Chapter 41

The nuns transformed into blood fiends, moving with practiced precision to surround Baron Cambera.

Baron stood tall, twin revolvers in hand, blades gleaming. The cross-shaped scar on his face blazed with blood and fire, one eye molten gold, the other rose-red.

He looked utterly calm, his gaze as serene as jade—yet within that serenity coiled a lethal intent, sharp and unforgiving, the resolve to shatter rather than yield.

Sister Theresa circled him with the other blood-fiend nuns, her breathing a faint whistle in the air.

"L... why...?"

"I've heard enough whys tonight."

Baron cut her off, raising gun and blade. "I'm tired of them."

Sister Theresa froze, then smiled. "Then let's descend to hell together."

The blood fiends howled. Blade-like claws flashing, they surged at Baron before he could draw breath.

He fought without technique, relying only on instinct to dodge the storm of steel.

Five against one; he could not claim ease, yet he slipped past every killing stroke.

Blades and claws tore open wounds. Blood—both the fiends' and his own—splashed across the air, sizzling into crimson steam on the flaming edge, flashing brighter on the blood-forged blade.

Steel and scarlet. Life and death in the blink of an eye.

The fire-blade parried the first fiend and took its head. The blood-blade vanished; chains of his own blood burst from the wound in his back to impale the second fiend that tried to strike unseen.

The third descended from above, claws scything down. A fresh blood-blade condensed across the crossed barrels of his guns. He blocked, but the monster's weight drove him to one knee, stone cracking beneath.

The fourth lunged, claws aimed for his heart. He twisted aside and rammed an iron-thorn bolt into the third fiend's jaw.

Yet the true strike came from the side, accompanied by a beast's roar; the heart-thrust had been a feint.

The fourth fiend sank fanged jaws into his shoulder, ripping free a great flap of flesh.

Triumph gleamed in its crimson eyes as it gulped the meat. Baron, teeth clenched against the agony, looked into those blood-filled pupils and answered with violence of his own.

The blood chains vanished; the second fiend crashed lifeless. New chains sprouted from the torn flesh on his shoulder and, in a single heartbeat, punched through the fourth fiend's skull.

Blood Dominion—the power Baron had gained upon becoming a blood-path demon-hunter. As its name implied, he could shape his own blood into any weapon he willed.

Without noticing, only Sister Theresa remained.

Baron bit into the neck of the fiend that had reverted to a nun and drank the blood still warm. Beneath his torn robe the wound in his shoulder knitted itself closed.

Unlike contract knights who wielded only Dragonfire, blood-path hunters gained both Blood Dominion and the ability to heal by feeding.

Perhaps maddened by thirst, he found the nuns' blood almost cloyingly sweet—so much so that it tasted, impossibly, like iced black tea...

He jerked back, releasing the nun's throat and clutching his brow, fighting the sudden, insatiable urge to drink.

Sister Theresa stood quietly at the foot of the altar, gazing up at Baron with the same tenderness she once used to sing hymns.

Had her hands not warped into claws, had her habit not concealed a monstrous body, he might almost have believed she would smile at him gently.

Baron pressed his palm to his forehead; the eye that remained visible shifted between blood and gold.

"It's over, Sister Theresa," he said. "The journey to hell—perhaps you'll walk it alone."

"The years I spent as a nun have taught me to endure solitude," the nun replied.

"Then that is best." The vampire hunter L closed his eyes coldly.

"L, what are you doing? Do you intend to kill Sister Theresa?"

A shout came from above. Baron looked up. The priest from the Crimson Cathedral was sprawled across the shattered glass roof, shouting down at them.

Baron frowned and tightened his grip on the revolver's handle. Was this priest a Blue-Blood cultist? How else had he found them?

Sister Theresa smiled gently. "No need to guess. He is merely an ordinary priest. I summoned him here only to finish something."

"What do you mean, 'finish something'?"

She paused. "He stole my innocence."

"Innocence?"

"In the year of famine, when I was fourteen, I left home and came to Mondra to become a nun of the Crimson Church. The priest drugged black bread and raped me."

Though her tone was flat, Baron heard the hatred and blood in every word.

"You intend to kill him here," Baron said.

"Then will the righteous demon-hunter stop me...?"

"No..."

Instead, Baron shook his head and closed his eyes. "Stop what? I never saw any priest here."

Sister Theresa smiled quietly. "Mister L, you truly are unlike other hunters."

A scream rang out; then silence. When Baron opened his eyes, the nun—her strength renewed—stood dignified before the pool of blood, once more a blood-fiend.

"If I had not killed Sheila... perhaps we would never have fought..." the fiend said.

"But for the sake of those dead girls, I believe you would draw your blade in the end." She shook her head.

"Then..." the hunter said.

"Come!" the fiend cried suddenly. "Let it be for all those innocent dead!"

At those words the hunter burst forward under the moonlight, twin revolvers crossed, blades forming a cross.

The fiend bared claws and horns, every trace of tenderness gone—pure demon now!

They passed each other. A single sound.

Outside the grove a leaf drifted to earth; overhead a shard of glass fell and shattered; a drop of blood burst upon the ground.

One strike—only one. The blade drank blood; all of Sister Theresa's claws snapped; a cross-shaped wound split her chest.

The killing intent faded; victor and vanquished decided.

"Actually, I—"

Sister Theresa opened her mouth, but the hunter gave her no chance. The blade spun; blood spattered the ground like a moon.

"Thank you," she whispered, the corners of her mouth lifting, eyes already dark.

For an instant Baron thought she smiled, the curve of her lips gentle, etched with tenderness.

"Save your repentance for those you murdered..."

He watched her fall backward, light as a falling leaf, lonely and beautiful.

Without hesitation Baron freed Cecy from the cross and lifted her into his arms.

He hurried to another altar, pocketing into his ring the Timebloom and the nameless, still-quivering kidneys meant for sacrifice...

"Mama..."

As he turned to leave, the girl's first waking word made him shudder. He looked down at Cecy's pale face and the crystal tears on her lashes.

He stroked her cheek, then drew from his coat a gold-coin chocolate. "Everything is over. There are no gods and no bad people anymore... Eat, it's chocolate, sweet..."

But Cecy did not take the chocolate. She stared dully at Elisa's corpse in the blood pool and called, again and again, "Mama."

Baron carried the girl carefully into the pool. She wriggled free and waddled like a fledgling duck toward Elisa.

He thought she meant to embrace her mother, but Cecy pushed aside Elisa's body and the bones covering the pool's floor, revealing an alchemical sigil hidden beneath.

Baron froze; he had not noticed the sigil before. It looked like some kind of alchemical array...

He narrowed his eyes. The design... resembled children's crayon drawings he had once seen in a basement—snake-like lines forming a human outline, a bronze mark like an open hand.

Those intricate alchemical patterns—were they not the same flower once carved on a child's neck?

While Baron puzzled over the sigil and the "mama" Cecy spoke of, the little girl began gathering small bones. She fell and rose again and again, childish determination on her pale face.

Baron sensed something wrong. He lifted the girl's clothes—and what he saw severed his nerves with a surge of savage despair.

In the moonlight the child's body was covered with pale, dried scars.

Why dried?

Because all the blood was gone.

The Baron's earlier words—"You came too late"—had been no metaphor. Baron had simply arrived too late, and so the girl would die.

Those wounds, so many wounds... Baron could not imagine how such a small child had lived this long. She looked like a hedgehog stripped of every quill.

Cecy, unaware of the storm behind her, called again and again in her childish voice to the great sigil beneath the blood pool, a "mama" she had never before uttered.

Mama...

Baron finally understood. From the start, the girl's "mama" had never been Elisa, but this vast children's crayon beneath the blood.

The child could not grasp what a mother truly was, only sensing that perhaps it was something warm that stayed beside you. And so the children of the cathedral had taken the sigil they saw every day and made it their mother.

They were too young, too small, to understand loneliness, and so they had invented a mother who belonged only to them.

Cecy placed the little bones carefully in the center of the sigil's hand-like shape. She broke the chocolate with effort and drew three small figures on the ground. Then she stood and looked silently at Baron.

Baron understood. He pointed to himself and then to the figures. "I love your drawing. I'll show it to Olivia."

Little Cecy smiled—smiled until thin threads of blood ran from the corners of her mouth. Finally she could smile no more. She crouched, curled up upon the great crayon, and with one last look at Baron, gave a soft sound and closed her eyes in Mama's embrace.

In the moonlight the child's face was white as jade.

Baron did not look at Cecy again; he feared to see that peaceful, happy face.

He understood now why the girl had stumbled toward the sigun and heaped the bones there.

She had known she was dying, and for a child the best death is in a mother's arms.

Baron remembered a news story from his past life: there was a bird that, sensing death, would cross mountains and seas to return to its nest.

The commentator had said it was love of home that let "John" brave the journey alone, crossing ridges just to see once more the sky he had flown as a fledgling.

Yet to Baron, that longing was not for his homeland but for his mother.

A bird has many duties in life: it must evade predators, dodge poachers, beat its wings thousands of times a day, all for the sake of plucking a single tree-fruit from a mountain peak to feed its chicks.

Yet the moment it returns to its birthplace, to the place where its mother once stood, and tucks its head beneath her wing, every duty, every wretched thing, simply vanishes.

It is a child's most honest feeling—the world is cruel and real, but with Mother, there is nothing to fear.

Children's sobs echoed faintly, but this time not from the blood pool above.

A monster danced in frenzy there.

The dead Baron had "risen" again; the failed ritual had left his corpse under divine punishment, turning him into a monster of blood.

Yet Baron had never felt such gratitude—for his rage, and for the strength to unleash it.

Dragon-Knight and demon-hunter, Constantine or L—he clenched his twin revolvers, his eyes blazing gold and gleaming like red amber.

He lashed out blades of fire and blood, looked up at the monster hanging beneath the cross in the moonlight, crossed the twin guns, and pulled the trigger.

"God, f*** your mother!"