Chapter 400: Butterfly effect: The Return of a Witch
“Patriarch Duran! Miss, no, Lady Alice is back!”
“I can clearly see that…”
“Perando, sir!”
“I can clearly see that Perando,”Duran told the warrior who came rushing from Alice’s direction, presumably from the family mausoleum, “my question is: how and why?”
“I’m…not sure, patriarch! I can only report what I saw.”
“Okay then, what did you see?”
“Well…”
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“This way through the tunnels, now!”
Following your orders, patriarch, we escorted all of the non-combatants to the secret estate tunnels so that they could escape the crossfire.
“Women and children first! Pets after the elderly! Make sure to…huh?”
We were in the middle of escorting people to safety when I saw something weird floating above the barrier that looked like a weird ball of purple light.
At first I thought it was some kind of attack from the Blitzbluts and Moyudas and that it would just disperse after hitting the barrier, but it didn’t.
*Fwip!*
“What the fuck?”
Instead, I saw the orb slip right through the barrier and fly circles in the estate’s airspace for a couple moments before diving straight downward.
“What the fuck?!”
Not sure what to make of it, and seeing how I was the only one to see it happen, I ran towards the direction of the orb’s trajectory to figure out where it was headed.
You should have seen the look on my face when I had put it together that the orb was flying towards the mausoleum of all places.
…
“Oh no, oh no, oh no!,” Perando muttered to himself as he watched the weird purple ball of light fly towards the mausoleum.
It was bad enough that the Blitzbluts and Moyudas were trying to kill them, but now they were going to try and destroy their mausoleum?
The audacity!
He began to run as fast as his legs could carry him, hoping to the heavens he could make it in time to intercept it or at least make sure no one was in the area in case he was too late.
When he arrived at the mausoleum however, he was greeted with an unexpected sight.
“How the fuck?”
The orb of purple light didn’t explode once it made contact with the mausoleum as he feared, nor did it phase through the building’s exterior as it did the barrier.
Instead, the orb hovered over the mausoleum for a brief moment before floating over to the front of it and forcing the doors open with a show of aether that Perando never felt before, but felt weirdly familiar to him. The orb then proceeded to leisurely float into the mausoleum like a young woman returning to her home.
“Hey, wait!”
Perando ran towards the now open mausoleum, fearful of what the purple orb might do now that it had access to the mausoleum’s contents.
“Stop! Don’t touch any-”
But it was too late.
It should be noted that the Dunkelkrieg mausoleum was set up in such a way that the actual dead were interred in the mausoleum walls, while the body of Alice Dunkelkrieg was left out in the open on a specially designed bed/coffin on the chance that they would have to actually bury her for real.
As such, Perando had a front row seat to the purple orb merging with the faceless body of Alice Dunkelkrieg, the face of the aforementioned body suddenly being restored and then Alice Dunkelkrieg herself pulling herself up from the casket and cracking her neck in one quick motion.
“Aish my neck!,” Alice proclaimed after having cracked the aforementioned appendage, “mental note, deep tissue massage and maybe a bone rejuvenation pill for good measure because that was-tsk-aish!”
“What the fuck?,” Perando muttered at this sudden turn of events.
As a member of House Dunkelkrieg, he knew all about the tragedy of Alice Dunkelkrieg and how her face was stolen alongside her cultivation, with the culprit leaving only her faceless, still living body as proof that something terrible had occurred.
Which was why he was absolutely floored that this tragedy suddenly ended for no discernable reason.
“Aish! Who would’ve thought being out of your own body for fifty years would fuck it up this badly. I can’t tell if I have stiff muscles or stiff joints!,” Alice proclaimed as she kept stretching out all of her limbs.
“Well, at least my body hasn’t changed since that wretched fucking day. Now I just need to figure out wh-hold up…who the fuck are you?”
“Uhhh…”
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“So after explaining who I was, what was happening right now and how you took over as patriarch, she is very proud of you by the way, Lady Alice thanked me for my service and immediately bolted towards the battlefield…as you just saw,” Perando finished explaining.
Duran Dunkelkrieg, as well as the warriors present, were all staring at Perando with wide eyes as they tried to fully comprehend the information they were just given.
However, Perando wasn’t done shocking them yet.
“Oh, patriarch, this is going to sound weird, but…was Alice an Aether Lord or an Aether King when the tragedy occured?”
“Aether Lord,” Duran answered without thinking until it finally dawned on him what the question was exactly, “why?”
“Oh. Oh! Oh…those guys are fucked.”
???
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Outside of the Dunkelkrieg estate, the combined forces of House Blitzblut and Moyuda were waiting in anticipation for the new weapon they were given from their benefactor to finish charging.
The wait was only five minutes, but each second was agonizing.
Every second waiting was just another second longer of the Dunkelkriegs existing, which was just…unacceptable.
“How much longer must we wait for the cannon to finish charging?,” Karl Moyuda asked while biting his thumbnail in anticipation, “isn’t there a way to speed it up?”
“Not without damaging the weapon permanently, my friend,” Johan Blitzblut assured his collaborator, “besides it should be finished right about…”
FWOOM!
“Now.”
“The prism cannon is fully charged, Baron Blitzblut, Baron Moyuda!,” a warrior manning the prism cannon reported, “we’re ready to fire at your command!”
“That so? Then what are you waiting for? Fire!”
“Crack open that shell so we can start with the feast already!”
“At once!”
The warriors in charge of the prism cannon, leveled the apparatus until the crystal nozzle of the cannon was aimed directly at the gate of the Dunkelkrieg stronghold. As they did, wisps of aether began to appear and flow into the crystal, concentrating at the very tip in a rather showy fashion.
Once everything was ready, they pulled the trigger.
“Fire!”
BWOOM!
The prism cannon let out a groaning sound as a powerful beam of Luxari aether fired from that concentrated point and flew towards the stronghold, carrying enough power to turn even a mountain into a crater.
“Haha! Look how powerful it is!”
“The Dunkelkrieg House is finished!”
“Yeah, yeah-huh? What’s that creepy black thing coming out of the barrier?”
As the beam kept flying forward, a weird looking shadow seemed to jump out of the barrier they were aiming at and landed in a spot directly in the beam’s line of fire. Once they were in position, the figure drew a large two handed weapon from out of nowhere and took on a strange looking stance, holding the weapon above their head, as if readying themselves to bring it down on the beam itself.
“Who the hell is that? Is that an Aether Lord?”
“Think so…but I don’t recognize this aura…”
“Ah, who cares? They’re about to get annihilated by the prism cannon’s beam anyway so why bother to specu-”
[Nightmare Slash!]
“Huh?”
Before anything else could be said, before the beam had even made contact with the mysterious arrival or the barrier behind them, the mysterious figure in question suddenly used an aether art in tandem with the weapon in their hands and released a huge crescent shaped blast of dark aether that slashed right through the beam of Luxari aether and sliced the prism cannon that fired it right down the middle.
The warrior controlling the weapon and the beast carrying it were somehow spared the same fate, but it didn’t change the fact that they were both pissing their pants in terror over what had just happened.
Granted, they weren’t the only ones panicking.
“What the fuck?!”
“D-did that warrior just destroy the prism cannon in one hit? Did they just overpower it?!”
“What…who the hell is that?!”
As the warriors under their employ began to panic, both Baron Moyuda and Baron Blitzblut looked at each other with fear and confusion in their eyes.
They had thoroughly investigated the Dunkelkriegs’ fighting capabilities and they both knew for certain that no one in that while household had the power to overwhelm the prism cannon…so who the fuck was the person that just fucking did so?!
“Send a scout out now!,” Johan commanded, “I need to know exactly this warrior is-”
“Aish,” a powerful, aether enhanced voice suddenly interjected, “is that seriously anyway to treat a lady? I mean, I enjoy a nice diamond as much as the next girl, but that was downright horrendous! So gaudy!”
As soon as those words registered in Johan’s and Karl’s ears, as soon as they heard that voice, the two of them went pale.
“That voice…It can’t be!”
“Fifty years! That witch had been dead for the last fifty years and I refuse to believe that-!”
BOOM!
“OH FUCK IT IS HER!”
“Damn straight assholes,” Alice proclaimed as she landed amongst the warriors of the two aggressor houses, “I am back from the dead, and I am here to drag both of you to the pits of hell for daring to lay a finger on my precious little brother.”
As she made her intentions known to the crowd, the aether around her began to distort even further, darkening to an extreme degree, taking the form of shadowy monsters only seen in dreams.
“Now tell me, do you prefer an open casket or a closed one?,” Alice asked with a sinister smile.
As this question lingered in the air, the shadowy monsters made from Alice’s aura released demented laughter, terrible and cruel.
