He glanced toward the distant sky, where the ice Elves was still fighting with Clone, unaware of what had happened here. Summoning a coffin, he opened it to reveal a dried corpse from a thousand years ago, the body of the original Edward, its chest hollow.
He pressed the small golden heart into the cavity, closed the coffin, and vanished once more. His form dissolved into darkness, merging with the distant battle.
"This ice Elves will be troublesome if left alone," he muttered.
He tossed Nefit's body aside like trash. Not long after, another figure in a black hood appeared, breathing heavily.
"Damn it, still too late."
Chloe looked down sadly at the girl on the ground. Just days ago, this child had been full of energy, shouting about becoming a Chosen Hero. Now she lay motionless, her chest torn open.
Was this the fate of a Chosen Hero? Chloe knelt down, unwilling to leave the body like this. As she looked closer, she noticed something strange.
There was faint activity in the chest, something not belonging to Nefit herself. A dark object was embedded in the flesh, drinking in the flowing blood. Chloe recognized it as a scale from the Black Dragon, somehow lost here before.
Now, the scale was beginning to change. It writhed like slime, slowly binding the surrounding flesh together.
"Nefit!"
When Lyles Edward arrived out of breath, he saw the worst scene he had imagined. His youngest daughter had a gaping hole in her chest, blood still flowing, her body cold as she lay in the arms of an unfamiliar black-haired woman. His daughter had still been harmed after all.
Rage nearly burst out of him, mixed with grief he could not put into words, and the power inside his body began to leak out on its own. Chloe raised a hand, and several flashes of light struck him. She spoke quickly, telling him to calm down and saying that his daughter still had a chance to be saved if they could help the process along.
After several spells to suppress emotion and dull feeling were cast on him, forcing Lyles Edward to calm down, Chloe continued speaking. If she did not explain fast enough, he might have attacked her as the killer, and that would not end well for anyone. With the spells and the hope of rescue, Lyles Edward forced himself to suppress his grief and listen.
He did not ask who she was and simply crouched down, taking several deep breaths to steady himself. With a dark expression, he finally spoke. "Tell me the method. Anything is fine."
As long as it was real, he was willing to give up wealth, possessions, even his own life. Chloe pointed at the scale inside the girl's chest and explained that it was absorbing blood due to a revival reaction. Because of this, Nefet was barely hanging on, and if the scale could be fused with her body to become a new heart, she might live.
Lyles Edward felt it sounded absurd, but like a drowning man grabbing any floating object, he could not let go of this chance. He asked how it could be done and begged her to tell him. No matter how unbelievable it sounded, he was unwilling to give up.
Chloe asked where the scale had come from and whether it was from a Black Dragon. Lyles Edward froze for a moment, then sighed and briefly told the truth about hunting the dragon and how he had lost consciousness partway through. As she listened, Chloe frowned when he mentioned fighting the Lord, and her expression shifted again when she heard about the blackout.
In the end, she clenched her teeth and looked up. She said they could only do their best from here on. She explained that she had seen that Black Dragon once before, and even if she did not fully understand its nature, they had to gamble.
She said she would use some methods to draw over a trace of its awareness and try to talk to it. She would do everything she could to persuade it to save Nefit. During the process, she needed Lyles Edward to supply Magic from the side.
Chloe knew she was gambling. That Black Dragon was at least half-divine, its soul transformed from Gold toward crimson but not yet fully within The Realm. At that level, spirit and flesh were nearly one, and even a tiny remnant could revive, so she planned to pour power into the scale until it grew strong enough to be felt.
Using the dark power she drew directly from it, she hoped to open a channel for conversation. Even then, she was gambling again. She was betting that when it once chose to save her Clone even against the Abyssal Gods, its nature was not evil, and that it would also save Nefit now.
Taking a deep breath, Chloe pressed her hand to Nefit's shoulder. Cracks like shattered porcelain appeared on her body, a sign that she was forcing the dark power forming her body into the scale. She also poured her own Magic into it, while Lyles Edward pressed on the other shoulder and sent all his power in without hesitation.
The pitch-black scale began to writhe faster, greedily accepting all the energy poured into it. No matter how much power the two of them supplied, it showed no sign of satisfaction. Under this massive input, the scale rapidly grew and twisted into a black, gel-like mass the size of a heart.
It connected to the severed blood vessels, but this was not success. It was simply making it easier to draw Nefit's blood. Even so, the blood barely kept flowing, keeping her alive for the moment, and the most critical stage began.
Chloe focused her entire mind, using all her remaining will and strength to call out to the distant true body of the Black Dragon. The result was poor. Her calls vanished without response, and as the dark power forming her body neared exhaustion, there was still no answer.
If she continued any longer, her body would collapse completely and her remaining awareness would return early to Throne. She wondered if this was where she had to give up. Her form was already too damaged to maintain a proper shape, and beneath the black robe it was riddled with holes, even her eyes gone.
She could not see Nefit's face anymore, but she still remembered it. The child had said she wanted to become a Chosen Hero. Chloe had promised they would meet again in the future, and she meant to keep that promise.
The last trace of darkness was injected into the scale. A faint light hurried in after it, merging and stretching endlessly. At the same time, the flesh around the scale grew enough to form a tumor-like shape, developing muscle and producing its first heartbeat like a real heart.
"Thump."
With that first beat, Chloe realized in shock that she had not returned to Throne. Her body was still collapsed, and she should not have been able to see anything, yet she could clearly see Nefit. The heart was beating inside the hollow chest.
Nefit slowly opened her eyes and turned her head. Chloe knew there could only be one result. He had arrived.
She raised her head with effort and met His gaze. In a state she could barely call awareness, she took a breath and spoke sincerely. She introduced herself as Chloe, the one He had saved before in the Extra-Dimensional Space within the Abyss.
She said she was shamelessly asking Him to save this innocent child and that she would do anything within her power. She begged Him to help them. She thought she saw His mouth move in reply, but could not hear clearly, nor understand the outcome.
After a while, a familiar dark power like last time poured into her body. When Chloe opened her eyes and saw the real world clearly again, she immediately looked at Nefit in her arms. The child's pupils were no longer round, but vertical like a dragon's.
"Come to think of it, this is my first time doing business for someone I do not know," a voice said. "I will treat it as practice, and there is also an old acquaintance here that I almost forgot."
Belial had been happily heading down the road of wiping out an entire family when he stumbled upon a familiar friend request link. Seeing the light rushing toward him, he clicked it. To be honest, while studying it halfway, he still found his skill at making network cables lacking, and the framework inside him was only a rough idea.
This time, however, someone else had sponsored a direct link, giving him a chance to observe this strange method of cable creation. He wondered who this light was, since it kept appearing in odd places. In the end, he decided to help a bit in return for past help and the chance to learn.
Just as he was about to split off part of his awareness and enter the link, he froze. If his senses were right, there was a bit of his own body material there. He wondered when he had lost a scale in that place.