Weeping Phantom and Rimus both looked up, eyes drawn to the sky where two blurred figures tore through the air above the clouds. Every collision sent shockwaves outward, ripping clouds apart as if they were nothing more than smoke.
"The fact that even with the power the Knight Commander and I are giving him, he still can't beat Winter is infuriating," Rimus muttered, clicking his tongue. "No wonder Ercale lost to him." He turned toward Weeping Phantom, tail flicking sharply behind him. "Maledictus is keeping Winter occupied. While that holds, we gather what remains and move out."
Weeping Phantom exhaled slowly, arms crossing over her chest. "The remaining troops?" she echoed flatly. "And what exactly do you think that means at this point? A few dozen? Maybe a couple hundred if we're being generous?" She tilted her head. "How do you plan to take and occupy a town, let alone a city, with numbers like that?"
Rimus snapped his glare toward her, eyes burning. "I do not want to hear it from you. You will do as I say." His tiger tail went rigid, muscles coiling like he was seconds away from lunging.
She turned away, jaw tight, clearly biting back a response.
"I remember you being a lot more sassy with me."
The voice came from behind them.
Both reacted instantly. Rimus spun and lashed out with a kick while Weeping Phantom slashed in the same motion, steel cutting through the space where the speaker should have been. Instead, there was only a sharp snap, the sound of displaced air.
"Do you really want to fight me, Ms. Weeping Phantom?" the voice asked again, now behind them once more.
This time, Weeping Phantom froze. She knew that voice. She knew that blink.
She turned slowly, not attacking.
A girl stood there with white hair and gray eyes, unchanged from the last time Weeping Phantom had seen her.
"…Grace," she muttered, tension tightening her voice.
"You know her?" Rimus asked, then immediately shifted his glare to Grace. "Who are you? And what do you want?"
Grace pointed upward toward the sky. "That guy was supposed to stop all of you. And since I've been watching this entire time, he should have done that before that knight got a random boost." Her gaze returned to Rimus, calm but unwavering. "Now I hear you making plans while he's busy, so I'm going to take his place. I'm here to stop you."
She glanced at Weeping Phantom. "You can sit this one out. I don't want to fight you. I feel like Winter would be upset if you got hurt."
Weeping Phantom's eyes widened. "Huh!?" She snapped her sword up. "You think I give a shit about what that guy thinks? You're fighting both of us!"
Grace sighed.
She snapped her fingers.
Weeping Phantom vanished mid-motion, replaced instantly by a rock where she had been standing.
Grace turned back to Rimus, her expression unchanged. "Alright. Now that she's out of the way," she said evenly, "let's deal with you."
Rimus stared at the spot where Weeping Phantom had been standing, the rock sitting there in her place, before slowly turning back to Grace. His expression twisted into a sneer. "Light magic," he said derisively. "If you think that's all it takes to bring down a Demon Lord—" He reached into his coat and pulled out two paper talismans, pressing one flat against each palm. "—then you are sorely mistaken."
Grace took a measured look at him, eyes traveling over the talismans, his stance, the tension coiled through his body. "I know," she said plainly. "I fought one before. I couldn't do anything. Not really." She stepped back once, then again, grounding herself. "And that pissed me off. I hated how useless I was." Her gaze sharpened. "So I trained. I actually put in real effort for once in my life. What I have now is more than enough to put you down, kitty."
A vein throbbed at Rimus's temple. "I'll leave you in bloody chunks!" he roared, lunging forward and thrusting his right palm out.
Grace snapped her fingers.
She vanished as the space she had occupied detonated. The ground imploded inward, a wide, deep section of earth erased as if flash-heated into plasma and dispersed. Dust and debris were still being pulled into the cavity when Grace reappeared behind him.
"So that's what the right one does," she remarked.
Rimus twisted, but not fast enough. Grace's roundhouse kick slammed into his stomach, the impact compressing air and flesh alike before launching him upward at brutal speed. She snapped her fingers again, reappearing above him mid-flight, and drove a downward kick toward his chest.
Rimus raised his left palm.
The force vanished.
The momentum bled out instantly, as if the energy itself had been canceled rather than redirected. Grace pulled her leg back, hovering in place. "Well," she muttered, "that's frustrating."
Rimus snarled and tore another talisman from his coat, slapping it against his chest. His body jerked, then stilled as he came to a dead stop in midair, suspended as though gravity had forgotten him. "That's the only hit you get!" he barked. He reached into his coat once more and produced a small chicken bone, fixing Grace with a vicious grin before snapping it in half.
Grace's left hand shattered at the wrist.
Rimus froze when, less than a second later, the hand reformed—fractured segments sliding back into alignment, light tracing the seams until it was whole again.
"What!?" he shouted. "You can't heal with light magic!"
Grace flexed her fingers once, then twice, as if checking the joints. "You're right," she said calmly. "You can't heal living tissue." She drifted to a stop in the air, buoyed by controlled thermal expansion—light heating the surrounding air just enough to create lift without combustion. "But you can repair objects."
She raised both palms.
Twin beams of focused light lanced out, punching cleanly through Rimus's shoulders. The heat was precise, the photons carrying enough energy to shear molecular bonds rather than simply burn. Rimus screamed as Grace lifted her hands higher, nearly severing his arms entirely.
His body began to betray him. He gagged, vomiting as his nervous system misfired, head pounding violently. Invisible to the eye, Grace shifted the spectrum again, flooding him with a sudden burst of high-energy gamma radiation. Cells ionized en masse, DNA unraveled, biological systems collapsing in cascading failure as thermal energy spiked beyond containment.
There was no explosion.
Rimus simply came apart, matter breaking down as his body superheated and dispersed, leaving nothing behind but scorched air and drifting particles.
Grace lowered her hands, the air around her slowly cooling. "See?" she said quietly. "I told you."
She looked at the empty space where Rimus had been. "More than enough to put you down."