like—
Butterflies.
Why, even as her body was breaking, as her cursed veins screamed, as she should have been consumed by agony—
Why was she feeling this instead?
What the hell was happening?
Everything—everything looked different.
The light. The air. The very world itself.
Her fingers trembled, curling against the cracked stone beneath her.
“Don’t—”
She barely managed to whisper the word.
Because she knew.
She knew what this feeling meant.
It was something she had never wanted. Something she had never believed in.
And yet—
She wanted to live now.
Her eyes widened, breath catching in her throat—
And then—
He moved.
「Annihilation Sword. Reverence of Severity.」
BOOOOOOOM.
The entire world shattered.
Space itself—cut.
The battlefield collapsed into an abyss of distortion, the very air torn apart as an unfathomable force surged from Lucavion’s blade. The void spiraled outward in a merciless tide, swallowing everything—time, space, light, existence itself—devouring the Kraken’s form in an instant.
Aeliana couldn’t breathe.
Read exclusive content at My Virtual Library Empire
She couldn’t think.
She could only witness.
And in that moment—
Something else surfaced in her mind.
A voice.
A memory.
“My daughter…”
It was faint, distant, like a whisper carried by the wind.
“One day, you will meet someone who will be the sole reason for you to live…”
Aeliana’s breath hitched.
“Never let go of that person.”
The words of her mother.
Words she had buried. Words she had never believed.
But now—
Now, as she watched him, as she watched the very world break apart around him, as the weight of the past, the present, and the future crushed into a single moment—
“Ah…”
Her lips parted, her eyes wide in realization.
“I met him.”
And then—
The world went dark.