Surrounded by devastation, Sunny, Kai, and Effie stared at each other with confused expressions on their faces. Their weapons were still raised, ready to strike at the enemies… however, there were no enemies around.
Just dead silence.
Sunny tensely studied the devastated hall, then slowly pulled out the emerald amulet and looked at the little girl with a silent question written on his face.
“Effie… tell me… is there, perhaps, a slumbering Saint somewhere in the temple?”
She frowned, then shook her head.
Sunny was genuinely perplexed.
“Uh… maybe there is an indescribable horror that had been contained by the chalice? And we have set it free? Or an ancient curse? ”
The little girl wiped the sweat off her bruised face, then said in her soft, childish voice:
“Not that I know of. Uh… no, there are no horrors. Or curses.”
Sunny blinked a couple of times.
“So, what… we really won? Just like that?”
Effie stared at him for a bit, and then yelped in outrage:
“What the hell do you mean by just like that?! We just wiped out half a hundred vicious Awakened battle zealots, and you yourself killed three Ascended champions! Not to mention destroying the chalice… which was supposed to be indestructible, by the way… was that not hard enough for you, you crazy demon?!”
He tilted his head a little and thought about it.
“Well, when you put it like that… I guess it was a bit hard…”
The three of them, especially Sunny, had indeed achieved something remarkable just now. But it still felt weird… he didn’t even lose a single limb, body part, or heart!
Well… he did lose half of a horn. That had to count for something, probably?
Sunny scowled. That victory had not been easy — in fact, it had been the opposite of that. However, it had not been as costly as he would have expected it to be.
Three Ascended were no joke, let alone as fearsome as the War Maidens had been. Granted, they had faced him after being mangled by the Strike of Thunder and the consequent explosion of the chalice. And he had only been able to damage the chalice, thus allowing the divine flame contained within to destroy it, because of his insight into how true sorcery worked.
So, in a sense, this victory was the result of those months Sunny had spent barely surviving in the Red Colosseum, as well as his trials in the countless nightmares that gifted him his third Shadow.
…And more than a bit of luck.
He sighed, then asked dubiously:
“So, what? We can just… go?”
Effie looked around, her gaze lingering on the corpse of the white-haired Maiden for a few seconds. Her little face turned somber, and then, she simply shrugged.
“Unless you want to get roasted even more by the divine flames, I suggest we do.”
Kai, who had been silent this whole time, looked around, as well. His gaze, however, seemed to be aimed at something beyond the walls of the devastated hall. Then, he lowered his head, his eyes turning dark.
The young man lingered for a few moments, and then said in a low, hoarse voice:
“Are there… are there other children that were being trained in the sect? Do we need to take them with us?”
Sunny froze, then scratched the back of his head in embarrassment.
“Oh, yes. I, uh… did not think about that. The War Maidens were known to take in orphaned girls, right? Where are they?”
He wasn’t too happy about the prospect of taking care of a bunch of kids, especially since he had just slaughtered their previous caretakers. But the idea of leaving them here did not sit right with Sunny, whether or not they were just phantasms of the Nightmare.
Noctis would end up having to deal with settling the children in the Sanctuary, anyway.
Effie’s childish face slowly turned still, and she briefly glanced down, in the direction where Kai had been looking a few moments ago. She turned away and said in a strangely even tone:
“Ah… there were a few other girls with me before, indeed. But they… well, they didn’t make it.”
She dismissed the Dusk Shard, then bent down to pick up one of the swords laying on the stones.
“The War Maidens were not bad people, you see… at least not at the start of it all. But somewhere along the way, the sect changed. By the time the girl whose body I took over ended up with them, it was as though… as though everyone here had gone insane.”
She walked to the next corpse, stared at it with strange darkness in her eyes, and then picked up another weapon.
“They were obsessed with the idea of creating a warrior capable of slaying someone called Solvane. So, their training — what they called training, anyway — had grown vicious, cruel, and inhumanly hard. Of all the girls subjected to it, only a handful survived. In this batch, ah… I was the only one.”
Effie sighed, then stopped, staring once again at the body of the white-haired War Maiden with a complicated expression.
“Strange, isn’t it? It was not like they hated us. On the contrary, they seemed to care about their wards a great deal. Didn’t stop them from killing us, though.”
She remained silent for a bit, and then added:
“…And despite the fact those girls were being tormented and killed, it didn’t stop them from loving their killers. Humans are very weird that way, huh?”
The little girl was silent for a few moments, then suddenly smiled.
“So, yeah. I would like to get out of this place very much. If there is nothing else… let’s just go.”
Sunny hesitated, then silently motioned to Kai to come closer to Effie. She was putting on a brave face, but he could sense that beneath it, the huntress was… deeply disturbed by what had happened to her in this temple, and what they had done to the temple themselves.
Then, he turned around and headed for what remained of the stone chalice.
As he got closer, the heat of the divine flame grew almost unbearable. Sunny once again activated the enchantment of the Memory of Fire and the augmentation of the Underworld Armament, then moved carefully between the burning shards of stone.
In the spot where the chalice had stood before, surrounded by a ring of flames, a simple knife made of a piece of ghostly glass lay, reflecting the furious white light of the fire. Because of the shape and position of the deep fractures that had spread through the cracked floor, it seemed as though the glass blade had been the epicenter of the terrible explosion.
There was not a single blemish on its surface, though.
Sunny lingered for a moment, then leaned forward and picked up the Glass Knife. It was light and cool to the touch… just how he remembered it. Just to make sure, Sunny glanced beneath the surface of the glass blade and froze for a moment, transfixed by the sight of a single string of fate encased within it, looping endlessly on itself.
Even if he had not seen that knife in one of his nightmares, he would have instantly recognized it for what it was.
The key to an immortal’s death. The Ivory Lord’s death.
…He had found it.
